baba ramdev was called the father of modern yoga.
baba ramdev was called the father of modern yoga.
who is called the father of modern yoga?
baba ramdev
in the mid 1980s, while doing research at the mysore palace, sjoman made copies of the yoga section of the sritattvanidhi, a "colossal" illustrated compendium, authored in the 19th century in karnataka by the then maharaja. the book included diagrams of 122 yoga asanas. unlike the few other known historical yoga treatises, the emphasis was solely on the physical activity. some appeared based on indian wrestling and other gymnastic exercises, in that aspect more closely resembling modern yoga as exercise forms such as ashtanga vinyasa yoga. both b. k. s. iyengar and pattabhi jois, who are major influences on modern yoga forms, themselves studied under teacher tirumalai krishnamacharya at the mysore palace in the 1930s. sjoman further researched krishnamacharya, finding several writings in the palace library. sjoman discovered that the royal family, in the early 1900s, had employed a british gymnast to train the young princes. so, when krishnamacharya arrived in the 1920s to start a yoga school, his schoolroom was the former gymnasium complete with ropes. sjoman argues that several exercises detailed in a purposely written western gymnastics manual were incorporated into krishnamacharya's syllabus, resulting in his vinyasa style, and further passed on to iyengar and jois. sjoman's book "the yoga tradition of the mysore palace" was published in 1996 including the 122 asana illustrations and extracts from the gymnastics manual. naturally, the radical, perhaps heretic, idea that some of its practice is based on something as mundane as british gymnastics caused a stir in the yoga world.
norman sjoman
the philosopher ernest wood referred to "modern" yoga in the title of his 1948 book "practical yoga, ancient and modern". according to andrea jain, the study of modern yoga as a "concretized field" began in 2004 with the monograph "a history of modern yoga" by elizabeth de michelis. prior to it, early yoga scholarship such as by mircea eliade did not distinguish premodern yoga and modern yoga. the typology of "modern yoga" then did not exist. the monograph by de michelis, states andrea jain, was a groundbreaking work that presented for the first time a fourfold typology comprising "modern psychosomatic yoga, modern meditational yoga, modern postural yoga, and modern denominational yoga".
modern yoga