Vadodara gurus popularized concept of yoga worldwide

VADODARA: For yoga enthusiasts, Rishikesh, Mysore and Banaras are usually considered the go to destinations. But very few know that Gujarat’s Sanskarnagari Vadodara has a rich heritage when it comes to yoga, the ancient Indian art of healthy living.
It was in Vadodara that Yogi Arvind, the proposer of integral yoga experienced his first yogic enlightenment.
His student Swami Kuvlayanandaji, who is credited for being founder of the first yoga research institute in the world at Lonavala in Maharashtra in 1929, was born in Dabhoi. And he got his bachelor’s degree from erstwhile Baroda College, now M S University.
The Dabhoi-born yoga guru completed his formal studies under Yogi Arvind, then a French teacher at Baroda College and got his physical education at Manekrao Akhada. “But he (Kuvlayanandaji) learned yoga from Swami Madhavdasji, fondly known as the Bengali Baba, who settled in Malsar near Vadodara on the banks of river Narmada at the age of 80,” said city-based ayurvedic doctor Ritesh Patel, a masters in yoga from Bengaluru’s Yoga University.
Swami Madhavdasji, a yoga master from Mukhopadhyaya family in Bengal, had practiced yoga techniques in the Himalayas for more than 50 years before he settled in Malsar.
“Interestingly, he inspired Swami Kuvlayanandaji to do research on yoga. Inspired by his guru, Swami Kuvlayanandaji in 1920-21 investigated the effects of yogic practices on the human body with the help of his students in a laboratory at Baroda state hospital,” said Patel.
“Swami Madhavdasji also taught yoga to another disciple — Yogendraji — from Surat who later became the founder of world’s oldest yoga institute — The Yoga Institute in Santa Cruz in 1916,” said Patel, who plans to write a book on Baroda’s yoga heritage.
Interestingly, Yogi Arvind learnt pranayama from Shri Devdhar who was an engineer from Baroda and disciple of Swami Brahmanandji.
Another yoga guru Swami Kruplavanandaji on whose name Kripalu yoga style is named was also born in Dabhoi. “This yoga style is quite popular, especially in the United States. It was his student Amrit Desai from Dahod, who developed and popularised this style of yoga in 1960 and named it after his guru,” he said.