The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  The whole city poured into the streets, dancing and embracing. Music seemed to come from everywhere, along with the flashing and popping of firecrackers. After years of nightly blackouts, the suddenly lit-up city looked radiant, magical. “Wherever we went, people were crowding and singing, swinging placards and signs; ornaments hung down from lamp posts and wires, flags of the victorious nations waved in the wind, and the entire population was in a most jubilant state,” recalled a Jewish man suddenly free from the Hongkew ghetto.

  By September, Chinese troops were in control of Shanghai, the port was open, and American firms were once again opening their doors. “Shanghai is now absolutely mad: prices jumping up, cafes, cabarets, bars, girls—all for the military,” writes Avshalomov. “It is a gay life for those who have U.S. currency. For the rest—heavy burden and hardships.” Thanks to their factory, Eugenia and Jan had access to American dollars. She got rid of her German papers and obtained a Czech passport. Soon she was teaching yoga again.

  It’s a measure of how quickly the city’s social life revived that before the end of the year, Eugenia decided to put on another dance performance, this one to benefit victims of the famine ravaging the Indian state of Bengal. K. P. S. Menon, India’s representative to the provisional Chinese government in Chungking, traveled to Shanghai to attend. He’d been delighted, upon meeting her earlier, to realize they had a number of mutual friends. “I was interested to see in her possession a photograph of the youngest Rajkumari of Mysore, for whose marriage to the Maharaja of Bharatpur I was primarily responsible,” he wrote in a letter to a British colleague.

  After he saw her dance, though, his assessment was vicious. “Indira Devi’s much-advertised performance turned out to be a flop,” he wrote to another diplomat. “It brought in a lot of money for the Indian Relief Fund but the performance itself was disappointing. It was so amateurish. Her ‘mudras’ were stiff and artificial and her feet seemed to have no life in them. Moreover she is getting a little too old for the stage. She is 46; and all her yoga practice cannot conceal her age…I feel sorry that the first exponent of Indian dancing in Shanghai should have been so poor.”

  Menon may have been unkind, but he was still worth knowing. By the end of the war, Eugenia’s marriage to Strakaty was essentially over, and she began to feel that her relationship with Avshalomov was holding both of them back. With Menon’s intercession, she got a visa to travel to India, and in March 1946 she slipped out of town, heading for Bombay aboard the Highland Chieftain. She wrote to Avshalomov’s son from the ship, “I firmly believe that his star will shoot up soon—only it will not be given me to witness. This is one of the reasons for my speedy departure. Hope he will realize it one day.” A few months later, Strakaty, to whom she was still officially wed, sailed home on a British repatriation ship. She’d never see him again.

  · CHAPTER 10 ·

  EUGENIA ARRIVED in Bombay in 1946 as the British, exhausted by World War II, prepared to depart. There were furious negotiations about the future of the subcontinent, with Muslim nationalists agitating to carve out an independent Pakistan. Communal violence flared all over the country. British expatriates rushed to pack up their belongings, selling whatever they couldn’t take, before independence was declared in 1947.

  Eugenia’s plan to continue her yoga studies in such conditions wasn’t entirely impractical. Yoga was, after all, the one constant in her life, the thing she could turn to whenever everything else crumbled. The new Indian nation would need a new health system, and there was tremendous enthusiasm among Indian leaders to make yoga a part of it. One of Eugenia’s friends, Dr. G. V. Deshmukh, a prominent nationalist and a great champion of women’s rights, urged her to write a book to help popularize the discipline. He even promised to write the foreword. Other friends, the maharaja and majarani of Tehri Garhwal, offered to host her at their palace in the Himalayas while she worked.

  The palace—which today houses the Ananda Spa, perhaps the most sumptuous hotel in India—sits on a ridge overlooking the deep green Doon Valley and, in the distance, the holy city of Rishikesh, situated just over twelve miles away, on the banks of the Ganges. Mircea Eliade once called Rishikesh “the paradise of hermits and contemplatives.” Its streets were full of wandering sadhus in saffron robes, naked ash-smeared yogis with dreadlocks piled on their heads like bird’s nests, and all manner of monks, swamis, and pilgrims.

  Among all these holy men, Eugenia was told, was a yogi so advanced in his practice that he had reached the transcendent state of samadhi, the culmination of the yogic journey. Another royal friend of hers, the Rani Madhvi of the princely state of Jasdan, offered her a letter of introduction to the holy man. So she made her way to his Rishikesh ashram, hoping to continue her yogic studies with him while she worked on her book.

  In interviews and memoirs, Eugenia never identifies the swami, calling him by the pseudonym Swami Somnatashram. It’s extremely likely, however, that it was Swami Sivananda Saraswati, an English-speaking Brahmin physician from Tamil Nadu who, in the 1920s, renounced his comfortable, prosperous life to become a sannyasin in Rishikesh. Like Eugenia’s pseudonymous sage, Swami Sivananda was deeply influenced by Vivekananda; he presented yoga as a universal science of life that united the truths of all great religions. In 1936 he founded the Divine Life Society, an organization to propagate yoga and Vedanta. Among its aims was the promotion of healthy living through classes on yoga asanas, breathing, “well-regulated diet…well-disciplined life, nature-cure methods.”

  Even as a mystic, Sivananda injected a strong element of middle-class uplift in his teachings. “His approach to solving the world’s problems, as well as India’s, was fundamentally grounded in personal reform, both physical and spiritual, and the notion that if each individual made him- or herself into a better person, the world would…be a better place,” writes scholar Sarah Strauss. The Divine Life Society ashram was deliberately as much a spiritual tourist destination as a traditional hermitage. Sivananda once described it as “an ideal place of retreat for the educated citizen of the world, wherein he can renew himself and recreate and refresh his being, physically, mentally, morally and spiritually.” It had, among its supporters, a number of local aristocrats, among them Eugenia’s friends.

  An imposing, broad-shouldered man with a shiny bald head, Swami Sivananda could be terse and elliptical, frustrating those who came to him in search of clear guidance. When Eugenia sought him out, he told her he wasn’t interested in becoming her teacher—he was busy translating ancient manuscripts and had no time for new disciples. Nevertheless, she kept showing up at his ashram in order to be in his presence as he worked. Occasionally, she writes, he would toss off a pithy observation, and she would eagerly latch onto it, feeling like a dog grateful for scraps.

  Meanwhile, she struggled with her book, writing draft after draft as she tried to communicate what she’d learned from Krishnamacharya years ago. Her surroundings helped compensate for the pain. In the mornings, she would meditate in one of the palace’s shady gardens, listening to the whisper of a small fountain. The maharani had assigned her a servant, and during the afternoons, he would drive her to the temple-filled city, which pulsed with the prayers of wandering holy men, or to the Divine Life Society ashram.

  Eventually the swami got used to Eugenia’s presence at the ashram and, like Krishnamacharya before him, developed a tolerant affection for her. One day he asked her if she’d yet found a teacher. When she replied that she hadn’t, he replied, “Come tomorrow and study with me.”

  Like Vivekananda, Swami Sivananda divided yoga into four paths: raja, or “kingly,” yoga, the yoga of concentration and physical and mental discipline; bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion; jnana yoga, the yoga of learning; and karma yoga, the yoga of selfless service. Raja yoga, Eugenia writes, was what she learned from her pseudonymous swami. Three times a week she would go to the ashram to study various techniques of sensory withdrawal, concentration, and meditation. Back at the castle, she would try to prac
tice them.

  At times, the intense mental discipline was wearying. Vivekananda had warned in his book Raja Yoga that before one mastered the practice of concentration, there could be “[g]rief, mental distress, tremor of the body, irregular breathing.” Eugenia, who had begun to think of him as a sort of spirit guide, was finding out what he meant. Once, when she was at her desk writing, she had the sense that the room was suddenly full of a dark and fearsome presence. Feeling almost unable to move, she went to bed and lay in a cold sweat. A materialist might interpret what happened to her as a panic attack, not unlike the ones that first drove her to seek relief in yoga. Her teacher told her that sinister forces sometimes arose to impede the spiritual progress of yogis and that she was thus waging a struggle for her soul. That’s how she chose to understand it.

  In the end, she won. The fear lifted, and she felt calm, buoyant, and productive. She finished her book, Yoga: The Technique of Health and Happiness, dedicating it to the “women of India in the person of my gentle and understanding friend without whose encouragement and care this book would not have been written,” a reference to the maharani whose palace she was living in. As promised, Dr. Deshmukh wrote a brief foreword. The book itself was divided into two parts: a short, selective autobiography about the role of yoga in her own life, and some practical instruction in asana and diet.

  Far from a mystical work, the book argues that modern doctors and scientists had simply discovered what the yogis knew all along about mental and physical hygiene. “People are coming to realize that this system perfected centuries ago, deals in a very thorough way with nerves and glands and their effect on the body,” she wrote, promising that the practice would provide “better sleep, a clearer and calmer mind, and a happier outlook on life.”

  The book pleads with Indians to rediscover the greatness of their own spiritual traditions rather than “blindly copying the West, which is in a state of spiritual and moral bankruptcy and despair. Of late the Occident has been turning its attention to India in the hope of getting some spiritual food, without which men cannot exist for long, however healthy, rich and comfortable they may be.” Such sentiments would have been welcome in a country proud of its new independence, though by the time it was published, she’d be gone.

  When her writing was finished, Eugenia made plans to teach yoga at a nature cure center that the Cambodian monk Bellong Mahathera (known as “Bhante” by his legions of admirers) was planning to open in Kashmir. A former judge who’d been educated at the Sorbonne before becoming a wandering forest ascetic, Bhante developed a form of alternative medicine based on vegetarianism and color therapy. He was close to both Gandhi and Nehru; the latter gave him a former Mughal pleasure garden as thanks for curing one of his parents, and turned it into a Buddhist mission. Bhante’s ideas about healing meshed with Eugenia’s—he believed that many ills could be cured by sunshine, fresh food, and positive thoughts. (He would live to be 110.) Yet before she could start working with him, she received a telegram calling her back to China.

  After World War II, Eugenia’s mother had stayed behind in their house in Shanghai, happy to live as part of the White Russian community. But while the Japanese occupation was over, China’s instability wasn’t. The civil war between China’s Nationalists and Communists commenced in July 1946. A Chinese general, deciding he wanted the house Sasha was living in for himself, sent fourteen gunmen to seize it. Sasha wasn’t sure what to do; she had no legal claim to the house, which Jan had put in Eugenia’s name.

  So Eugenia made her way to Shanghai to help. There, she found her mother a room and sold as many of their belongings as she could before the general had a chance to appropriate them for himself. While in the city, and despite her earlier attempts to cut things off with him, she resumed her relationship with Avshalomov, who had become conductor of the Shanghai Municipal Council Symphony Orchestra.

  When she arrived, Avshalomov was preparing to stage The Great Wall, a symphony and ballet based on a tragic folktale about a wife who commits suicide rather than marry the emperor, who has had her husband killed. He hoped to take it on tour throughout Asia before proceeding to the United States. Eugenia had long believed in her lover’s talents and wanted to see him thrive. She threw herself into the Chinese Music Drama Association, the group formed to put on the production; in the show’s program, she’s listed as “Honorary Secretary.”

  It must have been gratifying to see The Great Wall succeed spectacularly. “[T]hose who have seen it are anxious to see it again,” raved the Shanghai Evening Post. “This is because the show is a great work.” That doesn’t mean, though, that Eugenia was ready to yoke her life to the composer’s.

  She still hoped to return to India, but Sasha begged her not to. She feared that her daughter would become a Buddhist nun, lost to the world. Besides, Sasha had heard about the Hindu-Muslim violence that was escalating as India’s independence neared. She didn’t want to see her daughter caught in yet another civil war. Instead, she and her friends urged Eugenia to go to America. It was, they said, a democratic country, where she’d be free to disseminate her yogic teachings. They talked about the sun in California and the perfume of lemon and orange trees. One of Sasha’s friends, Sonia, said that she’d heard about a yoga school opening in Hollywood and suggested that Eugenia would be just the person to lead it. Sonia was going to California herself. They could travel together, and Sonia could make introductions.

  Eugenia was torn. She loved India, but she had seen enough war for several lifetimes. Unable to make up her mind, she went to a travel agent and bought two tickets, one for India and the other for the United States. She would leave on whichever ship first departed the Shanghai harbor.

  At least, that’s the story she would tell later. In fact, she’d received a visa for the United States in New Delhi that August, so she must at least have considered the possibility of a new start in America. Perhaps, as she later nurtured her reputation as the First Lady of Yoga, she felt it difficult to explain why she’d left the country she claimed as her spiritual homeland. If her soul was in India, why was she in Hollywood? It might have felt neater to attribute the move to an accident of chance rather than an act of will. Or maybe she had simply been leaving her options open and had never made up her mind about where her future lay. Either way, she was on the USS General W. H. Gordon when it sailed for San Francisco right around New Year’s Eve, 1947. Before long, Avshalomov followed her.

  · CHAPTER 11 ·

  IN 1911 the brothers Adolph and Eugene Bernheimer, German-Jewish collectors of Asian art who lived in New York, began work on their summer home in Los Angeles. They dreamed of replicating, in the hills above Hollywood, a palace that was located in the Yamashiro Mountains near Kyoto, and because they were very rich, they brought artisans from Japan to help them. Their teak-and-cedar villa, which took three years to complete, was built around a courtyard and set amid exquisite terraced Japanese gardens with thousands of varieties of trees and plants, not to mention waterfalls, goldfish ponds, and a six-hundred-year-old imported pagoda. The home’s circular verandahs offered sweeping views of the Los Angeles Basin, just then being transformed into the capital of American film. The Los Angeles Times reported a rumor that the bachelor owners had made a pact that “no woman shall ever enter the place as an invited guest.”

  It was a pact they couldn’t keep. Eugene died in the 1920s, and by the end of the decade their palace had been transformed into the clubhouse of the Hollywood Four Hundred, an exclusive organization of show business elite. It fell into disrepair during the Depression—rumor has it that it served as a brothel employing desperate actresses. Then came the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the resulting backlash against all things Japanese. Vandals destroyed much of the landscaping, the palace’s gorgeous carved wood was painted over, and the estate became a military school. At the war’s end, it was transformed once again—into a fifteen-unit apartment building. Thanks to a letter from a friend in Shanghai, that apartment building was where Eug
enia settled when she arrived in the United States in 1947.

  It was a lucky place to land, close to the action in Hollywood but removed enough to be peaceful, with piney air and lots of tranquil corners conducive to yoga and meditation. Adjusting to a new life in America, Eugenia would depend on both. Contrary to what she’d been told, there was no yoga studio awaiting her. She had no job, no family in the country, and no homeland to return to. She was nearing fifty in a city that worshipped ingénues. She had six thousand dollars in savings—a substantial amount in 1947, but hardly enough to live on. “The only thing left to do,” she writes, “was to begin anew.”

  Still, if she ever panicked, she left no trace of it. Beginning anew was something she was extremely good at, and Los Angeles was the ideal place for it. With World War II, Southern California had become the world capital of the sort of spiritual innovation that flourished in Europe during Eugenia’s youth. Krishnamurti had made Ojai, about eighty miles northwest of Los Angeles, his home base. Swami Prabhavananda, a boyish, endlessly patient, chain-smoking monk from Vivekananda’s Ramakrishna order, had established a Los Angeles Vedanta Center in 1930. In Hollywood, artists and intellectuals, many of them Europeans driven into exile by the war, flocked to both men. There was a great hunger for the insights of the East adapted to address the malaise of the West.

  The fact that Eugenia had so few connections meant she could finally shed her old identity once and for all. Hollywood was a place where people regularly swapped the quotidian names they were born with for more melodious or sophisticated or exotic ones. Many of the people who would become Eugenia’s most illustrious students had jettisoned the names their parents gave them—Jennifer Jones was born Phyllis Isley, Ramon Novarro was originally José Ramón Gil Samaniego, and Greta Garbo had been Greta Gustafsson. In Los Angeles, Eugenia could finally and fully become Indra Devi. Few in America knew her as anything else.