Indra Devi

She is the missing piece. Indra Devi is the figure who carried [[t-krishnamacharya|Krishnamacharya]]‘s teaching to America before [[bks-iyengar|Iyengar]]‘s Light on Yoga, before Pattabhi Jois’s American students, before Desikachar’s viniyoga. She did it in heels and a sari, taught Greta Garbo at a Hollywood studio, and lived to 102 in Buenos Aires. She is also one of the four major Krishnamacharya students — and the one least well-credited in the standard genealogies of modern yoga, partly because she was a woman and partly because the lineage she founded did not survive her in institutional form.

Life — the long version

The biography is unusual enough to warrant the long form.

• Birth: 1899, in Riga (then part of the Russian Empire, now Latvia). Father: Vasili Peterson, a Swedish bank director. Mother: Sasha Labunskaya, a Russian actress.
• Childhood and early adulthood: raised in St. [[petersburg-ny|Petersburg]] and Moscow in a cosmopolitan, educated household. Read Yogi Ramacharaka (the pen-name of American writer William Walker Atkinson, whose popularizations of yoga and Indian thought were widely read in early-20th-century Europe) at age 15; the encounter was formative.
• The Revolution: fled Russia in 1917 with her mother. Lived in Berlin, then Paris, through the 1920s. Became an actress and dancer in the European theatrical scene.
• Krishnamurti: in 1926, in the Netherlands, she heard Jiddu Krishnamurti speak; the encounter confirmed her decision to travel to India.
• India: arrived in 1927. Married Jan Strakaty, the Czechoslovak Trade Commissioner to Bombay, in 1930. Lived as a diplomat’s wife in Bombay for several years.
• Film career: in 1937 she had a brief Bollywood career under the name Indra Devi (the name she would keep), starring in two Hindi films; she found the Bombay film world unsatisfying.
• Mysore: in 1937, on the recommendation of friends, she approached [[t-krishnamacharya|Krishnamacharya]] at the Mysore Palace yoga-śālā. He initially refused her — he did not accept women students, and certainly not foreign women. The Maharaja of Mysore ([[krishna|Krishna]] Raja Wadiyar IV, Krishnamacharya’s patron) intervened on her behalf; Krishnamacharya, under protest, took her on, and gave her the same demanding training he gave his male students. After several years, his attitude toward her — and toward women students generally — shifted; he later sent her with his blessing to teach.
• China: in 1939, on [[t-krishnamacharya|Krishnamacharya]]‘s instruction, she went to China to teach yoga to the wife of Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Mei-ling) and to organize yoga classes for the diplomatic community. She lived in Shanghai through the war years.
• Husband’s death and return: Jan Strakaty died in 1946. Indra Devi was in her late forties, widowed, alone.
• Hollywood: in 1947 she moved to [[echo-park|Los Angeles]], having earlier visited the United States and recognized it as the location where yoga could plausibly spread to a mass audience. She opened a small yoga studio on Sunset Boulevard. Her early students included Hollywood actresses (Garbo, Swanson, Linda Christian), socialites (Elizabeth Arden, who became a friend and helped market the practice), and a steady stream of [[echo-park|Los Angeles]] professionals.
• Forever Young, Forever Healthy (1953) — her first book; one of the earliest English-language yoga books written by a Western woman, framing yoga as a practice of vitality and longevity accessible to mid-century American readers.
• Other books: Yoga for Americans (1959), Renew Your Life Through Yoga (1963), Yoga for You (1982), and several others.
• Mexico and Argentina: in 1953 she remarried (Sigfrid Knauer, a German-American physician); they relocated frequently. In 1985, after Knauer’s death, she moved to Buenos Aires, opened the Fundación Indra Devi, and taught daily for the next 17 years. Her presence in Argentina seeded a major Spanish-speaking-world yoga community.
• Death: April 25, 2002, in Buenos Aires, at age 102. She practiced and taught nearly to the end.

The method

Indra Devi taught what she had learned from [[t-krishnamacharya|Krishnamacharya]] — a postural and prāṇāyāma practice rooted in his Mysore-period teaching, simplified for the body conditions and cultural expectations of her American (and later Latin American) students. The hallmarks:

• Accessibility. Where [[bks-iyengar|Iyengar]] drove students into the postures with severe alignment-precision and [[k-pattabhi-jois|Pattabhi Jois]] drove them through demanding fixed sequences, Indra Devi worked with what the student’s body could do. The viniyoga instinct — adapt the practice to the practitioner — is recognizable in her teaching; she and T.K.V. Desikachar were arguably the two students who best transmitted Krishnamacharya’s mature individualized method.
• Yoga as practice of vitality. Her framing was not principally the eight-limbed path or the samādhi goal; it was yoga as the means by which a person can live long, well, and conscious. This framing — yoga as wellness practice — has shaped American yoga more than the more spiritually-saturated lineages have acknowledged.
• Daily practice. She herself practiced every day until close to her death; her teaching emphasized regular practice over intensity.
• Mind training. She wrote and taught on positive affirmation, breath, and meditation as much as on āsana — the yoga she presented was always a comprehensive practice, not just postural.
• The teacher’s example. Her own visibly youthful, healthy, articulate, joyful late-life presence was itself part of the teaching. She did not need to claim that yoga produced longevity — she demonstrated it.

Why she is under-credited

A few reasons:

• She did not found an institutional lineage. [[bks-iyengar|Iyengar]] founded RIMYI; [[k-pattabhi-jois|Pattabhi Jois]] founded AYRI / KPJAYI; Desikachar founded the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram. Indra Devi’s institutional vehicle — the Fundación Indra Devi in Argentina — has continued, but it has not produced the international teacher-pipeline that the others have.
• Her students were not principally Indian or American men. They were Hollywood actresses and Latin American women — populations that historians of yoga have systematically under-attended to.
• She wrote in English for a popular audience, not in Sanskrit for scholars. Her books are warm, accessible, sometimes domestic in register — easy to dismiss as “yoga for the masses” even when their content is substantial.
• The lineage Mark Singleton documents in Yoga Body foregrounds [[t-krishnamacharya|Krishnamacharya]], [[bks-iyengar|Iyengar]], and Pattabhi Jois. Indra Devi gets a paragraph. She deserves a chapter.

The reckoning is in progress. The 2019 documentary Indra Devi: La Maestra (Argentina) and Michelle Goldberg’s The Goddess Pose (2015) — a full biography — have begun the recovery.

What she gives 0mn1.one

A few transmissions:

• The transmissibility of practice across cultures. Indra Devi carried Mysore-style yoga to America without losing its integrity; she also carried it without inflating it. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s instinct toward serving every form of life across cultures is congruent.
• The compatibility of yoga with worldly life. She taught actresses, diplomats’ wives, businessmen, schoolchildren. She did not require renunciation; she required practice. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s [[karma-yoga|karma yoga]] framing — action in the world as the path — has Indra Devi as a model.
• Late-life vitality. She practiced and taught nearly to the day she died at 102. The model of useful, present, contributing life into very old age is one [[0mn1one|the platform]]‘s worldwide abundance vision needs.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Member of: [[person]]
• Student of: [[t-krishnamacharya]]
• Pioneer of: [[modern-postural-yoga]]

Sources

1. Indra Devi. Forever Young, Forever Healthy. Prentice-Hall, 1953. Source class: primary text.
2. Indra Devi. Yoga for Americans. Prentice-Hall, 1959. Source class: primary text.
3. Michelle Goldberg. The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West. Knopf, 2015. Source class: book / definitive biography.
4. Indra Devi: La Maestra (documentary, dir. Cecilia Cifuentes Garcés, Argentina, 2019). Source class: documentary film.
5. Fundación Indra Devi (Buenos Aires) — institutional. Source class: institutional / ongoing.

Lenses still to grow

• The China years — what she taught Soong Mei-ling and the Shanghai diplomatic community; what survives of that period.
• The Latin American transmission — what the Argentine and broader Spanish-speaking-world yoga community has retained.
• Comparison with the other [[t-krishnamacharya|Krishnamacharya]] students — what specifically she carried from Mysore that [[bks-iyengar|Iyengar]] and Jois did not.
• The under-credited women teachers of the modern era — Indra Devi, Vanda Scaravelli, Angela Farmer, Judith Lasater, Donna Farhi, Sharon Gannon — as a constellation she belongs to.