B.K.S. Iyengar

No yoga teacher of the twentieth century put the postures within reach of more people than Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar. His 1966 book Light on Yoga, six hundred photographs of his own body in the asanas with plain instructions for each, became the reference manual for a generation of teachers in every style, and is still in print in more than eighteen languages.¹ His method, taught in studios across some seventy-two countries, is the patient one: exact alignment, long holds, and the props he introduced (blocks, belts, blankets, ropes) so that a stiff office worker, a pregnant woman or an eighty-year-old can work at the same posture as an athlete, safely.²

The sick child of Bellur

Iyengar was born on 14 December 1918 in Bellur, a poor village in Karnataka, the eleventh of thirteen children, during the influenza pandemic. His childhood was a run of malaria, typhoid and tuberculosis, and he later said doctors did not expect him to see twenty.³ The turn came in 1934, when his sister's husband, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, newly installed at the Mysore Palace yogashala, took the frail fifteen-year-old in and put him to work at the postures.³ Iyengar appears as a teenager in the palace's 1938 demonstration films, bending beside his teacher in what may be the earliest surviving footage of linked asana practice.⁴

The apprenticeship was brief and famously hard, but in 1936–37 Krishnamacharya sent him to Pune to teach, and Pune became his home and laboratory for the rest of his life.³ He married Ramamani in 1943; they had six children, including Geeta and Prashant, who both became major teachers of the method.³

Menuhin, and the West

For years Iyengar taught in obscurity, practicing ten hours a day and working out, on his own recovering body, what exactness in a posture requires. The door to the West opened in 1952 through an unlikely student: the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, then perhaps the most famous musician alive, who credited Iyengar's teaching with restoring his playing and brought him to Europe.³ By the 1960s Iyengar was teaching regular classes in London. The city became his first Western stronghold, and Britain's education authorities eventually offered Iyengar yoga in evening institutes.⁵

Then came the book. Light on Yoga, published in London in 1966 after years of rejections, did something no yoga text had done: it showed everything, systematically, with the precision of an anatomy atlas.⁵ Thirteen more books followed, including Light on Pranayama (1981) and Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1993).² In 1975, two years after his wife's death, he opened the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute (RIMYI) in Pune in her memory, and it has been the lineage's mother institute ever since.³

Recognition arrived in waves: India's Padma Shri in 1991, the Padma Bhushan in 2002, the Padma Vibhushan in 2014, and a place on TIME's list of the hundred most influential people in 2004.⁵² He taught into his nineties, leading eight hundred students at his eightieth birthday intensive, and died in Pune on 20 August 2014, at ninety-five, of kidney failure. India's prime minister was among the first to mourn the man who "brought yoga into the lives of many across the world."⁶

What an Iyengar class is

An Iyengar class moves slowly and asks for exactness. Postures are held, examined and corrected rather than flowed through; the teacher's instructions are anatomical and specific; and the room is full of equipment, the wooden blocks, belts and bolsters Iyengar devised so that alignment is never sacrificed to stiffness or injury.² The same infrastructure made the method a natural for therapeutic work, and medical classes for students with specific conditions are a fixture of the lineage.

Teaching credentials are unusually strict. Only assessed, certified teachers may call their classes "Iyengar Yoga," and the path is long by design: a minimum of three years as a student before mentorship can begin, then around three more years with an approved teacher before the first assessment, which examines theory, personal practice and live teaching separately.⁷ Since July 2020 the worldwide certification ladder has run from Level 1 to Level 5, replacing the old Introductory-through-Advanced grades.⁷

The lineage today

RIMYI in Pune remains the center of the Iyengar world, led by the family, his son Prashant Iyengar and granddaughter Abhijata Iyengar, with a published calendar of classes and workshops running into 2027. Foreign students need eight years of Iyengar practice even to apply, and places book out a year or two ahead.⁸ Geeta Iyengar, his daughter and the method's great teacher of yoga for women, died in 2018, days after leading his centenary celebrations.⁹ National associations administer training and assessment in dozens of countries; in the United States that is IYNAUS, whose 2026 convention in Philadelphia is led by Abhijata.¹⁰ A teacher who names B.K.S. Iyengar as their lineage is telling you the class will be precise, prop-friendly, and safe to bring an imperfect body to.

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