B. K. S. Iyengar

B. S. Iyengar was born in 1918 in Bellur, in what is now Karnataka, into a poor family battered by the influenza pandemic then sweeping India. He was the eleventh of thirteen children, and childhood left him wrecked by malaria, typhoid, and tuberculosis. “My arms were thin, my legs were spindly, and my stomach protruded in an ungainly manner,” he later wrote of those years. His father died of appendicitis when Iyengar was nine, and the family’s poverty deepened.

In 1934 his brother-in-law, the yogi Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, brought him to Mysore to build strength through asana practice. It worked, and by 1936 Iyengar was teaching his own classes. He credited yoga with saving a life that illness had nearly ended before it started.

The real turning point came in 1952, when he met the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, an early convert to yoga in the West. Their friendship carried Iyengar’s teaching beyond India, and in 1966 he published Light on Yoga, a 300-page manual of postures and photographs that sold nearly three million copies and was translated into at least seventeen languages. He founded his institute in Pune in 1973 and kept teaching there into his eighties, once holding a headstand for six minutes while swiveling his legs, according to a 2002 account.

Students ranged from Aldous Huxley to Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, whom he famously taught to stand on her head at 85. He wrote Light on Life in 2005, reflecting on decades in which yoga moved from ridicule to reverence. India awarded him the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan, and finally the Padma Vibhushan in 2014, the year he died in Pune of heart failure at 95. “He took yoga to the world,” his granddaughter Abhijata Sridhar-Iyengar said. “He knew that.”