The city-based Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute (RIMYI) will hold a 10-day practical exposition of Iyengar yoga at Balewadi stadium to commemorate the birth centenary of yoga exponent B.K.S. Iyengar.

The commemorative functions, which began on December 3, will conclude on December 12 followed by celebrations on December 13 and 14 — the day which marks the birth centenary of Yogacharya Iyengar.

More than 1,200 of the late guru’s students from 53 countries will be participating in the sessions which include in-depth asana and pranayama teachings.

A biographical film titled Iyengar, the Man, Yoga and the Student’s Journey by New- York based Jake Clennel will be screened on December 13-14.

Yogacharya Iyengar, who made Pune his home since 1937, died at the age of 95 in September 2014.

“While we are aware of his contribution to society and his work in popularising yoga, it is vital to remember what he did with yoga. His teaching was about what we do within ourselves with yoga. He never saw yoga as a means to improve one’s health – something with which it is being increasingly identified today,” said his son Prashant Iyengar, at a rare press conference at the RIMYI on Wednesday.

He observed that despite all the adulation brought about by his ‘celebrity status’, guruji never lost sight of true meaning of yoga as an intensely spiritual exercise.

“Few are aware that it was Guruji, who, through his researches, helped develop numerous props that people are now marketing the world over. Prime Minister Modi, too, struck a pose on one such prop on the occasion of World Yoga Day,” he said.

He pointed out that the yogacharya always attempted to expound on the true meaning of an ‘asana’ through his teachings.

“An asana far transcends physical dexterity…it helps to clear the mind and set it at rest. Just standing on the head is not shirsasana and this is what guruji always emphasised in his teachings,” Mr. Iyengar said.

He said that the build-up to the centenary celebrations had been marked by numerous activities throughout the past years, with the RIMYI teaching yoga to rickshaw drivers’ outfits as well as extensively touring districts in Maharashtra’s hinterland including Ahmednagar and Nashik and a number of other cities like Patiala and Chandigarh among several others.

Guruji’s daughter Geeta Iyengar noted that the yogacharya’s commentaries on Patanjali’s Yoga sutras had helped make the text accessible to the common man

“Guruji, who came to Pune in 1936-37, was always a very sickly man. Yet he combated his illness by thinking profoundly about Yoga Sutras. He entered into a subjective experience of the body using the asana as an instrument. It is his emphasis of the profundity of yoga that we hope to carry forward,” she said.

She further said that guruji’s teachings emphasised that there was a deep thought behind every asana and it was not merely physical in nature.

“His whole approach was that one should be calm and quiet and leave behind the ego,” Ms. Iyengar said.

The Yogacharya’s granddaughter Abhijata, said the institute would never patent any prop originated by guruji nor was it keen on spreading the Iyengar brand of yoga through ‘advertisement’.