Bellur is a village in Kolar district, in the eastern plains of Karnataka, and it is the first word in the name of the man who did more than anyone else in the twentieth century to carry yoga out of India and into the world. Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was born there on 14 December 1918, in the middle of the global influenza pandemic, the eleventh of thirteen children in a poor schoolteacher's family. He was, by his own account, a sickly and unpromising child. He died in Pune in 2014 at the age of ninety-five, having taught heads of state, violinists, philosophers and several million ordinary people.

A frail beginning

Iyengar's early years were shadowed by illness. He suffered malaria, tuberculosis and typhoid in childhood, compounded by malnutrition, and he later described himself as a thin, weak boy with protruding stomach and spindly limbs whose survival to adulthood was not assumed. His father died when he was around nine, and the family's already precarious position worsened.

In 1934, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to Mysore to live in the household of his brother-in-law, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who ran a yoga school under the patronage of the Maharaja of Mysore. Krishnamacharya was a formidable and demanding teacher. Iyengar's instruction under him was brief — by his own reckoning only a matter of weeks of direct teaching — and often harsh, but it was decisive. He began to practise obsessively, largely teaching himself from that point onward, and his health was transformed.

Pune and the making of a method

In 1937 Krishnamacharya sent the eighteen-year-old Iyengar to Pune to teach. He arrived knowing almost no Marathi, with no money and no reputation, and spent years in real hardship, teaching small groups and working relentlessly on his own practice. He married Ramamani in 1943, and she became central to his working life.

What emerged from those decades of solitary practice was a distinct approach to the postures of hatha yoga. Iyengar's method is built on precision of alignment, on holding positions for extended periods, and on a detailed anatomical understanding of what each posture is doing to the body. Its most recognisable innovation is the systematic use of props — belts, wooden blocks, bolsters, wall ropes and benches — so that a student who cannot yet achieve a posture unaided can still enter it correctly and receive its effect. This single idea opened serious yoga practice to the elderly, the injured, the stiff and the seriously ill, and it underpins virtually all modern therapeutic yoga, whether or not it carries his name.

Light on Yoga and the global spread

In 1952 Iyengar met the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who became a student and then an advocate. Menuhin brought him to Europe, and Iyengar began teaching in London, Switzerland and elsewhere through the 1950s and 1960s. The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti was another long-standing student.

In 1966 he published Light on Yoga, a systematic manual covering roughly two hundred postures, photographed and described with an exactness no previous book had attempted. It has never gone out of print, has been translated into many languages, and is generally regarded as the single most influential yoga book ever written. He followed it with:

Light on Pranayama (1981), on breath regulation
Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, his commentary on the classical text
Light on Life (2005), a more reflective and philosophical work written in his eighties

In 1975 he opened the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Pune, named for his wife, who had died shortly before. It became the centre of the worldwide Iyengar system, and certified Iyengar teachers now work in dozens of countries under a rigorous assessment structure he devised.

Recognition and return to Bellur

Iyengar received the Padma Shri in 1991, the Padma Bhushan in 2002 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2014, the year of his death. Time magazine named him among the hundred most influential people in the world in 2004. He continued to teach, demonstrate and travel into his nineties, including a widely reported teaching visit to China in 2011.

He never severed the connection to Bellur. In later life he directed substantial resources back into his birth village, funding a temple dedicated to Patanjali, the sage associated with the classical yoga tradition, along with support for local schooling and village amenities. He treated it as an obligation rather than a gesture, and the village became a point on the map for Iyengar practitioners visiting India.

Legacy

Iyengar's importance lies less in any single posture or technique than in a shift of framing. He insisted that yoga was a precise discipline with verifiable effects on the body, teachable to anyone in any condition, and simultaneously a philosophical practice inseparable from the classical tradition it came from. That double insistence — rigorous and accessible at once — is why his method spread to hospitals, physiotherapy clinics and community halls as readily as to studios. The sickly boy from Bellur reshaped how the world understands one of India's oldest exports.