Indra Devi

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A letter from Indra Devi

Indra Devi , born Eugenie Peterson , also Eugenie Strakatý (born April 30 . Jul / 12. May  1899 greg. In Riga , Russian Empire ; † 25. April 2002 in Buenos Aires ) was a Swedish-Russian-American actress and yoga teacher. She was a student of T. Krishnamacharya . Her students addressed her as Mataji ( Hindi : "little mother").

Life

Indra Devi was born as Eugenie Peterson on April 25, 1899 as the daughter of the Swedish banker Vasili Peterson and the Russian nobleman Alejandra Labunskaia in Riga. She attended drama school in Moscow . In 1920 she fled the Bolsheviks to Germany with her mother and worked as a dancer and actress in Berlin .

Since she was attracted to Indian culture by reading Rabindranath Tagore , she traveled by ship to India in 1927 , where she starred in Indian films under the stage name Indra Devi. In Bombay she met the Czechoslovak diplomat Jan Strakaty, whom she married in 1930.

She decided to take yoga lessons from Tirumalai Krishnamacharya , but was only accepted as a woman after the intercession of the Maharajas of Mysore and trained as a yoga teacher in 1938. During her long stay in India she made the acquaintance of Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru .

In 1939, her husband was transferred to China , where she opened the first yoga school in Shanghai in the house of Song Meiling , wife of the Chinese generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek . After the end of the Second World War , she returned to India with her husband.

After her husband's death in 1947, she went to California and opened a yoga studio in Hollywood in 1948 . In 1953 she married the doctor Sigfrid Knauer in Los Angeles . She had her stage name officially recognized and became a US citizen. American cosmetics entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden also offered yoga classes from Indra Devi as part of her health programs. Her clientele included Hollywood actors Greta Garbo , Eva Gabor , Gloria Swanson , Jennifer Jones and Robert Ryan, among others . In 1960 she traveled to Moscow and after a conversation in the Kremlin , yoga classes were approved in the Soviet Union . In 1961, she opened a yoga studio in Mexico , which she closed in 1977 after her second husband died in a car accident. She then moved to Sri Lanka to live there.

Indra Devi was a follower of Sathya Sai Baba , which is why she called her yoga style Sai Yoga . In 1982 she settled in Buenos Aires at the offer of supporters of Sai Baba , where the Fundacion Indra Devi was founded. Indra Devi, who was fluent in Russian, German, English, Spanish and French, traveled around the world teaching her yoga.

In February 2002 she suffered a stroke and died on April 25, 2002 in Buenos Aires at the age of over a hundred years. Their ashes were scattered in the Río de la Plata .

Works

  • The Technique of Health and Happiness (1946)
  • Forever Young, Forever Healthy - Yoga for Americans (with foreword by Gloria Swanson)
  • Yoga made easy . Stuttgart (1960)
  • A new life through yoga . Munich (1973)
  • Yoga for you . Munich (1978)

literature