Modern Bow Posture

Bow Posture, Dhanurasana, in Yoga Mimamsa 1925

Read about the premodern version of Bow Posture, dhanurasana​, here.

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?

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

These premodern prone backbends are not called Bow Posture. By 1925 when Yoga Mimamsa publishes instruction, the modern die for dhanurasana​ seems to be set.

Yoga Mimamsa 1925

Popular Yoga Asanas 1931

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.

Kuvalayananda's book Popular Yoga Asanas from 1931 also includes Bow Posture, which is no surprise since it is drawn largely from issues of Yoga Mimamsa. 

​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

Nearly every modern text that we examined contains the posture, from North India's Shivananda lineage, East India's Ghosh lineage, South India's Krishnamacharya lineages, to Europe.

Selvarajan Yesudian ~1950

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)

All the students of Bishnu Charan Ghosh include Bow Posture in their instructions. This includes Buddha Bose (above), Labanya Palit in 1955, Ghosh himself in 1961 (demonstrated by his daughter Karuna), Dr Gouri Mukerji in 1963, Monotosh Roy in the 60-70s, and Bikram Choudhury in the late 60s.

Labanya Palit, 1955

Karuna Ghosh, 1961

Dr. Gouri Shankar Mukerji, 1963

Monotosh Roy

Bikram Choudhury, ~1968

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)

Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha

Iyengar, in his hugely influential ​Light On Yoga, is specific about where to carry the body's weight and also to keep the knees slightly apart: ​"Do not rest either the ribs or the pelvic bones on the floor. Only the abdomen bears the weight of the body on the floor. While raising the legs do not join them at the knees, for then the legs will not be lifted high enough." (Iyengar 1966: 101-2)

Iyengar 1966

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.

The instruction and performance of Bow Posture has been mostly consistent from about the 1920s. It is still unclear when it transitioned from the premodern, seated version into the prone backbend. Its hyper-modern shift to greater depth that resembles contortion more than dhanurasana is also interesting, but a topic for another time.