The lost path of yoga

Yoga was never one single story.
It was a web of teachings, shaped and reshaped by politics, personalities, and power.

From ancient ascetics meditating in forests to modern practitioners flowing in sunlit studios, yoga has always mirrored the times. It adapted, bent, and transformed to express the spirit of each generation.

But in that constant evolution, some paths vanished, erased by history or overshadowed by others that fit the narrative more neatly.
One of those forgotten paths belongs to a man who believed strength could be sacred, that muscle could serve awareness, and that the body itself could become a spiritual instrument.

His name was Bishnu Charan Gosh.
And if his vision had shaped the global yoga story as much as his brother’s did, our understanding of yoga today might look very different.

Two brothers, two visions

At the dawn of the 20th century, colonial India was a land in flux. Spiritual movements and physical reform schools were emerging side by side, each trying to define what it meant to be both Indian and modern under British rule.

Amid this cultural awakening were two brothers from Bengal, Paramahansa Yogananda and Bishnu Charan Gosh.

Yogananda would become the saint, the mystic, the missionary.
He carried the gospel of inner realization to the West, teaching meditation and devotion as the bridge between East and West.
His Autobiography of a Yogi became one of the most influential spiritual books of the 20th century, inspiring millions to seek transcendence through stillness.

Bishnu Gosh stayed behind, less known but no less visionary.
Where his brother turned inward, he turned toward the body.
He believed discipline, control, and physical vitality were essential to liberation.
In his view, strength was not a distraction from spirituality but its foundation.

Their paths diverged, and with them, yoga itself split into two great narratives.

Yoga and the Indian body

To understand Gosh’s work, we need to step into the India of his time.

The late 1800s and early 1900s were marked by the struggle for independence and a deep cultural insecurity. British colonial ideology often described Indian men as physically weak, effeminate, and morally inferior. The colonial “civilizing mission” painted the Western male body as rational, disciplined, and strong, while depicting the Indian body as passive and frail.

This insult wounded the national psyche.
And from that wound, a movement was born.

Educators, nationalists, and reformers began to advocate for physical culture such as gymnastics, wrestling, calisthenics, and martial training as a means of reclaiming dignity and self-respect.
Building the body became a way to build the nation.
Strength was no longer vanity; it was patriotism.

Yoga, too, was pulled into this current. What had once been a mostly ascetic, meditative discipline began to take on new physical and social dimensions. In this environment, Bishnu Gosh found his calling: uniting the contemplative heritage of yoga with the modern urgency of strength.

Bishnu Gosh: the visionary of strength

In 1923, Gosh founded the College of Physical Education in Calcutta.
It was part yoga school, part gymnasium, part research lab.

Here, students learned not only asana and pranayama but also muscle control, resistance training, and breathing techniques drawn from both Eastern and Western systems. Gosh documented results, experimented with medical supervision, and framed yoga as a science of vitality.

His public demonstrations became legendary: yogis holding impossible poses, performing feats of balance and strength that bordered on circus but radiated devotion.

Critics accused him of spectacle. Admirers saw genius.

To Gosh, the two were not mutually exclusive. The body was both stage and altar.
He taught that mastery of the body could lead to mastery of the mind.

It was radical for its time and deeply Indian in spirit, echoing the ancient idea that tapas, or disciplined effort, burns through ignorance.

Bikram Choudhury: fame and infamy

No conversation about Bishnu Gosh can ignore his most infamous student, Bikram Choudhury.

In the 1970s, Bikram carried Gosh’s teachings to America.
He adapted the system into a 26-posture sequence performed in a heated room, and from there, he built a global empire.

The mirrors, the sweat, the repetition all reflected Gosh’s emphasis on discipline and control. But Bikram added something else: showmanship.
He turned yoga into a brand.

For a time, it worked. Bikram Yoga became a worldwide phenomenon. Celebrities practiced it, studios spread across continents, and the image of yoga as a path to physical perfection reached its peak.

Then came the collapse.
A series of lawsuits and allegations of sexual assault and psychological abuse exposed a darker side of charisma and control.
Bikram fled the United States, and his empire crumbled.

Yet the tragedy runs deeper.
Bikram’s personal downfall tainted the lineage itself, burying the nuance of Gosh’s work under scandal.
The philosophy that strength and awareness could coexist was reduced to a cautionary tale about ego.

Meanwhile in Mysore

While Gosh was redefining yoga in Calcutta, another revolution was unfolding in the royal halls of Mysore Palace.

Supported by the Maharaja, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya was developing his own synthesis of yoga, movement, and breath.
He drew inspiration from classical scriptures, Indian wrestling (kushti), and mallakhamb, a traditional pole and rope discipline that cultivated balance, power, and grace.

His classes for young boys in the palace gymnasium laid the foundation for what we now know as modern postural yoga.
From his students, B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, and Indra Devi, came most of the lineages that define contemporary yoga today.

The Mysore method emphasized vinyasa, breath synchronization, and alignment. It was more fluid, less performative, but equally physical.
In that sense, Krishnamacharya and Gosh were working toward the same goal: to revive the Indian body through movement.

They just took different roads.
One spoke in the language of grace, the other in the language of power.

Pattabhi Jois

Among Krishnamacharya’s students, K. Pattabhi Jois became one of the most influential voices.
He formalized Ashtanga Yoga, a dynamic sequence built on repetition, breath, and inner heat.

Jois often warned his students about the dangers of confusing yoga with physical culture.

“It would be a shame to lose the precious jewel of liberation in the mud of ignorant body building.”

To him, yoga was a sacred fire, not a spectacle. The body was a vessel for purification, not display.

And yet, that statement reveals a deep ambivalence, a fear that the physical could eclipse the spiritual.
It drew a line between muscle and liberation that perhaps was never necessary.

Because when we look back through Indian history, strength and spirituality have always coexisted.

The strength tradition in India

Long before Western gyms arrived, India had akharas, training grounds where wrestlers practiced kushti, a sacred discipline combining physical conditioning, diet, breath control, and moral code.
They lifted stones, wrestled in mud, and treated the body as an offering to the divine.

There was also mallakhamb, the art of balancing, climbing, and hanging from a wooden pole, blending gymnastics and devotion.
These traditions celebrated strength as purity, not ego.

Bishnu Gosh’s vision fits within this lineage.
He didn’t invent the marriage of strength and spirituality, he continued it.
His work was part of a continuum that stretched from the akharas of Varanasi to the yoga studios of the future.

The lost path

If history had unfolded differently,
if Bishnu Gosh had traveled West instead of Yogananda,
if his message had been heard as clearly as Krishnamacharya’s,
perhaps the modern yoga world would not treat strength and stillness as opposites.

Maybe resistance training and meditation would have evolved side by side.
Maybe yoga would have embraced effort without guilt and power without ego.

Instead, we inherited a divided legacy: one path that worships transcendence, another that worships performance, and a silent gap between them.

But that gap is closing.

A return?

Today, a new generation of practitioners is rediscovering what Gosh understood a century ago.
Strength training, calisthenics, mobility work, and mindful resistance are not the enemies of yoga.
They are its evolution.

The body needs resistance to grow resilient.
The mind needs challenge to stay awake.
And both need awareness to remain whole.

Maybe the jewel of liberation was never meant to stay untouched above the mud.
Maybe it was meant to shine through it.

What do you think?
Did yoga lose something when it distanced itself from strength?
Can muscle and mindfulness coexist on the same path?