For the past 100 years or so, Bow Posture is done lying on the belly, holding the feet or ankles, and bending the body backward, as pictured above in 1925. Prior to that, the posture seems to have been done sitting and pulling the feet toward the ears. The question remains: Where and when did the posture transition into its modern iteration?
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Postures done lying on the belly and grabbing the ankles from behind have existed for at least a couple hundred years. The 18th century Gheranda Samhita has a position called Ushtrasana, Camel Posture, that we wrote about here.
In South India, the Sritattvanidhi contains a posture called Nyubjasana. It is instructed: “Lie face down. Cross the heels and take hold of the toes with the hands and roll. This is nyubjasana, the face-down asana” (Sjoman 1999: 84). This text is likely from the 19th century and seems to have been influential at the Mysore palace where Krishnamacharya innovated many elements of modern postural yoga. Interestingly, the instruction is to “roll” the body back and forth rather than hold in stillness. |
Camel Posture as instructed in the Gheranda Samhita
Nyubjasana as instructed in the Sritattvanidhi
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Yoga Mimamsa 1925
Popular Yoga Asanas 1931
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The earliest modern representation of Bow Posture known to us is from 1925 in Yoga Mimamsa. It is pictured at the top of this article and to the left. “It will readily be seen that this posture is a combination of the two exercises Bhujangasana [Cobra Posture] and Salabhasana [Locust Posture]”. This posture is said to accomplish the benefits of those others but to a lesser degree.
In its early days, Yoga Mimamsa was a proponent of more traditional yogic practices and unsupportive of the increasingly exercise-focused iterations of yoga that were developing. This leads us to believe that Bow Posture was accepted as part of the yogic canon, even though we discussed its older history last time. Contrarily, the insistence that Bow Posture is not a useful as bhujangasana or shalabhasana may suggest that it was not as established as these other, older postures. |
Krishnamacharya’s Yoga Makaranda in 1934 is curiously devoid of the posture. It makes one wonder about the influence of the
Sritattvanidhi above.|
From 1930 onward Bow Posture seems quite set in the canon of yogis everywhere. Shivananda’s 1931 Yoga Asanas contains it. In many ways this work draws from Kuvalayananda and Yoga Mimamsa, though some new research shows that Shivananda was also influenced by Jain asana practices.
Buddha Bose’s Yoga Asanas in 1938 contains the posture. This is not surprising because of Bose’s clear influence by Shivananda and Kuvalayananda. Bose’s Bow Posture is pictured to the right. Interestingly, Bose also includes Ushtrasana, the Camel Posture, as a prone backbend similar to the Gheranda Samhita. |
Buddha Bose 1938
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Selvarajan Yesudian ~1950
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One of the most interesting variants actually comes from a European publication in the 1940-50s by Selvarajan Yesudian and Elisabeth Haich. Yesudian was raised in India and moved to Hungary in the 1930s, taking yoga instruction with him.
Their text encourages rocking in the posture, recalling the Sritattvanidhi‘s instruction to “roll” the body back and forth: “The effect of the exercise can be heightened if we rock gently to and fro during the posture.” (Yesudian 1953: 133) |
Labanya Palit, 1955
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Karuna Ghosh, 1961
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Dr. Gouri Shankar Mukerji, 1963
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Monotosh Roy
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Bikram Choudhury, ~1968
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A couple further interesting instructions: A student of Shivananda wrote an encyclopedic book in the late 60s called Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha. Its instruction of Bow Posture is quite specific about which muscles to use: “In the final position the head is tilted back and the abdomen supports the entire body of the floor. The only muscular contraction is in the legs; the back and arms remain relaxed.” (APMB: 209)
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Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha
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Iyengar 1966
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Iyengar’s instruction to keep the knees apart is in direct opposition to that in Yoga Mimamsa in 1925, which says, “As the muscles become more and more elastic, the knees should be drawn closer, till at last they are made to stand together, carrying the intra-abdominal pressure to its highest limit.” You can see the knees together in the picture above from Yoga Mimamsa.
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