Yog-Ganga Centre For Yoga Studies

101 Old Rajpur, Dehradun, India

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Teachers
Swati and Rajiv Chanchani, a husband and wife team are
founder-directors of the Yog-Ganga Centre. They began
studying yoga in 1975 with Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar.
Over the last four decades, Swati and Rajiv have spent
several months each year at the Ramamani Iyengar
Memorial Yoga Institute, Pune learning, practicing,
appreciating, and assisting with the Iyengar family.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Swati and Rajiv were invited to

teach yoga to defense personnel and students at premier
institutions ranging from the National Defence Academy
and the Indian Military Academy to The Doon School
and the Welham Girls School.

In 1995, Swati and Rajiv published Yoga for Children: A

Complete Illustrated Guide to Yoga Including a Manual
for Parents and Teachers. This book has been
acknowledged as a classic and pioneer and has been
reprinted more than thirty-five times and been translated
and published in French, Japanese, Korean, and
Portuguese. Translations in other languages are underway.

In 1990s, Swati and Rajiv made a series of major

breakthroughs by bringing yoga formally into the Indian
educational system as a subject on par with English,
Mathematics, Natural and Social Sciences. In 1999, the
Indian Council for Secondary Education, the nation’s
leading education board accepted their syllabus. Around
the same time they designed and launched a diploma in
yoga for school children. This diploma is today
administered and awarded by Ramanani Iyengar
Memorial Yoga Institute.

Also in the 1990s, Swati and Rajiv periodically advised

the Indian government. Such consultancy included the
conceptualization of the international yoga week at
Rishikesh, the development and release of the nation’s
first ever postage stamps of Yoga, and development of a
special exhibition on Himalayan biodiversity and
folklore.

Since the opening of the Dehradun campus of the Yog-

Ganga Centre in 2001, Swati and Rajiv have been
designing and teaching a remarkable series of yoga
intensives. These intensives have been recognized as
authoritative and appealing, enjoyable and rigorous. In
these intensives they have been tracing the roots of yoga
in mythology, legend, and history, and including many
stories and tales bringing out the quality of and
inspiration for postures. They have also been stressing the
links of moral and ethical values implicit in the practice
of yoga, including non-violence, truthfulness, and
contentment. In addition, they have been highlighting
geometrical forms and precision in the postures so that
their students can relate abstract concepts through what
they have learnt through their body movements.

Swati and Rajiv have also been continuously promoting

and refining Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar’s skillful and
pioneering adjustment of asanas to improve the health of
individuals irrespective of their age and condition. They
have been doing so by carefully using props, modifying
individual asanas, designing dynamic sequences, and
integrating asana and pranayama practice with the
adoption of other components of the eight fold path of
ashtanga yoga and its sister science, Ayurveda.

In more recent years, Swati and Rajiv have been

extensively studying relationships among and between
Indian aesthetics and yoga philosophy and practice. This
pursuit has led them to read extensively, confer with
scholars, visit museums worldwide, and scour hundreds
of places of historical and cultural significance in India
and to build up an extensive archive of representations of
asanas in medieval Indian sculpture and painting.

Ultimately, the creation of archive has furthered their own

yoga practice.

They are continuing to design new intensives at the Yog-

Ganga Centre and at forums worldwide, and mentor their
own students, some of whom have become teachers in
their own right. Swati and Rajiv are also editing and
writing articles and books, growing herbs, and medicinal
plants. Finally, they are continuing to advise and assist
friends and neighbors, government agencies, and non-
government organizations seeking to conserve Rajpur’s
rich historical fabric, biodiversity, and its renown as a
sanctuary for spiritual seekers.

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