Tamil Nadu’s famed yoga instructor and Padma Shri awardee Nanammal passed away in Coimbatore on Saturday. She was 100.
Popularly known as the ‘Yoga grandma’, Nanammal taught yoga to hundreds of students, many of whom are currently yoga instructors, as per reports. Hailing from a family of agriculturists, she started doing Yoga after watching her grandparents doing yoga at their house when she was a little girl.
Born on Feb 1920, she started practising yoga from the age of 10 and retained her passion for yoga even after she got married to a Siddha practitioner. She would do yoga at least once every day. Thanks to her enthusiasm, her family members also learnt yoga and now, over 35 members of Nanammal’s family teach yoga to others. She led a life as close as possible to nature, which inspired many to visit the city and get yoga training under her.
Nanammal could do over 50 yoga poses, including the peacock pose, the bridge pose, the headstand and the raised lotus pose, even when she a nonagenarian. She would perform yogasanas wearing a saree. She was also involved in creating awareness among girl students about yoga’s role in addressing health-related problems.
In recognition of her talent, skill and excellence in yoga, Nanammal was awarded the Padma Shri in 2018 and also won the Nari Shakti Puraskar award, which she received from the President of India on International Women’s Day in 2016. She was also conferred with the Yoga Ratna award by the government of Karnataka in 2017. Nanammal had also made an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records by teaching yoga to 20,000 students and enthusiasts in Coimbatore.
Her cremation will take place at the Thudiyalur electric cremation ground on Sunday.
Here is an older video that TNM had done about her: