A teaching session on the temple stones, on film for Kings & Yogis.
Kings & Yogis
A documentary on the kings, scholars, and yoga traditions of Mysore.
The world of Mysore that shaped Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya is still alive: its Sanskrit College, its scholars, the teachers who carry the practice today, and the Wadiyar court that has long patronised them. Many hours of interviews and footage have already been recorded. What remains is to finish the film.
Support the FilmThe community of Mysore is telling its own story, including the King and Queen.
Most yoga practised in the world today traces back through one teacher: Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya. He was formed by Mysore. By its kings, by the Parakāla Maṭha, by the Sanskrit community of the Maharaja's Sanskrit College, where he himself once taught āsana.
That world is still here. The Royal Family is still here. The Sanskrit College is still here. The senior scholars who know these texts in the way they have always been known are still teaching. Kings & Yogis is the documentary record of all of it, with the people of Mysore telling the story themselves.
Filming is nearly complete. What remains is the editing, the translation work, the music, the colour, and the cost of finishing a film at the level this material deserves.
Moments from inside the work.
A small selection from years of filming in Mysore, with the scholars of the Maharaja's Sanskrit College and the oldest living teachers of the tradition.
The voices.
Among those who have given long-form interviews for Kings & Yogis:
Several centuries, told through the people who carry them.
Our first documentary, Mysore Yoga Traditions (2017), looked at the nineteenth-century background of the practice. Kings & Yogis reaches further back, into the long relationship between the Wadiyar kings and the yoga traditions they studied, patronised, and embodied.
The Royal Family of Mysore were not bystanders to yoga. They were students of it. They were the patrons of the Sanskrit College where Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya later taught. They commissioned manuscripts. They built institutions whose work continues today.
The film is built largely from interviews with the people of Mysore. The King and Queen, the scholars of the Sanskrit College, the teachers who hold the textual and practical knowledge of this place. The account is theirs, in their words.
Once Kings & Yogis is released and earning, 10% of all film proceeds will be contributed to the Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya Yoga Museum, a library and study room the Maharaja's Sanskrit College is creating in the room where he once taught āsana.
The museum is the College's own project, going ahead with or without us. Our role is to commit a share of future film revenue toward it. Donations to finish the film are a separate matter and do not flow to the museum.
The knowledge is intact. The people are aging. The manuscripts are deteriorating.
We made our first documentary in 2017 because we kept meeting scholars in Mysore whose knowledge was extraordinary, completely intact, and entirely undocumented for the outside world. Many were already in their eighties and nineties. Several of the scholars we have since interviewed have already passed.
The palm-leaf manuscripts that hold much of India's yoga literature are also deteriorating, and quickly. There is a window here, and it is closing.
In 2019 we launched the Mysore Yoga Conference, bringing international students into direct contact with these scholars. The Online Studies programme followed, so the teachings themselves could travel. Kings & Yogis is the next piece of that work: the visual and cultural record of where it all came from.
Anyone who would like to support this work may do so.
Donations go toward editing, translation, music, color, and post-production, the cost of finishing the film at the level the material deserves.