The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  Like the Theosophists before him, Kuvalayananda dreamed of melding modern rationalism and ancient wisdom. He wanted to reclaim what he saw as India’s indigenous system of exercise, while proving its validity in Western terms. So he began conducting experiments, subjecting yogic claims to unprecedented scientific scrutiny. In 1924 he opened the Kaivalyadhama Ashram in Lonavla, southeast of Bombay, where, with the support of a sympathetic prince, he built a laboratory full of the most up-to-date equipment available.

  Eventually, he began to systematize series of poses and other yogic practices, prescribing them like medicine for various ailments. To Gandhi, for example, he recommended saltwater and diluted milk in the morning, followed by an enema, Savasana (corpse pose), a modified shoulder stand, and nightly massage.

  As a recognized expert on physical education, Kuvalayananda sat on government panels to devise exercise regimens for schools. In these, he combined asanas with calisthenics and moves that were traditionally part of the training program for Indian wrestlers—dands, or push-ups, and surya namaskars, a flowing series of lunges that today form an essential part of modern hatha yoga classes. These assemblages of yoga poses with Eastern and Western bodybuilding techniques set the precedent for contemporary Western yoga.

  Kuvalayananda gave yoga classes at the ashram, though these were gentler and more static, geared toward therapy rather than exercise for adolescents. The demand was so great that in 1932 he expanded to Bombay. There, he began offering courses for women, having become convinced that certain yogic exercises, particularly those focused on the abdomen and pelvic area, could aid childbearing. That’s where Eugenia was finally introduced to asana practice.

  Arriving at the simple two-story building, she was examined by a doctor. She met briefly with the swami himself, though he didn’t teach her; she had to study with the women. She was ushered into a room with a matted floor, where several women in saris were practicing individually. A female instructor showed her how to breathe deeply, to expand her chest and the back of her ribs to take in more oxygen. Then she taught Eugenia three poses: a seated forward bend, the plough, and the shoulder stand. Eugenia, who had never before encountered these basic postures, was mortified to find that she was too stiff to do any of them correctly.

  When she returned the next day, she asked a fellow student to lean on her back while she bent forward and tried to touch her toes, but the teacher stopped her—forcing the postures was forbidden. All of them, she said, would come in time. “Which will probably be in my next incarnation!” Eugenia said. For the most part, the classes bored and frustrated her. Except for her mother, Eugenia rarely idolized women. She was still looking for a guru who could excite her devotion the way Krishnamurti had, and this teacher, however well intentioned, was no such figure. Nevertheless, she kept going, and slowly started to make progress.

  Then, suddenly, at the start of 1936, the Czech government decided to transfer Jan Strakaty to China, and Eugenia’s life in India appeared to be coming to an end. She was sad, but took the news with equanimity, prepared for what she hoped would be a novel adventure. Jo returned to Prague right away, but Eugenia stayed on in India several more months, packing up their household and saying her good-byes. When her May 7 departure date arrived, she remembered how destroyed she’d felt all those years ago when she left Der Blaue Vogel, and she marveled that she wasn’t overwhelmed now with a similar heartbreak. Certainly, as she spent her last day in Bombay, she was full of nostalgia, thinking back over her first trip through the country with Krishnamurti, and all the activists, artists, princes, and princesses she’d come to know since. Yet she told herself that she had a pilgrim soul and could find peace anywhere on earth. After a decade in the country, she still knew little of hatha yoga, but perhaps she’d internalized a bit of classical yoga’s philosophical detachment.

  But just a bit. Soon after arriving in Prague, Eugenia and her mother departed for a trip to the fashionable spa town of Karlsbad. It was a beautiful place, famous for its sulfurous hot springs. Situated in an emerald valley, it boasted promenades, luxury shops, and elegant Baroque and Art Nouveau buildings. People went there to recover from various ailments, but also to socialize and parade around in the latest fashions; such spas were famous for their personal intrigue and social climbing. The 1936 season would be one of the last; in 1938 Karlsbad and the entire region of the Sudetenland were annexed by Nazi Germany. Eugenia was largely unaware of the encroaching peril. Rather than being anxious, she was deathly bored.

  Seeking to escape the tedious social whirl, she and Sasha moved to a smaller town, where Eugenia spent her days wandering the forests and regressing into elaborate fantasies about Vava, her adolescent love. Her life was heading in a depressing direction, her chance for autonomy, for individual accomplishments, slowly receding.

  Then she received the wedding invitation that would transform everything. The nephew of the powerful, forward-thinking Maharaja of Mysore, whom Eugenia had befriended during her years on India’s social circuit, was getting married. Perhaps Eugenia was not as resigned to leaving India as she thought, because given the chance to return, she was elated. It wasn’t just that the Mysore Palace was one of the most stimulating and opulent environments in the entire subcontinent, but also that under the Maharaja’s patronage there was a yoga shala, or school, run by the brilliant, stern, and intense yogi Sri Krishnamacharya.

  If she went to the wedding, she’d have the opportunity to meet him. It might be her last chance to find a true yoga master and, more than that, to escape the stultification of a life without ambition. Traditional yoga, of course, is supposed to teach you how to renounce worldly goals, not how to achieve them, but Eugenia had never been bound by tradition.

  · CHAPTER 8 ·

  GANDHI CALLED the Maharaja of Mysore the rajarishi, or “saintly king.” Cultured and introverted, Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV made Mysore the most progressive of India’s princely states, kingdoms that existed outside the direct authority of the Raj. The maharaja built universities and hospitals and poured money into public works; his state was the first in India to have electric lights. He also spent lavishly on public buildings and landscaping, creating elegant parks, boulevards, and public squares. The state’s capital, Bangalore, was known as the Garden City, but the green, temperate city of Mysore, where the royal family lived, was even lovelier.

  Arriving at the Mysore Palace after her depressing interlude in Europe, Eugenia found a timeless fantasia, a gorgeous Indo-Saracenic granite monument of graceful, ornate arches and gilded domes. (It was hard to tell that it was a relatively modern structure, completed in 1912 after the older, wooden palace burned down.) Surrounding it were smaller palaces, intricately carved pyramid-shaped temples, and fragrant gardens. Inside the palace, an endless procession of rooms were decorated with the world’s finest materials: ceilings were of Burmese teak or Scottish stained glass, doors were inlaid with ivory, and mosaic floors were paved with ivory and semiprecious stones. Visiting dignitaries were seated on elaborate silver chairs with red velvet cushions. During the annual Dasara festival, the Maharaja rode an elephant in a howdah shaped like a temple and plated with eighty kilograms of gold.

  The palace’s artistic abundance matched its material splendor. The maharaja was a music lover who played the flute, violin, veena, sitar, saxophone, harmonium, and piano, among other instruments, and awoke daily at 5:00 a.m. to practice them. The palace employed celebrated Indian musicians and a European band with a German conductor. (Examiners from Trinity College of Music in London were brought in to make sure that each Western-style musician was up to the highest standards.) On the seventh day of Dasara, the royal court paid homage to Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, learning, and the arts, by worshipping the palace’s books and musical instruments.

  For all the luxury surrounding him, the maharaja was personally austere and reclusive. He was deeply interested in philosophy and, like Tagore, passionate about encouraging the interchange between East a
nd West. He had traveled widely in Europe and hosted Western intellectuals such as Carl Jung and the British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington at the palace. The maharaja didn’t just want to learn from Europe, though. Like his father, who had funded Vivekananda’s sojourn in the United States, he wanted to share India’s greatness with the world.

  Loving the company of writers, the maharaja invited the peripatetic mystic and author Paul Brunton (originally a German Jew named Raphael Hurst) to live at his palace for several years in the 1930s. Brunton saw Krishnaraja as the sort of philosopher king imagined by Plato in The Republic, and wrote that the maharaja had “absorbed the best ancient wisdom of [his] own hemisphere and yet respected the best modern achievements of the Occident.”

  This attitude extended to the emerging hatha yoga renaissance. In addition to being a dedicated scholar, the maharaja was an avid sportsman, and by the early 1930s, he’d helped turn Mysore into “a pan-Indian hub of physical culture revivalism,” in Mark Singleton’s words. There was already a history of interest in yoga at the palace. A manual compiled by the maharaja’s great-grandfather in the mid-nineteenth century contains illustrations of many yoga poses—it’s one of the earliest-known records of an asana practice tradition. The maharaja was eager to develop and popularize this tradition, and to that end, he enlisted a brilliant but indigent and obscure yogi named Tirumalai Krishnamacharya.

  Krishnamacharya was a compact, proud man with a face like an eagle’s. His head was shaved except for a small tuft that marked him as a Brahmin, and on his forehead he painted vertical white lines signifying his caste. Only five feet two inches tall, he was extraordinarily lithe yet strong—a rare silent newsreel of him taken in 1938, when he was already fifty years old, shows him moving through a series of poses with incredible grace and fluidity. Shirtless in a white dhoti, he practices on a carpet outdoors, beginning with his legs folded in a lotus position but lifted off the ground as he balances on his hands. From there, he leaps back into a pose that looks like upward-facing dog, his tongue thrust out of his mouth and his eyes wide open. He contracts his abdomen, pulling his stomach muscles up until they seem to disappear beneath his protruding ribs. After several breathing exercises, he assumes multiple variations on the shoulder stand and the headstand, exercising perfect control as he repeatedly touches his feet down both in front of him and behind him before picking them back up again.

  Even more impressive in the newsreel are the feats of one of his students, his brother-in-law B. K. S. Iyengar, who seems to move in slow motion as he jumps from downward dog into an arm balance with outstretched legs, then bends his elbows back and moves his chest toward the earth, as in the half push-up known as Chaturanga. From the backbend known as full wheel, he lifts his legs up into a handstand and then swings them through his arms and into a split. Balanced on his forearms, he bends his back until the soles of his feet rest on the crown of his head.

  Some of the poses the two men demonstrate in the newsreel are now part of standard yoga styles, but before Krishnamacharya, they weren’t known as asanas at all. He was a modern innovator who, in a strategy common to classical Indian philosophy, worked hard to put the authority of a long, distinguished lineage behind his advances. As Fernando Pagés Ruiz wrote in Yoga Journal in 2001, “You may have never heard of him, but Tirumalai Krishnamacharya influenced or perhaps even invented your yoga.”

  Krishnamacharya has since become a legend, and his biography shrouded in myth. It’s known that he was born to a distinguished South Indian Brahmin family in November 1888. His father, a scholar, gave him strict, exacting instruction in the Vedas and other religious texts, waking him at 2:00 a.m. to repeat the religious chants he had to learn by heart.

  When he was ten, his father died, and he was sent to Mysore to continue his education at the Parakala Math, the monastery of a school of Vishnu devotees.

  At sixteen, according to the tale he told his followers, he was visited by a vision of one of his ancestors, the sage Nathamuni, who told him to journey to the town of Alwar Tirunagari, over three hundred miles away in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. Once there, he asked an old man where he might find Nathamuni and was directed to a mango grove by the side of a river. By the time he got there he was so exhausted that he fell unconscious. Either asleep or in a trance, he met Nathamuni, and the sage recited a lost text, Yoga Rahasya, or “Secrets of Yoga.” Upon awakening, according to the story, Krishnamacharya remembered every word Nathamuni had said and would later cite the Yoga Rahasya as the scriptural basis for his revolutionary yoga system.

  As a teenager and young adult, Krishnamacharya continued to pursue his religious studies in both Mysore and the holy city of Benares, delving deeply into major religious texts and mastering Sanskrit grammar and several systems of Orthodox Hindu philosophy. These milieus, however, didn’t give him much opportunity to develop his interest in hatha yoga. One of his teachers suggested that, if he really wanted to master the practice, he make a pilgrimage to Tibet to find a hermit named Ramamohana Brahmachari.

  Now, the cave-dwelling Himalayan master is a common trope in Hindu legends, and no evidence remains of Krishnamacharya’s journey. Yet, according to the tale he told his disciples, he found the yogi, a tall man with a long beard and wooden shoes, living in a cave with his wife and three children, and he stayed with them for seven and a half years. Ramamohana Brahmachari instructed him in a lost Nepalese text called the Yoga Kurunta, which was rich in information about asana and pranayama. Krishnamacharya claimed that, under the yogi’s tutelage, he mastered three thousand asanas and learned the kind of extreme physiological self-control that would, in time, allow him (seemingly) to stop his heartbeat. At the end of his apprenticeship, his guru instructed him to go home, get married, and spread the message of yoga throughout society.

  Which is what Krishnamacharya did. He turned down an opportunity to lead the Parakala Math, which would have required a vow of celibacy. Instead, in 1925, he married a twelve-year-old girl named Namagiriamma and, forgoing the respect and authority he could have earned with a traditional scholarly vocation, began traveling and lecturing in an effort to popularize hatha yoga. For a time, he supported himself by working on a coffee plantation, a humiliation for a man of his caste and learning. On his days off, he gave sideshow-like strongman demonstrations that he hoped would capture the attention of the masses: stopping cars with his bare hands, lifting objects with his teeth, contorting himself into difficult asanas, and slowing his pulse to simulate death.

  Krishnamacharya’s commitment to his singular path was rewarded when the Maharaja of Mysore attended one of his lectures and, impressed, invited him to come teach at the palace. Charging Krishnamacharya with developing India’s great contribution to the world of physical culture, he gave him a wing of Mysore’s Jaganmohan Palace, near the splendid palace where he lived, to open a yoga shala, and even sent him to Kuvalayananda’s pioneering ashram to learn from his experiments.

  At the maharaja’s behest, Krishnamacharya traveled the country throughout the early 1930s demonstrating the amazing feats of physiological control that his yoga practice made possible. In 1935 a French cardiologist, Dr. Thérèse Brosse, tested Krishnamacharya’s purported ability to stop his heart. Using an electrocardiographic lead, a pneumogram, and a pulse wave recording from the radial artery (in the forearm), she found that, indeed, he was able to make his pulse disappear for several seconds. Later, a team of doctors speculated about how he and other yogis achieved this effect. They concluded that, by tensing the muscles of the abdomen and thorax (the yogic technique, or “lock,” known as udhyana banda) and closing the vocal folds (what yogis call jalandhara banda), Krishnamacharya created an “intra-thoracic pressure” that interfered with the blood’s return to the heart. Maybe he couldn’t stop his heart, but he could make its beats so slow and soft that they were inaudible, itself an amazing feat.

  Well before her trip to the Mysore Palace, Eugenia witnessed one of these displays. Krishnamacharya lay d
own on the floor, breathed deeply, and his pulse appeared to stop. Spectators were permitted to check it; doctors listened to him with stethoscopes. “I really fail to understand how these yogis can produce such phenomena,” said a German doctor. Given that, Eugenia replied, why didn’t more people study yoga seriously? “Is it,” she asked, “because we Westerners think it is beneath our dignity to acknowledge our ignorance of certain physical laws unknown to us, and therefore prefer to dismiss the Indian teachings as fantastic and obscure?”

  In Mysore, Krishnamacharya worked in the same Jaganmohan Palace gymnastics hall as H. Anant Rao, a bodybuilding and gymnastics teacher. Palace records make it clear that his teaching was subsumed under physical education: “The Physical Instruction Class was under Mr. V. D. S. Naidu, and during the latter part of the year Mr. Krishnamachar [sic] was appointed to teach the Yogic System of exercises to the Prince.”

  In addition to the prince, Krishnamacharya was charged with teaching yoga to young boys of the royal Ursu caste, who had far too much animal energy for a deliberate, static practice. Thus Krishnamacharya, working in a milieu of experimentation and dialogue among different physical culture systems, pioneered a dynamic, flowing type of yoga that today is often known as vinyasa, which entails a kind of squat-thrust jump-back between poses.

  As Singleton has shown, elements of vinyasa yoga bear an uncanny resemblance to the gymnastics system created by the Danish physical education teacher Niels Bukh. Krishnamacharya undoubtedly came into contact with Bukh’s gymnastics, since it was used by the British army and was popular in YMCAs throughout India. In one of Bukh’s sequences, for example, the student begins sitting up with legs outstretched, as in the yoga Dandasana pose. Then he or she jumps back into a plank pose, balancing on hands and toes while holding the body horizontal, before turning over and balancing on one hand and one foot—yoga’s Vasisthasana pose. From there, the practitioner moves into what Bukh called “Hand Standing pose,” which is identical to downward-facing dog, an upside-down V made while standing on hands and feet. All this is accompanied by deep, rhythmic breathing.