· CHAPTER 7 ·

IN AUGUST OF 1932, more than five hundred wandering Hindu holy men, or sadhus, camped out on Bombay’s Chowpatty Beach after attending a festival in the city of Nasik, about one hundred miles away. (In order to get rid of them, Nasik officials had offered free transportation out of town.) As the weeks went by and the ash-smeared mendicants, some entirely naked, showed no sign of leaving, Bombay authorities got worried. They couldn’t forcibly remove the sadhus without creating a backlash among poor Indians who admired them, but much of the middle class found them mortifying, while the Europeans were alternately titillated and appalled. At a meeting about the problem, one municipal official fretted that crowds of people were going to see the holy men. “No respectable people will go there,” responded another, M. A. Karanjawalla.

Over lunch one day, a German girlfriend of Eugenia’s proposed an outing to see the sadhus, and Eugenia immediately agreed. So, on a steamy summer evening, with the lights of Bombay glowing behind them, they joined the carnivalesque throngs wandering “through the rows of mushroom-like umbrellas stuck in the ground,” each one sheltering a wild-looking ascetic. They were, as far as Eugenia could tell, the only Europeans there.

Eugenia was fascinated. The men were naked or nearly so, their skin smeared with holy ash. Some were bent into impossible-seeming contortions or frozen in precarious balances. “They resembled a group of jugglers and acrobats in gray tights and make-up,” she wrote. “Their fantastic coiffures towered on their heads like huge birds’ nests, stiff as wigs and yellowish from the application of cow dung.”

One of them stood on his head the entire time they were there.

“Why on earth is he doing that?” Eugenia asked.

“To please God,” answered a bystander.

Eugenia made a remark about God’s peculiar taste and said she’d always imagined genuine Indian yogis quite differently from these showmen.

“But these are not yogis,” exclaimed a passing student. “These filthy loafers and mischief makers only ruin India’s good name with foreigners such as yourselves.”

Such was the reputation, during her first years in India, of hatha yoga, the body-centric yoga practice Eugenia would later make famous. It was widely seen as the province of magicians, con men, and sideshow contortionists. Even champions of Indian religion typically dismissed it. When educated people, whether Indian or Western, spoke respectfully of yoga, they usually meant a system of breathing, meditation, and philosophy, not physical postures.

Madame Blavatsky had described the “torture and self-maceration” of hatha yoga as “the lower form of Yoga.” Swami Vivekananda, the Bengali monk who became an iconic figure of the Hindu renaissance, was largely dismissive of it. Vivekananda’s hugely influential 1896 book Raja Yoga inspired educated Indians and catalyzed a Western fascination with Indian spirituality that has yet to abate. But Raja Yoga—which means “Kingly Yoga”—dismisses hatha yoga. “We have nothing to do with it here, because its practices are very difficult and cannot be learnt in a day, and, after all, do not lead to much spiritual growth,” he writes. “Many of these practices—such as placing the body in different postures—you will find in the teaching of Delsarte and others. The object in these is physical, not spiritual.” (He is referring to François Delsarte, a French acting teacher who inspired an international vogue for spiritualized gymnastics.)

Yet, as the 1930s progressed, hatha yoga’s reputation began to change rapidly. Thanks to a few brilliant innovators, it was being transformed from a lurid, threatening relic into a wholesome indigenous science of health and longevity. And Eugenia, on a quest to free herself from her heart-palpitating nervous attacks, would find herself right at the center of the hatha yoga renaissance.

Yoga as a system of physical fitness is, contrary to conventional wisdom, a fairly modern phenomenon. If few people realize that, it’s partly because the word yoga is so labile, creating a false sense of continuity among many distinct practices. As the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade writes, “The word yoga serves, in general, to designate any ascetic technique and any method of meditation.” When people say “yoga,” they can be talking about many different things.

It is true that Indians have been doing yoga for millennia, but their practices didn’t necessarily have anything in common with yoga as currently understood by the West, as a series of poses and breathing exercises designed to strengthen the body and calm the mind. Much like Theosophy, modern yoga is a hybrid of ancient and contemporary ideas, an East-West fusion.

The most well-known text of classical yoga is The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali, which scholars generally date to somewhere between 200 BC and AD 250, though the techniques it presents are thought to be far older. References to the philosopher Patanjali are common in contemporary Western yoga classes, which might give students the idea that their practice is rooted in his writing. It isn’t. The Yoga-Sutra is a short text, comprising 196 aphorisms. The sum total of its teaching about yoga poses is this, in scholar Georg Feuerstein’s translation: “The posture [should be] steady and comfortable. [It is accompanied] by the relaxation of tension and the coinciding with the infinite [consciousness-space].”

Patanjali’s yoga is neither an exercise regimen nor a medical modality. It is a practical philosophy—and arguably a quite pessimistic one. Starting from the assumption that human life is full of intolerable suffering and that suffering derives from mental activity, it offers a schema for escaping the pain of worldly existence through the dissolution of the ego and the cessation of thought. As the second stanza of the Yoga-Sutra puts it, Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah, which Feuerstein translates as “Yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness.”

In their diagnosis of the human predicament, Patanjali and other classical yoga philosophers had some of the same insights that would later spawn existentialism and psychoanalysis. They understood the way our perceptions shape our reality, and they were profoundly concerned with the anguish of being trapped by one’s thoughts. They elaborated practical techniques, particularly breathing and concentration exercises, to aid adepts in observing the workings of their own minds, a sort of self-psychoanalysis or even self-hypnosis.

Mystics from every religious tradition report rapturous experiences of union with the divine and direct perception of numinous truths that transcend language and logic. Yoga elaborates a rational path for inducing such suprarational states. That’s why so many who developed a taste for altered states of consciousness in the 1960s found yoga congenial. It can be, as Feuerstein subtitles one of his books, “The Technology of Ecstasy.”

It’s clear why so many iconoclastic Western thinkers have been electrified by yogic wisdom. “Depend upon it, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully…to some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in an 1849 letter. Many psychoanalysts, particularly Carl Jung, saw the parallels between their own disciplines and yoga philosophy; Jung called yoga “one of the greatest things the human mind has ever created.”

Nevertheless, classical yoga clashes with the deepest values of modern individualism. The point of Patanjali’s philosophy is to reject and transcend this world, not to function more easily within it. His yoga is a tool of self-obliteration more than self-actualization. Feuerstein, a great admirer of Patanjali, is adamant about this. Patanjali’s idea of the conquest of the ego “presupposes that we turn our back on all things of the world, on life itself,” Feuerstein writes. “Patanjali’s is not a way of living in the world free from fear of death or loss of any kind, but of acquiring an other-worldly dimension of existence where properly speaking it no longer makes any sense to talk of fear or its removal. The transformation of human nature as envisaged in Classical Yoga is entirely a process of negation of everything that is ordinarily considered as typically human.” The archetypical yogi, after all, was a half-naked hermit.

The fact that yoga is now seen as a route toward individual development and a more efficacious life in the world is thus a historical irony. Eugenia would play an important role in this conceptual transformation.

While classical yoga has little to say about asana practice, in medieval times a clear yogic focus on the body, and on techniques for preserving it, emerged. Hatha yoga, as the physical side of yoga is called, was originally the name of a discipline practiced by an order of twelfth-century ascetics known as the Kanphata yogis. As Eliade explains, however, “the term soon came to be the collective designation for the traditional formulas and disciplines that made it possible to attain [the] perfect mastery of the body.”

It is in the hatha yoga texts—The Gheranda Samhita, The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and Shiva Samhita—that asanas first play a major role. The first of these books describes thirty-two poses; the second, fifteen; and the third mentions eighty-four, though only four, the seated poses Siddhasana, Padmasana, Paschimottananasana, and Sukhasana, are elaborated upon. Most of the asanas described in these texts are either seated or supine; there’s no mention of now-familiar standing sequences such as surya namaskar, or sun salutations, in any ancient work.

Hatha yoga combined elements of Patanjali’s yoga with tantra, a transgressive, occult tendency within Hinduism that turns upside down traditional concerns with purity. Tantra is itself a complex, multilayered tradition, but Wendy Doniger, one of the leading Western scholars of Hinduism, writes that tantric texts and rituals typically include “worship of the goddess, initiation, group worship, secrecy, and antinomian behavior, particularly sexual rituals and the ingesting of bodily fluids.” Inversion and reversal are hugely important within tantra. Substances that classical Hinduism regards as polluting are transubstantiated and become sacred; one variant of tantra prescribes ritual ingestion of the “Five Jewels”: semen, urine, feces, menstrual blood, and phlegm.

In hatha yoga, it’s the very functions of the body that are inverted. In his eccentric but fascinating study of yoga and Zen, Arthur Koestler points out that in hatha yoga, if “the function of an organ can be reversed, this will be done, whatever the effort.” Organs meant for excretion are instead trained to take substances in—Vajroli Mudra, described in The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, involves sucking released semen, or bindu, back into the urethra. (“The Yogi who can protect his bindu thus, overcomes death; because death comes by discharging bindu, and life is prolonged by its preservation.”) Meanwhile, organs meant for intake—the eyes, the mouth, the nose—“must be blocked, locked, sealed to the world. If this cannot be done completely, the functions will at least be partially suspended: breath, heart-pulse, pulse.”

Pranayama, the control of the breath, is thus something much more significant than simple deep breathing. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika instructs in the practice of Khechari Mudra, in which the yogi cuts the tendon connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth, then works, over time, to lengthen it. Eventually, the yogi can push the tongue behind the soft palate and use it to direct breath from one nostril to another, or shut the breath off completely. “He who knows the Khechari Mudra, is not troubled by diseases, is not stained with karmas, is not snared by time,” The Hatha Yoga Pradipika promises.

Hatha yoga’s ultimate aim is the raising of sacred kundalini energy. Often envisioned as a snake that lies coiled at the base of the spine, kundalini energy represents man’s dormant (and sometimes supernatural) potential. Hatha yoga exercises are meant to awaken it and then force it up a channel that runs along the spine to the crown of the head. As it rises, the energy traverses the body’s chakras, or energy centers, activating latent powers as it goes.

There’s an element of magic here that gets lost if you interpret the texts as simple guides to better health. Certain asanas are said to confer siddhis, or “supernatural powers.” The complex mystical physiology elaborated on in yoga texts—the subtle body comprised of chakras and nadis, or “channels”—does not necessarily correspond with the empirical, physical body. In other words, it’s a mistake to see the chakras merely as analogies to nerve plexuses. “ ‘Subtle physiology’ was probably elaborated on the basis of ascetic, ecstatic, and contemplative experiences expressed in the same symbolic language as the traditional cosmology and ritual,” writes Eliade. “This does not mean that such experiences were not real; they were perfectly real, but not in the sense in which a physical phenomenon is real.”

When yoga is seen this way, mixing up mystical physiology and concrete human anatomy would be a category error akin to performing a blood transfusion with wine from the Eucharist. Yet this sort of categorical confusion about the difference between mystical, symbolic language and secular literalism would become hugely important in the development of yoga-as-exercise.

Indian spirituality has long valued feats of asceticism, and asanas were involved in religious austerities as well as alchemical experiments. The seventeenth-century French physician and traveler François Bernier writes of naked, ash-smeared “Jauguis,” some dragging heavy chains, others spending hours in handstands and other postures “so difficult and painful that they could not be imitated by our tumblers.” The point of these exercises was devotional rapture and the destruction of individual subjectivity more than the enjoyment of robust good health.

That said, there was an important physical fitness element in the lives of many hatha yogis. These men—and they were overwhelmingly men—were often far from the peaceable sages of the Western imagination. In fact, large numbers of them were fighters, akin in some ways to Shaolin monks. As the scholar Mark Singleton writes, from the fifteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century, “highly organized bands of militarized yogins controlled trade routes across Northern India.” Many formed mercenary militias. According to G. S. Ghurye, a leading Indian scholar, as many as seven thousand naked ascetics used to march, armed with spears, shields, bows, and arrows, at the head of the Jaipur Army.

To prepare their bodies for fighting, these militant yogis adopted punishing exercise regimens that were, as Ghurye puts it, “almost the counterpart of the military drill that a regular regiment receives as a part of its training to keep it in trim.” It’s possible that some of the exercises now associated with hatha yoga had their origin in this sort of combat training, something separate from the yogis’ religious practice. That, writes Singleton, would help “explain the apparent discrepancy between postures described in medieval hatha yoga texts and the kind of postural practice ascribed to hatha yoga by modern innovators.”

The British Raj was mostly able to pacify India’s yogin armies, driving the yogis to society’s margins. “No longer able to make a living by trade-soldiering, large numbers were forced into lives of yogic showmanship and mendicancy, becoming objects of scorn for many sections of Hindu society, and of voyeuristic fascination or disgust for European visitors,” Singleton writes. They became, in other words, like the yogis Eugenia saw on Chowpatty Beach.

Such yogis were despised by orthodox Hindus and many modern reformers alike. The former reviled their impurity and disregard for caste. The latter saw them as relics of a superstitious, even barbarous, past they were eager to leave behind. Thus even as yoga philosophy enjoyed renewed international respect around the turn of the twentieth century, hatha yoga remained in disrepute—until the global craze for physical culture rehabilitated its reputation.

If Swami Vivekananda wasn’t a hatha yogi, he nevertheless helped set the stage for the hatha yoga revival. A crucial bridge between India and the West, Vivekananda was the first Indian to turn the traditional missionary relationship on its head, bringing a modernized version of Hinduism to America. At the same time, he helped transmit back to India Western ideas about the spiritual value of physical fitness, ideas that would inform the reinvention of hatha yoga.

Vivekananda’s arrival in the United States for the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 was a signal event in the history of American alternative spirituality. The parliament was held in conjunction with the Chicago World’s Fair, an unprecedented spectacle erected to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Pavilions—the Electricity Building, the Palace of Mechanic Arts, the Agricultural Building—celebrated the country’s innovation and abundance. Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape designer who created Manhattan’s Central Park, turned the grounds into an American Venice, replete with canals, lagoons, and gondolas. The world’s first Ferris wheel conducted amazed visitors heavenward. On the Midway, sideshows and cultural curiosities beckoned: fortune-tellers, magicians, and the famous Cairo Street, with its bejeweled camels and scandalous belly dancers.

The World’s Parliament of Religions partook of the fair’s universalizing spirit, its optimistic American assumption that all the world’s faiths could be gathered together, each contributing its own particular treasures. “Religion, like the white light of Heaven, has been broken into many-colored fragments by the prisms of men,” wrote the conference chair. “One of the objects of the Parliament of Religions has been to change this many-colored radiance back into the white light of heavenly truth.”

Over two weeks in September, the parliament brought together representatives from most of the world’s religions—Jews and Christians, Hindus and Muslims, Buddhists, Parsis, Zen masters, Confucianists, and Shintoists. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, sent a speech to be read in absentia, and thousands packed the hall to hear it. Many attendees were Theosophists; even Mohammed Webb, an American convert who represented Islam, identified with the society. Altogether, one hundred fifty thousand people attended.

The undisputed star of the conference was thirty-year-old Swami Vivekananda. Stout but handsome, with a regal, leonine bearing, he was “clad in gorgeous red apparel, his bronzed face surmounted with a huge turban of yellow,” as one attendee described him. With a sharp wit and a delightful Scottish brogue courtesy of the mission school where he’d learned English, he was perfectly attuned to the parliament’s universalizing religious spirit.

A devoted Indian nationalist, he’d been sent to the United States to plead for an end to the Christian missionary activity that was subverting his country’s religious traditions. (One of his patrons was the Maharaja of Mysore, whose son and successor would later have a major impact on Eugenia’s life.) Vivekananda was a devotee of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, an ecstatic mystic and worshipper of the goddess Kali. He was also dedicated to defending the reputation of Hinduism abroad, and to that end, he reimagined his master’s teachings in a way that was very much in line with Western liberal religious sentiments. His hybrid philosophy was deeply influenced by American transcendentalism, which was itself shaped by romantic conceptions of Indian thought, one of those cross-cultural Ouroboroses found throughout the history of yoga in the West.

Vivekananda well understood how India (and he himself) could benefit from the veneration of searching Westerners. As he wrote in a letter to the Maharaja of Mysore, educated Americans had become “disgusted” by theories of “a big tyrant God sitting on a throne in a place called Heaven, and of the eternal hell fires.” His version of the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, which saw God not as a capricious father but as “our highest and perfect nature,” could speak to American intellectuals, filling the void left by religious disenchantment.

Further, he believed, the more that sophisticated Westerners came to admire Indian religion, the more they would support Indian independence. “By preaching the profound secrets of the Vedanta religion in the Western world, we shall attract the sympathy and regard of these mighty nations,” Vivekananda wrote to one journalist friend, “maintaining for ever the position of their teacher in spiritual matters, and they will remain our teachers in all material concerns.” Elsewhere, he put it a bit more crudely. “As our country is poor in social virtues, so this country is lacking in spirituality,” he wrote. “I give them spirituality, and they give me money.”

In Chicago, Vivekananda presented Vedanta as essentially an ancient, venerable antecedent to American New Thought, the popular mind-over-matter doctrine. He invited Americans to slough off Judeo-Christian ideas of sin and guilt: “Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name, heirs of immortal bliss—yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners…Sinners? It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature.”

Americans embraced Vivekananda’s vision of salvation through self-realization. The New York Herald called him “undoubtedly the greatest figure in the Parliament of Religions.” Following the parliament, he signed up with a lecture bureau and spent months traveling around the country for speaking engagements. Disciples began to collect around him; in 1895 he initiated his first two Western sannyasins, or “renunciants.” When his book Raja Yoga was published in 1896, it sold out in months.

Vivekananda’s modernized version of Vedanta would have a huge impact on American New Age religion, particularly in Los Angeles, where the Vedanta Society that his followers opened would attract expat devotees such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley. Frank Baum, the Theosophist author of The Wizard of Oz, first heard Vivekananda speak in Chicago and was deeply affected by him; Baum’s biographer Evan I. Schwartz argues that the quests of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion are all allegories for the four yogic paths that Vivekananda elaborated.

Almost as important as the ideas that Vivekananda brought to the United States, though, were the ones he brought home to India.

Vivekananda had come to America at the height of the craze for what was then called physical culture. It started in the mid-1800s, when experts in both Europe and the United States grew worried that sedentary lives born of industrialization were making people weak and neurotic. An evangelistic passion for the wholesome, curative powers of exercise and health food was thus born. The idea of “muscular Christianity” infused the quest for bodily strength with religious valor.

American newspapers and magazines hailed men such as doctor and homeopath Diocletian Lewis, a feminist, temperance activist, and abolitionist who promoted a gymnastic-based “movement cure” for female invalids. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes, ran the famous Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which treated famous patients such as President William Taft and aviatrix Amelia Earhart with a regime of vegetarian food, breathing exercises, gymnastics, massage, and enemas.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Prussian strongman Eugen Sandow became an international celebrity and sparked the modern bodybuilding movement. While Vivekananda was in Chicago for the World’s Parliament of Religions, Florenz Ziegfeld, then an unknown impresario whose father ran a struggling Chicago nightclub, made his name by putting Sandow onstage, to awed reviews: “Sandow looks and feels more like a steel machine than a human being,” wrote the Chicago Tribune. “[W]hen he holds three horses on his chest, to say nothing of a teeterboard on which the animals stand, people forget to applaud, they hold their breaths and wonder.”

Vivekananda was strongly affected by the physical culture movement, even if he didn’t do much exercise himself. If Westerners had pioneered muscular Christianity, he sought to create a muscular Hinduism, believing that Indians needed physical strength to gain their independence. After all, British domination was often justified in terms of physical superiority over sickly, effeminate subalterns, and Indians had internalized this hierarchy. One popular children’s chant from the Indian state of Gujarat went, “Behold the mighty Englishman / He rules the Indian small / Because being a meat-eater / He is five cubits tall.”

For Vivekananda, as for others who followed him, becoming strong was a crucial step toward becoming free. Indeed, he was even willing to jettison the most profound Hindu taboos in the name of bodybuilding. An unrepentant beef eater, he told one disciple, “The entire country has become crowded with sickly, dyspeptic, vegetarian ascetics…Now we have to make our countrymen enterprising by feeding them fish and meat.” Vivekananda also made a crucial link between controlling the body and controlling the mind, asking in one dialogue, “How will you struggle with the mind unless the physique be strong?”

Physical culture spread rapidly in turn-of-the-century India, closely linked to Indian nationalism. When the bodybuilder Sandow traveled to India in 1905, as part of a triumphant world tour, he was a sensation. As he stepped off the train at Calcutta’s Howrah Station, he found hundreds of people waiting to greet him, and when he appeared in theaters and tents around the country, the standing-room-only crowds were “electrified,” in the words of the Times of India. Local newspapers heaped praise on him, and one wealthy Parsi businessman offered him ten thousand pounds if he stayed on in the country. The Maharaja of Baroda displayed a life-size plaster cast of Sandow in his personal museum.

Sandow assured his Indian audiences that with proper training, they, too, could become strongmen. “The native Indians have a fine foundation for the building of large, physical men,” he wrote in the Indian Sporting Times. This was a message that they were eager to hear, since it suggested that British physical superiority wasn’t innate.

At the same time, as the Indian independence movement gained strength, Indian nationalists turned away from the accoutrements of the Raj. People who had once worn Western clothes donned garments made from khadi, India’s homespun cotton cloth. It’s not surprising that they would seek an authentically Indian form of physical culture as well. In hatha yoga—or a modernized, hybrid form of it—they found it. Thus, starting in the nineteenth century, a new, rationalized kind of hatha yoga was born, one that would reach full flower in the twentieth.

In the mid-1930s, Eugenia, finally cured of her long malaise, asked a friend of hers, a Nepalese princess named Buba, if she knew where she could find a yoga teacher. Buba referred Eugenia to her brother, Prince Mussoorie, who credited the discipline with transforming him from a heavy and unhealthy child into a lithe and vivacious man. The prince, in turn, directed Eugenia to Swami Kuvalayananda’s new yogic health center on Bombay’s Charni Road, one of the centers of the hatha yoga renaissance.

Kuvalayananda was a charming, solicitous man with a white walrus moustache and corkscrewing white hair that reached his shoulders. “He reminded me of Einstein because he had the same peculiar look in his large brown eyes: speculative, puzzled and naïve at the same time,” Arthur Koestler wrote of him in the 1950s.

A dedicated nationalist and yoga revivalist, Kuvalayananda had been at the forefront of hatha yoga’s transformation from a mystical, tantric practice into a modern health regimen. Yoga, he believed, could serve as the basis for an authentically Indian kind of physical culture. Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father, praised Kuvalayananda’s work, saying, “He opened out an entirely new field of research and has shown that the different aspects of Yogic Culture Therapy could not only stand the fierce light of modern sciences but are well in advance of all that has so far been discovered in the West.” Yoga became proof of Indian greatness.

Born Jagannath Ganesh Gune in 1883, Kuvalayananda became deeply interested in both Indian nationalism and physical culture while a young man at Baroda College. He read the works of Bernarr Macfadden, an American muscleman and publishing tycoon, and studied with Rajratna Manikrao, a revolutionary who developed mass gymnastic drills to prepare young men for the anticolonialist struggle.

Like the Theosophists before him, Kuvalayananda dreamed of melding modern rationalism and ancient wisdom. He wanted to reclaim what he saw as India’s indigenous system of exercise, while proving its validity in Western terms. So he began conducting experiments, subjecting yogic claims to unprecedented scientific scrutiny. In 1924 he opened the Kaivalyadhama Ashram in Lonavla, southeast of Bombay, where, with the support of a sympathetic prince, he built a laboratory full of the most up-to-date equipment available.

Eventually, he began to systematize series of poses and other yogic practices, prescribing them like medicine for various ailments. To Gandhi, for example, he recommended saltwater and diluted milk in the morning, followed by an enema, Savasana (corpse pose), a modified shoulder stand, and nightly massage.

As a recognized expert on physical education, Kuvalayananda sat on government panels to devise exercise regimens for schools. In these, he combined asanas with calisthenics and moves that were traditionally part of the training program for Indian wrestlers—dands, or push-ups, and surya namaskars, a flowing series of lunges that today form an essential part of modern hatha yoga classes. These assemblages of yoga poses with Eastern and Western bodybuilding techniques set the precedent for contemporary Western yoga.

Kuvalayananda gave yoga classes at the ashram, though these were gentler and more static, geared toward therapy rather than exercise for adolescents. The demand was so great that in 1932 he expanded to Bombay. There, he began offering courses for women, having become convinced that certain yogic exercises, particularly those focused on the abdomen and pelvic area, could aid childbearing. That’s where Eugenia was finally introduced to asana practice.

Arriving at the simple two-story building, she was examined by a doctor. She met briefly with the swami himself, though he didn’t teach her; she had to study with the women. She was ushered into a room with a matted floor, where several women in saris were practicing individually. A female instructor showed her how to breathe deeply, to expand her chest and the back of her ribs to take in more oxygen. Then she taught Eugenia three poses: a seated forward bend, the plough, and the shoulder stand. Eugenia, who had never before encountered these basic postures, was mortified to find that she was too stiff to do any of them correctly.

When she returned the next day, she asked a fellow student to lean on her back while she bent forward and tried to touch her toes, but the teacher stopped her—forcing the postures was forbidden. All of them, she said, would come in time. “Which will probably be in my next incarnation!” Eugenia said. For the most part, the classes bored and frustrated her. Except for her mother, Eugenia rarely idolized women. She was still looking for a guru who could excite her devotion the way Krishnamurti had, and this teacher, however well intentioned, was no such figure. Nevertheless, she kept going, and slowly started to make progress.

Then, suddenly, at the start of 1936, the Czech government decided to transfer Jan Strakaty to China, and Eugenia’s life in India appeared to be coming to an end. She was sad, but took the news with equanimity, prepared for what she hoped would be a novel adventure. Jo returned to Prague right away, but Eugenia stayed on in India several more months, packing up their household and saying her good-byes. When her May 7 departure date arrived, she remembered how destroyed she’d felt all those years ago when she left Der Blaue Vogel, and she marveled that she wasn’t overwhelmed now with a similar heartbreak. Certainly, as she spent her last day in Bombay, she was full of nostalgia, thinking back over her first trip through the country with Krishnamurti, and all the activists, artists, princes, and princesses she’d come to know since. Yet she told herself that she had a pilgrim soul and could find peace anywhere on earth. After a decade in the country, she still knew little of hatha yoga, but perhaps she’d internalized a bit of classical yoga’s philosophical detachment.

But just a bit. Soon after arriving in Prague, Eugenia and her mother departed for a trip to the fashionable spa town of Karlsbad. It was a beautiful place, famous for its sulfurous hot springs. Situated in an emerald valley, it boasted promenades, luxury shops, and elegant Baroque and Art Nouveau buildings. People went there to recover from various ailments, but also to socialize and parade around in the latest fashions; such spas were famous for their personal intrigue and social climbing. The 1936 season would be one of the last; in 1938 Karlsbad and the entire region of the Sudetenland were annexed by Nazi Germany. Eugenia was largely unaware of the encroaching peril. Rather than being anxious, she was deathly bored.

Seeking to escape the tedious social whirl, she and Sasha moved to a smaller town, where Eugenia spent her days wandering the forests and regressing into elaborate fantasies about Vava, her adolescent love. Her life was heading in a depressing direction, her chance for autonomy, for individual accomplishments, slowly receding.

Then she received the wedding invitation that would transform everything. The nephew of the powerful, forward-thinking Maharaja of Mysore, whom Eugenia had befriended during her years on India’s social circuit, was getting married. Perhaps Eugenia was not as resigned to leaving India as she thought, because given the chance to return, she was elated. It wasn’t just that the Mysore Palace was one of the most stimulating and opulent environments in the entire subcontinent, but also that under the Maharaja’s patronage there was a yoga shala, or school, run by the brilliant, stern, and intense yogi Sri Krishnamacharya.

If she went to the wedding, she’d have the opportunity to meet him. It might be her last chance to find a true yoga master and, more than that, to escape the stultification of a life without ambition. Traditional yoga, of course, is supposed to teach you how to renounce worldly goals, not how to achieve them, but Eugenia had never been bound by tradition.