Modern Masters
About Modern Masters
The physical yoga practised around the world today has a traceable and surprisingly recent history. Its philosophical vocabulary reached the West with Vivekananda in the 1890s, who presented yoga as a rational science of the mind and had little interest in postures. Its physical form was assembled in twentieth-century India: at Kuvalayananda's research institute, which put yoga under laboratory measurement from 1924, and above all in the Mysore Palace yogaśālā, where Tirumalai Krishnamacharya taught adolescent boys from 1933 in a hall that had previously housed a gymnastics programme. Four of his students carried different versions of the work outward — Iyengar with alignment and props, Pattabhi Jois with fixed breath-linked series, Indra Devi to Shanghai and Hollywood, and his son Desikachar with an insistence that practice be fitted to the individual. Parallel lineages ran from Sivananda's ashram in Rishikesh and from Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. None of this is a scandal. It is simply how a tradition stayed alive.
