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Google has created one of its trademark doodles to celebrate the life of BKS Iyengar, who founded the style of yoga known as 'Iyengar yoga'.

Iyengar, whose full name is Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar, was born in 1918 into a poor family in southern India - one of 13 children, of whom only 10 survived.

As a child he suffered from poor health and at the age of 15 one of his brother-in-laws, who ran a yoga school in the state of Mysore, invited Iyengar to visit, in order to improve his health through yoga practice.

In 1937, he was 19, he was sent to the city of Pune in the state of Maharashtra to teach yoga but it was not until 1952 that Iyengar became an international guru, after he introduced renowned violinist introduced the violinist Yehudi Menuhin to the art.

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Menuhin was impressed by Iyengar's skills and invited his teacher to Switzerland in 1954. After this introduction Iyengar continued visiting the West and schools teaching his brand of yoga were opened across the globe.

He studied anatomy, psychology and physiology to pioneer modern therapeutic yoga and after a scooter accident dislocated his spine, Iyengar began exploring the use of props to help disabled people practice Yoga.

Iyengar's had a happy arranged marriage to a woman named and said of the couple: "We lived without conflict as if our two souls were one."

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She died when she was 46 and Iyengar called his yoga school in Pune after her. His son, Prashant, and daughter, Geeta, are now the principal teachers in the Pune yoga school, and his granddaughter, Abhijat, has also taught there. He is also survived by four other daughters.

In 2004, Iyengar was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In 2014 he was awarded a state honour, the Padma Vibhushan. He died in August 2014 aged 95.