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, and teachable to boys in a hall. It is often said to be more dynamic than anything in the older texts, and that is less true than it sounds: the Mysore palace itself held the Śrītattvanidhi, a nineteenth-century illustrated compendium of 122 āsanas, and the eighteenth-century Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati describes rope work and jumping practices. Both have been published since, and both make the older corpus look considerably more athletic than the standard account allows.

Where his practice came from is the historical question. Indian wrestling and physical culture, probably; European gymnastics circulating in India at the time, on the evidence, also. Haṭha lineages are usually asserted as well, and here it is worth being careful: Krishnamacharya's documented training is in Sanskrit and Vedic scholarship, and his yoga lineage rests on his own account of years spent with a teacher near Kailash and of a text, the Yoga Kuruṇṭa, that no one else has seen and which is not extant. That may well be true. It is not independently corroborated, and pages that state it flatly are repeating a single self-report.

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 — a different destination from the one the classical texts describe, and worth having on its own terms.

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.