https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/8a3cc7fd460ad8ef6065d0aefd16ae0fc4978470_sury-feat.jpg?auto=compress,format

yoga sequence

A yoga teacher in 1930s India inspired today’s transnational yoga with his spectacular fusion of tradition and innovation.

Suzanne and Alaric both practice Iyengar yoga. Alaric holds the ‘plough’ asana (posture) for the video, as Suzanne, who is also a yoga scholar, explains that Iyengar yoga is distinguished by “precision in how asana is performed”.  

Ruth has also been doing yoga for many years. As she flows effortlessly through a series of moves, she says, “I practise ashtanga yoga, which is an asana-based sequence of postures – there are various different sequences.”

Experienced yoga practitioners describe their practice in terms of the system in which they trained. This is likely to be one of a handful of transnational yoga systems: ashtanga, Iyengar, Sivananda or one of their many spin-offs. 

Transnational yoga systems are usually centred on a postural (asana) practice that draws on a synthesis of ancient metaphysical yogic practices, traditional South Asian physical culture and modern Western exercise systems. 

Nowhere is the fusion of elements in modern yoga better demonstrated than in the method developed in 1930s India by Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989).

Krishnamacharya has been described as the “father of modern yoga” (by yoga scholar Mark Singleton in ‘Yoga Body’) largely thanks to the global success of his students. The creators of Iyengar yoga and ashtanga yoga – B K S Iyengar (1918–2014) and Pattabhi Jois (1915–2009) respectively – helped to make modern postural yoga a global phenomenon. Indra Devi (1899–2002), a Latvian-American who also trained with Krishnamacharya, popularised yoga in America with the help of celebrity Hollywood clients such as Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo.

The record sleeve for Indra Devi's home yoga course, 1963.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/17be0ec53ba01358e662132bbddae369233eed01_devifn.jpg?auto=compress,format

Yoga for Americans

Born to a Brahmin family in Karnataka in Southern India, Krishnamacharya was initiated into the culture and practice of yoga from a young age. In 1915, at the age of 27, he travelled to Tibet to study yoga with the guru Rammohan Brahmacari. He spent several years teaching and touring until 1931, when the Maharajah of Mysore invited him to teach at the Sanskrit school in Mysore. Two years later he was given a wing of Jaganmohan Palace in Mysore to run a yogasala (yoga school).

Krishnamacharya’s yoga system comprised a series of asanas joined by a repetitive linking sequence, based on surya namaskars.

Photograph of Krishnamacharya and his yoga students at the Jaganmohan Palace in Mysore, from his book 'Yoga Makaranda‘ 1934.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/646089306005feacc1e6a5d81bd096ede41fd110_krishnamacharya_yoga_sessions_mysore_palace3x2-compressed-1.jpg?auto=compress,format

Yogasala at Mysore Palace

Maharajah Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV (1884–1940) took a close personal interest in physical education and often invited indigenous and foreign practitioners to Mysore. Among his other proteges was the bodybuilder K V Iyer, who taught in a gymnasium next to the yogasala. 

Yoga was still the subject of scorn among the youth of Mysore in the 1930s (Singleton). They preferred the more fashionable and ‘manly’ surroundings of Iyer’s bodybuilding gym to Krishnamacharya’s yogasala. 

Krishnamacharya worked under the personal direction of the Maharajah with a mandate to popularise yoga practice. If yoga was to compete with the theatrical masculinity of bodybuilding and other modern movements, it had to attract people’s attention.

Krishnamacharya did regular demonstrations at Mysore University to encourage students to take up yoga. The Maharajah also sent him further afield on what he called “propaganda work”, performing yoga demonstrations all over South India. 

He also gave yoga classes as part of a physical education programme for the royal household, and performed spectacular yoga demonstrations at the Maharajah’s court. As a student, Iyengar recalled demonstrating asanas at the palace to visiting dignitaries, including delegates from the YMCA (Singleton).

The Maharajah even funded a silent movie for national circulation. The hour-long film shows a 50-year-old Krishnamacharya accompanied by the young B K S Iyengar ‘performing’ advanced asanas. The academic and curatorial advisor Sita Reddy has suggested that new ways of presenting yoga, such as film and photographic yoga manuals, led to new ways of perceiving yoga and ultimately to new ways of practising it (in ‘Yoga: the art of transformation’).

The need to perform a ‘yoga showcase’ might well have contributed to Krishnamacharya’s flowing style of yoga. The vinyasas (postures with linking sequences) are held for a relatively short time, in contrast with the older yoga tradition of holding a single pose for a length of time. Coordinating the asanas with counted breaths would also have helped synchronise postures in a group display.

Physical culture had taken colonial India by storm. Military and educational institutions all over India offered a mix of indigenous and modern physical education. Krishnamacharya worked in just such an environment at the palace in Mysore, and inevitably this had an impact on his method.

Mark Singleton notes the similarity to exercise drills in a popular gymnastic system of the time, Bukh's ‘Fundamental Gymnastics’ and to Kuvalayananda’s Yogic Physical Education developed for schools. 

Krishnamacharya believed that that yoga practice should be adapted to the time and place it was taught, and to the specific requirements of the student. One of his early students recalls that he was “innovating all the time in response to his students” (Singleton). He would modify his postures to suit the individual, even creating new positions when needed.

It’s no wonder, then, that Iyengar and Jois developed two very different systems that were both inspired by the same guru.

Pattabhi Jois taking a yoga class, date unknown.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/e908c4d0c77b5bdc0e392938fb60c2a0d57ab530_larry_schultz_with_pattabhi_jois.jpg?auto=compress,format

Pattabhi Jois

Jois’s ashtanga yoga consists of three series of asanas, linked by surya namaskar-based vinyasas (transitions), performed in a counted breath sequence. Jois trained and taught at the Sanskrit school, where Krishnamacharya developed a practice suitable for larger groups of active young men like him.

Iyengar, who experienced the more personal training of the yogasala, took a different approach, discarding counted breaths and insisting on very precise asanas, each held for longer periods of time. 

Krishnamacharya was steeped in spiritual yoga and Hindu philosophy. He was keen to give his method the authority of the ancient texts, in particular Patanjali’s Yogasutras. The Indologist Norman Sjoman, who spent some time in Mysore, noted that the palace library contained several old manuscripts about indigenous practices, including hatha yoga, which Krishnamacharya would have studied. 

Krishnamacharya was selective in his use of the ancient texts, rejecting some aspects of hatha yoga where they differed from the Yogasutras, because “the main source for yoga Patanjali Darsara (Yogasutras) does not include them… it is gravely disappointing that they defile the name of yoga”. (Singleton)

A page from ‘Sritattvanidhi’, an early 19th-century manuscript in the Sarasvati Bhandar Library in Mysore Palace. 

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/6384b58de5853d7dc0fce2666bb5f486432ad9e4_img_20180207_151834.jpg?auto=compress,format

Sritattvanidhi

The synthesis of old and new can also be seen in the work of earlier yoga innovators such as Yogendra and Kuvalayananda because of the traditional teacher-student system of learning that they inherited. 

In the South Asian tradition, knowledge was transmitted as a whole, without distinction between what was learnt from the teacher and what the student may have contributed. As such, Krishnamacharya attributed his method to his own guru and to historic texts that he may or may not have encountered, rather than to his own innovations. There was no conflict for him between the continuity of tradition and the fact that the renaissance of postural yoga was “self-consciously concerned with modernity and modernising tradition” (Yoga scholar Joseph Atler in Singleton).

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/47796eca9daff4cbfde2edad9e9d5a3e8854a425_bks_iyengar_centre_house.jpg?auto=compress,format

B K S Iyengar at Centre House

The process of “amalgamation and borrowing” has been a constant feature in yoga, ancient and modern. Yoga continues to transform both itself and its practitioners as new teachers develop systems of their own. 

Jois and Iyengar adapted the Mysore method to meet the needs of a transnational, global community with their own mix of tradition and innovation. In the West, new schools such as Jivamukti yoga in the 1980s and power yoga in the 1990s have arisen from practitioners of ashtanga yoga and Sivananda yoga. In India, modern transnational yoga coexists alongside the continuing ancient practice of the ascetics and the even newer televised mass yoga of Ramdev.

As Krishnamacharya said, yoga adapts to time and place. At the beginning of the 21st century, a new wave of health and well-being has given the therapeutic and health aspects of yoga a new purpose. 

Eunice and James told us about the yoga therapy that they provide. In 2008, Eunice, a yoga teacher from London, volunteered with the charity We Act. She went to teach ashtanga vinyasa yoga to mainly women and children in Rwanda. Her classes supported the clinical therapy for traumatised victims of the genocide of 1994. Eunice is convinced of the therapeutic benefits of yoga for supporting people who are experiencing physical and mental suffering.

Yoga therapist James came to yoga through his own experience of stress and injury. He now works with people with severe mental health problems and believes “there’s ways that we can use movement in yoga to subtly affect people’s breathing and then their state of being”.

Is well-being a public health issue? The Centers for Disease Control in the United States see it that way. For them, well-being “integrates mental health (mind) and physical health (body), resulting in more holistic approaches to disease prevention and health”.

Many yogis around the world would say this sounds a lot like modern yoga.

 Lalita is a web editor at Wellcome Collection.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/2eedaa4b953f4484e87fafe09219180d04e39954_c3d344c9-bee0-483e-8a04-639cbb554443_lkphoto.jpg?auto=compress,format

Lalita Kaplish

@LalitaKaplish

Author

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/07885837442ab1d3815f7e9d99883a9fb9921d87_sury-feat.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/2743b29b511b2b97796033e6faaaf8134622c378_sury-feat.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/4ad89d8a36e5306dd632e7a53a4349e502eb5dc3_sury-feat.jpg?auto=compress,format

A yoga teacher in 1930s India inspired today’s transnational practice with his spectacular fusion of tradition and innovation.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/bbc028f17f2eed264ddfa2cb9d0a5916eba46dbf_bm-yogis.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/11434057db023ee78dcb13856b829caf70e0a59d_bm-yogis.jpg?auto=compress,format

Shaiva ascetics performing tapas

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/71c0184f46da456d1e04a85d7f1855fd943d6e7d_bm-yogis.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/7ec8e9b704d0a5652fa33bda85554445d8699d3f_bm-yogis.jpg?auto=compress,format

Follow the journey of how a tradition with ancient roots in the Indian subcontinent ended up as a weekly yoga class for millions around the world.

Not one yoga, but many yogas

The yogi as hermit, warrior, criminal and showman

Vivekananda’s journey

Yoga gets physical

Sun salutations and yoga synthesis in India

Yoga adapts to time and place

The History of Yoga

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/e67213fe1279af4c48c2fc7b4088ed60cc3f8dc4_kohbar_of_mithila.jpg?auto=compress,format

Kohbar of Mithila

Surya namaskars, or sun salutations, have a long history in South Asia, but their place at the heart of modern yoga is more recent.

Eunice is an ashtanga yoga practitioner. She describes the surya namaskar sequence that she demonstrates in the video as “form, connected with breath in the same sequence every time you do it”.

There are many variations on sun salutations or surya namaskars as a sequence of asanas (poses) in yoga. But the first systematic presentation of surya namaskar only appeared 90 years ago in Aundh (now part of the Indian state of Maharashtra), in 1938 in ‘The Ten-Point Way to Health: surya namaskars’ written by Pratinidhi Pant, the Rajah of Aundh. 

The Rajah didn’t claim to invent surya namaskar: “What we give here is in fundamentals the age-old method of performing surya namaskars, and the one followed by our revered father the late Rajah of Aundh. For 55 years he did these.” He simply, “developed and changed it in accordance with modern science… and experiment by ourselves in person” (Pant, 1938).

Sun salutations were indeed an ancient tradition, originally thought to have been purely incantations to the rising sun. The poses themselves are similar to traditional martial arts exercises called dands and jors. The Rajah, who was also a bodybuilder, notes that the traditional ‘pahilwan’ or wrestler would have used such exercises to build strength, but excessive overuse was not healthy.

The ten postures in the Rajah of Aundh's surya namaskar sequence, from his book 'The Ten-Point Way to Health', published in English in 1938.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/12d25067bf838343bcc261e53dab19cd87fc8162_sn1-aundh.jpg?auto=compress,format

The Rajah of Aundh’s sequence of poses is designed to be repeated in cycles, accompanied by rhythmic breathing. It also requires the repetition of the different names of the sun and Vedic hymns. Pant explains that this is because “the functioning of the body is not complete if the vocal cords are left silent”, and “vibrating extends their influence… to every corner of the body”. For non-Hindus he offers a secular sequence of accompanying mantras: “om, hram, hrim, hrum, hraum, hrah”, because these sounds “are too valuable in their physical effect to be left out”.

'The Ten-Point Way to Health’ never describes surya namaskar as yoga. But the Rajah did a lot to promote it as a physical education programme in the schools of Aundh. 

The bodybuilder K V Iyer was a physical culturist who developed his own system of bodybuilding, incorporating hatha yoga and surya namaskars for fitness and body conditioning, along with European techniques. He set up a series of gymnasia and a centre in Bangalore offering bodybuilding and training.

Cover of 'Perfect Physique' by K V Iyer, 1936.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/328ae43182ad64c58cbc386f770332a7953b5b05_iyerbook.jpg?auto=compress,format

Perfect Physique

During the 1930s, Iyer appeared in international physical culture magazines, often in classical Greek poses. He was an admirer of Sandow, and later corresponded with another celebrity bodybuilder, Charles Atlas. Never modest, Iyer claimed that he was “India's most perfectly developed man” (Singleton). 

Iyer was an avid practitioner of hatha yoga, which he described as “an ancient system of body-cult... [that] had more to do in the making of what I am today than all the bells, bars, steel springs and strands I have used”. 

Iyer published his own booklet on surya namaskar in 1937, but like the Rajah of Aundh, he never described surya namaskar as part of yoga.

While international imports such as Eugen Sandow's bodybuilding and gymnastic-style exercise systems were influential, for men such as Iyer, indigenous practices such as wrestling, kabaddi, yoga, mallakhamba and martial arts such as lathi were equally important.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/a89805ece2207a097e61cae5d14caba5a80c9219_wrestlers.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/d425aff8257c35d5c2b89c954a44b012c117ca82_acrobats.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/df96b43a39e21888f2242e58dee56c059efed0c0_acrobats1.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/a301f5ce6bc2d8461ca646dfa11426ff0130f0d0_kabaddi-old-naukri-nama.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/6706fa0db36d9c64218d346b776d49cbd671942f_malkhamb_team_of_the_bombay_sappers.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/ca6390414fc1ec88e2ba7c40826b36e2b25501f5_performing_mallakhamb.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/921e515cdf47005f28347b357c98da70fb9b28e2_1024px-lathi_khela_ancient_festival_-_shamim_tirmizi.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/71dc69cb374c95034fbeb7b9a7a0da1581056815_wrestlers2.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/a1e56de3871f7ce25cc4613920a80f87c41af7c4_vaalum-parichayum.jpeg?auto=compress,format

Traditional sports and martial arts

The international physical culture movement, with its promise of a new masculinity and national status through physical self-improvement, had a particular resonance in colonial South Asia. 

Lord Baden-Powell described the colonial task in British India as “that great work of developing the bodies, the character and the souls of an otherwise feeble people” (Sen, 2004). Such rhetoric of cultural, moral and physical degeneracy had been internalised by the native populations after centuries of colonial rule and an anglicised educational system. 

As the independence movement grew in colonial India, it became a matter of national pride to present South Asian (male) bodies as strong and powerful, and hence able to challenge colonial rule. Physical fitness became an expression of cultural power and resistance.

A loosely connected movement emerged to synthesise a modern indigenous physical culture using traditional styles and the global methods of the international movement.

Professor Rajratna Manikrao set up the Vayam Mandirs or Temples of Exercise, which taught athletics, paramilitary drills and traditional martial arts. Manikrao's militant movement aimed to produce a potential army of strong, well-trained men who would ultimately challenge British rule (Singleton).

Along with Iyer and others, Manikrao was responsible for the proliferation of traditional akharas (gymnasia or wrestling schools), places that taught a mix of traditional and modern bodybuilding and exercise. These akharas often served as centres for political struggle, where the practice of yoga became a cover for martial arts training and resistance – a conscious evocation of the militant yogi ascetic of the past. 

An early example of the trend to map the metaphysical yoga body onto the scientific anatomical body in a work by Swami Hamsasvarupa, c. 1900–10.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/2215bf11fd683cbab44d2a3471af336e127a4ab1_sciyoga.jpg?auto=compress,format

Shatchakra niroopana chittra with bhashya and bhasha

Jaganath Gune was a young man who trained in one of Manikrao’s Vayam Mandirs in 1907. But his main influence was the yoga ascetic Sri Madhavadas (1798–1921), a Bengali barrister-turned-renunciate who established an ashram in Gujarat. 

Yoga scholars (Atler and Singleton) have noted the significance of Madhavadas as the teacher of two yoga modernisers, Kuvalayananda and his contemporary Yogendra, who between them laid the foundations of the health and fitness dimension of modern yoga and yoga therapy.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/9a822713a7278a66e9c0d6dc20346ae34f0da7f4_388px-swami_kuvalayananda.jpg?auto=compress,format

Kuvalayananda

Gune joined the ashram for two years, adopting the name Kuvalayananda, and there he practised and learned a form of hatha yoga that prescribed asanas, kriya and pranayama for medical problems. 

In 1921, Kuvalayananda took what he learned from Madhavadas and combined it with his own interest in scientific research to create a yoga research centre at Lonavla on the outskirts of Bombay (now Mumbai).

He and his researchers measured the physiological effects of asanas, pranayama, kriya and bandha in order to develop a therapeutic yoga practice. Their findings were published in the Institute's journal called ‘Yoga-Mimansa’, a mixture of scientific review and illustrated yoga manual. By drawing on the authority of science, Kuvalayananda gave yoga a greater status in the modern world.

Pages from the scientific section of the journal 'Yoga Mimansa', showing blood-pressure measurements for the posture.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/70611c3a74e5c3a0a4b2a253943220d02e1bbdd7_mimansa1.jpg?auto=compress,format

Yoga Mimansa, 1930

In a clear crossover between physical culture and yoga, Kuvalayananda developed a yogic system of physical education for schools in the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, drawing on Manikrao's mass drill programme.

As a boy, Madhavadasji’s other pupil, Yogendra (born Maribhai Desai) had suffered a serious bout of typhoid. Growing up in cosmopolitan, middle-class Bombay, he took up wrestling and physical training in his teens, gaining the nickname ‘Mr Muscle-man’.

In 1916, after hearing a talk by Madhavadas, and to his father's dismay, he gave up his college studies and went to stay in Madhavadas's ashram. 

Two years later Yogendra returned to Bombay. With the help of his wealthy patrons, he established the Yoga Institute, a place that had health and healing at its heart. The Bombay middle classes were familiar with international physical culture systems such as Swedish gymnastics. They saw the physical yoga revival in the same way – as a ‘movement cure’ for health and fitness. 

Building on his success in Bombay, Yogendra decided to follow in the footsteps of the Rajah yoga innovator Vivekananda and others, and take his technique to America. During his four years in America he promoted yoga as a form of therapy, giving lectures and demonstrations. By 1920, he had raised enough support to set up an American Yoga Institute, which operated as a sanatorium and appealed to the alternative medicine community. Harvey Kellogg – the doctor and inventor of the breakfast cereal – was among his supporters.

Yogendra was the ‘householder yogi’. He was married and had a family. His yoga was a sanitised, modern form of hatha yoga, designed to appeal to the respectable middle classes as a health and fitness activity. 

Like Vivekananda, he was keen to distance it from the disreputable persona of the ‘wild’ yogi. But unlike Vivekanada, who rejected physical yoga altogether, Yogendra rehabilitated it into a rational, domesticated practice, which could ultimately lead to “physical well-being, mental harmony and moral elevation”.

He saw yoga as a holistic practice with an ancient tradition, and he was dismissive of what he saw as adjuncts such as surya namaskars. “Surya namaskars or prostrates to the sun – a form of gymnastics attached to the sun worship in India” were “indiscriminately mixed up with yoga physical training by the ill-informed”, he insisted.

Kuvalayananda was also familiar with surya namaskars. Mark Singleton points out that the Bombay Physical Education Committee syllabus Kuvalayananda developed for schools in the province has a chapter devoted to “individualistic exercises, dands, baithaks, namaskars and asanas”.

In this chapter, namaskars are distinct from asanas, but both are categorised as physical training. The surya namaskar sequence he presents is a series of dands, described as Ashtang dand, probably in reference to an existing position known as Ashtanga namaskara, in which eight parts of the body touch the ground simultaneously. At this point, surya namaskar is not recognised as a sequence of yoga asanas but, like yoga, it has been put in the category of physical culture. 

By the late 1930s, all the elements of modern yoga are present in colonial India: the synthesis of modern and traditional physical techniques, the therapeutic methods for health and well-being, and the ancient spiritual and mystical roots that appealed to orientalists and New Agers in the West, and nationalists in the East. 

All these elements existed in what has been described as the crucible of global yoga, the Mysore school of yoga. And it was there that the surya namaskars so beautifully demonstrated by Eunice entered the canon of yoga asanas.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/78f1bfb61bb31f437390eb7633587647088ef890_kohbar_of_mithila.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/8fedc3df63541329e54bf797db7505c318b7cb5d_kohbar_of_mithila.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/6b610be3ad31ca6caa9fc12e176e7e0adf1ae706_kohbar_of_mithila.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/a89af1b07e7e83e0dced4b1267a731f2b62e337e_ling-feat2.jpg?auto=compress,format

Ling Gymnastic Centre, Stockholm, c. 1910

Modern yoga owes a debt to the physical culture movement, which created a world obsessed with health and fitness.

The world went sports crazy in the first quarter of the 20th century. The first modern Olympics had just been held in 1896, inspiring new interest in athletics and the Ancient Greek physical ideal.

The relatively new science of physiology – the study of the physical and biochemical systems of the body – provided criteria for how the body should perform. This new emphasis on the link between health and exercise inspired a growing culture of physical improvement. 

Several individuals developed their own personally branded exercise systems. These ‘celebrity trainers’ often used themselves as proof of the success of their system, from the military and medical origins of P H Ling's Swedish gymnastics, to the self-improving daily routine of J P Müller, and the showmanship and mass appeal of Eugen Sandow's bodybuilding. Exercise was not only a trend for men: Genevieve Stebbins was one of a number of women who developed exercise systems suitable for the modern woman.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/a77ffddd865d302a55ba293f3fd6107821e10415_statue.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/09a822363f3d9f881420baa6c7bdc10730f1aebc_soeurs.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/e119a3b5dedae65d48fd8459f0ea3f5c76172fe4_school.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/ae0e2684f868957f21b37a694f2975ef728cd15a_scouts.jpg?auto=compress,format

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/9ac49fee2c78d30a5f59a6c8e3140914f5db0569_buddha-pose.jpg?auto=compress,format

In addition to exercise systems, the physical culture movement also spawned a host of publications and organisations, such as the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). All had in common a cluster of ideas relating to personal improvement, nationhood, morality and a redefinition of masculinity in physical terms.

The movement began in Scandinavia and Germany, sweeping the rest of Europe and North America, inevitably making its way to colonial India. The anthropologist Joseph Atler suggests that the development of postural yoga is directly linked to the “reinvention of sport in the context of colonial modernity and also to the increasing use of physical fitness in schools, gymnasiums and public institutions”.

An exercise sequence from ‘The Gymnastic Free Exercises of P H Ling’, 1853.

The Gymnastic Free Exercises of P H Ling

Pehr Henrik Ling was a gymnastics instructor in the Military Academy at Carlsberg in Sweden. As a tuberculosis sufferer, he found that a daily exercise routine improved his health, and decided to share his experience. 

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/258b410dc29bcfd959b7d739f20d9d4313996be1_ling-face.jpg?auto=compress,format

P H Ling

Ling attended classes in anatomy and physiology and developed a science-based ‘movement cure’, aimed at treating muscular and nervous disorders. He eventually founded the Royal Gymnastic Central Institute for the training of gymnastic instructors, and after several attempts to interest the Swedish government, his system was taken up by the Swedish military.

Ling's system of large groups led by an instructor to perform repetitions and cycles of postures was a model for many exercise systems to come.

A women's exercise class at the Ling gymnastics centre in Stockholm, 1910.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/5b69cf961d3e419822393682381ac8f81b06d2e1_ling-women.jpg?auto=compress,format

Ling Gymnastic Centre, Stockhlm ca.1910

The Swedish system, as it came to be known, was highly influential in other countries. It spoke to a growing belief that the state shared the responsibility of ensuring that the citizens of tomorrow – children – were mentally and physically fit to serve their country in the future. And so gymnastic and other exercise systems entered the school curriculum.

Translated into economic and political terms, strong healthy workers and soldiers were essential to meet the demands of the industrial revolution and of empire. 

The introduction of military drills in the colonial army and gymnastic drills in the anglicised school system also led to greater participation and awareness of physical culture in South Asia.

An exercise sequence from ‘My System: 15 minutes’ exercise a day for the health’s sake’ by J P Müller, 1900.

My System

Jørgen Peter Müller (1866–1938) was a Danish gymnastics educator and author. His book ‘My System’, published in 1904, was a bestseller. His system consists of 18 exercises done in a daily 15-minute routine. The system also includes stretching and breathing routines and a towel-rubbing routine to follow a daily bath. 

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/34f9454992cf84c2a378c5a6df05d78770c57a8d_j.p._muller1.jpg?auto=compress,format

Mein System : 15 Minuten täglicher Arbeit für die Gesundheit

Müller encouraged individuals to use his system in order that they “might have children who are improved editions of their parents”, so rendering “the noblest service to the state” by “raising the level of the race as a whole” (‘My System’, 1904). 

A driving force behind the rise of physical culture was a growing concern about the physical and mental decline of humanity. Degeneracy was a term that was widely used to suggest that a particular social or cultural group was in decline or, in the case of Western ‘races’, at risk of moving past their prime. 

Fortunately this process was said to be reversible. The hereditary flaws of previous generations could be reversed by better education, exercise and selective breeding. Self-improvement and good health could be aligned with the greater good and national improvement. 

Some postures in Müller's system are uncannily similar to modern yoga postures. Mark Singleton notes that the yoga posture ‘the plank’ appears in his system decades before it is seen in yoga systems. 

But Müller was also aware of yoga. In his book on breathing he discusses the “Yogi complete breath”, although he finds his own system to be better. His system was certainly known in colonial India, suggesting an exchange of ideas with the emergent modern yoga systems in South Asia.

Cover of ‘YMCA Association Men’ magazine, June 1919, USA.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/2c91f279abcbc1490b0581ff08398dbf45c67bd5_ymca_association_men_cover_june_1919-1.jpg?auto=compress,format

YMCA cover June 1919

Muscular Christianity first arose in the mid-19th century in relation to writers such as Charles Kingsley, who advocated a combination of “athleticism, patriotism and religion” (Putney) as an antidote to the negative effects of industrialism. It was an ethos that was taken up in English public schools, the military and the Young Men’s Christian Association.

The YMCA saw exercise as a tool for moral reform and inculcating Christian values – “education through the body, not of the body” (Singleton). Its red triangle logo symbolised the threefold nature of manhood: mind, body and spirit. 

The YMCA was active in India from the mid-19th century. In 1919, while teaching and coaching basketball at a high school in Illinois, Harry Crowe Buck (1884–1943) was invited by the International Committee of the YMCA to serve as the Physical Director of the Central YMCA in Madras (now called Chennai), India. In 1920 he opened a physical training school in Madras.  

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/9e2bf07c82fbe42bef5c341d408c0572012c2714_buck.jpg?auto=compress,format

Harry C. Buck

For the YMCA, he devised “programmes and courses which combined Indian and Western physical exercise” and trained the first Indian athletes to attend the modern Olympic Games in 1924.

The YMCA contributed to a new social and moral respectability for physical culture in South Asia, especially among the middle classes and ruling elites. It also reinforced the link between spirituality and physicality, which was a good fit for yoga, with its spiritual roots. 

But more importantly for modern yoga, it helped pave the way for physical yoga traditions like hatha yoga to be rehabilitated.

An issue of Sandow’s ‘Magazine of Physical Culture and British Sport’, 1901.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/62b93676a381318e8e398e3288d8f9c290bd366c_magazine.jpg?auto=compress,format

Sandow's Magazine, May 1901

Among the most popular figures in the physical culture movement was the bodybuilder Eugen Sandow. Through tours, lectures and demonstrations, Sandow initiated a worldwide revolution in bodybuilding. His books and popular magazines were infused with similar values to muscular Christianilty. 

Eugen Sandow posing for his ‘Magazine of Physical Culture’, c.1900.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/aabd5051a4cc5c30a1eb976430dc078b6c212495_sandow.jpg?auto=compress,format

Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture

In 1904, Sandow visited colonial India. He toured the country with a tent that could hold 6,000 people, and was greeted by crowds of every class of society, colonial and native. Thousands were turned away every night (Chapman and Waller).

Asked by one reporter what would happen if Bengal took up his system en masse, he replied “from delicate they will become strong”. And he had plenty of examples to prove it among his Indian followers. 

Sandow’s magazine featured exponents of his system from around the world.

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/fe3e517060e366d43b690a6ee137a6723bab2728_sandow-mag.jpg?auto=compress,format

Portrait Gallery, Sandow's Magazine, May 1901

His message was notably free of the rhetoric of degeneracy, blaming poor diet and want of exercise rather than innate racial inferiority for any weakness. “The native Indians have a foundation for the building of large physical men,” he insisted. But his message was unintentionally subversive, offering empowerment through the control of your own body. 

Bodybuilding as a sport emerged from the theatrical tradition of the strongman, a common feature of fairs and shows (Chow). Thanks largely to Sandow, this manufactured view of masculinity entered the mainstream as a legitimate measure of manhood. Soon every country had to have its own Sandow.

An exercise sequence from ‘Sex Efficiency Through Exercises: special physical culture for women’ by T H van der Velde, 1932.

Sex Efficiency Through Exercises

In many ways the physical culture systems aimed at women were closer to modern yoga than gymnastics or bodybuilding. The Delsarte method (1811–71), which was likened to hatha yoga by Vivekananda, was supported and furthered by an American woman, Genevieve Stebbins. 

https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/53d4795116db69d6d8077e27e5d3da815532d090_genevieve_stebbins_astley_1902.jpg?auto=compress,format

Genevieve Stebbins, 1902

Her book ‘The Genevieve Stebbins System of Physical Training’, 1898, includes chapters on relaxation, breathing and dance-like sequences of exercise ‘drills’. 

Modern yoga owes a debt to the physical culture movement that created a world obsessed with health and fitness.

Wellcome uses cookies.

The History of Yoga

About the author

Lalita Kaplish

Stay in the know

Wellcome collection

Finding us:

Opening times:

Today's opening times

Wellcome uses cookies.

The History of Yoga

About the author

Lalita Kaplish

Stay in the know

Wellcome collectionWellcome Collection

Finding us:

Opening times:

Today's opening times

Wellcome collection