Krishnamacharya also drew on the Mysore Palace’s own gymnastic tradition. As N. E. Sjoman demonstrates in his book The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, some of Krishnamacharya’s asanas are originally found in a palace gymnastics manual titled Elements of Gymnastic Exercises, Indian System. “It is quite clear that the yoga system of the Mysore Palace from Krishnamacariar is another syncretism drawing heavily on the gymnastic text, but presenting it under the name of yoga,” writes Sjoman.
None of this is to say that Krishnamacharya was a fraud or a plagiarist. He was, rather, a brilliant synthesizer, a man capable of drawing from everything he had at hand to create something vital and new. His yoga was to gymnastics what Vivekananda’s spirituality was to Unitarianism or Bollywood is to Hollywood: a modern Indian art developed in dialogue with the wider world.
Eugenia, in turn, would present this system to a world starved for authenticity as the timeless wisdom of the East. Yet first she had to convince the orthodox Brahmin Krishnamacharya to share his secrets with a woman and a Westerner.
Eugenia was one of thousands of royal guests at the maharaja’s nephew’s wedding. Because Krishnaraja Wadiyar had no children, the young man was his heir apparent, and his marriage to a teenage princess from central India was a particularly grand occasion. Life magazine sent a photographer, and ran a piece with the headline “Heir to $400,000,000 Gets Married in India.” Festivities began with an act of clemency, as the maharaja threw open the gates of the central jail and released nearly two hundred prisoners. The wedding ceremony was held in the palace’s spectacular octagonal marriage pavilion. Cast-iron pillars painted a rich peacock blue supported a soaring domed ceiling made of stained glass with intricate images of peacocks and floral mandalas, motifs repeated on the mosaic floors. It all “presented a scene of Oriental grandeur,” reported the Times of India.
The groom arrived on a richly caparisoned elephant, following a majestic procession through the palace grounds accompanied by musicians. The bride entered the pavilion with Brahmins chanting Vedic hymns. The two exchanged garlands of flowers and made offerings to a sacred fire, and representatives from all the surrounding Hindu monasteries came to offer their blessings. Afterward, elaborate feasts and music and dance recitals were held.
Eugenia, however, wasn’t interested in any of the celebratory indulgence. Her concern was meeting Krishnamacharya. As soon as she arrived in Mysore, she went to the yoga shala uninvited and unannounced and asked to speak to the master. He received her in a large, light-filled room, sitting cross-legged on a carpet. At first he was respectful to his patron’s guest, but as soon as he realized she wanted to study at his shala, his tone changed. “In my school there are no women, there are only men, and, among them, none are foreigners,” he told her firmly. (The only exceptions he made were for his female relatives—early on, he taught yoga to his wife, his sister-in-law, and his two daughters.) Eugenia tried to convince him, but he wouldn’t budge. Finally, he ordered her to leave.
—
She was terribly disappointed, both by her own failure to become Krishnamacharya’s student, and by his depressing conservatism, so at odds with the sort of unconventional wisdom she’d expected to discover. But she was not deterred. She decided to go over his head and speak directly to the maharaja. The maharaja, of course, was devoted to spreading the wonders of yoga to the West. Eugenia was his friend and guest. He ordered Krishnamacharya to teach her.
Even when he wasn’t being forced to act against his will, Krishnamacharya was a very difficult man. “Guruji had a frightful personality,” writes B. K. S. Iyengar, the younger brother of Krishnamacharya’s wife and, in later years, the guru’s most famous disciple. Krishnamacharya’s moods were unpredictable, and he could be violent toward those closest to him. “He would hit us hard on our backs as if with iron rods,” writes Iyengar. “We were unable to forget the severity of his actions for a long time. My sister also was not spared from such blows.”
Iyengar, who died in 2014 at ninety-five, would eventually become the most celebrated yoga teacher in the world. Yet in the early 1930s, he was a sickly, skinny adolescent, enervated from bouts of malaria and typhoid. “My sisters and sisters-in-law used to say that my head would hang down on a repulsive body in such a way that they never touched me on account of my appearance,” he writes. He was the eleventh of thirteen children, and his family, already poor, was driven close to destitution when his father died shortly before the boy’s ninth birthday. At sixteen, he went to live with his sister and Krishnamacharya, where he was to help with the housekeeping.
Iyengar enrolled in the maharaja’s high school and was one of the few outside the royal family permitted to attend the two-hour classes held each afternoon in the yoga shala. However, he was weak and stiff, and at first Krishnamacharya largely ignored him.
Then, in 1934, Krishnamacharya’s prized pupil ran away, no doubt because of his master’s punishing discipline. The maharaja was hosting a YMCA conference at the palace, and Krishnamacharya was supposed to give an asana recital. Needing someone to demonstrate, he recruited Iyengar and demanded that he learn a series of difficult backbends within three days. Terrified of disappointing his fearsome brother-in-law, Iyengar pushed himself into the poses. He was left in excruciating pain and had tremors for months, but he did them correctly and even won a fifty-rupee prize from the maharaja. After that, he often demonstrated for Krishnamacharya’s presentations.
Seventy years later, Iyengar had only a vague memory of his first meeting with the European lady who started taking classes at the shala in 1938. He was sure that had Krishnamacharya known she’d been an actress, no amount of pressure from the maharaja could have convinced him to instruct her.
Luckily, he was unaware. So, gruff and full of resentment, he acceded to his patron’s request and took her on. Assuming her interest in yoga was just a momentary fancy, he figured that if he made things unpleasant enough for her, she’d eventually go away. “Why are you going to complicate your life with such a rigorous discipline?” he asked her. Rigorous discipline, though, was exactly what Eugenia was looking for. She needed something to throw her energy and determination into. Her drifting, aimless, too-easy life was driving her mad.
At first, Krishnamacharya entrusted her lessons to one of his students. “From now on, you will have to submit to a severe diet,” he told her. She proudly answered that she’d long been a vegetarian. He told her that wasn’t enough. While she was studying at the shala, she had to give up all “dead” food, meaning anything preserved or refined: white sugar, white flour, white rice, anything canned. Nor was she allowed to eat any vegetables that grew underground, such as potatoes, carrots, or onions—only plants that “receive the rays of the sun.” Eggs were off-limits, as was anything spicy, salty, or sour. She had to give up tea and coffee, a painful sacrifice. She was even told how to chew her food—instead of swallowing, she was supposed to masticate each bite until it disappeared.
Krishnamacharya’s student gave her a strict schedule. She was to wake up before sunrise and perform asanas and meditation, then head to the school for more asana instruction. Dinner had to be two hours before sunset, and she had to be in bed by 9:30, meaning there would be no partaking of the festivities at the palace. She had to bathe in lukewarm water and was forbidden to warm herself in front of a fire. She couldn’t travel, meaning she’d be separated from her husband for several months.
She was overwhelmed by it all, and somewhat disappointed. “I imagined that I would be undergoing some sort of mystic and occult training, but I was mainly questioned about the movement of my bowels and the effect of the diet and exercises on my system,” she writes. Yet Jo, surprisingly, encouraged her. He had much to do to prepare for the move to Shanghai and was happy to have her in one place while he traveled and then got settled in China. So she dedicated herself to the training, making her way from the palace to the shala every day after a frugal breakfast. Weeks went by, and Krishnamacharya started to realize that she
was serious. “The European student wasn’t so delicate as he thought!” she writes. He developed a grudging respect for her and eventually took over her training.
Because Eugenia was a middle-aged woman and not a wiry, hyperactive boy, the yoga that Krishnamacharya taught her was less aerobic than the system he imparted to Iyengar or K. Pattabhi Jois, another of his protégés who would eventually become a world-famous yoga teacher. Yet many of the poses were the same—a combination of seated postures from classical hatha yoga sources and standing lunges and twists adapted from traditional Indian gymnastics and wrestling exercise regimens as well as from Niels Bukh. She learned to sit in a lotus pose, to bend her back into a bow pose, to support herself with her legs in the air in a shoulder stand. She was terrified to attempt a headstand, but another student, a sixty-six-year-old man, convinced her that if he could do it, she could, too, and within weeks she was balancing easily in the center of the room.
At first, Eugenia found it all exhausting. She felt sluggish and bloated. Krishnamacharya told her that it would take time for the postures to work on her body and normalize the function of her hormones. This notion that yoga improves the working of the endocrine system has since found support among scientists, with studies showing that hatha yoga has a positive effect on blood glucose levels in diabetes patients, on sufferers of thyroid disorders, and on postmenopausal women plagued by hot flashes. No one is entirely sure how this works. Some of yoga’s benefits come from the way it combines mindfulness meditation, which is known to calm the nervous system, with the salutary effects of exercise. Additionally, recent research has shown that certain movement patterns “interact reciprocally with cognitive and emotional states…Yoga, and other repetitive motion patterns appear to restore and entrain the rhythmicity of biological functions that are often disrupted during periods of stress,” in the words of a 2009 journal article. Some speculate that yoga’s contractions and contortions physically stimulate the thyroid and pineal glands.
Whatever the mechanism, it worked on Eugenia. As the months passed, the benefits of her new lifestyle began to show. The bloating went away, and she started losing weight. Her skin because smooth and radiant. Naturally, she was elated by the changes. “I felt as light and carefree as a school girl on a summer vacation,” she writes. Her depression and anxiety abated. She was grounded and focused as never before.
As part of the second stage of her training, Krishnamacharya initiated her into his methods of pranayama, or breath control. He hewed to the traditional view of pranayama as a powerful secret that must be learned directly from a master. Locking the door so no one could bother them, he taught her how to breathe through one nostril and then the other and how to retain the breath for various lengths of time. Given all the drama around it, she expressed surprise at how simple it seemed. “He told her that although Pranayama may seem simple, it is extremely powerful and, used wrongly, can be disastrous, leading to ‘serious physical and mental troubles.’ ” There was still a bit of occultism, a bit of dangerous magic, in this yoga. After her own catastrophic attempt at amateur yogic healing, she no doubt took his admonition seriously.
Eugenia’s life at the palace and the shala, at once luxurious and monastic, continued for eight months, until December, when it was time for her to join her husband in Shanghai. One day, toward the end, Krishnamacharya told her he had plans for her. As her training had gone on, her powerful charm had begun to work on him, and like his patron the maharaja, he’d come to believe that yoga wasn’t an art just for Indians, that it should be spread worldwide.
“Now that you are going to visit other countries in the world,” he told her, “I want you to teach yoga.”
The idea terrified her, and Eugenia protested, saying she couldn’t teach what she’d only just learned herself.
“You can do it and you will do it!” he replied firmly.
They spent the time until her departure reviewing her lessons. She’d kept notebooks throughout her stay in Mysore, and together they went over the details of asanas, diet, breath, relaxation, and meditation, with Krishnamacharya explaining how she should impart it all to her future students. She still wasn’t sure she’d ever have any, but he was her guru. She couldn’t refuse.
· CHAPTER 9 ·
EUGENIA’S SHIP arrived in Shanghai on a cold, damp day toward the end of December 1939. Storm clouds darkened the sky, and the wind whipped her clothes around her legs as her boat steamed up the sludgy Whangpu River to moor off the Bund, Shanghai’s great ersatz European boulevard. The city’s legendary skyline was a towering wall of gray granite and marble buildings in a potpourri of Western styles, evidence of Shanghai’s status as a Far Eastern outpost of both Europe and America. Encountering her new home, Eugenia writes, “I was invaded by a thick, colorless melancholy.”
It wasn’t just that she missed India. Upon leaving Mysore, she’d spent several months in Bombay before sailing for China. It’s not clear why she was delayed there for so long, but she may have put off her trip because she was, once again, in love. In books and interviews, she would sometimes briefly mention a man named Indra Dev, a Dutch aristocrat by birth who had originally come to India to study yoga and classical Indian dance. Despite his youth, Eugenia later said, he was “far advanced along the spiritual path,” and he taught her concentration and meditation techniques.
Her descriptions never go further than that, but in later years, she often spoke of him to friends as one of her great romances, though she said it was a spiritual rather than a sexual love. He was, she said, thin and graceful, almost fey—in the one picture she showed to confidants, he had a flower in his dark hair. The name he adopted, so much like hers, was just the beginning of the correspondence between them. Their souls, she said, had merged. (It’s possible that it was in homage to him that she would eventually drop the second i in her pseudonym Indira Devi.) Yet they couldn’t remain together—she had both a husband and a mission in China.
This romance would explain the overwhelming depression that descended on her during her last days in India. “I understood then why people commit suicide, not being able to stand this suffocating agony, which seems to crush the heart like a heavy weight,” she writes. It was her old friend and master Krishnamurti who finally jolted her out of her anguish, arriving in Bombay just as she was preparing to leave. At first she went daily to the talks he gave to a study group at the home of an old Theosophist named Ratansi Morarji, but she was so distracted by her own unhappiness that his words barely registered. Finally, during a private meeting with her onetime guru, she confessed her sorrows.
“Do you know what the real cause of your suffering is?” he asked her. “It is fear. You are afraid to face your troubles. In the process of discovering the cause of sorrow, which is craving, you face utter loneliness. You are fully awake only when you are not trying to avoid something, when you are not trying to escape from the inevitable, which is to be alone. And through the ecstasy of that solitude you will realize Truth.”
His words, though stern, had a transformative effect on her, breaking through her despondent miasma. They would, in some sense, govern all her relationships going forward—she would never again seek to become one with another person and would cherish her independence above all else. By the time she boarded the ship for China, she felt peaceful, if not exuberant. She had no interest in the social life on the boat, but she attributed this to spiritual development, not depression. While dressing for dinner her first night at sea, she writes, “I discovered that I didn’t care any more to decorate myself with jewels and make up my face with lipstick and rouge…It felt strange to think that [I] was once a good companion for those who enjoyed gaiety, cinemas, and dancing.” She kept to herself, reading, meditating, and helping to nurse a sick old man on board. It’s hard to imagine what her husband, Jan, thought of the subdued, sari-clad woman who met him when the ship docked.
If Eugenia was feeling quiet and reserved, her new home was anything but. For Shanghai’s newcomers,
the sensory assault rivaled that of Bombay. “As you stepped ashore Shanghai’s inimitable odour of expensive scent and garlic overwhelmed you,” writes one of the city’s chroniclers. “A dozen different languages assailed your ear. Beggar children tugged at your clothes. American cars hooted at your rickshaw puller. Trains hurtled past. Above your head the foreign buildings of the Bund thrust into the sky. At your feet Chinese beggars picked at their sores. Down a side street a middle-aged Russian woman and a pubescent Chinese girl fought over a sailor.”
Shanghai in the late 1930s was a place where all the players in the incipient Second World War coexisted in an uneasy, unstable equilibrium, and it was thick with intrigue and violence. Among many of the foreigners, a mad, apocalyptic joie de vivre prevailed. In some ways Shanghai, the fifth-largest city in the world and the most cosmopolitan, blended every place Eugenia had ever lived. Cyrillic signs lined Avenue Joffre, an area known as Little Russia. Like Bombay, the city was run by a smug Western colonial establishment unaware of the titanic forces emerging to put an end to its rule. Thousands of eastern European Jews brought a taste of Berlin and Austria to the city, opening restaurants such as Café Louis on Bubbling Well Road, famous for its pastries, handmade chocolates, and sweet Berliner Weisse cocktails, a mix of weak local beer and raspberry syrup. Both its rampant gangsterism and wild nightlife put Weimar to shame. There was even a Berlin-style cabaret, the Black Cat on Roi Albert Avenue, where the famed comedian Herbert Zernik delivered his biting routines.
Shanghai’s internationalism was the result of its odd status as a city over which no nation held full sovereignty. The British had made their way into China by force a hundred years earlier, sending a flotilla of gunboats to exact outrageous concessions from the Tao-kuang emperor, including the opening of five Chinese ports to foreign settlement and trade. Shanghai was the most lucrative, and soon other nations demanded a piece of it. What eventually evolved was a city divided into three, each section with its own government and police force. Of Shanghai’s twenty square miles, twelve and a half were controlled by foreigners. The British and Americans ruled the International Settlement, where Sikh policemen brought from India patrolled the streets. The French Concession was under the sovereignty of Paris. With some exceptions, Western residents of these enclaves lived outside the jurisdiction of Chinese law, subject instead to courts run by Europeans and Americans. The Chinese had what was left of Shanghai, including the original walled city.
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