Yoga in Britain

The yoga scholar Mark Singleton notes that early British travellers who visited India considered yoga practitioners to be unpleasant, vagrants at best and libertines at worst. John Ovington in his A Voyage to Suratt, In the Year, 1689[2] described them as "holy mendicants" who had a "sordid aspect";[3][lower-alpha 1] he attributed their taking solemn vows to remain in strange postures all their lives as "Delusions of Satan".[3] Similarly, John Fryer in his 1698 A New Account of East-India and Persia[5] recorded a "Jougie" who had a gold ring in his "Virile Member"[3] (his penis) to keep him from sexual activity, and wrote of ascetics who held postures until their limbs withered; he called such people "Vagabonds" who pretended to be pious.[3]

Mary Bagot Stack in "Seal" posture (now Salabhasana, locust pose) in Building the Body Beautiful, the Bagot Stack Stretch-and-Swing System, 1931

Early in the 1900s, the occultist Aleister Crowley travelled to India, devoting himself to Rāja yoga at the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai. He learnt some asanas and studied Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. He claimed to have attained the spiritual state of dhyana, the seventh stage on the path to enlightenment defined by Patanjali.[6][7][8][9][10] In 1939, Crowley gave a series of lectures on yoga, under the "modest"[6] pseudonym of Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji.[lower-alpha 2] He helped to link yoga in the mind of the British public with magic, yogis with fakirs, and tantra with "Western esoteric sexual practices".[6][11]

In the 1930s, the yoga scholar Mark Singleton notes that Health and Strength magazine ran two kinds of article relating to yoga. The first spoke of "yoga" but without mentioning asanas; the second, which it did not call "yoga", for women, including postures such as those now called Trikonasana, Paschimottanasana, and Salabhasana.[12] In July 1935, the magazine featured Adonia Wallace demonstrating the "Exercises Which Gave Me Fame"[13] as "The Girl with the Perfect Figure",[13] with the poses now called Rajakapotasana, Urdhva Dhanurasana, Natarajasana, and Eka Pada Viparita Dandasana.[13] Similar postures were taught to the Women's League of Health and Beauty in Britain by Mary Bagot Stack in the period between the world wars with the "Bagot Stack Stretch-and-Swing System". Stack had travelled to India, and had learnt some yoga poses there.[14]

The BBC broadcast the first yoga television programmes in 1948 and 1949 to a small audience,[lower-alpha 3] presented by the ex-MI6 agent Sir Paul Dukes, who had an interest in spirituality; he had visited Pierre Bernard's Country Club in Nyack, New York which taught hatha yoga. A still shows three women in Shirshasana (tripod headstand) on a circular stage.[16]

Yogini Sunita's charisma attracted a large female following in Birmingham in the 1960s.[17]

Classes in yoga as exercise started to appear across Britain in the 1960s, and asana sessions became a common option among adult education evening classes. For example, in Birmingham, a local newspaper editor, Wilfred Clark, gave a lecture on yoga to the Workers' Educational Association in 1961, meeting such an enthusiastic response that he proposed yoga classes to the local education authority, and founded in turn the Birmingham Yoga Club, the Midlands Yoga Association, and finally the British Wheel of Yoga in 1965. Yoga groups soon sprang up all over Britain.[18][19]

The yoga researcher Suzanne Newcombe states that yoga in Birmingham was largely inspired by a Brahmin woman from a devout Catholic family in Bombay, born as Bernadette Bocarro. She trained as a Franciscan nun but left the convent and then learnt "Pranayama Yoga" in Bombay, marrying another Indian Catholic, Roydon Cabral. In 1960 she moved to Birmingham, taught yoga to a few friends, and by 1961 presented herself in a sari as "Yogini Sunita", exciting curiosity by sitting on the floor. An interviewer described her at that time as "wearing a flame-coloured sari, sandals and long silver earrings with her dark hair swept back in a chignon."[17] She was a charismatic teacher, attracting many middle-class women with her calm, relaxed manner, her skill and air of authority when teaching relaxation, and her ability to combine bringing up a family with a busy schedule of teaching and writing.[17][20]

B. K. S. Iyengar with yoga teacher Malcolm Strutt at Iyengar Centre House, London, 1971

Yoga reached London's evening classes in 1967. The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) stated that classes in "Hatha Yoga (sic)" should not cover the philosophy of Yoga, favouring "Keep Fit" classes in asanas and "pranayamas (sic)" especially for people aged over 40, and expressing concern about the risk of "exhibitionism" and the lack of suitably qualified teachers. The ILEA's Peter McIntosh watched some classes taught by B. K. S. Iyengar, was impressed by his 1966 book Light on Yoga, and from 1970 ILEA-approved yoga teacher training was run by one of Iyengar's pupils, Silva Mehta. Since the ILEA had insisted that classes should be free of yoga philosophy, Iyengar was careful to encourage students to follow their own religious traditions, rather than trying to follow his own family's Visistadvaita, a qualified non-dualism within Hinduism.[18][21] The ILEA had considered the British Wheel of Yoga, but, Newcombe suggests, since the Wheel had argued that yoga was not a physical education topic, McIntosh doubted they would be able to provide good quality yoga as ILEA physical education.[22]

In 1968, the rock music group The Beatles led counter-cultural interest, travelling to India and practising Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in his ashram at the "yoga capital of the world",[23] Rishikesh.[24] In Crosby, on Merseyside, Kailash Puri, a Sikh woman from Punjab, taught yoga, pranayama and relaxation in the wave of interest generated by The Beatles; her students Frank and Hazel Wills ran a yoga slot on the BBC lunchtime programme Pebble Mill at One starting in 1973.[20]

Yoga classes grew beyond those of local education authorities when ITV screened Yoga for Health from 1971, watched by an audience estimated at 4 million. Richard Hittleman was brought in from the United States for want of a suitable British presenter. The model and ballerina Lyn Marshall was chosen to demonstrate the poses under his instruction, on the grounds that "any reasonably fit person"[25] could benefit from yoga, even though, as Newcombe remarks, Marshall was, as a trained dancer, hardly average.[25] Marshall went on to publish a series of illustrated guides to yoga, including Wake up to Yoga (1975) and Keep up with Yoga (1976).[26] Newcombe estimates that the number of people, mainly middle-class women,[lower-alpha 4] practising yoga in Britain rose from about 5000 in 1967 to 50,000 in 1973 and 100,000 by 1979; most of their teachers were also women. With the rise of feminism and higher education for women, middle-class British women were starting to resent being housewives, and given their relative economic freedom, were ready to experiment with new lifestyles such as yoga. Newcombe speculates that their husbands may have found having their wives attending "course on traditionally feminine subjects like flower arranging or cooking ... less threatening and more respectable than employment outside the home."[18] The women saw evening classes as safe, interesting, and a good place to make friends with like-minded people. Further, women in Britain were accustomed to gendered physical education, dating back to Mary Bagot Stack before the Second World War.[18][28]

Yoga camp, Oxford, 2016

Adult education funding was cut sharply in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, and yoga moved from public to private classes.[29] In the 1990s, commercial yoga studios started to appear in city centres. At the same time, yoga was recognised as a valid sporting activity by the UK Sports Council; it recognised the British Wheel of Yoga as yoga's governing body, without giving it powers to enforce yoga teaching standards.[29] A more energetic style, Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, became popular in the new studios with their audience of young, ambitious and often male practitioners. The style, founded by K. Pattabhi Jois, made yoga into an aerobic exercise with continuous flowing movements, the asanas linked by vinyasa sequences based on Surya Namaskar, the salute to the sun.[29]

The first Iyengar Yoga Institute (IYI) outside India was founded in Maida Vale, London, in 1983.[30] The old IYI building was replaced in 1994, and the new one was officially opened by Iyengar in person in 1997. From the start, Iyengar personally assessed the quality of the teaching every year.[31]

Alongside the yoga brands, many teachers, for example in England, offer an unbranded "hatha yoga", often mainly to women, creating their own combinations of poses. These may be in flowing sequences (vinyasas), and new variants of poses are often created.[32][33][34] The gender imbalance has sometimes been marked; in Britain in the 1970s, women formed between 70 and 90 per cent of most yoga classes, as well as most of the yoga teachers.[18] This caused yoga to evolve as a female practice, taught by women to women.[35]

By 2019, yoga had become "massively popular" in Britain,[20] to the extent that its practice was altogether "unremarkable";[1] some 500,000 people practise it regularly each week, and as many as 3 million have at least tried it.[36][37]