Body guru: A century ago, this muscleman used yoga instead of steroids

Nearly a century ago, in an era before steroids, there was an Indian who was both a yoga master and an accomplished bodybuilder. Named Bishnu Charan Ghosh, he was the younger brother of Paramahansa Yogananda (originally Mukunda lal Ghosh), famously the author of perennial spiritual best-seller, Autobiography of a Yogi.

Ghosh has seen a revival, most recently during the summer of 2024, when fitness coach and influencer Jeff Cavaliere shared several black and white images on Instagram demonstrating the spectacular bodies of Ghosh and his students, citing them as examples of what pre-steroid bodybuilders achieved. 

The images were from the 1930s, but what Cavaliere did not mention and was perhaps unaware of was that some were from an era when Indians in a variety of fields were influencing the modern world in pre-social-media ways. 

The images (other than one of Eugen Sandow) were of Ghosh, his disciple Buddha Bose, and Ghosh’s students. They were among the earliest exponents of yoga who took their knowledge across the seas and were received with significant interest in Europe, America, Japan, and elsewhere. 

They demonstrated their skills at important gatherings in the US at places such as Columbia University, while Japan even honored Ghosh with a tribute postage stamp in 2017. 

While names such as BKS Iyengar (1918-2014) and Bikram Choudhury (founder of Bikram Yoga) are now integral to the global yoga story, the history of Ghosh, Buddha Bose and the Calcutta legacy was unfortunately less spoken about for a long time. 

Some of the images Cavaliere used are from Ghosh’s first book, Muscle Control & Barbell Exercise, published in 1930 with Keshub Chandra Sen Gupta. Though this history was mostly forgotten, images like those of Ghosh and his students continue to feed people’s curiosity. 

In November 2013, American writer and yoga enthusiast Jerome Armstrong came across one such image in a Smithsonian building in Washington DC that marked the beginning of his journey into this history. 

The images on display tracked the historical roots of yoga as it morphed from its classical practice in India into a modern worldwide phenomenon. He bought a commemorative book, Yoga: The Art of Transformation.

“In the chapter on the origins of yoga asana practice was a full-page photo of Buddha Bose. Beneath the photo was a caption: Buddha Bose, a student of yoga master Bishnu Ghosh, shows his skills at a yoga exercise demonstration, London, ca. 1930s. The photo of Buddha was phenomenal; he was performing a difficult abdominal muscle control posture,” says Armstrong. 

He was initially intrigued by the lack of detail on something so spectacular. Later, Armstrong found Bose’s unpublished manuscript. This document, an entire album of postures titled, Yoga Asanas, remained with Bose’s family in London for decades and was much later found with an art collector. When Armstrong found this, he made up his mind to write a book titled, Calcutta Yoga.

The book took Armstrong to Kolkata and marked a new beginning in interest in the history of yoga from the city, and Ghosh’s yoga college that still functions with students from across India and beyond.  

“One reason for writing the book was that I was fascinated by this history. There was also a sense of injustice at how Bikram Choudhury, who rose to the pinnacle of fame following this tradition, did little for the world to know about Ghosh’s yoga college in Kolkata or his legacy,” says Armstrong. “Interestingly, while I was  writing the book, Choudhury’s influence was ebbing because of his cases of abuse, and Bishnu Charan Ghosh and the Kolkata legacy was once again being talked about.”

Contrary to the somewhat orthodox image of yoga gurus, the phase in which these popular photos were taken, Ghosh was heavily into bodybuilding. He was influenced by bodybuilders such as Walter Chit Tun and Eugen Sandow, who were a global sensation in the early 1900s. 

The tradition of yoga came to him from his brother Yogananda, himself an extremely popular guru. This combination of two traditions made Ghosh’s approach to exercise unique. He broke it down as resistance training for strength, and yoga for internal health. 

In this approach to exercise or knowledge in general, Ghosh was also a product of his time in Bengal, where secular nationalism was finding a home in the akhadas (gyms) and becoming the meeting point of global knowledge and Indian traditions, explains Ida Jo Pajunen, a writer, researcher and yoga teacher. 

The social, political and physical movements were very closely knit. One of India’s greatest spiritual leaders, Swami Vivekananda, lived in the same neighbourhood as Ghosh and was known to visit akhadas.   

Pajunen says that Ghosh became one of the leaders of a physical culture boom in Kolkata which coincided with the nationalist sentiment. The texts were now in Bengali and English, making it more accessible than the older Sanskrit texts. Ghosh also mentions secular nationalism in his book Muscle Control and Barbell Exercises, dedicating it to the Young Bengal movement which rose in opposition to orthodox Hinduism in the 1830s. 

Another shift in this era was that women, who were previously not encouraged to practice hatha yoga, were now being celebrated as teachers and practitioners. One such woman was Ghosh’s student Reba Rakshit, who is the subject of Pajunen’s book, Strong Woman, published earlier this year. One of Rakshit’s well documented stunts was a full-grown elephant walking over her chest.

“Ghosh’s initial fame was partly because of the incredible stunts his students were pulling off with their skills in muscle control,” says Pajunen. “He also produced several bodybuilding stars like Monostosh Roy who became the first Asian to win the Mr Universe title.” 

Though his practice involved a combination of yoga and strength-building exercises, he started writing about the importance of asanas much later. We get to know many of his views on yoga from his disciple Buddha Bose’s writing, which mentions that Ghosh believed that the proper practice of yoga asanas can increase longevity and was a natural way to strengthen all living or atrophying muscle fibres and tissues. 

At Ghosh Yoga college this is the approach that is still followed, says Muktamala Mitra, granddaughter of Ghosh, who now is in charge of the institution.

“The emphasis here is on curative or therapeutic aspects of Yoga. There is an emphasis on a holistic total condition of the individual so that a prescription or list of Yoga asanas can be prepared. All students and teachers here follow that,” she says. 

Mitra says that the college still welcomes regular local and international students. Some come with pains and physical issues or just to get fitter and some come to study the practice and become trainers. 

Though the scientific basis of such therapy remains to be proven, this approach towards physical well-being still has many loyalists. One of them is celebrated Bengali actor Tota Roychowdhury, who practices yoga three times a week for an hour.

Growing up in Kolkata, he learnt yoga from his mother, never quite realizing which school he was following. 

“As a teenager, I used to play football and was working towards becoming a professional, it was this yoga practice twice a week that kept me relatively injury free,” he says.  

Roychowdhury even trained with weights at one of the centers started by Ghosh. But it was only much later that he started finding out about the history of Ghosh and the others. 

“When I look back, I am amazed at how ahead of his times Ghosh was. He was combining multiple disciplines nearly a century before it became a trend and producing strength athletes and bodybuilders who were shocking the world,” he says.