As an international yoga hub next only to Rishikesh (Uttarakhand), linked with the Beatles and Mahesh Yogi, Mysuru has a strong “yogic pedigree” associated with the royalty.
The city’s fame as a yoga hub has concretised in the last few decades thanks to yoga gurus such as late K. Pattabhi Jois of the Ashtanga fame and late B.K.S. Iyengar. Both of them learnt yoga under the renowned guru T. Krishnamacharya here.
But the western world’s first tryst with yoga came through Indira Devi, who, again, has a Mysuru connection. She was born Eugenie V. Peterson in Riga, Latvia, in 1899. She became a theatre artiste and was introduced to Indian culture through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings. She approached Krishnamacharya to be his disciple, but he flatly refused as she was a woman and a westerner, according to various accounts.
The resolute aspirant approached the then Maharaja of Mysore Nalwadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar at whose insistence Krishnamacharya agreed to teach her. Not only did she become the first woman student of Krishnamacharya, Eugenie went on to earn the fame as “first lady of yoga”. She introduced yoga in China, prevailed upon the Soviet authorities to lift the ban on yoga, and taught Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson, among others. She died in 2002 in Argentina at the age of 102.
While Indira Devi took yoga abroad, her fellow students Pattabhi Jois settled in Mysuru and B.K.S. Iyengar in Pune and drew students from around the world. Their Mysuru connection through their illustrious teacher Krishnamacharya, who was patronised by the Mysore palace, did add to their hallowed pedigree. Sritattvanidhi , a treatise attributed to Mummadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar (1794–1868), is reckoned to contain instructions on more than 100 yoga asanas .
Norman E. Sjoman’s book Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace dwells on how Nalwadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar funded the publication of Krishnamacharya’s books on yoga, apart from contributing generously to a film on Iyengar’s yoga for propagation.
