Authentic Yoga: The Genius of India’s Living Inheritance

Some months before B.K.S.

Iyengar, one of the great modern teachers who carried yoga from India to the world, died in Pune on 20 August 2014, aged ninety-five, I went to see him.

By then he was far more than a celebrated guru.

He was an exacting practitioner who had made yoga intelligible, disciplined and accessible to millions.

The violinist Yehudi Menuhin helped introduce him to Europe.

Light on Yoga, first published in 1966, became for many the classic doorway into the discipline.

Even China recognised him with commemorative stamps.

I had known Iyengar over many years, first as a student and then as an admirer of his extraordinary integrity.

His genius lay not only in virtuosity, though that was formidable, but in compassion expressed as method.

He opened yoga to those who might never have been able to benefit from traditional postures: the elderly, the injured, the disabled, the stiff, the frightened and the medically fragile.

Blocks, belts, blankets and chairs became instruments not of dilution but of entry.

His work continued through Geeta Iyengar, Prashant Iyengar, Abhijata Iyengar and a global community of teachers shaped by his precision.

When I entered that day, he was holding an extraordinarily complex posture with an intensity that seemed to suspend time.

I asked him why he still subjected himself to such rigour.

Why not rest? His answer has stayed with me. “There are still parts of my body,” he said, “that my consciousness has not reached.” In that sentence lay one of yoga’s deepest aspirations: not the conquest of the body by the will, not physical mastery as spectacle, but the building of bridges between body and mind, sensation and awareness, matter and consciousness.

Yoga, at its most authentic, is intelligence entering every neglected corner of our being.

This is why, on International Yoga Day, we may need not only celebration but also self-examination.

Yoga is rightly honoured as one of India’s great gifts to the world.

Yet the rituals of celebration can sometimes obscure what is being celebrated.

We see choreographed gatherings, perfect rows of bodies in public squares, corporate wellness sessions, school competitions rewarding contortion, and the annual theatre of mats unfurled in Times Square.

There is nothing wrong with collective practice.

Bodies breathing together across nations can be moving.

But when yoga becomes spectacle, competition, branding, or a soft advertisement for national pride, its essence recedes.

A posture held for applause is not the same as an asana entered with awareness.

A child who learns to out-bend another child may acquire flexibility, but not necessarily humility.

A civilisation that treats yoga as proof of superiority has misunderstood a discipline intended to loosen the ego that seeks superiority.

Yoga is not performance.

It is not gymnastics wrapped in Sanskrit.

It is the yoking of our scattered being into attention, so that body, breath, mind and conduct may become clearer, steadier and freer.

This matters also because yoga is precise.

To imitate it casually from a television screen or public square can be unwise.

A technique suitable for one body may be unsuitable for another.

Forceful breathing practices, for example, may be harmful for people with high blood pressure, hernia or other vulnerabilities.

Precision is not pedantry; it is compassion.

The discipline trains us to respect limits, to listen deeply, and to understand that progress in yoga is not measured by how far the body can be pushed, but by how honestly consciousness inhabits it.

The genius of Indian civilisation has never been the preservation of knowledge as untouchable perfection.

Its deeper genius has been the capacity to absorb, adapt and integrate without losing its centre.

Yoga evolved through conversation with Buddhist contemplative traditions, Jain ethics, Sufi interiority, Tantric maps of subtle energy and the many currents of India’s philosophical life.

This was not syncretism as decoration.

It was disciplined testing: retaining what transformed the practitioner, and allowing forms to change when life required it.

This diversity within authentic yoga matters especially now, when public life is marked by fragmentation, chauvinism and the urge to turn inheritances into ownership claims.

Yoga’s own history offers another possibility.

It has remained alive because serious teachers have responded to contemporary predicaments and individual needs without losing its core.

One temperament may need rigour, another tenderness; one body alignment, another breath; one mind silence, another service.

Diversity here is not confusion.

It is disciplined plurality, held together by the aspiration to reduce suffering and awaken intelligence.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras remain a luminous example.

He did not prescribe a fixed physical system for all future ages.

He offered a philosophical matrix.

His formulation of asana as steady and comfortable left space for centuries of development.

Hundreds of postures could emerge later because the original teaching was not a cage but a crucible: preserving principles while allowing forms to evolve.The last century witnessed one of yoga’s most creative renewals.

Iyengar democratised access through therapeutic precision.

T.K.V.

Desikachar carried forward another essential insight: yoga must be adapted to the person, not the person forced into a rigid system.

In the tradition of Viniyoga, practice became radically individual.

A pregnant woman, a child, an athlete, an executive, a labourer, an elder or someone in fragile health could each receive an appropriate practice.

This was inclusivity not as slogan, but as method.

Yogamaharishi Swami Gitananda Giri, from whom I had the privilege of learning yoga, established at his Ananda Ashram in Pondicherry one of the most rigorous and scientifically grounded lineages of the modern era.

His work is carried forward today by his son, Yogacharya Ananda Balayogi Bhavanani.

The emphasis was not on mere posture, but on the wholeness of yogic life: breath, discipline, ethics, concentration, subtle awareness and service.

The Bihar School of Yoga, under Swami Satyananda, bridged scientific rationalism and spiritual seeking.

Yoga Nidra addressed stress, insomnia and exhaustion.

Systematic pratyahara offered a remedy for sensory overload before the digital age made distraction a common affliction.

Its integration of discipline, research and seva showed that yoga was not an escape from the world, but a way of re-entering it with steadier attention and a more generous heart.

The Sivananda tradition responded to modern fragmentation through a simple framework: exercise, breath, relaxation, diet and positive thinking.

Its genius lay in making practice accessible without demanding religious conversion.

One could chant without becoming Hindu, breathe without abandoning one’s faith, meditate without subscribing to a doctrine.

A Muslim might find Allah in the breath, a Christian might deepen prayer, an atheist might discover ethics through embodied awareness.

None need be diminished.

The Krishnamacharya lineage reveals how one tradition can give rise to many valid forms.

Ashtanga’s rigour speaks to energetic temperaments, while therapeutic branches serve those seeking healing.

The variety is not a weakness.

It is evidence of vitality.

Together, these schools helped make yoga secular without making it shallow, accessible without emptying it of depth.

Yoga can now be practised in hospitals without invoking divinity, in schools without religious conflict, in corporations without sectarian identity, and in prisons, homes and community centres with equal legitimacy.

Yet accessibility must not become dilution.

Yoga’s purpose is not to help us endure the intolerable without question.

Its deeper function is to reveal the patterns that generate suffering: restlessness, fear, compulsive desire, aggression, isolation, greed and the illusion of separateness.

Relaxation techniques and lifestyle changes are valuable, but only when connected to this larger inquiry.

Otherwise, yoga becomes another commodity in the marketplace of self-improvement.

Civilisational pride, if brittle and defensive, can harm the inheritance it seeks to protect.

Yoga does not need triumphalism.

It needs humility.

Its motivation was never self-exaltation, but transcendence; not separateness, but interdependence.

Its highest expression is compassion in action, the recognition that individual and collective well-being cannot be separated.

As yoga spreads across the world, it offers a rare model of how ancient wisdom can remain alive without demanding belief, how a tradition can be universal without becoming rootless, and how a practice can belong to everyone without belonging exclusively to anyone.

This is India’s true gift: not proprietary wisdom, but a living path of transformation.

Yoga asks no one to abandon who they are.

Yet, at its best, it invites each of us to become more than we have been.

Authored by: Rajiv MehrotraThe author is managing trustee, the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

The views expressed are personal