The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  Some people might find this disillusioning—there’s a reason that the relatively recent provenance of so many yoga poses is rarely discussed in yoga studios—but it’s also freeing, because it means we don’t have to think about yoga in terms of purity and corruption or to feel guilty for adapting it. Indeed, to adapt yoga to modern needs is even to be part of a tradition of sorts. Today’s Western yoginis may not really be heiresses to Patanjali, but they are very much part of a lineage that goes back to Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Indra Devi.

  In the last years of her life, Devi came to understand and even appreciate the way that women, following her example, were adopting and transforming techniques developed by Indian male ascetics. “Now that women have liberated themselves from the house, they are looking for something spiritual,” she told the Buenos Aires Herald. “Men, now that they have lost the prerogatives they had for thousands of years, tend to justify themselves, taking refuge in technology.” A few months later, the author of another profile wrote that Devi “perceives a great imbalance between the sexes, and describes men as being on the throne with a choice to make: either step down of their own accord, or be pushed off.”

  She had become, in the end, a sort of feminist. Though she’d always been apolitical, she started speaking out on one burning issue: abortion rights. Worshipping freedom, she was incensed by the idea that anyone would be forced to bear a baby against her will, and the growing antiabortion movement in the United States left her indignant.

  For reasons that were never clear, Devi was also convinced that a douche of coffee and olive oil could bring on a late period. Further, she believed that this secret knowledge could give women control over their bodies. So, in a quixotic attempt to liberate women from the tyranny of biology, she had leaflets typed up in three languages that she would distribute to friends and students. Saying that it was a “gross injustice” that men could force women to continue an unwanted pregnancy, the flyers offered her recipe, and concluded, chain-letter style, by urging recipients to copy them and send them on. That way, eventually, “every woman in the world will be able to get this simple and free information.”

  Of course, yoga remained her overriding passion, and the worldwide yoga explosion meant that she was in greater demand than ever. In 1988 she joined a host of global yoga luminaries in Zinal, Switzerland, for the inauguration of the International Yoga Federation, a body meant to unite national and regional yoga associations. The same year, she traveled to Madras for Krishnamacharya’s one-hundredth birthday. There is video of her draping his neck in a garland of flowers and then sitting as his feet as he blesses her. “He likes you,” says his smiling son. “I like him too!” she replies, laughing. Together, they chant a Sanskrit mantra, a prayer for mankind to be led from darkness to light, from the fear of death to the knowledge of immortality.

  If there was any fear of death left in Devi, she never showed it. A psychic once told her that she would die at ninety, so in 1989 she prepared to say a grand farewell, but the year passed and she was still working as hard as ever, spending her ninety-first birthday in Moscow. There, she was interviewed on a popular television show while sitting, throughout, in lotus pose. The next day, admirers mobbed her on the street. Russia was in the early stages of its own yoga boom—by 2010, the New York Times reported, “Yoga, which was officially taboo in Soviet times but retained an underground following, has been embraced by Russia’s elite. In 2007, shortly before he became president, [Dmitry] Medvedev told Itogi magazine that he was ‘mastering yoga,’ as one activity that helps him deal with the stress of political obligations.”

  Devi was back in India in 1990. There, rushing off a plane in Madras, she fell and broke her arm. A doctor told her that without surgery she would never be able to use it again. Ignoring him, she created a program of rehabilitative exercises for herself and recovered within eight months. The next year, she traveled to India once again, and then, the year after that, to England. In 1995 she joined yoga teachers from all over the world at a conference in Jerusalem designed to bring Jews and Arabs together through the practice.

  An old friend of hers, Tao Porchon-Lynch—who, as of this writing, continues to teach surprisingly vigorous classes in her late nineties—remembers hearing her inimitable voice from the back of the stage. “Suddenly, I hear somebody say, ‘I can do it! Don’t tell me I can’t do it!’ ” says Porchon-Lynch. Someone had made the mistake of trying to help Indra Devi down the stairs.

  In 1996 Devi planned to go to India one more time, perhaps for good. Not long after she’d flouted the first prediction of her death by surviving her ninetieth year, she’d gone to see a French psychic living in Buenos Aires, who told her she would die in a year ending in eight. Again, she began preparing for the end. Often she told people that she planned to spend her last years in a hermitage, in keeping with the tradition of many Indian spiritual masters. It would have been her last reinvention: the secluded contemplative.

  It’s hard to say where she would have gone. Many of her old friends were dead, and her onetime spiritual homes no longer offered refuge. In 1994, Swami Premananda, who had built a new ashram in Tamil Nadu, was arrested for raping and illegally detaining orphan and indigent girls who’d been entrusted to his care and for involvement in the murder of an estranged disciple. Three years later, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. (He died behind bars in 2011.) Devi must have been aware of the case, but she never spoke of it publicly.

  Meanwhile, whatever faith she’d had left in Sai Baba was destroyed in 1993, when six people were killed in the avatar’s residence in circumstances that remain mysterious. A few things are clear: Four young devotees armed with knives had broken into Baba’s quarters. When his attendants tried to stop them, the intruders stabbed two of them to death. While Sai Baba escaped through a back stairway, the boys tried to barricade themselves in his bedroom. Then heavily armed police barged in and, citing self-defense, killed the four boys.

  After that, things get murky. To this day, no one knows what the boys’ motive was, and many have alleged that they were killed to prevent them from testifying, possibly about sexual abuse. Velayudhan Nair, the former home secretary of Andhra Pradesh, claimed there was a cover-up and called the shootings “absolute cold-blooded murder.” Some of the policemen involved were arrested, but charges were never brought, and according to a BBC report, Sai Baba was never even interviewed.

  In the wake of the killings, Devi told Díaz Herrera, with whom she remained close during his exile, that she was finished with her former guru. “She said there was a crime, but it was covered up,” he recalled. “She cut everything off.” Despite her aversion to challenging the faith of others, she even broached the subject of the murders with her old friend Bettina Biggart, who was still a Baba devotee and was outraged by Devi’s impertinence.

  “She was totally in the wrong on that,” Biggart said. “She wasn’t there, she didn’t know what happened. In India, treatment can get a little rough. If she accepts that he was the avatar, you do not question what he does! Whether he’s God or the avatar, he’s not a normal being, and everything he does is for upliftment!”

  For Devi, with so many connections severed, returning to India would have meant, once again, sailing into the unknown. This had never stopped her before, so she boarded a plane, but with a new, unaccustomed unease. There was a layover in Singapore, and while in the airport, she bumped into a door and hurt her finger. The injury, she decided, was a sign that the trip wasn’t meant to be. Without leaving the airport, she turned around and went right back to Argentina and the people she loved. She had reached, she realized, her final incarnation, at least in this lifetime.

  People sometimes asked her why she never carried out her plan to retire. “I don’t know!” she writes. “I didn’t want to!” Having never claimed that she was an Eastern spiritual master, she felt no need to abide by traditions of renunciation. “I changed my opinion because there are always more things to do.”

/>   Including one more trip. In 1998 Díaz Herrera, by then back in Panama City, got a worried phone call from David Lifar. “Mataji wants to go to Panama to see you,” Lifar said. She insisted on traveling alone. She was ninety-nine and had recently had fainting spells, but she would not be dissuaded. So Lifar put her on a 6:00 a.m. flight from Buenos Aires to Lima, Peru, where she had a two-hour layover, finally reaching Panama in the afternoon. Díaz Herrera picked her up at Tocumen airport.

  At his house—more modest than the Altos del Golf mansion, which he had long since leased—she took off her sandals. Assuming she was exhausted after the long flight, he asked if she wanted to rest a while.

  “If you want to rest, go rest,” she said to him.

  “No,” he said, “If you want to rest a little from the trip…”

  “If you want to go, my dear, you go,” she repeated. “I’m not coming here to rest.”

  During that trip, he accompanied her on a visit to a hospital for the elderly and once again arranged for her to give a talk at a university. Because 1998 was the year she’d been prophesied to die, Díaz Herrera believed she’d come to say good-bye. She was weaker than she’d been before, the sparkle in her eye not quite as bright, her memory unreliable.

  One morning, 9:30 came and she still hadn’t gotten out of bed. Worried, Díaz Herrera’s wife went to check on her. Walking into Devi’s room, she found her sitting up in bed. “Nobody’s come to give me my good morning kiss,” Devi said sweetly. “How can I get up without my kiss?” Touched, Díaz Herrera went in and gave her a hug. One can see this as senility or playfulness, or both. For the colonel, it was evidence of her capacity for love.

  Once again, prophecy failed. The year 1999 arrived, and with it, Devi’s one-hundredth birthday. David and Iana Lifar organized a huge party for her in Buenos Aires, and more than three thousand people came to celebrate her century on earth. By that point, her memory had started to go, though only those who’d known her for a long time realized it. Biggart, in town for the festivities, remembered accompanying her to a restaurant. “She was out of it then,” she said. “Nobody knew it but Rosita and I.” Yet when a group of photographers showed up, Biggart recalled, Devi straightened up and pulled her shoulders back, a grande dame ready for her close-up. She was still present enough to care how she looked in pictures.

  Devi had given up teaching, though she continued to give talks to small groups of students. Her eyesight had become bad, but she wouldn’t wear glasses, so she didn’t do much reading anymore. Often she’d sit in her room listening to music and feeding pigeons from her window.

  Her death, when it came in 2002, just before her 103rd birthday, was not a good one. David Lifar told journalists that she “went in peace, without suffering at all,” but other friends recall her fury at being confined to a bed in a clinic, fed by a nasogastric tube that she kept trying to pull out. Convinced that she was ready to die, they were outraged at the measures that were taken to sustain her, but lacked the legal standing to do anything about them. “We just have to understand that this is part of Karma, which Mataji had to fulfill in this life,” wrote one of her disciples.

  In keeping with the teachings Devi had picked up from her husband—as well as her own lifelong fear of being trapped in a coffin before she was fully gone—her corpse was left alone for three days in order for her soul to review the life she’d lived before departing. Perhaps she should have been left for longer, because the story unwinding before her disembodied self—in reverse, according to the Anthroposophists—would have had many more chapters than most.

  If the Anthroposophists were right, she would have seen Panama on the cusp of an attempted revolution, Buenos Aires after the dictatorship, and Sri Lanka at the start of the civil war. She’d have watched herself at Sai Baba’s ashram during the exhilarating early days when a new epoch in human history seemed to be at hand. She’d have revisited her ranch in Mexico during the height of the counterculture and Hollywood in its lavish heyday. She’d have seen Shanghai during the bleakest days of the war, the Indian independence movement, and the birth of Bollywood. She’d be in Ommen with the Theosophical Society at the moment when it seemed that the Messiah had arrived, and then dancing in the cabarets of Berlin. She’d again flee the terror of the Russian Revolution, and then relive the aborted hope with which it began. Finally, she’d have found herself in the grand brick house by the river in Riga with her adored teenage mother. She would have seen the start of the twenty-first century, the whole of the twentieth, and the end of the nineteenth.

  Then, when her self had truly dissolved, her body was cremated and her ashes scattered in the Río de la Plata, trailed by floating South American flowers, their stems trimmed to look like lotuses.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many people across the world helped me with my research for this book that I can’t begin to list them all. I’m particularly grateful to Agnese Luse, who did invaluable work for me in both Riga and Berlin, and to Nicole Grouman, who helped me conduct interviews in Argentina. Roberto Díaz Herrera was generous with both his time and his anecdotes when I met him in Panama City, as was Piero during our meetings in Argentina. Paul O’Brien was full of colorful stories, told with a wonderfully wry sense of humor. The late B. K. S. Iyengar, a man with endless demands on his time, had the immense kindness to meet with me and share his memories of Krishnamacharya’s yoga shala when I showed up unannounced at his yoga center in Pune. My friend Anna Pomykala helped me decipher a Polish-language biography of Fryderyk Járosy, and my friends Jessica Heyman and Shirley Velasquez did their best to correct my Spanish in many of my e-mail exchanges. I’ve learned so much about yoga practice from Lesley Desaulniers and my other wonderful teachers at Prema.

  I’m hugely thankful to Lexy Bloom, my meticulous and patient editor at Knopf, as well as to Jenna Dolan, my heroically precise copyeditor. My fact-checkers, Kyla Jones and Ben Phelan, saved me from some truly mortifying mistakes. (Those that may remain are, of course, my responsibility.) This book wouldn’t exist without Larry Weissman, my friend and agent. For years, he listened to me say that someone really should write a book about Indra Devi before helping me realize that that person could be me.

  When I began researching this book, I had no children. As I finish it, I have two. I couldn’t have completed this book while having babies and working in journalism without the support of my husband, Matt Ipcar. I’m thankful to him for so much, from taking me to India so many years ago to accompanying me to Panama with a nursing infant in tow and now reading to our toddler in the next room while I type these acknowledgments. Every blessing in my life begins with him.

  NOTES

  This book is the product of archival and library research as well as firsthand reporting. Several sources were interviewed multiple times. Direct quotations that come from written sources and from author interviews are indicated in the notes.

  INTRODUCTION

  “As our home industry expands”: Gita Mehta, Karma Cola (New Delhi, India: Penguin Books India, 1990), p. 7.

  I ended up writing a story: Michelle Goldberg, “Untouchable?” Salon, July 25, 2001, http://​www.​salon.​com/​2001/​07/​25/​baba/, accessed September 12, 2014.

  “what was thought to be the first yoga class”: Douglas Martin, “Indra Devi, 102, Dies: Taught Yoga to Stars and Leaders,” New York Times, April 30, 2002.

  This opinion is reductive: George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” Partisan Review, January 1949.

  CHAPTER 1

  “As a child”: Indra Devi, Una mujer de tres siglos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2000), p. 37.

  she and her mother had the opportunity to connect: Ibid., p. 67.

  At the time, Eugenia was already: Natalia Apostolli, Indra Devi: Una vida, un siglo (Buenos Aires: Javier Vergara Editor, 1992), p. 22.

  The building is still standing: Interview with Vladimir Eichenbaums, Riga historian, March 2010.

  To Eugenia, it seemed: Devi, Una mujer de tres siglos
, p. 30.

  There was a constant stream of guests: Ibid., p. 31.

  “going totally against the conventions of the epoch”: Ibid., p. 36.

  “décolleté”; “coquettish gestures”: Yug, review of Polish Blood, in Segodna, March 20, 1924, p. 5; Yug, review of Les cloches de Corneville, in Segodna, April 11, 1924.

  There she insisted: Apostolli, Indra Devi, p. 26.

  For an aristocratic only child: Devi, Una mujer de tres siglos, p. 33.

  Walking beside Sasha: Ibid., p. 39.

  “We are preparing a little text-book”: Yogi Ramacharaka, Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), p. 17.

  “You are too emotional”: Devi, Una mujer de tres siglos, p. 40.

  “Swing back the hands”: Yogi Ramacharaka, quoted in Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 361.

  “The shelves of the Russian philosophical bookshops”: Sir Paul Dukes, The Yoga of Health, Youth, and Joy (London: Cassell and Co. Ltd., 1960), p. 5.

  Between 1881 and 1918: Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 21.

  The work of Papus: Gary Lachman, Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2008), p. 163.

  “She may or may not”: Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), p. 31.