COIMBATORE: Famed Yoga teacher and Padma Shri awardee V. Nanammal passed away here on Saturday. She was running 100. Her end came at 12.30 pm. Her family said she had been confined to her bed for about a month due to a fall she suffered. Popularly known as ‘Yoga grandma’, Nanammal taught yoga to hundreds of students, and many of them are currently yoga instructors.
Despite hailing from a family of agriculturists, she started practicing Yoga after watching her grandparents doing Yoga at their house when she was a little girl. She 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 awarded Padma Shri in 2018 in recognition of her talent, skill and excellence in yoga. Nanammal 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.
She was born on Feb 1920 and started practising yoga from the age of 10. She was married to a Siddha practitioner. Thanks to her enthusiasm, her family members also learnt yoga and now, over 35 members of Nanammal’s family teach yoga to others. Her cremation will take place at the Thudiyalur electric cremation ground on Sunday.
