Breath of the Gods: An interview with Jan Schmidt-Garre in Abaton-Kino Hamburg

Laura von Ostrowski

23rd May 2024

The Interview

von Ostrowski: Thank you for coming here tonight and I want to welcome you in the name of the University of Hamburg to this movie screening of the Breath of the Gods which will be shown as part of our third international academic yoga conference Yoga Darśana, Yoga Sadhana (2024).

And I am very happy and grateful that we can at least briefly welcome you here, Jan Schmidt-Garre, who came from Berlin to Hamburg tonight, the director of the movie, to our illustrious group of yoga scholars and all the other yoga enthusiasts here in the room.

I felt the wish to interview you since the first time I saw the movie in 2012 in a small cinema in Munich. And I feel very lucky that now, 12 years later, I have the chance – I don’t know how it happened, but it happened. You are surely one of the few Westerners who met Krishnamacharya’s most famous students and children while they were still alive.

To investigate the history of modern yoga, especially in the Krishnamacharya lineage, you went to South India, you looked at archival material and you interviewed BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Krishnamacharya’s son Shribhashyam, his three daughters and others.

Back then, I had read Mark Singleton’s book Yoga Body from 2010, who had a similar research question to yours, which indeed is very familiar to many of us researchers here in the room: How old are yogic āsanas? The answer that the movie provides to this difficult question might not be as genealogically precise as the one we researchers try to and must produce.

But with your truly interested investigations into Krishnamacharya’s family and lineage and with your eye for detail and beauty, which I appreciate a lot, you managed to produce unique historical material and you have succeeded in finding an almost artistic but also somehow autoethnographic answer to your initial research question, as we will see.
You yourself report that you have experienced a completely new fusion of body and mind through your own practice of Ashtanga yoga. But what fascinated you so much about the topic of modern yoga, that you decided to spend years making a movie about it?

Schmidt-Garre: Ja, it’s true that I experienced this. I started practicing yoga 22 years ago and very soon I was fascinated by this practice, and I wanted to know more about it. And I had a very good yoga teacher in Munich, called Patrick Broome and – that was actually the initial moment – he showed me the cover of a magazine that is now not existing anymore, called Namarūpa. It was a very nice magazine from New York and on the cover there were two old men who looked really, really weird – I had never seen such people. And those were Pattabhi Jois and B.K.S. Iyengar who were reunited for this interview after decades of not seeing each other. And I asked my teacher: »Who are these guys?«, and he said: »Well that’s the fathers of modern yoga!«, and told the whole story to me. He then further explained that they’re both students of the same person called Krishnamacharya and that important parts of what’s been done today is a product of his teachings. I thought wow, that’s very interesting, and I decided to do this film.

von Ostrowski: Alright, but how did you manage to get this close to Krishnamacharya’s entourage, to his family and his students, how did you do this?

Schmidt-Garre: Well, that took a while. It was very different from person to person. It was very easy with Pattabhi Jois, because he was very open and I think I wrote him a letter, but I don’t remember if he answered or not. But anyway, I went to Mysore and visited his Shala and met with his grandson and then also with him. That wasn’t difficult, because he was very approachable. I mean he had other issues, that maybe some of you know – sexual abuse, not nice – but as a person he was very approachable, so that was not complicated. With B.K.S. Iyengar it was much more difficult. I wrote him a letter and then I got a letter from him, a very beautiful one, written on airmail paper, this very, very thin paper, which is not existing any more. And he explained that he has told the story so many times in his life and that he is not interested to do that again.

von Ostrowski: But then he did…

Schmidt-Garre: Yes, exactly. So, I also went there at some point, which is actually what you do in India: You go there and talk to people. And then he was very kind, and at the end, he did it. With Krishnamacharya’s family it was also complicated, I started of course with the most famous of them, which was Desikachar in Chennai. His son, Kausthub Desikachar replied and wanted to talk and I also met with Desikachar who was very kind – I think it was on his birthday. But then Kausthub explained that he wanted total control of the movie and that he would decide who would be in the movie and who not, and I had to tell him that this is not exactly what I want. We negotiated for years and during that period his father got very ill and lost his mental abilities, so at the end I stopped negotiating because it wouldn’t have worked any more. So that was very sad.

But I talked to his brother, who was also super interesting – Shribhashyam who lived in Nice – he is also dead now, they’re all dead, except for the sisters. And he introduced me to his sisters and even to their oldest brother, whom I met briefly. But he lives secluded in a monastery and didn’t want to contribute to the movie.

von Ostrowski: This is a very interesting story because you come from a very different realm, not from the yoga scene, but you rather produce and direct artistic movies, so it is fascinating that you had such a luck and such a persistence to get to that material.

You state yourself at the beginning of the movie, that it is not so easy to find historic evidence in India. Some of the stories that teachers are telling in the movie about the past are indeed mythological, or when you look at them in a proper historical light, they might not be as they say, but it’s just part of their tradition to say so. I don’t know if you also experienced that or if you had thought about that. So did you also look – which is interesting for us scholars – at our research on the history of yoga? Did that somehow inform your questions or was it even a basis of your research and if not so, why?

Schmidt-Garre: I did a lot of research and I read for instance also Mark Singleton’s book Yoga Body. We even had the plan to bring him to India and I wanted to interview him and share some experiences with him, but then he didn’t get a Visa, that’s why he couldn’t come. Even though I don’t agree to his book entirely. Your research I didn’t know then.

von Ostrowski: Oh, I am not talking about my research in particular, just the whole academic Yoga Studies research.

Schmidt-Garre: Yes, when did you start with that?

von Ostrowski: You mean the whole group of people? It started in 2004 with Elizabeth DeMichelis’ book The History of Modern Yoga.

Schmidt-Garre: Yes, I know that book. Of course, I did a lot of research. I am not totally up to date any more as I completed the film in 2011, so it faded away a bit.

von Ostrowski: And when did you start working on the movie?

Schmidt-Garre: In 2007. But when I started with it, I had already read a lot, for many years I had read only yoga literature, so I knew a lot. But to answer your question about the tradition, about evidence and research in India: Yes, it’s complicated, because they have a totally different approach to history than we have. It’s not that they’re lying, but Pattabhi Jois for instance always claimed that he got his teachings quasi directly from a 3000-year-old book that was eaten by ants…

von Ostrowski: … from the Yoga Korunta, yes, we all know that story …

Schmidt-Garre: Exactly, and he believed that. It is difficult to hear from someone that the tradition changed in the 19th century, for example, and that there was a turning point. I think it’s part of Indian tradition, it makes a good brahmin to claim that you have everything from your teacher and he has everything from his teacher and so on, what they call parampara. And the only one who didn’t say so was Iyengar, because he was a different guy and he said, »I did all on my own«, but this is very un-Indian.

von Ostrowski: That’s indeed true. You already talked about abuse in the Krishnamacharya lineage, of Pattabhi Jois, but also Krishnamacharya had fierceful hands and we see that he uses violence to a certain degree in his teaching. And this is visible in the movie, people talk about it. Do you somehow regret to not have investigated this further or do you even see it as a part of modern Yoga, of asana practice?

Schmidt-Garre: No, it’s not intrinsic, it can be practiced without this of course.

von Ostrowski: Sorry, I meant, if you consider it to be a part of the history of modern yoga.

Schmidt-Garre: Well, I don’t know exactly. I read this book of, what’s his name again…

von Ostrowski: Matthew Remski?

Schmidt-Garre: Yes, Matthew Remski’s book (Practice and all is coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond) about Pattabhi Jois and his practices and I was really horrified. I had heard about this before, but not when I was doing the film. So I really didn’t know that. I don’t know what I would have done if I had known that. But also Kausthub had those accusations and quite some people. But others not at all. Iyengar for instance not at all. I mean, he was a difficult person, but I can’t imagine that he ever treated someone like that. Ja. What again was the question?

von Ostrowski: Ah, the question was just that if one knows about the abuse in the world of modern yoga and sees the film, one also observes this topic present in the movie. For example Iyengar talking about the violence of his teacher, or Krishnamacharya’s daughter about her father having been very strict and so on. So I was wondering what your thoughts are about this in retrospect.

Schmidt-Garre: Yes, true, you will also see it soon – Iyengar himself tells that Krishnamacharya was a very, very strict teacher and that he was slapping his students and so on. And Iyengar, he was quite a robust boy. And he was still kind of traumatized by what his brother-in-law did to him. And he himself – I’ve put it in the movie on purpose – at some point also slaps someone.

von Ostrowski: Yes, he did that, several times.

Schmidt-Garre: Yes, and I got one of those moments. I didn’t try to hide this.

von Ostrowski: You have produced very realistic re-enactments of Krishnamacharya’s yoga demonstrations in front of the royal family at the Mysore Palace. So realistic that they are now widely circulated on the Internet as original historical footage. Why didn’t you label them more clearly as re-enactments?

Schmidt-Garre: I’m sorry that the recordings are considered historical documents. At the same time, I’m also pleased because it shows that the footage has turned out to be credible. Of course, I could have inserted »reenactment« – I might do that today and have just done so in a new film in which I re-staged a historical audio document by Rachmaninoff, in other words I gave the historical soundtrack the missing image, so to speak. At the time, I didn’t want to write that in, because such an insert takes the viewer out of the experience of the film and reminds him that she or he’s sitting in a movie theater.

von Ostrowski: How did you manage to make these re-enactments this realistic and where did you find the actors who were so perfected in āsana practice?

Schmidt-Garre: There are very few written documents about what happened in Mysore in those days. But we were lucky to find many witnesses whom I interviewed about the demonstrations. First of all, Krishnamacharya’s relatives who were part of the demonstrations, especially of those done in other cities of South India in order to propagate Yoga. The oldest daughter Pundarikavalli was born in 1931 and remembered many details. She and her two years younger sister Alamelu are featuring together with her father in the 1938 film which I also used. Krishnamacharya’s wife and her sister Jaya Lakshmi were the first women he taught yoga to. Jaya Lakshmi only died recently and could tell us a lot. And there were the other students of Krishnamacharya’s who could relate on the demonstrations, basically Pattabhi Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar and Srinivasa Sharma. All these interviews took place before we shot the demonstrations.

Two of the yoga performers – Shiva Kumar and Shyam Narayanan – are āsana tournament champions from India, teaching now in Hong Kong. Alex Medin who did the choreography chose and instructed them. The only real Brahmin in this group is Prasad Bathundi, a sanskrit scholar from Mysore. He is the one who does this amazing Buddhāsana in the village demonstration and he had only started practising two years before! The two girls are also yoga practitioners from Mysore. A difficult cast was Krishnamacharya himself. Here we couldn’t just go for outward similarity. He had to be a Brahmin and to breathe yoga and its tradition. So we were lucky to win Alex’ Sanskrit professor at the Mysore Sanskrit College for the part: Gangadhara Bhat.

von Ostrowski: From the 1940s on, Sivananda Yoga was the most famous modern yoga lineage in Germany, which was also promoted by the monopoly of Yoga Vidya. This changed when dynamic yoga styles like Jivamukti Yoga became famous in the 1990s. Why did you focus on dynamic yoga and didn’t include static Sivananda Yoga into your movie at all?

Schmidt-Garre: On the one hand, because I myself was trained in the South Indian tradition, i.e. by Krishnamacharya’s great-grandson students. On the other hand, because that would have resulted in a completely different movie, a more scientific one. Despite all the research and every effort to be historically correct, I was interested in the author’s personal search for the origins of his practice, which leads him to the teachers of his teachers’ teachers and finally to this almost mythical person Krishnamacharya, who hovers above them all. That Krishnamacharya’s influence on modern yoga is huge is, I think, indisputable. But of course there are also developments that have nothing to do with him and play an important role in today’s yoga. Apart from Sivananda, one would certainly need to mention Yogi Bhajan with Kundalini Yoga.

LvO: What about the history of yoga surprised you most while making your movie?

Schmidt-Garre: This completely different historical consciousness in India, which we have already talked about. The fact that every traditional Indian scholar downplays or even denies his own contribution makes it extremely difficult for historians to trace lines of development. Even as a director, you have to be extremely careful because it is of course tempting to retell these mythical stories. At the same time, however, it can also give a Western researcher a certain schadenfreude to destroy these myths – and that doesn’t necessarily lead to the truth either. This is my criticism of authors like Norman Sjoman and Singleton, who want to derive the whole of modern yoga from the – Western-influenced – body-building school at the palace of the Maharaja of Mysore instead of from the Yoga Korunta. This school, by the way, as I show in the film, was only opened a few months after Krishnamacharya’s Yoga Shala.

von Ostrowski: What did you think about yoga in the West, for example in Berlin, after having completed the movie? And did you continue your practice?

Schmidt-Garre: Yes, I continued and I still do and I practice almost every day. And I am actually doing what I’ve learned from Shribhashyam and from Iyengar and from all of them. I do a mix of what they taught me, and I am better now than what you will see in the film, but much older, you will also notice ((he laughs)). And for you first question, well, I started here in the West with my yoga practice, so it’s not that I’m an Indian raised person. I started here and I was very lucky with my teachers, I think. And of course, everybody would tell you, it’s very spiritual in India and here it’s all commercial and only about sports but this is not my opinion. In a certain way, Indians are much more down to earth and less spiritual than what we’re encountering here.