Those who don’t know the history of hatha yoga’s rise in the west might be forgiven for making some assumptions. It’s easy to imagine that the exercise regimen was introduced to America and Europe by traveling hippies who “discovered” it in India, then eventually co-opted by yuppies in the 1980s who had grown tired of their Jane Fonda workout videocassettes.
That would go a long way, after all, to explaining the success of Lululemon Athletica, the yoga apparel retailer founded by an Ayn Rand-loving billionaire who famously refused to stock clothing for plus-sized women. Avaricious capitalists certainly love to exploit the Age of Aquarius for the sake of money.
As Michelle Goldberg points out in The Goddess Pose, however, that’s not how it happened at all. Yoga in America, she writes, “first took root among rather square elites and then spread to the counterculture before being reappropriated by the mainstream”. In other words, the western version of yoga was originally less George Harrison and more Betty Draper.
If it weren’t for Indra Devi, the subject of The Goddess Pose, yoga might never have become a western craze at all. Devi, born Eugenia Vassilievna in 1899, wasn’t the first yoga teacher in the United States, but she was undoubtedly the first successful one. When she taught her first American class in the late 1940s, yoga had a reputation stateside as being “racy, disreputable, and perhaps a bit ridiculous”. (This thanks to a series of moral panics and scandals surrounding yoga in the early 20th century.)
The story of how Devi came to embrace yoga and spread its gospel in America is as fascinating as it is unlikely. She was born into Russian aristocracy, the daughter of a teenage mother who left her family at a young age to pursue a career as an actress. Devi held no grudge against her mother; the two reunited when Devi was a young woman. It was at the home of one of her mother’s theater friends that Devi first encountered the term “hatha yoga”. Her mother’s friend tried to dissuade her from getting too excited – she shouldn’t go to India, he told her. “You are too emotional, my dear.”
The advice didn’t take. Devi became a celebrated cabaret actress in Berlin, but her interest in Indian religion and philosophy never disappeared. In 1926, Devi traveled to Ommen, Holland, for a meeting of the Order of the Star in the East, a gathering of theosophists. Goldberg quotes the writer Rom Landau, describing the audience at one such event: “[T]hey look deep into your eyes when they talk to you; they have a weakness for sandals … [and] for the rougher kind of textiles and such colours as mauve, bottle-green and purple. The men affect long hair, while the women kept theirs short.”
Devi fell in love. She eventually relocated to India, where she met Jawaharlal Nehru, who told her that yoga saved his sanity when he was in prison. Not long after, she became a student of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the legendary teacher often called “the father of modern yoga”. Soon Devi found herself in Shanghai after her first husband, a Czech diplomat, was transferred to the city. She taught her first yoga classes in a small house owned by Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
After the marriage dissolved, Devi moved to Los Angeles. “Beginning anew was something she was extremely good at,” Goldberg notes, and before long, she was teaching yoga to Greta Garbo, Jennifer Jones and Gloria Swanson. She married again, wrote a book called Yoga for Americans, and became a disciple of the controversial Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba. In 2002, she died in Buenos Aires at the age of 102.
As the foregoing illustrated, it’s hard to condense Devi’s life into a few paragraphs. She had a knack for being present at some of the 20th century’s most iconic moments, so much so that Goldberg compares Devi to Zelig, the hero of the Woody Allen film of the same name, and to Forrest Gump. She was in Shanghai when the HMS Peterel was sunk on 8 December 1941 and in Dallas when John F Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963. She met John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1970 (neither the musicians nor the yoga teacher were impressed), and played a bizarre part in Manuel Noriega’s deposition from power in Panama in 1989.
Yet there were also long gaps in her diaries and history when Devi was essentially unaccounted for. Still, Goldberg manages to create a remarkably coherent, fascinating narrative about her, emphasizing her ability to “survive her world’s collapse by reinventing herself” and her tendency to “play down her own misfortunes, casting a rosy, magical glow around her history”.
Goldberg, herself a yoga student, thankfully manages to avoid either lionizing or condemning Devi, who had as many faults as she had gifts – she essentially abandoned her second husband after he became ill, leaving him to die in a country he knew nothing about. It was a stunning act of cruelty, but Devi was always independent, and never let herself get dragged down by loyalty to family and friends. If it’s true that enlightenment is non-attachment, Devi might have been one of the most enlightened people in the world.
But Goldberg refuses to moralize – her goal in writing The Goddess Pose seems to have been not just chronicling the life of one of the world’s great iconoclasts, but also providing a history for how hatha yoga went from an Indian spiritual tradition to an everyday part of western lives. She succeeds admirably on both counts, writing with understanding and a healthy sense of skepticism.
Indeed, the only hint of judgmentalism from Goldberg is in the book’s title – ungenerous readers might wonder whether the author intended “pose” to have a meaning outside the literal one. Was Devi’s career a pose, an act, a put-on? It’s doubtful Goldberg meant that, though – whatever else was true about Devi, she was probably sincere, perhaps to a fault. “There is no such thing as unchanging authenticity,” Goldberg writes. And Devi, unlike a pair of £100 yoga pants from Lululemon, was, in the end, the real thing.
