Б.К.С. Айенгар: Батыс әлеміне йоганы әкелген ұстаз

Indian yoga teacher who brought yoga as exercise to the Western world

Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar (14 December 1918 – 20 August 2014) was an Indian teacher of yoga and author. He is the founder of the style of yoga as exercise, known as "Iyengar Yoga", and was considered one of the foremost yoga gurus in the world. He was the author of many books on yoga practice and philosophy including Light on Yoga, Light on Pranayama, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and Light on Life. Iyengar was one of the earliest students of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who is often referred to as "the father of modern yoga". He has been credited with popularizing yoga, first in India and then around the world. The Indian government awarded Iyengar the Padma Shri in 1991, the Padma Bhushan in 2002, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2014. In 2004, Iyengar was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

B. K. S. Iyengar was born into a poor Sri Vaishnava Iyengar family in Bellur, Kolar district, Karnataka, India. He was the 11th of 13 children (10 of whom survived) born to Sri Krishnamachar, a school teacher, and Sheshamma. When Iyengar was five years old, his family moved to Bangalore. Four years later, the 9 year old boy lost his father to appendicitis.

In 1943, Iyengar married 16 year old Ramamani in a marriage that was arranged by their parents. He said of their marriage: "We lived without conflict as if our two souls were one." Both Iyengar's eldest daughter Geeta (1944–2018) and his son Prashant have become internationally known teachers in their own right. His other children are Vanita, Sunita, Suchita, and Savita. Geeta, having worked extensively on yoga for women, published Yoga: A Gem for Women (2002); Prashant is the author of several books, including A Class after a Class: Yoga, an Integrated Science (1998), and Yoga and the New Millennium (2008). Since Geeta's death, Prashant has served as the director of the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute (RIMYI) in Pune. Iyengar's granddaughter, Abhijata Sridhar Iyengar, trained for a number of years under his tutelage, and is now a teacher both at the Institute in Pune and internationally. Iyengar died on 20 August 2014 in Pune, aged 95.

3 October 2005 was declared as "B. K. S. Iyengar Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The noun "Iyengar", short for "Iyengar Yoga", is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as "a type of Hatha yoga focusing on the correct alignment of the body, making use of straps, wooden blocks, and other objects as aids in achieving the correct postures." On 14 December 2015, what would have been Iyengar's 97th birthday, he was honoured with a Google Doodle. It was shown in India, North America, much of Europe, Russia, and Indonesia. Yogacharya B. K. S. Iyengar: Uniting Through Yoga, a documentary film by Vishaal Desai, was released on his birth centenary in 2018. Leap of Faith (2008), another documentary film by Aditi Makim and Valentina Trivedi, covered his life from childhood to adulthood and the hurdles he faced in his career. Currently, thousands of yoga instructors are CIYTs (Certified Iyengar Yoga Teachers), accounting for over 1100 in just the United States.