{"id":4542,"date":"2014-11-02T08:46:34","date_gmt":"2014-11-02T13:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=4542"},"modified":"2014-11-02T08:46:34","modified_gmt":"2014-11-02T13:46:34","slug":"wawadia-the-cremation-of-b-k-s-iyengar-draft-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wawadia-the-cremation-of-b-k-s-iyengar-draft-excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"WAWADIA: The Cremation of B.K.S. Iyengar (draft excerpt)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following reflection\u00a0is featured in the full prospectus<\/a>\u00a0for WAWADIA, released Nov 1 in support of the\u00a0IGG campaign<\/a>\u00a0to help fund publication. In the eventual book, this piece will help to set\u00a0the historical stage for the current flood of change and innovation sweeping through the world of modern postural yoga. Notes and citations are are the end. I welcome all feedback.<\/em><\/p>\n

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All of these practices make us into a true human being,\u00a0because we are still not fit for the divine level. \u00a0\u2014B.K.S. Iyengar<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

O<\/span>\n<\/span>n August 14th, 2014, the news flashed through the yoga world that Mr. Iyengar had been admitted to a private hospital in Pune following a three-week illness. He was accompanied by daughter Geeta, son Prashant, and their family physician. His blood pressure, regulated by decades of equanimity in standing postures, was dangerously low. His breathing, famous for demonstrations of control and retention, whistled shallow in his barrel chest. The doctors placed him on a ventilator for the first day, but he insisted it be removed. His heart, which had thumped faithfully through countless backbends, was feeble. His feet, which had stepped on the backs of devotees prostrated in child\u2019s pose, which students gazed at for hours as he instructed the subtleties of ball-mound rooting and inner-arch-lifting, and which, in later years, devotees touched to show their respect, were now swollen with deoxygenated blood and pooling lymph.<\/p>\n

By August 18th, the man who had introduced the principles of \u201ckidney breathing\u201d to the world of postural yoga was placed on dialysis, as his kidneys began to fail. On the 19th, doctors administered a nasogastral feeding tube. Reports of his earlier refusal to be hospitalized expanded, suggesting that most if not all of these interventions would have been unwelcome. The man who had enthusiastically worked to open dialogue between yoga and biomedicine was now firmly in the clinical grasp of the latter. It would seem that a precious goal of the experiential yogi\u2014to be able to feel the approach of death unmediated and in solitude\u2014was now lost to him. In his last hours, his lifelong passion for self-observation\u2014for carefully monitoring the qualities of every twitch and pulse for the signs of grace or its absence\u2014was occluded by the clinical gaze. If he\u2019d been able to continue to listen to his heart, its faltering thump would have been drowned out by the heart monitor that amplified it.<\/p>\n

On August 20th at 3:15 am local time, Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar died. On social media, some refused to use the word \u201cdeath\u201d\u2014 insisting on \u201cmahasamadhi\u201d, which describes the ultimate absorption of a meditator.<\/p>\n

G<\/span>\n<\/span>lowing tributes flooded the web, hailing the \u201cLion of Pune\u201d, the supreme innovator, inspiration of millions. Hundreds described how Light on Yoga <\/i>appeared in their lives at critical junctures, and changed their paths. They posted photos of their broken-spined copies, scribbled on on every page, held together by rubber bands. Senior students issued somber and tender memorials.<\/p>\n

Amongst my several thousand yoga contacts on Facebook, only one dared to share an openly conflicted response. She wrote that she was grateful for his \u201ckeen eye and passion for precision,\u201d but mindful of his \u201cpatriarchal, old-school guru\u201d persona, known to \u201chumiliate, bully, and shame his students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another friend posted a possibly sardonic homage: a photograph of a female Lego figure stuck to a Lego baseplate in a hands-free headstand. The caption read: \u201cThanks, Guruji.\u201d<\/p>\n

I took it this way: Iyengar\u2019s yoga seems to recall a child\u2019s dream of perfect order and uniformity. As if a body\u2014a woman\u2019s body especially\u2014unfolded its potential by being folded just so<\/i>. As if a teacher is meant to provide a template in absolute symmetry with his idea of virtue, if not with the curves of the world. But there was also a touch of melancholy in the Lego image, glinting out through its sepia Instagram filter. It seemed to say: Yoga has made children of us, in good ways and painful ways. Maybe we recaptured a sense of play and wonderment. Maybe we regressed into depending upon a new parental energy. Now that he is gone, we must grow up, and put away our toys<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The best mourning is complex, avoiding mystification and hagiography.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>\n<\/span>he Iyengar family brought the patriarch\u2019s body home, dressed it in ivory silks for the cremation rites, and laid it out on a simple bamboo mat. They draped it with garlands of flowers. I imagine they felt the silent questions of every mourner: Where did his movement go? Where is the prana he sculpted and nourished for seventy years? Where is the cellular intelligence he spoke of now? Does it just fall silent? Is it in the air around him? Has it become part of us?<\/p>\n

Those more remote are left to wonder what this death, for all of its preparation, felt like. Was it different from any other death? Did his obsession with breathing yield some final flash of insight or consolation as it collapsed? Did he feel the skittish rise of udana v\u0101yu dart through his spine with his last exhales? Was that sensation obstructed by the feeding tube? Did radiance slowly fill the space left by his retreating senses and mind? What did his yoga do for him in the end?<\/p>\n

No one can know. Iyengar\u2019s body in death is as enigmatic as it was in life, as silent and strange as the millions of photographs he leaves behind. The most demonstrative yogi in modern history used this body to form shapes purported to be windows to a brighter internal reality. His brash display both allied him with a revisioned Hatha heritage and alienated him from the philosophical bent of other streams of yoga evangelism, like those initiated by Vivekananda and Aurobindo. With every extension, flexion, and rotation, he insisted that the material perfection of a form\u2014or the actions towards a form, however subtle\u2014was sacramental. To a rapidly disembodying world, he offered forms of the body in attitudes of sombre praise. Students the world over learned and mimicked those forms, and many now testify to transformation and healing. But their reports are marked by equal amounts of pleasure and suffering.<\/p>\n

We can never grasp the internality of another person\u2014even less, perhaps, one upon whom we project our wishes. We have the artifacts of Iyengar\u2019s flesh: his words on paper, his bombast on scratchy video, his fading echo in the spines, hips and shoulders of the thousands who studied with him in person. But no one can say for sure, without quoting Iyengar\u2019s grand self-reporting, how his yoga felt for him<\/i>. No one knows the ratio of bliss to pain in his body, how he managed the anxiety of that youthful dream he confided to Victor, and what dissatisfactions drove him to demand so much of his students. We cannot ask him: Was it worth it?\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Had his life-long experimentalism not collided with the ancient rites of his family, Iyengar may well have donated this vacated body to science. No one would have been more interested in his autopsy than him. Was his marrow transformed by a lifetime of practice? Did he avoid the brain-tissue calcifications of other men his age? Did his arterial system remain plucky and plaque-free till the end? Were his lungs really as enormous as they seemed from the outside? Did he have the world\u2019s largest diaphragm?<\/p>\n

But there can be no autopsy of the guru. We cannot dissect him, for this would reduce his body to the same substance as our own. We cannot find his myth within his corpse, for either it is departed, or we realize it was only ever in ourselves. The Iyengar family is both abiding tradition and protecting his devotees when they scramble to cremate him at the earliest possible time.<\/p>\n

Early on in the research for this book, I tried to parse one of Patabhi Jois\u2019 more provocative aphorisms in an article online. One slightly chafed reader suggested that I pick on Mr. Iyengar\u2019s words instead, because he was \u201cstill alive to set me straight.\u201d She was pointing out something I\u2019d long felt in my own practice\u2014that if I were ever to make it to Pune, all of the niggling questions about technique that his senior students seemed to disagree on would be resolved. I could ask him exactly what he meant by this instruction or that, as though it would help me understand my body or my life better. Well, he can\u2019t clarify anything now. Soon enough, we will have to stop asking what he meant, forced to turn to our peers for less certain answers. Arguments and insights into the great man\u2019s methods, dictates, gregariousness, warmth and tantrums will dissolve as his living memory dissipates.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>\n<\/span>he giants of the modernist age of yogic entrepreneurial globalization are now all departed, debilitated, or disgraced. Sivananda is gone, along with most of his disciples. Kripalvananda, who taught asana as the dance-like expression of spontaneous bliss, is gone. Muktananda and Swami Rama are gone, their magic and abuses leaving a trail of\u00a0the ecstatic wounded. Yogi Bhajan is gone, leaving his aphorisms blurring on millions of wet Yogi Tea teabag tags. Pattabhi Jois is gone. T.K.V. Desikachar, one of the last living links to the grandfather of modern postural yoga, T. Krishnamacharya, is reportedly suffering from dementia, and has been hidden away by his family, ostensibly to save face. In a completely different and ignominious fall, Bikram Choudhury is now facing charges of having raped several students.<\/p>\n

With the exception of Jois (through this grandson Sharath), none of these evangelists has left a successor of note, and those who have presumed to succeed them\u2014Amrit Desai, John Friend, and Kausthub Desikachar, among others\u2014have all been quickly cut down to size, on the surface by their own ethical failings, but on a deeper level by a more skeptical culture that is less tolerant of idols, and more seduced by irony than it is by charisma. The death of Iyengar marks another step towards the growing democratization of the yoga world\u2014perhaps not in terms of who has commercial clout, but certainly in terms of who holds authority.<\/p>\n

When no one is left to tell us exactly what to do, can we finally say we are adults?<\/p>\n

The death of a great man also erodes the Great Man Story, leaving space through which more hidden stories may emerge. I\u2019m thinking of Vanda Scaravelli, ten years Iyengar\u2019s senior, one of his few female students who didn\u2019t seem intimidated by him, who would punch him playfully in the belly and tease him about his weight. She went on to teach a small cache of students, one at a time, who have all gone on to influence yoga for decades without grandiose institutes, certification programmes, or even websites. Scaravelli died in 1999 in Florence, where she lived and taught for over thirty years.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also thinking of Dr. Karandikar. He was Iyengar\u2019s personal physician until he was reportedly worn down by the teacher\u2019s constant stream of verbal abuse. Karandikar left the Ramamami Iyengar Memorial Institute to found Kabir Baug Sanstha just three kilometres away, across Pune\u2019s Mutha river. Kabir Baug is a sprawling yoga therapy clinic and therapeutic college that serves thousands of mostly Indian clients and students every year. While Iyengar globally advanced the hypothesis of \u201cyoga as therapy\u201d, Karandikar seems to have quietly proven it by staying at home and using a seamless blend of ancient and modern techniques. Most injured clients who come to Kabir Baug for asana instruction receive a spinal x-ray before they even begin. This clinic is unknown to the global yoga community, I think, because Karandikar\u2019s skill is not occluded by the projection of intuitive wizardry, but rather demystified through the medical technologies that have almost replaced divine vision. Karandikar has flown below the radar of Western fetish and orientalism, perhaps because his work is to show us that embodied insight is not the domain of a charmed few, but is democratically available to everyone.<\/p>\n

W<\/span>\n<\/span>ithin twelve hours of his death, Iyengar\u2019s body was brought from his home to the Vaikunth crematorium by ambulance. It was laid in perfect savasana upon a pyre of sandal and rosewood. Prashant touched the flame to the kindling at 3 pm. There were only one hundred people in attendance\u2014most of them Western students. The pujaris chanted Vedic hymns, perhaps including the oldest funeral verses of all: \u201cI am because you have been. You will be because I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

A certain vision might emerge through the white smoke. It rises in the hearts of those who he loved, strutted before, taught, harangued, slapped, kicked, injured, hugged, and healed. It might reflect how his soul now sees itself, if one believes in souls:<\/p>\n

It is of a white-haired man, walking through clouds towards a simple gate. His leonine bearing is disrupted by his worried mood. Perhaps he wonders if he is standing tall enough, breathing deeply enough, if he is pliant enough in his spine to adequately bow to his forbears, his austere guru, and the earth itself. He puzzles over which asana to assume to ask forgiveness from those he burned with his zeal. He frets over whether he is finally fit to honour the thrilling and awful gift of being a body.<\/p>\n

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