What is B.K.S. Iyengar?
Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar (1918–2014) was an Indian yoga teacher and the founder of Iyengar Yoga. He trained under Krishnamacharya in Mysore, moved to Pune in 1937, and spent the next seven decades developing a system centred on three principles: precise anatomical alignment in every posture, long sustained holds, and the systematic use of props such as blocks, belts, and bolsters. His 1966 manual *Light on Yoga* became the most widely cited English-language yoga text of the twentieth century.
Iyengar Yoga vs. Ashtanga and Viniyoga
Iyengar Yoga is often confused with Ashtanga Vinyāsa, the style codified by Pattabhi Jois, who trained alongside Iyengar under Krishnamacharya. Ashtanga links postures in fixed series through breath-synchronised transitions; Iyengar holds individual postures for minutes with the aid of props, prioritising alignment over flow. Viniyoga, developed by T.K.V. Desikachar (Krishnamacharya's son), applies the same source material individually and therapeutically, without fixed sequences. The flow classes that dominate Western studios today descend mainly from Ashtanga. The three traditions share a lineage but differ sharply in method.
From a sickly boyhood to Pune
Iyengar was born in 1918 in Bellur, Karnataka, into a Brahmin family of limited means. He was a sickly child. By his own account he survived malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, and the effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic. In 1934 his sister married Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the yoga master then resident at the Mysore palace under Maharaja Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV. Krishnamacharya took Iyengar on as a student to rebuild a body he considered close to broken. The training was severe: long holds in postures the boy could not yet perform, food withheld until postures were mastered, and demonstrations for which the teacher used the student as subject. Iyengar's subsequent emphasis on alignment, props, and sustained holds reads, on his own account, as a refinement of Krishnamacharya's method by a body that had to make every posture work without natural flexibility.
The method
In 1937 Iyengar was sent to Pune to teach. He stayed for seventy-seven years. The method that consolidated through the 1940s and 1950s was distinctive on three points. First, alignment: each posture was decomposed into a precise geometry, specifying which joint stacked above which and which line of force ran through the body. The practitioner was held to that geometry. Second, time: the Iyengar posture is held for minutes, not breaths. The long hold allows alignment to settle into deep tissue rather than remaining a surface arrangement. Third, props: Iyengar was the first major teacher to use blocks, belts, blankets, ropes, bolsters, and walls as systematic instruments. They were not concessions to weakness but means by which a body of any condition could enter the underlying form of a posture. *Light on Yoga* (1966), with over five hundred photographs of his body in two hundred āsanas, became the postural canon for two generations of Western practitioners.
The full curriculum
Iyengar regarded āsana as the third of Patañjali's eight limbs, not a free-standing fitness programme. His own commitments, explicit in *Light on Yoga* and in his commentaries on Patañjali's *Yoga Sūtras*, held that the full practice included sustained prāṇāyāma, the moral preliminaries (yama and niyama), pratyāhāra, and dhyāna. The posture and breath work were preparation for meditative absorption, not ends in themselves. The Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute (RIMYI), which he opened in Pune in 1975 in memory of his late wife Ramamani, has remained an unusually traditional centre: long sequences, no music, no Sanskrit-free repackaging, a curriculum that takes years to traverse. It is now directed by his son Prashant and granddaughter Abhijata. The studio yoga most Western practitioners encounter under the Iyengar Yoga name preserves the alignment-and-prop pedagogy but has often shed the embedding of āsana in the eight-limb path. What Iyengar gave the West, above all, was the premise that yoga is a precise discipline: that a body met carefully and held with attention can become an instrument of the inward work that the haṭha texts had always claimed it could be.
The wider lineage
Iyengar's lineage is one of three branches of modern postural yoga descending from Krishnamacharya's reform at the Mysore palace. Pattabhi Jois, his fellow student, codified Ashtanga Vinyāsa, the breath-paired sequences from which contemporary studio flow descends. T.K.V. Desikachar, Krishnamacharya's son, developed Viniyoga, a more individuating and therapeutic adaptation of the same source. Indra Devi, the first Western woman the lineage trained, carried the system to Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. The four streams cover most of what the West now calls yoga. Paramahansa Yogananda's *Autobiography of a Yogi* belongs to a parallel tradition, the kriyā yoga line of Lahiri Mahasaya, distinct from the Mysore reform but reaching the same Western audience. Sadhguru's *Inner Engineering* and its online course are a later generation and a fifth stream, sharing none of Iyengar's institutional inheritance but addressing, in practical terms, a recognisably Patañjala curriculum. Iyengar died in Pune on 20 August 2014, aged ninety-five.
