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Business News/ Industry / The legacy of BKS Iyengar
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The legacy of BKS Iyengar

The yoga 'guru' leaves behind his philosophy and practice to his immediate family and the thousands he taught and mentored

Originally from Bellur, Karnataka, Iyengar learnt yoga under Sri Krishnamacharya, his brother-in-law. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/MintPremium
Originally from Bellur, Karnataka, Iyengar learnt yoga under Sri Krishnamacharya, his brother-in-law. Photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint

Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar, the world’s best known and most widely followed yoga guru, died at the age of 95 in Pune in the early hours of Wednesday.

Rajvi Mehta, his close aide and disciple, said: “Guruji was hospitalized a week ago when he complained of breathlessness. His family was by his side when he breathed his last. Till Monday night, he was in conversation with his granddaughter and son."

Iyengar is survived by five daughters and a son. Many close to him believe his granddaughter Abhijata will be his heir; she has been under his tutelage since childhood and was by his side in the last few years when he conducted his classes or made public appearances. His son Prashant, 65, runs the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute (Rimyi) in Pune.

Till late last year, Iyengar continued taking therapy classes (known as medical classes) at the Pune institute. When Mint Lounge visited the centre for an interview, he was correcting the physically demanding postures of students as well as instructors in his sharp Marathi. He was agile for his age, and lucid and good-humoured during the interview.

His close associates said he practised for two-three hours every morning, trying to perfect the stretches he had devised, combining and cementing the eightfold path to enlightenment in Patanjali’s yoga sutra. At 95, he could do the sirsasana, or the head stand, for half an hour at a go. Iyengar reiterated during the interview that yoga was as much an art as a science.

Iyengar began his life as a yoga guru in Mumbai and Pune. In the 1960s, violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin introduced him to the West and since then, Iyengar yoga, which the guru devised entirely on his own—improvising on Patanjali’s hatha yoga by making use of straps, wooden blocks, and other objects as aids to achieve the correct postures—has spread across the world.

There are Iyengar yoga centres in 72 countries, from Africa and China to North America. Famous actors and sportspersons have found health and fitness solutions in Iyengar’s methods and among those who have regularly visited his Pune institute are cricket stars Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble and Sachin Tendulkar.

In 1975, after his wife’s death, he opened Rimyi, its design inspired by the eight-limbed theory of Patanjali’s yoga system. But the guru continued to travel all over the world, his last famous trip being to Beijing, China, in 2013. Iyengar repeatedly petitioned for permission to establish a temple for Patanjali, who formulated the original yoga sutras in ancient Hindu texts. Each time, this was turned down because Patanjali cannot be characterized as a god.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when yoga returned to its country of origin as a fitness fad via the West, many forms and brands of yoga flourished. Iyengar often expressed his scepticism at this proliferation, and his disciples and Iyengar yoga centres continued to maintain its purist style.

The guru never spoke about a successor. “I consider the grossest of gross and the finest of fine students as equals," he said in his interview to us in December, just before his 95th birthday.

He hoped his practice and art would remain with the thousands he had taught and mentored for health, equilibrium and inner peace.

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Published: 20 Aug 2014, 11:56 AM IST
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