Tirumalai Krishnamacharya

Most of the yoga taught in the world today runs back, within a teacher or two, to one man who never left India and never sought a following outside it. Tirumalai Krishnamacharya taught yoga for some sixty years, first in a palace school in Mysore and then from a small house in Madras. Among his students were B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi and his own son T.K.V. Desikachar, each of whom founded a lineage of their own.¹ Flowing vinyasa classes, precision alignment work, and one-to-one therapeutic yoga all trace to his room, which is why he is often called the father of modern yoga.²

A scholar first

Krishnamacharya was born on 18 November 1888 in Muchukundapuram, a village in what was then the princely state of Mysore, into a family of Sri Vaishnava scholars that traced its descent from the ninth-century sage Nathamuni.³ His father, a Sanskrit teacher, began his instruction early and died when the boy was about ten, after which the family moved to Mysore.² The education that followed was formidable even by the standards of traditional Indian scholarship: logic and Vedanta at Mysore's Parakala Matha monastery from 1909 to 1914, then years of advanced study in Benares, with examinations at Patna and scholastic titles in six classical systems of Indian philosophy.³

The yoga came next. In the early 1920s Krishnamacharya spent, by his own account, more than seven years in the Himalayas near Lake Manasarovar with a teacher named Ramamohana Brahmachari, studying Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and an enormous repertoire of postures. He returned to India in 1922, and as the story is told in the lineage, his teacher's parting instruction was not to seek renown but to marry, raise a family, and teach yoga. He married Namagiriamma in 1925.³

The palace school at Mysore

Around 1925 the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV, a famous patron of physical culture and the arts, invited Krishnamacharya to teach in Mysore, and in 1933 gave him a yogashala, a yoga school, inside the Jaganmohan Palace.² The school's textbook was Krishnamacharya's own Yoga Makaranda, written in Kannada in 1934 at the palace's request.³

What happened in that room between the early 1930s and 1950 shaped everything after it. Teaching mostly energetic boys, Krishnamacharya developed a way of joining demanding postures into repetitive, breath-linked sequences, the root of every "vinyasa" or "flow" class taught since.¹ In 1938 the Maharaja sponsored a black-and-white film of Krishnamacharya and his students demonstrating the practice, with a teenage B.K.S. Iyengar among them; a 57-minute copy survives, and it is possibly the earliest footage of linked yoga postures anywhere. The Maharaja circulated such demonstrations around India deliberately, the Smithsonian's curators note, "as an act of nation building": yoga as a modern, Indian answer to European gymnastics.¹

The students went out from Mysore early. In 1936–37 Krishnamacharya sent the young Iyengar to Pune to teach, the seed of what became Iyengar Yoga.⁴ Pattabhi Jois, who had come to him as a boy, stayed in Mysore and made the flowing sequences his life's work. Indra Devi, a European-born student he at first refused and then famously accepted, carried the teaching to Shanghai and then Hollywood. Krishnamacharya himself never taught in the West; his global reach came entirely through his students.¹

The Madras years

Indian independence ended the princely patronage, the yogashala lost its funding, and in 1950 it closed. Krishnamacharya moved to Madras, today's Chennai, and in 1952 took a position at Vivekananda College.³ The Madras decades were quieter and, in their way, just as consequential. Teaching individuals rather than classrooms of boys, he adapted the practice to the person in front of him, old or young, ill or well, an approach his son T.K.V. Desikachar would later systematize.

Desikachar's own turn came in 1961. A newly graduated engineer, he watched his father greeted with an embrace by a Western woman whose insomnia he had treated, an intimacy unheard of for an orthodox Brahmin teacher, and decided the same day to abandon engineering and study with him.⁵ In 1965 the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti sought Krishnamacharya out, and was assigned the son as his teacher.⁶ Later personal students included A.G. Mohan, who recalls a teacher for whom attention itself was the practice: "steady mindfulness from moment to moment," inseparable from any posture.⁷

Krishnamacharya continued teaching into extreme old age and died in Madras on 28 February 1989, at 100.³

What he taught

There is no single "Krishnamacharya style," and that is the point. His method survives as several schools that look strikingly different: the athletic, breath-linked series of the Jois line; the precise, prop-supported alignment work of the Iyengar line; and the individualized, breath-centered practice of the Desikachar line, known in the United States as Viniyoga.¹ What they share is his grammar. Vinyasa, the linked sequence; the breath as the medium of movement; and the principle, drawn from Patanjali, that practice must be fitted to the practitioner rather than the practitioner to the practice.⁸

Historians have also placed the Mysore years in a wider frame. Mark Singleton's Yoga Body (Oxford, 2010) locates the palace yogashala at a crossroads where Indian tradition met the international physical-culture movements of the day, a reminder that the flowing, posture-heavy yoga of the modern studio was, in part, invented in that room rather than inherited whole from antiquity.⁹

The lineage today

The custodial institution of Krishnamacharya's own teaching is the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram (KYM) in Chennai, founded by Desikachar in 1976, which runs classes, one-to-one yoga therapy, teacher training and textual research from two centers in the city.¹⁰ His teaching also continues through the schools of his direct students (among them A.G. Mohan's Svastha Yoga and, in the United States, Gary Kraftsow's American Viniyoga Institute⁸) and, at one remove, through every Ashtanga and Iyengar teacher in the world. Teachers in this wider family often name Krishnamacharya as their lineage when the Mysore tradition itself, rather than one of its branches, is what they teach.

Watch