India Devi's fascination with India began at 15 when she read a book by poet-philosopher
Rabindranath Tagore and a yoga instruction book by
Yogi Ramacharaka. In Berlin, she worked as an actor in
The Blue Bird, touring Europe, and accepted a proposal of marriage from the banker Herman Bolm, on condition she could first go to India; he agreed and paid for the trip. She set off on 17 November 1927, crossing India from south to north, wearing a
sari for the first time, sitting on the floor and eating with her fingers. She came back three months later, a changed woman, speaking only of India, and returned Bolm's engagement ring. She soon went back to India, selling her valuables to pay for the trip. At the
Theosophical Society in Adyar (Madras, now
Chennai), dancing "an Indian temple dance", she met
Jawaharlal Nehru, starting a long-term friendship, and the
Indian film director Bhagwati Mishra, who gave her a part in
Sher-e-Arab (Arabian Knight): the 1930 premiere made her a film star in India, under a new stage name, Indra Devi. In 1930, she married Jan Strakaty, a commercial attache to the
Czechoslovak consulate in
Bombay, and for some years lived as a society hostess there. When she was leaving India to follow her husband to China, Krishnamacharya asked her to work as a yoga teacher there.
India and China Her husband died unexpectedly in 1946, Devi taught her own form of
hatha yoga, with
asanas (postures) and
pranayama (breath control); she avoided spiritual teaching, which she preferred to leave to yoga gurus. Her teaching style was in
Stefanie Syman's words "gentle and even relaxing". She was almost immediately successful in attracting leading stars, including men as well as women; Syman notes that "she could charm the pants off men". Elliott Goldberg gives a different explanation for her success, attributing it to her packaging of
yoga for women as a "beauty secret, youth elixir, and health tonic". More generally, in his view, Devi saw
yoga as a remedy for anxiety and stress, noting that this
transformed yoga from something that dissolved the ego to something that strengthened it, because, he commented, Americans did want to change "but not all that much". Devi's advocacy of yoga for stress relief contributed, in Goldberg's view, to the widespread acceptance of
yoga in America, and earned her the nickname "first lady of yoga". She taught yoga to many celebrities including
Greta Garbo,
Eva Gabor, and
Gloria Swanson. Also among her students were
Ramon Novarro,
Robert Ryan,
Yul Brynner,
Jennifer Jones, and the violinist
Yehudi Menuhin, who brought Iyengar to the West. She later recorded several instructional talks on yoga, including "Renew Your Life with Yoga."
Latin America In 1961, Knauer bought Devi a large
ranch near
Tecate in Mexico; she opened the Indra Devi Foundation there. From 1966, she became close to the Hindu guru
Sathya Sai Baba, and she travelled often from Tecate to
Bangalore and
Puttaparthi. She closed the Tecate operation in 1977 and moved with her very ill husband to Bangalore. In 1984 she and Knauer made a trip to Sri Lanka, where he died. In 1985 she moved to
Argentina. In 1987 she was elected president of honour of the International Yoga Federation, and of the Latin American Union of Yoga under the presidency of Swami Maitreyananda at
Montevideo,
Uruguay. She died in
Buenos Aires in 2002. ==Legacy==