Biography

BKS Iyengar Biography: Birthday, Early Life, Career, Legacy, Family, Death

Iyengar was born to a poor Brahmin household in the small village of Bellur, Karnataka, South India, on 14 December 1918.

BKS Iyengar Biography: Infrequently throughout history, there have been individuals whose accomplishments have left a positive imprint on the entire globe. B.K.S. Iyengar (1918-2014) fit this description. In 2004, Time Magazine ranked him among the one hundred most influential people in the globe. His fellow Indian, Mahatma Gandhi, proclaimed, “We must be the change we wish to see in the world” (We must be the change we wish to see in the world), and Iyengar lived by a similar principle through his prolonged practise, study, and teaching of yoga. His approach to yoga was unrelated to mere physical flexibility or New Age spirituality.

BKS Iyengar Biography

Name:	B.K.S. Iyengar
Birth Date:	14 December 1918
Place Of Birth:	Bellur, Karnataka
Death:	August 20, 2014

Early years

Iyengar was born to a poor Brahmin household in the small village of Bellur, Karnataka, South India, on 14 December 1918. His beginnings were not auspicious. Eleventh of thirteen children, he was born ailing to a mother suffering from then-widespread influenza. A series of childhood illnesses, including typhoid, malaria, and tuberculosis, limited his education.

His father perished when he was nine years old, and continued illness, malnutrition, and poverty gave him a low life expectancy at the age of fourteen. When he bent over to touch his toes, his middle digits only reached his knees because he was so stiff. At the close of life, it is simple to impose a form and a trajectory that are inconsistent with its lived reality. The odds were against Iyengar reaching maturity, let alone becoming the greatest yoga practitioner in the world at the extraordinary age of 95.

BKS Iyengar Profession

B. K. S. Iyengar, an Indian yoga instructor, was inspired by Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, a yogi who invited him to Mysore in 1934 to practise yoga asanas to better his health. At the age of eighteen, Krishnamacharya sent Iyengar to Pune to disseminate the teachings of yoga, but Iyengar’s relationship with his guru was strained during his tutelage.

In 1954, Iyengar was invited to Switzerland by violinist Yehudi Menuhin, whom he befriended in 1952. Menuhin believed that yoga practise enhanced his performance, so he invited Iyengar to teach in Europe. Iyengar taught in Ann Arbour, Michigan, in 1956, and then returned there in 1973, 1974, and 1976.

Iyengar’s first book, Light on Yoga, was published in 1966 and became an international best-seller. He also taught yoga to celebrities such as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Jayaprakash Narayan, Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, Aldous Huxley, Annette Bening, Mira Nair, Donna Karan, and prominent Indian figures such as Sachin Tendulkar and Kareena Kapoor.

In 1967, the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) requested classes in “Hatha Yoga” that were devoid of yoga philosophy but included asanas and “pranayamas” suitable for persons over the age of 40. Iyengar complied with the proscription of yoga philosophy and urged his pupils to follow their own religious traditions rather than his family’s Visistadvaita, a qualified non-dualism within Hinduism.

In 1954, Yehudi Menuhin, a violinist, invited Iyengar to teach in Europe. Natarajasana, Iyengar’s signature pose, became the defining yoga pose of the late 20th century. In 1975, he established the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Pune to honour his late wife.

Iyengar supported nature conservation by donating 2 million rupees to the Chamarajendra Zoological Gardens in Mysore and adopting a tiger and a juvenile in his wife’s memory. He also assisted the Pune chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of India in raising awareness of multiple sclerosis.

Donations to his ancestral village of Bellur in the Kolar district of Karnataka comprised Iyengar’s most significant charitable endeavour. Through the Bellur Trust fund, he oversaw the transformation of the village by supporting a variety of charitable endeavours.

BKS Iyengar Family

Iyengar wed 16-year-old Ramamani in 1943 in a marriage arranged by their parents. He stated regarding their union, “We lived without conflict as if our two souls were one.” They collectively reared five daughters and one son. Ramamani passed away at the age of 46 in 1973, and Iyengar named his yoga institute in Pune the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in her honour.

Geeta (1944–2018), Iyengar’s eldest daughter, and Prashant, his son, have both become internationally renowned instructors in their own right. Other members of his family include Vanita, Sunita, Suchita, and Savita. Geeta, who has conducted extensive research on yoga for women, published Yoga: A Jewel for Women in 2002. Prashant is the author of numerous publications, including A Class after a Class: Yoga, an Integrated Science (1998) and Yoga and the New Millennium (2008). Prashant has served as the director of the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute (RIMYI) in Pune since Geeta’s passing.

Abhijata Sridhar Iyengar, Iyengar’s granddaughter, trained under his guidance for a number of years and is now a teacher at the Institute in Pune and internationally.

BKS Iyengar Legacy

The Board of Supervisors of San Francisco proclaimed October 3, 2005 as “B.K.S. Iyengar Day” According to University of Pittsburgh anthropologist Joseph S. Alter, Iyengar “has by far had the greatest impact on the global spread of yoga.” The Beijing branch of China Post presented him with a commemorative stamp in his honour in June 2011. There were over thirty thousand Iyengar yoga pupils in 57 Chinese cities at the time.

The noun “Iyengar,” which is short for “Iyengar Yoga,” is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as “a type of Hatha yoga emphasising the correct alignment of the body and employing straps, wooden blocks, and other objects as aids to achieving the correct postures.”

On what would have been Iyengar’s 97th birthday, December 14, 2015, he was commemorated with a Google Doodle. It was exhibited in India, North America, a significant portion of Europe, Russia, and Indonesia. Vishaal Desai’s documentary Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar: Uniting Through Yoga was published on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2018. Another documentary by Aditi Makim and Valentina Trivedi, Leap of Faith (2008), covered his life from childhood to adulthood and the obstacles he confronted in his career.

Thousands of yoga instructors are currently Certified Iyengar Yoga Teachers (CIYTs), with over 1100 in the United States alone.

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