- Nanammal from Coimbatore, 99 year-old was India’s oldest yoga teacher popularly known as Yoga Grandma’.
Padma Shri awardee V. Nanammal was India’s oldest yoga teacher. Popularly known as ‘yoga grandma,’ she could do more than 50 yoga poses, including the sirsasana (headstand), the paschimottanasana (seated forward bend) and the mayurasana (peacock pose), all in her usual attire —a simple pink saree. She taught the art to lakhs of students, some of whom went on to become instructors around the world. The ‘yoga grandma’ taught a million students over 45 years, attempted the Guinness world record, and practiced the art till her last days. She had even attempted the Guinness Book of Records by teaching yoga to 20,000 students in Coimbatore.
Born in February 1920, in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, the ‘yoga grandma’ started with a yoga routine at a very young age. She started practicing yoga when she was eight. And she learned yoga from her father, who was a martial artist. Her grandparents also practiced yoga regularly, in the evening, after returning home from the farms. Born to an agricultural family based at Zamin Kaliyapuram, she moved to Periya Negamam after her marriage to a Siddha practitioner and finally settled down in Ganapathy.
Her first student, Balakrishnan said, was her mother-in-law, following her marriage at the age of 18 years. “She suffered from serious back pain, she was her first patient. Over time, the mother-in-law recovered,” he said.
She never stopped practicing yoga at any point in her life. That was the secret of her health. She used to wake up at 5 am, using a neem stick to brush her teeth, practicing yoga, followed by a breakfast consisting of kanji (a rich, water-based liquid diet). She wasn’t a fan of white sugar and instead relied on jaggery for her diet. She was a strict vegetarian and ate different vegetables every day for lunch. At night, V. Balakrishnan said that his mother ate only fruits and drank a glass of milk. Now, her entire family follows the same diet.
Nanammal died at the age of 99, three months short of 100 years, on 26 October 2019. She was bedridden after suffering a fall. Speaking to Wings of Vision magazine, her son V. Balakrishnan said, “Mother taught yoga to over 100 students daily at our centre till the day she was bedridden. In fact, at 99, she travelled with me to Malaysia, Singapore, and Muscat and performed yoga”.
“She had an excellent memory and eyesight till the day she died. She made it a point to practice sirsasana every day — this is what kept her healthy,” he added. V. Nanammal and her family had started the Ozone Yoga centre in 1972. Balakrishnan said that the centre teaches yoga in around 980 schools in Tamil Nadu and also teaches Silambam martial arts, where the yoga guru dedicates two hours during the day for this purpose.
She won the Nari Shakti Puraskar award on International Women’s Day in 2016, and the Karnataka government awarded her the Yoga Ratna in 2017. In total, she had won 150 awards and six gold medals at the national level. While receiving the Padma Shri award in 2018, her son told us that she was “very happy that this recognition had come for making all those she teaches yoga remain healthy.”
According to the well-known yoga guru B.K.S. Iyengar, “Yoga is like music. The rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul creates the symphony of life.” Practicing yoga benefits both the mind and body, and nobody is a better example than 99-year old V. Nanammal from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu to throw light on the advantages of yoga.
