A Modern Twist With an Ancient Name

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Bharadvajasana carries a name that sounds as old as the Vedas themselves. Bharadvaja is one of the seven great seers of Hindu tradition, credited with composing much of the Rigveda's sixth book, and a posture named for him invites the assumption that the posture is just as old. It is not. The pose does not appear under this name, or in a clearly matching form, in either of the two classical hatha yoga manuals that between them describe the other named asanas treated here: the Gheranda Samhita's thirty two postures and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika's fifteen. It enters the written record instead in the twentieth century, in B.K.S. Iyengar's 1966 manual Light on Yoga, alongside Pattabhi Jois's Ashtanga Vinyasa system, both students of the same teacher, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, whose early twentieth century Mysore practice is now understood to have generated a substantial share of the postures that modern students take to be medieval. A nineteenth century text, the Sritattvanidhi, does illustrate a pose under a related name, but the leg arrangement it describes reads as a variant of Padmasana rather than as the seated twist known today. None of this makes Bharadvajasana a fabrication. Sanskrit naming after a revered sage was, and remains, how a new posture is given standing within the tradition it belongs to, and the gap between an old name and a young pose is itself a fact worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over, the same discipline the atlas already applies to the Hatha Yoga Pradipika's own claim of eighty four asanas against the fifteen it actually describes.