Four Women Who Influenced Modern Yoga

These four women helped shape modern yoga - have you heard of them? This International Women’s Day, let’s celebrate and find out more.

Starting top left (clockwise): Yogini Sunita, Geeta Iyengar, Madame Blavatsky, Indra Devi.

If you’re a yoga teacher, or have practiced for a while, you’ve probably come across important figures such as Krishnamacharya (the father of modern yoga), B.K.S Iyengar (found of Iyengar Yoga) and Swami Vivekananda. What do these people all have in common? They’re men! Granted, they’re important and remain influential but yoga has a rich and complex history - let’s widen and diversify what we know. I’m going to introduce to you four important women who have shaped the recent history of yoga - I’ll work chronologically.

Madame Blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91) was a Russian aristocrat who, in 1875, founded the Theosophical Society.

Like many upper class Europeans in the Victoria era, she travelled extensively, became interested in Spiritualism and was exposed to Hindu and Buddhist ideas. She claimed to have been schooled by religious adepts in India, to have visited Tibet where she was taught by Buddhist lamas; to have access to secret knowledge and secret texts. This was the authority on which she founded the Theosophical Society in New York, with Henry Olcott and William Judge.

Blavatksy wrote and published extensively as part of the Theosophical Society – her theories blended science, philosophy and religion and, supposedly, revived ancient wisdoms and revealed esoteric ideas. Followers of Blavatsky saw her as a sage, and others saw her as a total charlatan - she was accused of making fraudulent claims (such as being clarivoyant) and it is clear now that some of her ideas were far fetched and unfounded.

Charlatanism aside - Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society were instrumental in shaping the popular view of what yoga is outside of India, mostly in Europe and America in the 1800’s.

She was, for example, an early promoter of the Yoga Sutras and the Theosophical Society published their own edition - they had the money and the printing press to do so. The Yoga Sutras remain one of the primary texts for yoga practitioners in the west in the 21st century and this is, in part, due to Blavatsky’s early distribution and championing.

Indra Devi

Eugenie Peterson (1899–2002) was born in what was the Russian Empire, now Latvia. In the 1930s she travelled to India where, for a short time, she became a film star and changed her name to Indra Devi.

In 1938 she saw Krishnamacharya perform his yogic feats at the Mysore Palace - things like stopping his heartbeat and complex asana. She wanted to learn yoga and so, at the Maharaja’s insistence, Krishnamacharya took her on as his first foreign (i.e. non-Indian) female student.

After a year of instruction she left India - Krishnamacharya told her to teach yoga and this is what she dedicated the rest of her life to. She taught in China in 1939, where she went with her diplomat husband, and then in the 1940s moved to America. In 1947 she opened a yoga studio in Hollywood, LA (the first in the area) and famously taught yoga to starlets of the time such as Greta Garbo and possibly even Marilyne Munroe.

Devi’s style of yoga was aimed at helping women de-stress, stay healthy and trim, rather than reaching enlightenment. In the 1950s she published several books that were widely read and translated into many languages - my grandam had one of her books and it’s possible yours did too.

Yogini Sunita

Yogin Sunita (1932-1970) was born in Bombay, India and moved to the UK in the 1960s with her family.

Today, she is not well known but in her time she had a huge influence on the relatively small yoga scene of Britain. She lived in Birmingham, where, by 1965, she taught yoga to over 700 students and began training yoga teachers.

In 1961 she appear on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour (goals!) to talk about her unique techniques of flowing postures, relaxation and breathing. Like Devi, most of her students and trainee teachers were women. She tragically died in 1970 aged only 38 - given the way yoga grew in popularity it is hard not to think about how wide her influence could have been if her life had not been cut short.

Geeta Iyengar

You probably recognise Geeta Iyengar’s name - she is the daughter of one of the most famous yoga teachers of the 20th century, who named his style of yoga after himself - B.K.S Iyengar and Iyengar Yoga.

Geeta (1944-2018) began working with her father once she had completed her education by teaching and assisting on his international yoga tours. In the 1980s she took over the the running of the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Pune, India, alongside her brother.

As well as continuing her father’s legacy, Geeta became an important teacher of yoga in her own right. She developed new ways of teaching and practicing yoga specifically for women at different stages of their life. Many women were doing yoga in the 20th century but she really considered how to adapt yoga practice for pregnancy, menopause and different times of the menstrual cycle.

She wrote several popular books including ‘Yoga: A Gem for Women’ (2002), ‘The Women’s Yoga Book’ (2007) and ‘Iyengar Yoga for Motherhood’ (2010).

Conclusion

It is easy to sit in a yoga class, to look around and wonder, why are there so many women here? If Indra Devi or Yogini Sunita had not popularised their gentle stretching techniques and appealed to women, specifically, what would modern yoga look like? If Blavatsky had not used her power to publish the Yoga Sutra, would it appear on almost all yoga teacher training reading lists today?

Of course, we can never know for sure, and there are plenty of other important figures - men and women - who shaped what yoga has become but so often women like this are forgotten, or their relevance underplayed. Swami Vivekananda is sometimes credited for popularising the Yoga Sutras but Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society had translated this text decades before he arrived in America. Equally, Indra Devi was teaching yoga in LA to celebrities years before Pattabhi Jois or Bikram Choudhury arrived in California.

Let’s not forget the women who shaped modern yoga and instead celebrate their legacies.

If you’re interested in finding out more about women in yoga I will be teaching a course - live, online - on this very topic. Join my newsletter here to find out more details and when I’m open for bookings.

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