Indra Devi

Eugenie Peterson (, ; 12 May 1899 – 25 April 2002), known as Indra Devi, was a pioneering teacher of yoga as exercise, and an early disciple of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the "father of modern yoga".

She went to India in her twenties, becoming a film star there and acquiring the stage name Indra Devi. She was the first woman to study under the yoga guru Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, alongside B.K.S Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois who went on to become yoga gurus. Moving to China, she taught the first yoga classes in that country at the house of Soong Mei-ling, wife of Chiang Kai-shek.

Her popularization of yoga in America through her many celebrity pupils in Hollywood, and her books advocating yoga for stress relief, earned her the nickname "first lady of yoga". Her biographer, Michelle Goldberg, wrote that Devi "planted the seeds for the yoga boom of the 1990s".

Early years

Eugenie "Zhenya" Peterson was born on 12 May 1899 in Riga in the Russian Empire (now Latvia), to Vasili Peterson, a Swedish bank director, and Aleksandra Labunskaya, a Russian noblewoman who acted at the Nezlobina Theatre. Eugenie was given a Russian Orthodox baptism. She went to high school in Saint Petersburg, graduating with a gold medal in 1917. She briefly attended drama school in Moscow. In the Russian Revolution, her father served as an army officer and went missing in action in the civil war. Eugenie and her mother escaped to Latvia as the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, losing the family fortune; in 1920 they moved to Poland, and in 1921 to Berlin, where she became an actress and dancer.

In 1926, attracted by a notice in a bookshop in Tallinn, she went to hear Jiddu Krishnamurti at a Theosophical Society meeting in the Netherlands; his chanting of Sanskrit mantras around a campfire had a powerful effect on her. She later said "It seemed to me, I was hearing a forgotten call, familiar, but distant. From that day everything in me turned upside down."

Career

India

Devi's fascination with India began at 15 when she read a book by poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and a yoga instruction book by Yogi Ramacharaka. In Berlin, she worked as an actor in The Blue Bird, touring Europe, and accepted a proposal of marriage from the banker Herman Bolm, on condition she could first go to India; he agreed and paid for the trip. She set off on 17 November 1927, crossing India from south to north, wearing a sari for the first time, sitting on the floor and eating with her fingers. She came back three months later, a changed woman, speaking only of India, and returned Bolm's engagement ring. She soon went back to India, selling her valuables to pay for the trip. At the Theosophical Society in Adyar (Madras, now Chennai), dancing "an Indian temple dance", she met Jawaharlal Nehru, starting a long-term friendship, and the Indian film director Bhagwati Mishra, who gave her a part in Sher-e-Arab (Arabian Knight): the 1930 premiere made her a film star in India, under a new stage name, Indra Devi. In 1930, she married Jan Strakaty, a commercial attache to the Czechoslovak consulate in Bombay, and for some years lived as a society hostess there. When she was leaving India to follow her husband to China, Krishnamacharya asked her to work as a yoga teacher there.

India and China

Her husband died unexpectedly in 1946,

Devi taught her own form of hatha yoga, with asanas (postures) and pranayama (breath control); she avoided spiritual teaching, which she preferred to leave to yoga gurus. Her teaching style was in Stefanie Syman's words "gentle and even relaxing". She was almost immediately successful in attracting leading stars, including men as well as women; Syman notes that "she could charm the pants off men". Elliott Goldberg gives a different explanation for her success, attributing it to her packaging of yoga for women as a "beauty secret, youth elixir, and health tonic". More generally, in his view, Devi saw yoga as a remedy for anxiety and stress, noting that this transformed yoga from something that dissolved the ego to something that strengthened it, because, he commented, Americans did want to change "but not all that much". Devi's advocacy of yoga for stress relief contributed, in Goldberg's view, to the widespread acceptance of yoga in America, and earned her the nickname "first lady of yoga".

She taught yoga to many celebrities including Greta Garbo, Eva Gabor, and Gloria Swanson. Also among her students were Ramon Novarro, Robert Ryan, Yul Brynner, Jennifer Jones, and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who brought Iyengar to the West. She later recorded several instructional talks on yoga, including "Renew Your Life with Yoga."

Latin America

In 1961, Knauer bought Devi a large ranch in Tecate in Mexico; she opened the Indra Devi Foundation there. From 1966, she became close to the Hindu guru Sathya Sai Baba, and she travelled often from Tecate to Bangalore and Puttaparthi. She closed the Tecate operation in 1977 and moved with her very ill husband to Bangalore. In 1984 she and Knauer made a trip to Sri Lanka, where he died.

In 1985 she moved to Argentina. In 1987 she was elected president of honour of the International Yoga Federation, and of the Latin American Union of Yoga under the presidency of Swami Maitreyananda at Montevideo, Uruguay. She died in Buenos Aires in 2002.

Legacy

Biographer Michelle Goldberg comments that for most of her life, Devi's "only goal" was to bring yoga to the West, and when it became "a ubiquitous part of cosmopolitan urban culture, signifier of a lifestyle at once wholesome and sexy" in the 1990s, she had certainly succeeded, even if the new yoga is "much more vigorous than the style she taught".

Yoga remains, Goldberg writes, as Devi had made it, a predominantly female pursuit, despite the energetic workouts of Power Yoga; she created the link in the Western mind between yoga and organic food, "holistic spas, and biodynamic beauty products". Goldberg notes that yoga in the West is "a hybrid culture", with "an immense gulf between the limber young women in Lululemon yoga gear ... and the ash-smeared half-naked yogins .. on the banks of the Ganges".

Works