06/09/2026
Life of Indra Devi, mede student van BKS Iyengar bij Krishnamacharya in Mysore.
A woman sat through half an hour of a Hollywood lecture in 1947 before finally raising her hand to ask when the speaker was going to get to the yoghurt.
She wasn't being rude. She genuinely thought that was the topic. In 1947 America, the word "yoga" was so unfamiliar that people heard "yoghurt" instead, and nobody in that room could quite figure out why anyone would fly across an ocean to talk about dairy. The woman standing at the front, patiently explaining that no, this was yoga, not yoghurt, was about to become the person most responsible for introducing an entire continent to a practice that would eventually show up in nearly every gym, church basement, and living room in the Western world.
Her name, at that point, was Indra Devi. She wasn't born with it. She was born Eugenie Peterson on May 12th, 1899, in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, to a Swedish bank official and a Russian mother from a noble family who also worked as an actress. Nothing about that childhood pointed toward India. Then, at 15, she picked up a yoga instruction manual at a family friend's house, alongside the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, and something in her simply would not let go. She graduated from a St. Petersburg high school with a gold medal in 1917, the same year the Bolsheviks seized power and her family fled the country, first to Latvia, then Poland, then eventually to Berlin, where she spent her late teens and early twenties acting and dancing on stage.
She could have stayed there. She had talent, a theatre troupe, and a life in motion across Europe. Instead, in November of 1927, she boarded a ship for India, a country she had been fixated on since she was a teenager. She took a new name, Indra Devi, and found work in early Indian films, making her screen debut in 1930. She had a gift for people. Maharajas, gurus, diplomats, actors, socialites — she collected friendships across every level of Indian society, at a time when very few Western women moved so freely through all of them.
In 1930 she married Jan Strakaty, a Czechoslovak diplomat posted in Bombay. Diplomatic life came with expectations: quiet dinners, predictable routines, a wife who stayed in her lane. Devi did not stay in her lane. Through her husband's post, she was introduced to the royal court of Mysore, where the maharaja kept a yoga school inside the palace walls. Teaching there was a man named Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, a yogi so influential that historians now credit him as the architect of much of modern yoga as it's practiced today.
Here is what most people miss: Devi didn't come to Krishnamacharya as a curious tourist. She came to him in genuine physical distress. For four years she had suffered chest pains that doctors couldn't explain or treat, cycling through remedy after remedy with no relief. It was a friend who eventually suggested yoga, almost as a last resort. When it worked, she wanted to go straight to the source. She asked Krishnamacharya to train her properly. He turned her down flat. "It would be impossible for me to take on a woman, especially a foreign one," he told her. "It cannot be done." That single sentence is the hinge the entire story turns on — not the fame that came later, not Hollywood, not the books. A world-renowned master looked at her and said no, and she simply didn't accept it as final.
She kept asking. Eventually, in 1938, he relented, and Devi became the first woman — and the first foreigner — to train under Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, studying the same demanding curriculum he gave his male students, no modifications, no shortcuts. Two of her fellow students in that circle, B.K.S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois, would go on to become towering names in yoga in their own right. When her training was finished, Krishnamacharya told her plainly that she had to teach. In 1939 she opened what are believed to be the first yoga classes ever held in China, running a school out of a residence in Shanghai. Her students began calling her "mataji" — mother — a title she said she felt she'd earned rather than been given.
Then, in 1946, Jan Strakaty died, and the life she had built in India lost its center overnight. She had spent close to a decade teaching, studying, and building a reputation most Westerners had never heard of. Rather than retreat, she looked toward the one place that had never seen any of it: the West. In late 1947 she arrived in the United States, and by 1948 she had opened a yoga studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, in a city that had absolutely no framework for what she was about to teach it.
The confusion didn't last. Within months, some of the biggest names in American film were showing up to her classes — Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Eva Gabor, Yul Brynner, Jennifer Jones. She taught in a sari, by choice, never softening her appearance to blend in, even as she softened the language of yoga itself to make it land with an audience raised on gyms and calisthenics rather than ashrams. That translation work was the real skill. She wasn't just demonstrating poses; she was rebuilding an ancient discipline in terms an American in 1948 could actually use.
The books followed, and they were enormous. "Yoga for Americans," published in 1959, sold in numbers nobody expected for a subject most readers had dismissed a decade earlier as fringe or foreign. She became a U.S. citizen, lectured on television and radio, and carried yoga to Mexico and Argentina, teaching classes in countries that, like America in 1947, had never had a name for what she was doing. In the 1960s she reportedly ran into resistance from Soviet officials who initially treated yoga as a religious practice and moved to restrict it, only to see the policy walked back after her advocacy.
She eventually settled in Argentina, where she spent her final decades, revered by a country that had embraced her completely. She died in Buenos Aires on April 25th, 2002, at the age of 102, a woman who had lived through the fall of the Russian Empire, two world wars, and the entire twentieth century's transformation of how people think about health, movement, and the mind.
It's worth sitting with how narrow her window really was. One man's refusal. One woman who didn't leave the room when he said no. Everything that followed — the studios, the books, the millions of people who now roll out a mat before work — traces back to a yes that almost never came.
Some doors only open because someone refuses to accept that they're closed.
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