Bishnu Charan Ghosh


Bishnu Charan Ghosh, known as B. C. Ghosh, was a Bengali bodybuilder and Hathayogi. He was a younger brother of the yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, who became world-famous through his 1946 book Autobiography of a Yogi. In 1923 he founded the College of Physical Education, Calcutta. His writings influenced the development of modern yoga as exercise in India when they were taken up by Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram Yoga.
The annual yoga championships in Los Angeles are contested for the Bishnu Charan Ghosh Cup, named in his honour.

Life

Bishnu Charan Ghosh was born in Lahore, the youngest of eight children of Bhagabati Charan Ghosh and brother of Mukunda Lal Ghosh, better known by his spiritual name, Paramahansa Yogananda. His parents' guru was Lahiri Mahasaya, who taught Kriya Yoga.
Yogananda introduced Ghosh to yoga at his Ranchi School for Boys in Bengal, where he was one of the first seven pupils. As well as Yogananda's set of 84 "Yogoda" asanas gathered from different sources, his brother taught him the dramatic abdominal muscle isolation exercise traditionally used in hatha yoga as the purification known as nauli; Yogananda had used the exercise to impress Western audiences with his muscle control. In 1923, at the age of twenty, Ghosh opened the College of Physical Education in Calcutta, today run by his granddaughter Muktamala Ghosh under the name Ghosh's Yoga College. In 1925, he trained in physical education at the University of Calcutta, taught according to India's traditional physical culture of training, diet, and lifestyle. The equipment consisted of rough "nal" stones with a hole for use as a handle.
In 1930 he published his book Muscle Control, which relied heavily on the German bodybuilder Maxick 's 1913 book of the same name. The book features his adoptive nephew, Buddha Bose, demonstrating nauli and uddiyana bandha; Bose wrote a manuscript on 84 Asanas, not published until the 21st century.
In 1939 Ghosh went to America and taught at Columbia University, New York. In 1968 he went on a lecture tour of Japan.

Philosophy

Bishnu's muscle control was strongly influenced by Yogananda's Method Yogoda, as described in his 1925 book on that subject, which in turn was based on Maxick's Maxalding technique. This "Body Perfection by Will" relied on the use of weights and special apparatus for musclebuilding. Added to this was the weaving in of traditional asanas from Hatha yoga; he became well-known in India as a Hathayogi, teaching a yoga that was "a fusion of asanas, physical culture, and the muscle manipulation techniques that Ghosh had first learned from his brother".
The yoga researcher Mark Singleton has argued that Ghosh's method contributed significantly to the development of modern postural yoga. It has been stated that Ghosh also influenced the development of Sivananda Yoga's sequence of 12 basic asanas.

Legacy

Ghosh's Yoga College in North Kolkata continues to offer training in therapeutic yoga in the 21st century.
Bikram Choudhury, creator of Bikram Yoga, claimed to have been taught by Ghosh from the age of four. However, he actually began studying yoga in 1969, and he was not instructed by Ghosh directly. His system of yoga was based on Ghosh's writings. Choudhury named the Bishnu Charan Ghosh Cup, awarded annually at the International Yoga Asana Championships in Los Angeles, in Ghosh's honour.

Pupils