Krishnamacharya and the Mysore lineage

If you practise yoga anywhere in the world today, in almost any style, you are within two or three teaching generations of one man who taught in a hall in Mysore, four hundred kilometres from where I teach. That is not a devotional claim. It is a documented one, and here are the dates it rests on.

Tirumalai Krishnamacharya was born on 18 November 1888 and died on 28 February 1989, aged one hundred. He studied at Banaras, in Sanskrit and in the classical Indian systems, and the account of his yoga training, seven and a half years with a teacher named Ramamohana Brahmachari near Mount Kailash, comes from Krishnamacharya himself and cannot be independently confirmed. I flag that not to cast doubt on the man but because this page is about what is documented, and that part is testimony rather than record.

He met the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV, in Varanasi in 1926. In 1931 he was invited to teach at the Sanskrit College in Mysore. On 11 August 1933 a yogashala was opened for him at the Jaganmohan Palace, which is the single most consequential date in modern yoga. The Maharaja died in 1940, his successor was less interested, and the yogashala was closed by government order in 1950. Krishnamacharya moved to Madras in 1952, lectured at Vivekananda College, and spent the remaining thirty seven years of his life teaching individuals rather than classes, which turned out to matter as much as the Mysore period did.

He published Yoga Makaranda in 1934, in Kannada, with a Tamil edition in 1938. It carries 42 asanas and 95 photographs of himself and his students. That book is the best surviving evidence of what was actually being taught in that hall, and it is worth knowing that it exists, because a great deal written about this lineage is reconstruction and the book is not.

The romantic version of Mysore is a sage in a quiet hall transmitting an unbroken tradition. The documented version is stranger, more institutional and considerably more interesting.

The yogashala was a royal project. Its original purpose was to train the members of the royal household in what the sources of the time describe as physical exercises, and the Maharaja's patronage extended to funding demonstrations, films and a school. That patronage came with an expectation: yoga had to be visible, impressive and demonstrable. The Wellcome Collection, writing on this period, makes the point sharply: palace support put Krishnamacharya in competition with the fashionable bodybuilding gymnasia of the day, and that competition pushed him towards spectacular performable sequences rather than long held seats.

His students were largely boys and young men, taught in a way that would be recognised today as strict. Both Jois and Iyengar left accounts of a demanding teacher. Iyengar in particular was a sickly adolescent given postures he could barely hold, and the prop based method he later built is, read one way, a lifelong argument with how he himself was taught.

Then it ended, quite quickly. The Maharaja died in 1940, the patronage dried up, and by about 1948 Krishnamacharya was travelling to find work at the age of sixty. The government closed the yogashala in 1950. Modern posture yoga was not carried forward by the institution that produced it. It was carried out of Mysore in the bodies of four students who then disagreed with each other for fifty years, which is the subject of the next section.

One detail worth holding onto, because it explains something about every school in the lineage: what came out of that hall was not one method. Krishnamacharya taught different things to different people, by design, and said so. Yoga adapts to time and place was his own principle. The four incompatible systems his students founded are not four corruptions of one original. They are what his teaching looked like when applied to four different lives.

Almost every style on a modern timetable can be traced through one of these four people. The table is the fastest way to see both the debt and the divergence.

Read the last two columns together and a pattern appears that I find genuinely instructive as a teacher. Each student kept what suited his or her own body and circumstances and dropped the rest, and each then taught what they had kept as the whole thing. Jois, strong and young and taught in sequences, transmitted sequences. Iyengar, unwell and needing help, transmitted props and precision. Desikachar, taught alone by his own father, transmitted one to one adaptation. None of them was being unfaithful. All of them were doing what their teacher had actually done, which was to give the practice the shape the student in front of him needed.

Other students matter and are less known: Srivatsa Ramaswami, who studied with him for over thirty years and preserved the vinyasa krama material, and A. G. Mohan, who worked with him late in life. If you want to know what Krishnamacharya himself taught rather than what his famous students made of him, those two lines are where to look.

Three things in Yoga Makaranda surprise people who arrive expecting either an ancient scripture or a modern fitness manual.

Vinyasa does not mean what you think it means. In Krishnamacharya's usage the word means a stage in the execution of a posture. Sarvangasana in that book has twelve vinyasas, and the eighth of them is the posture itself; the other eleven are the counted way in and out. The modern use of vinyasa as the name of a style, meaning a flowing class, is a later narrowing of a technical term. Anybody choosing between hatha and vinyasa on a timetable today is choosing between two things neither of which is quite what he meant.

The breath carries the movement, not the other way round. The counted breath, and the audible breathing that became ujjayi in his students' schools, is the organising principle of the method. That is the part of the Mysore inheritance which is least visible in a photograph and which matters most in a body.

The sources cited are broader than the practice. The bibliography of Yoga Makaranda lists the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Gheranda Samhita and the Sritattvanidhi alongside works Norman Sjoman describes bluntly as having nothing to do with the tradition he was teaching in. That is a real criticism and it is also a window into the man's position: he was a Sanskrit scholar presenting a new physical method to a modern audience, and he anchored it in texts because that is what gave it standing.

Which brings up the delicate part. Krishnamacharya refused to take credit for his innovations and attributed the knowledge to his guru or to ancient texts. That was modesty, and it was also, unintentionally, an obstacle to history. The postures he devised or adapted were presented as recovered rather than made, and the popular history that followed took him at his word. The scholarship of the last thirty years has largely been the work of taking the credit back and giving it to him.

This section will irritate somebody and it is the most useful thing on the page.

Norman Sjoman's The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, published in 1996, established three things about the hall. The room Krishnamacharya was given had been a gymnasium, with the ropes still in place, which is a fact that changes how you read the rope work in Iyengar's later method. The palace already held a yoga compendium, the nineteenth century Sritattvanidhi, which illustrates 122 asanas and is strongly physical in emphasis. And some of the postures resemble those in the palace exercise manual and in mallakhamba, the Indian pole and rope discipline used by wrestlers.

Mark Singleton's Yoga Body, Oxford University Press, 2010, sets that local picture inside a national one: asana was held in low regard in nineteenth century India, the yoga Vivekananda took west in the 1890s contained essentially no postures, and from the 1920s a posture based practice emerged out of Indian nationalism, European physical culture, and the reform programmes of Shri Yogendra and Swami Kuvalayananda, with Krishnamacharya's Mysore method as the pivotal case.

Now the two honest qualifications, because this argument is usually reported badly in both directions.

First, Singleton does not say the postures were invented from nothing. He describes adaptation, reinterpretation and bricolage: old material transformed for a radically different social world. Second, the material being adapted was overwhelmingly Indian. The Sritattvanidhi is Indian, mallakhamba is Indian, the hatha texts are Indian, the wrestling tradition is Indian, and the man doing the adapting was an Indian Sanskrit scholar working under an Indian king. The claim that modern yoga is a Western invention is not what the scholarship says, and it is not what happened.

What I take from it as a teacher is simpler and slightly deflating. Trikonasana as we teach it, the long standing sequence, the fast rounds of surya namaskar: these are about a hundred years old, they were assembled by named people for particular purposes, and they are extremely good. Age is not what makes them good. That is a more respectable position than pretending they came down from the Vedas, and it also means we are allowed to keep improving them.

Take a studio timetable in Bangalore or London and cross out everything that traces back to Mysore. There is very little left.

• Ashtanga and everything downstream of it: directly from Jois, who learned the counted sequences in that hall as a boy.
• Iyengar, and the whole idea of props: directly from Iyengar, whose blocks, belts and ropes are a systematisation of what a body that cannot yet reach a posture needs. Hatha compared with Iyengar is largely a comparison between a general Indian class and his particular corrective method.
• Vinyasa, power yoga and most heated flow classes: descended from the linking principle, generally with the counting and the breath discipline removed.
• Restorative work, and yoga therapy as a field: from Iyengar's prop work on one side and Desikachar's individualisation on the other, both Mysore inheritances.
• Chair yoga, and adapting a practice for an unwell or older body: the same Desikachar line, and the one branch of the lineage I use most in my own hall.
• The audible breath in almost every modern class: ujjayi, out of the counted breathing of the Mysore method.

What did not come from Mysore is worth naming too, so the debt is not overstated. The seated breathing practices and the meditative material are much older and reach us through the hatha texts and their teachers, as set out in the history of yoga. Kundalini comes through an entirely separate twentieth century line. And the ethical frame that governs how any of it should be taught is Patanjali's, not Krishnamacharya's, which is why the eight limbs still decides arguments that no posture manual can.

Pages like this one exist, on most yoga websites, to end with a claim. The teacher turns out to be four steps from Krishnamacharya, or from Sivananda, or from somebody's grandfather in Rishikesh, and the history has quietly been doing sales work all along.

I am not going to do that, and the omission is deliberate. I have no documented connection to the Mysore lineage and I am not going to construct one. I have not studied with any of the four students named above and I am not going to imply proximity by writing vaguely about influence. What I can tell you is the whole of my provenance: I am eighty nine, I have taught for about forty years in a residents' association hall in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, in person and now also live online, to students of every age. That is it. There is no certificate on the wall of that hall and there is no chain of names.

Why write the page at all, then? Because the lineage is genuinely the history of what I teach, whatever my personal relationship to it. When I ask you to hold trikonasana with the front knee soft, that instruction has a hundred year old paper trail through Mysore, and you have a right to know it exists. And because a reader who has been told that their teacher's authority comes from an unbroken chain deserves to know how short and how documented most of those chains actually are.

The claim I will defend instead is a smaller and testable one: forty years of watching the same postures go wrong in the same way in a few thousand ordinary Indian bodies teaches you things that no lineage confers. That is the entire basis on which I would ask anybody to take my correction seriously, and it is available for inspection in an hour.

The reason this history matters practically, rather than as trivia, is that it tells you what to look for in a teacher.

Everything valuable that came out of that hall came out through the two things the whole lineage agrees on despite disagreeing about everything else: the breath organises the movement, and the practice is adapted to the person in front of you. Jois, Iyengar and Desikachar built three incompatible systems and all three held those two principles. Any modern class that has dropped both, which is a great many of them, has kept the postures and lost the method. That is the single most useful thing a reader can take away from a page about dead teachers.

So test it. Go to any class, this one or another, and ask two questions afterwards. Did the teacher tell me when to breathe, by name, in each posture? And did the teacher give me a different instruction from the person next to me? If both answers are yes, you are in the lineage described above, whatever the sign on the door says. If both are no, you are in an exercise class with Sanskrit names, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to attend and is not the same purchase.

You can run that test on me for nothing. Come to a free class, in the hall or on a video call, and watch what I do about your particular shoulder rather than about the room. Then ask me where the posture came from. I will tell you what is documented, what is inferred and what is tradition, in those three categories, the same way this page does. If you would rather read first, the history of yoga is the longer version of the same argument, and about the teacher contains everything that is actually known about me and nothing that is not.