How yoga travelled from India to the world

Two waves, not one

The first wave was philosophical, and it arrived in 1893 with a monk at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

Vivekananda's yoga was Vedānta with practical instructions attached: mental discipline, breath, concentration, and a metaphysics of the self. His Rāja Yoga of 1896 was the book that put the Yoga Sutras at the centre of the modern conversation. He had almost no interest in postures and said so, associating them with a body-focused practice he considered beneath the philosophy.

The second wave was physical, and it left India four decades later.

Mysore

In the 1930s Tirumalai Krishnamacharya taught at the palace in Mysore under the patronage of the maharaja, in a setting that also housed a gymnasium and a physical-culture programme.

What he taught was a vigorous, sequenced, breath-linked postural practice — demonstrable, teachable to boys in a hall, and far more dynamic than anything described in the classical haṭha texts. Where it came from is the historical question: haṭha yoga lineages, certainly; Indian wrestling and physical culture, probably; European gymnastics circulating in India at the time, on the evidence, also.

Three of his students carried it out of India:

• B. K. S. Iyengar, who systematised alignment, introduced props, and wrote Light on Yoga, which more than any other book defined what a posture is supposed to look like.
• K. Pattabhi Jois, who taught the fixed Ashtanga Vinyasa series that became the basis of most modern flow practice.
• Indra Devi, born Eugenie Peterson, the first prominent Western woman to be taught by Krishnamacharya, who took the practice to Shanghai, Hollywood and Latin America.

What changed on the way

The ethical limbs largely fell away. A class today typically begins with posture — the third limb — and the first two, restraint and observance, appear as an occasional mention rather than a prerequisite. The classical sequence held them to be the foundation.

The goal changed too. In the Sutras, the point of the practice is the stilling of the mind and eventually liberation. In a studio, the point is usually health, flexibility, strength or calm — all real benefits, and a different destination.

And the practice became an industry, with a scale nobody in Mysore in 1935 would have predicted: teacher trainings, apparel, retreats, and a certification economy.

What India kept

Worth noting, because the export version is often mistaken for the whole.

In India, yoga remained embedded in a wider religious life for a great many people, and postural practice never became the dominant meaning of the word. A Tamil household saying they do yoga may mean japa; a north Indian one may mean morning prāṇāyāma and nothing on a mat.

The Indian state has since taken up yoga as national heritage and diplomacy, with International Day of Yoga established at the United Nations in 2014 — which is another turn in the same story, and one that carries its own politics.