Elizabeth Kadetsky - First There is a Mountain

First There is a Mountain

Elizabeth Kadetsky

Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org

Copyright 2011, Text by Elizabeth Kadetsky

All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published 2019 by Dzanc Books

A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-936873-98-2
eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Designs

Printed in the United States of America

In the small Indian city of Pune, in the basement of the Iyengar Yoga Institute, was a humid, sliver-shaped library where cinderblock walls seemed to radiate sweat. Here an institute librarian, dressed in a sari and dark eye makeup, pursued her painstaking and apparently lifelong project of cataloging the vault into an antiquated and ever-crashing computer. There were three walls of bookssome 8,000 volumes in several ancient and modern Indic languages as well as English, German, French, Italian, even modern Hebrew. This was the personal library of the yoga master B. K. S. Iyengar, a random amalgam of yoga texts spanning several centuries and ranging from the classic to the obscure to the kitsch. A handful of Western yoga students diligently examined yoga texts at the end of a long, cafeteria-style table, barefoot and dressed, like me, in inexpensively tailored Indian Punjabi frocks of soft cotton, sparkly adhesive bindis adorning many of our foreheads. Several Indian Hare Krishna devotees from the distant state of Bihar congregated at the other end of the table, wearing ponytails at the crowns of their heads and white cotton wrap outfits. At the center of the long edge of table sat Iyengars closest disciple, a Frenchman of Muslim extraction named Faeq Biria whose dress, comportment, Indian speech inflection and bright way of communicating with his eyebrows gave him the look of not just a protg of Iyengar but a smaller and fresher version of the guru himself.

This is where I first heard the tale of Ramanuja. The legendary qualities ascribed to the saintflexibility, universality, courage, authenticity, a love of the bodywere the aspirations of the Iyengar Yoga Institute. Iyengar and his children could also teach you to stand on your hands, do a split or lie on the ground for twenty minutes without twitchingbut all this in the service of something higher, and more noble, and somehow mysteriously connected to this man called Ramanuja.

B. K. S. Iyengar was known now to tens of thousands of American and European yoga aficionados for having transformed an inaccessible and centuries-old collection of Indian philosophies and rituals into a therapeutic melding of meditation and exercise called, in our homes, Iyengar Yoga. His technique had healed millions and helped secure the place of a mind-body ethic in the modern model of health. To Indians he was also revered, as the man who resurrected a dying national tradition by popularizing the practice of asanasor physical postureswhose beneficial effects on the health and spirit proved the eternal wisdom of ancient India. To both camps, he was a kind of Ramanujaa populist who brought the esoteric to those who never had legitimate claim to it, and someone who looked beyond caste to fashion a personal vision of the holy.

Classically, yoga is a collection of philosophies sprung from the two thousand-year-old Indian holy texts called the Vedas that espoused a quest for liberation from the bonds of the material world through a life of ritual, discipline, and devotion to God. Nearly ten centuries later, during the time of Ramanuja, yoga reappeared in South Asia as a series of physical regimens whose practice was meant to link an individual with the divine through the purification of ones subtle bodya metaphysical ideal that roughly corresponded to the physical body. In the twentieth century, something called yoga arose in India once again, as a form of sport espoused by Indian nationalists. Drawing loosely from a small handful of newly unearthed medieval yoga texts, these revolutionaries sought to create a populist movement rooted in shared, and largely invented, physical choreographies. Rich, open to interpretation, and physically rewarding, this yoga became popular among Westerners and Anglophilic Indians alike. Fifty years later, the work of B. K. S. Iyengar and a handful of other Indians turned it into one more modern craze.

Today at the library, Iyengar himself was seated at an old oak school desk at the mouth of the sliver, peering through owl glasses at a flurry of philosophy texts, letters from his international retinue of students, and magazine articles about the global spread of yoga. He wore traditional South Indian dressdhoti, kurta and forehead markingsthough just this morning Id seen him doing yoga in the shiny green Umbro shorts that were the vogue this year at the World Cup in France.

Ever since my first yoga class fifteen years before, Id known there was an aging and charismatic Indian with a long white mane and eyebrows growing practically to his knees who ran a yoga school in India, and that he could still balance in a freestanding handstand while touching the soles of his feet to the back of his head. What Id learned over several months in his company merely rounded out the legend, of a traditional Indian who could navigate the Western mind. Iyengar spoke in Western medical tropes but had neither a formal education nor extensive skills in any Western or even Indian language other than his mother tongue, Tamil, little spoken here in a city whose own language was Marathi. Iyengar carried a host of other affectations from his ancestral past. Though he was born in the state of Karnataka, what he called his homeland was a place where no relative had lived for hundreds of years, a town hundreds of miles and several states away.

Id come to the library today as I did most afternoons. Id attended a guided morning practice in the studio upstairs, a two-hour workout under the gaze of Iyengar and his offspring. Id done headstands and twists, backbends and handstands. When I entered the library this afternoon, still lightheaded from the workout and requisite fasting, I touched the floor by Iyengars feet. He greeted me with a gruff nod of the head, and then I took a seat at the long table across from the Frenchman Biria, as Iyengar called him.

The room was quiet except for occasional interruptions from the Indian Hare Krishnas. You want to learn yoga? one asked me, eyeing the stack of books on the table at my side. I can help. But first please, can I ask you, why do you in the West do yoga?

I looked at him dumbly.

Excuse me can I borrow? another asked, drawing my stack of books before him and ensconcing himself in my research.

The first eyed the books again and looked at me ruefully. A book? Why are you learning from a book?

Eh. You, Iyengar grunted. Everyone looked. Biria lifted perceptibly from his seat, kicking his chair such that it rattled the case of books behind him. The guru was addressing me. I sprinted to the metal folding chair beside his desk. He gave me long look, then gestured to the paperwork cluttering his desk. It was galleys for a new collection of edited speeches, what would become his sixth book. You see I have my own research. He peered over the frames of his glasses and slicked back his white locks with his palms. Anyway. You asked what is yoga. Talk to Biria. He knows books. Ask him for thethethis saintRamanuja. You asked. Read Ramanuja.

Biria was on his feet now as well, having rushed to the exact section of the bookshelf that contained Iyengars collection on medieval yoga philosophy and located the dozen or so texts on Ramanujano easy feat.

Ramanuja is Gurujis ancestor, Biria said. This is the same family. Ramanuja, he continued, penned his famous commentaries in the very city the Iyengar family hailed from. The familys traditions all descended from this place: their taboos, their tattoos, their family prayers, and their devotion to Vishnu. Ramanuja shared even their dressdown to the white-ash U-shaped impression of Vishnus footprint.