In the familiar and unshakable Indian narrative, the discipline and practice of yoga is uniquely Indian in origin, going back hundreds of years, possibly even pre-dating Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Rishis have practised it for millennia, inspiring more recent gurus and swamis such as Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda. They in turn carried its calming allure to the restless West, where a marketing machine sexed it up with such arresting modern-day mantras such as “Inhale Love, Exhale Hate” and “Om Sweet Om.”Thus was born the American yoga industry, replete with hot yoga, cold yoga, yoga plus, yoga lite etc, and packed with poses such as downward dog and supine spinal twist. Yoga is now a $27-billion industry in the US, and according to one estimate, some 20 million people – about one in six households — practise it. Michelle Goldberg ’s The Goddess Pose , her engaging biography of Indra Devi, while acknowledging India as the spiritual home of yoga – more accurately, the home of spiritual yoga – offers fresh insights into commonly held assumptions, including the relatively new origins of many physical asanas. In fact, Goldberg, relying on scholarly western work on the subject, says some of the asanas may have even been influenced by both domestic and foreign exercises such as Indian wrestling (kushti), European calisthenics, Danish Ling gymnastics, and even British military exercises. Most of the asanas mentioned in India’s ancient texts are seated or supine, and contain no standing sequences such as the surya namaskar, she writes.The idea that a surya namaskar is anything but Indian and ancient may rile Indian hypernationalists, but Goldberg is quick to reassure that she is not challenging yoga’s Indian origins (“Prostrating before the sun would be obvious ancient practice and I don’t think you need gymnastics to pray to the sun.”) But she says there is “this huge gap in the understanding” of how Hatha Yoga, the physical manifestation of yogic practices, developed from what was originally and largely a spiritual discipline. Obviously, there are asanas in medieval Hatha Yoga, she says, but they were mostly seated poses, and it was only in the modern era going back to the legendary Krishnamacharya, teacher of yoga greats Pattabhi Jois and BKS Iyengar, that many of the more physical asanas were fine-tuned.It is to this Krishnamacharya that Indra Devi, Goldberg’s remarkable Russian-born renaissance heroine, gravitated, after coming across a yoga book as a teenager in Russia . Goldberg’s own discovery of yoga and Indra Devi forms a riveting prologue to an expansive book that underlines how truly global yoga has become after it was taken from Indian shores more than a century ago.A liberal New York journalist whose inflexible body was long at odds with a curious mind, Goldberg’s yoga journey begins in Dharamsala at the end of a backpacking trip in the late 1990s. Much of her yoga class consists of itinerants and foreigners, and Goldberg’s quest to understand the western fascination with yoga is fired up when she later chances across an NYT obituary of Indra Devi, an “esoteric female Forrest Gump” who died in 2002 at the age of 102 after a tumultuous life across four continents, much of it as the first western ambassador of yoga.Born in Riga (now in Latvia) as Eugenie V Peterson, Indra Devi (a name she took on later when she dabbled in Bollywood’s silent movies) eventually makes her way to Mysore, following her teenage fascination with Indian spiritualism (via Jiddu Krishnamurthy and the Theosophist movement). By then she has already starred opposite Prithviraj Kapoor in Arabian Nights and is bending her life to a spiritual dimension. Rebuffed by yoga master Tirumalai Krishnamacharya when she goes to him to learn yoga, she works her charm on his patron, the Maharaja of Mysore Krishnaraja Wodeyar.Wodeyar directs Krishnamacharya to teach her, thus making her the first woman outside his family to be trained by the guru. She eventually earns the grudging admiration of the master with her dedication, culminating in his instruction to her to go forth and spread the message of yoga across the world, much before his premier disciples, Jois and Iyengar, would go West.Indra Devi’s life, already eclectic and peripatetic, first takes her to Shanghai, where her Czech diplomat husband is posted. Opening her first yoga studio at the home of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, she turns her into a devotee. By then, the Mysore maharaja’s deep engagement with America, that included funding Swami Vivekananda’s trip to the US has already introduced the West to Raj Yoga, the highest spiritual form of yoga. But Hatha Yoga was still a work in progress, and it is Indra Devi who brings it to the country that is now the commercial hub of yoga.Already an early western implant in Bollywood, Indra Devi then makes her way to Hollywood. Among her early students: Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson. Yes, long before Annette Benning and Ali McGraw cottoned on to BKS Iyengar. Further digressions to Mexico, where she runs a yoga school at the height of the counterculture, and her dalliances with a Panamanian colonel and an Argentinian rock star round up a rousing life that Goldberg vividly highlights in all its multicultural splendour at a time the US-India engagement is thought to be a largely post-Independence affair when it actually goes back at least 230 years to the ice trade.Spice and spiritualism came much later, but it is yoga that has seized the American imagination in the past half century — much to the irritation of Indian nationalists who believe Americans are appropriating and distorting their tradition. Goldberg says she understands why some Indians would be offended by the American adulteration of their tradition, but maintains modern yoga forms that are popular in the US have developed because of an “ongoing cultural dialogue between the East and West.” The reason it has spread so widely is because it works and is effective. “I’m a highly strung New Yorker and I can tell you it has made a huge difference in my life. It is hugely therapeutic and has got me through pregnancy and more,” she told TOI.Indeed, much of America accepts this despite occasional flaps about yoga’s religious connotations. In a society attuned to simple slogans, the statutory warning on a yoga storefront said it best: Warning! Yoga Has Been Known To Cause Health and Happiness. Having lived the entire 20th century (1899-2002), Indra Devi would have agreed.