Ten Years of Friendship at the Taj Mahal

In 2015, we arrived in Kolkata, India and knocked on the door at Ghosh’s College of India. We introduced ourselves as students of yoga and visitors to Kolkata. We were working on the Buddha Bose manuscript project with Jerome Armstrong, and knew essentially nothing about what we were getting ourselves into or how the yoga world and our lives would change in the coming years. 

Now, ten years later we are celebrating a decade of connection, friendship and collaboration with the very people who answered the door that day: Muktamala (granddaughter of Bishnu Ghosh), Shantanu, & Srinjoy Mitra. 

We are here in India for the month promoting Strong Woman Reba Rakshit, and very kindly, the Mitra family offered that we all go visit the Taj Mahal together. It was a spectacular experience. Not only did we see one of the world’s iconic monuments, but we discussed the current yoga landscape. We talked about what might be next in the yoga world, and how we can work to preserve Ghosh’s Yoga College, which is over 100 years old and holds various histories of yoga across a century. 

Mrs Mitra works as the current principal of Ghosh’s College. We all discussed how yoga may be changing (as it always has been) but how there is value in knowing where yoga has come from and learning specific methods like the therapeutic, prescriptive yoga of Ghosh’s College that she teaches. 

Yoga has roots and has histories. Even as it changes, we hope people will remember and seek out an understanding of where it came from.