From fairly obscure beginnings in the middle of the 20th century, the practice of yoga in Britain has become a hugely popular pastime. It is difficult to find official figures on the number of people practicing yoga regularly, but it is believed that between 300,000 and 500,000 people regularly participate in what the UN describes as “a holistic approach to health and well-being” with “universal appeal”.
The discipline was popularized in Britain through the hard work and dedication of a diverse group of unusual individuals. There were competing ideas of yoga, different forms of practice and many different points at which yoga entered British culture, such as my book Yoga in Brittany explore. But there are two women whose dedication and enthusiasm played a huge role in popularizing yoga in Britain and whose legacies have sadly been largely forgotten.
Yogini Sunita
Yogini Sunita is born Bernadette Boccaro in 1932 to a Catholic family of Portuguese-Indian descent in a suburb of Bombay. She arrived in Britain with her husband and son around 1960. Finding her new acquaintances eager to learn yoga, she quickly adopted the persona of Yogini Sunita and began teaching what she had learned from Yogi Narainswami on the beaches near Bombay, which she called Pranayama Yoga.
In 1965 Sunita was teaching 780 yoga students at the Birmingham Athletics Institute. According historical sourcesshe was a charismatic teacher who taught flowing sequences of postures, many with at least one knee bent, one foot supported in the groin.
Sunita’s signature technique was the “sliding second” during which one evokes anxieties, before releasing them completely for “just a second”. Explaining Woman’s Hour to BBC Radio 4 listeners in 1961, Sunita described the practice as mental relaxation that allows one to meet the demands of life more effectively. In fact, Sunita claimed it equaled eight hours of “perfect sleep.”
Shortly before his sadly untimely death in 1970 at age 38, Sunita began training others to teach, but left no curriculum or training manuals. She wrote that mastery of Pranayama Yoga involved knowledge of psychology, the causes of tension, and knowledge of “three hundred exercises”. Sunita insisted, however, that “the gift and ability to convey such a subject can never be decreed by letters”.
In this, Sunita anticipated many debates about the nature and validity of “yoga teacher training programs” today. As Sunita understood in the 1960s, having a yoga teaching certificate does not automatically mean that a person will be a good or charismatic yoga teacher. She pointed out how yoga is an embodied practice and that not all competent practitioners make suitable teachers of this type of tradition.
Kailash Puri
A second notable woman who popularized yoga in Britain was Kailash Puri (1926-2017) who taught yoga from her home in Crosby with her husband, Gopal Singh Puri (1915-1995), between 1968 and 1990. Both Kailash and her husband were Punjabi-born Sikhs who had settled in Crosby through the employment of Gopal Puri at the polytechnic conference in Liverpool. in biological sciences.
Noticing a demand for yoga soon after the Beatles returned from India, Puri encouraged his wife to teach postures, breathing and relaxation exercises while he gave philosophical lectures and prepared herbal prescriptions. based on Ayurvedic principles. Kailash Puri also gave lessons in healthy eating and cooking with vegetables, and her influence in this area extended to her role as an Indian cuisine consultant at Marks & Spencer in the 1970s.
Like Sunita, the Puris also emphasized yoga as relaxation, an antidote to the problems of modern life – stress, materialism and emotional imbalance. Two of their students Frank and Hazel Willsfurther popularized these yoga methods with a regular slot on BBC Television’s lunchtime program Pebble Mill at One for several years from 1973 and with a book, Yoga for all.
Sunita and the Puris emphasized that their yoga practices were not associated with any specific religious ideology. They both claimed that the techniques were accessible to everyone and had significant health and relaxation benefits. Significantly, neither Sunita nor Puri set guidelines for training others in yoga. This means that their influence has been largely forgotten.
Meanwhile, men like BKS Iyengar (1918-2014)which has developed a standardized teacher training curriculum in conjunction with London’s adult education system, and Wilfred Clark (1898-1981)who founded the British Wheel of Yoga, have legacies much easier to document.
Why British women have embraced yoga
But the importance of these two women in inspiring other women should not be underestimated. Women quickly became the majority of yoga students and teachers in Britain, accounting for 70-90% of people attending yoga classes in the post-war period. There were several reasons for this. As Mark Singleton, yoga historian and senior researcher at SOAS, has pointed out, the practice of modern yoga has much in common with exercise methods such as the Swedish and Danish gymnastic exercises that were popular for women in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Yoga also offered relief from what a yoga teacher described in 1976 as “housewife syndromewhich included “monotony and lack of recognition, indefinite pain and psychosomatic symptoms”. Yoga, in the experience of many women of this period, provided a space to recharge physically and mentally.
Teaching yoga also gave women a viable job that could accommodate family commitments. Teaching yoga saved them more and less time compared to other jobs available to women at that time, such as secretarial work.
Yogini Sunita and Kailash Puri were more than just yoga teachers – their lives exemplify how yoga provided new opportunities for personal empowerment and social influence, offering a new path of liberation for women.
