Modern postural yoga in an expanded field

Abstract

One afternoon in 1985, a sexagenarian climbed Trocadero Hill in Paris. Reaching its summit, he approached a platform that offers a vista of the Eiffel Tower. Then, he removed much of his clothing and unrolled a mat. Resting his forearms and the crown of his head at the mat’s center, he raised his legs from the platform’s floor and over his head. Once perpendicular to the floor, he resisted gravity by extending his entire body skyward. He then turned both legs to his left, offering a commentary on the relationship between body and building and inviting comparisons between bones and joints and iron girders and rivets (fig. 1). Thereafter, he dressed and left the hilltop. The visitor was no stranger to the city. He was a celebrity who had been visiting Paris since 1954 and on this visit was Mayor Jacques Chirac’s personal guest. In fact, by the mid-1980s, wherever he went, Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was receiving a reception typically reserved for pop stars and acclaim as a man who was instrumental in bringing postural yoga to the West. Less than two decades later, in 2004, he was on Time magazine’s cover—with Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama—as one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. The following year, the Oxford Dictionary of English made his Sanskritic last name into an English noun, offering the following definition: “Iyengar (mass noun), a type of