The Scholars

Śrī B.N.S. Iyengar is the oldest living teacher of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, and the figure from whom the work of Mysore Yoga Traditions first grew. He learned the practice in Mysore in its early decades and has taught it across more than seven decades, training many of the teachers who now carry it around the world. He turns one hundred in 2026.

It was Śrī B.N.S. Iyengar who first opened the door between the international yoga community and the Sanskrit scholars of Mysore, making possible the kind of study these pages now document. He teaches the roots of the practice as someone who watched them take their modern form.

Dr. Alwar's father and teacher, Śrī U.Ve. Prof. M.A. Lakṣmīthāthāchārya Swami stood within the Nāthamuni Sampradāya, the line of Vedic learning that has shaped this tradition across generations. He gave his life to the study and teaching of Vedānta and the Bhagavad Gītā, and to the transmission of the Gītārtha Saṅgraha, the text at the heart of this paramparā.

The founder of Mysore Yoga Traditions studied the Bhagavad Gītā with him for three and a half years, at the Swami's request keeping no written notes, receiving the text as it has always been received here, in person and from memory. His teaching continues through his students and through his son, with whom that study now goes on.

Son of Śrī U.Ve. Prof. M.A. Lakṣmīthāthāchārya Swami, Dr. Alwar grew up deep within the Nāthamuni Sampradāya, formed by the same exacting standards of Vedic education and śāstric learning that have shaped this lineage for generations. He is Senior Professor at the Maharaja's Sanskrit College, Mysore, and Managing Trustee of the Saṃskṛti Foundation.

He does not teach these texts as literature or philosophy from the outside. He transmits them as they have been understood within this paramparā for nearly a millennium, with the depth, precision, and warmth of a scholar who has lived inside them his entire life. To study the Bhagavad Gītā with Dr. Alwar is to receive it through the same philosophical understanding that guided Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya, and that has shaped the yoga the world now practices.

Trained in both traditional gurukula and modern academic settings, Dr. Nagaraj Rao has taught at the University of Chicago, held a fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and been honored by the Sahitya Akademi for his contributions to translation. He is honorary editor of Sudharma, the world's only daily newspaper published in Sanskrit.

Now in his eighties, he continues to teach the Yoga Sūtras, the Upaniṣads, and the Sankhya Kārikā with undiminished clarity and warmth. His particular gift is making the subtle clear without making it simple, bringing philosophical precision while communicating in fluent English with an accessibility rare among Sanskrit scholars of his stature.

Dr. M. A. Jayashree and Dr. M. A. Narasimhan, a sister and brother who teach as a pair, have taught chanting and philosophy to yoga students in Mysore for decades and have carried that teaching to many countries. Dr. Jayashree is known for her work in mantra and Vedic chanting, which she has taught to thousands of students from outside India.

Together they lead the Anantha Foundation in Mysore, where they continue the recitation and study of the texts at the center of the Mysore tradition.

Trained in traditional gurukula education in Vedas, Vedānta, and Yogaśāstra at Veda Vijñāna Gurukulam, Bengaluru, Dr. Jayaraman subsequently earned a PhD in Sanskrit from the University of Madras, specializing in Tantrayukti, the ancient Indian methods of textual construction and methodology. He served for over a decade as Director of Research at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, Chennai.

He is currently Professor and Dean in the Division of Yoga and Spirituality at SVYASA Deemed University, and the author of twenty books and nineteen peer-reviewed articles on yoga and Sanskrit literature. He is also the creator of Yoga-Vaiśāradī, a searchable digital repository of classical yoga texts, and Yogasya Bhāṣā, a self-learning program in Sanskrit and yoga.

Yogācārya S. Sridharan is the senior mentor and consultant at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai, where he has practiced and taught yoga therapy for many years. He met Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya in person and contributed to the writing of his biography, and he speaks about the life and teaching of Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya from direct acquaintance rather than secondhand account.

His teaching reaches past the historical record into the view of yoga that Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya held, including the Yogavallī, a work that sets out his teacher's understanding of practice and its purpose.

Dr. K. S. Kannan is a Sanskrit scholar and the author of many books on yoga philosophy who has lectured at conferences internationally. In 2019 he was conferred the degree of D.Litt (honoris causa) by the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidya Peetha, Tirupati, and named a Senior Fellow of the Indian Council for Social Science Research.

He has held a nominated membership of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, and in 1990 received an international award for his paper on machine translation from Sanskrit to English.

Dr. T. R. S. Sharma studied directly with Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya and can speak first hand about what was taught in those āsana classes and how his teacher understood the philosophy behind them. An author and scholar now in his late nineties, he grew up within the Mysore yoga lineage and was later educated in the United States.

That double vantage gives him a clear view of the practice and of the way it has traveled and changed since leaving Mysore.

Dr. Mahadeva is Principal of the Maharaja's Sanskrit College in Mysore, the institution where Śrī Kṛṣṇamācārya and Śrī K. Pattabhi Jois once taught. He belongs to the Vīraśaiva tradition and teaches its texts and history from within, giving an account of a stream of South Indian religious life that runs alongside the yoga lineages of the same region.

Dr. Mohan Raghavan holds a PhD in philosophy and computational neuroscience and works at the meeting point of the two. He brings the methods of neuroscience to questions about Ashtanga Yoga, examining what the practice does and how its effects might be understood in the terms of the brain and nervous system.

Dr. Darshan Shankar is Vice Chancellor of the Trans-Disciplinary University in Bengaluru and founder of the Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions. Over more than two decades his work has built the field of Ayurveda-biology, which sets the systemic view of Ayurveda alongside the molecular methods of modern biology.

He received the Padma Shri from the Government of India in 2011 for his work in integrative health science.

Dr. G. G. Gangadharan is a practicing Ayurvedic physician and Director of the M. S. Ramaiah Indic Centre for Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine in Bengaluru. Trained in classical methods of diagnosis, including pulse diagnosis, he has spent his career bringing Ayurveda and local health traditions into everyday use, with particular attention to rural India and the medicinal plants on which much of that practice depends.

Yamini Muthanna studied Haṭha Yoga Vinyāsa under Śrī B.N.S. Iyengar for more than thirty years and teaches it as she learned it, without altering the methods worked out by earlier masters. She runs a school called Yogastala in Bengaluru and has taught in London, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles.

She is also an accomplished Bharatanatyam dancer and teacher who has represented Indian culture abroad under the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.

Nithin Sridhar is a writer based in Mysore whose work ranges across development, politics, and social questions, and into religion, culture, and ecology. He is the author of six books and the editor of IndiaFacts, an online publication on Indian history, culture, and philosophy.

He is currently pursuing a Master's in philosophy at the Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi.