International Women’s day 2023
Equity.
To honour “International Women’s Day” I thought I would introduce Indra Devi, a woman who was way ahead of her time as a pioneering teacher of yoga. Her story is incredibly inspiring.
Indra was born Eugenie Peterson to a Swedish father and Russian actress of noble birth. Her childhood in Russia was one marked with loneliness, loss and fear which lead her to seek spiritual comfort. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, she and her mother fled, penniless, and Eugenie ended up working across Europe as an actress, dancer and later joined a travelling theatre group.
In her 20’s, Eugenie accepted a proposal of marriage from a wealthy banker on the condition that he allowed her to travel to India first. Her fascination of the country was piqued from reading texts on philosophy and yoga, but she was principally captivated from hearing Jidda Krishnamurthi chanting Sanskrit madras during a Theosophical Society meeting in the Netherlands. She later said “It seemed to me, I was hearing a forgotten call, familiar, but distant. From that day, everything in me turned upside down”. Upon her return to Europe, she called off her engagement, sold all her valuable possessions and headed back to India.
Eugenie’s acting experience led her to parts in Bollywood films and adopted 'Indra Devi' as her stage name, a name she would later make her legal name and once she keep for the rest of her life. In 1930, she married Jan Strakaty, an attache to the Czecolsolvakian Consulate in Bombay. It was through her husband that she met the Maharaja of Mysore, himself a practitioner of yoga, and through his influence, the pair convinced the very reluctant yoga guru Krishnamacharya to allow her to become his pupil, and therefore becoming the first western woman to be his student.
Krishnamacharya became so impressed with Indra’s dedication to yoga, he invited her to teach in China when she moved there with her husband. She opened a yoga school in Shanghai teaching largely Americans and Russians, and at orphanages too, and earned the much title of Mataji - meaning ‘respected mother’.
Image: Amazon.co.uk
In 1946, her husband died unexpectedly and after a brief return to China, Indra obtained an American visa and settled in California. Here she taught her own style of hatha yoga, respecting the spirituality of yoga, she left this side of the teaching to the guru’s. Indra’s belief in yoga as a powerful tool to combat stress and anxiety, as a way for relaxation, helped her bring yoga to the every-day American. It was during this time, she became a published author of two books.
In the 1950’s Indra remarried and shortly after, she and her husband moved to South America where she opened the Indra Devi Foundation. She spent the next 40 years living in and travelling around South America and India researching, living and teaching yoga. In 1987, she was elected President of Honour of the International Yoga Federation. Indra Devi died in Buenos Aires in 2002.
In the western world we owe so much to Indra Devi and her contribution to yoga and the spreading of its philosophy, bringing together cultures and empowering us to all live in harmony and to be treated as equal. Indra Devi, for this I am grateful, and is why I have chosen to introduce you to her on this International Woman’s Day.