Eugenie and her mother escaped to Latvia as the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, losing the family fortune; in 1920 they moved to Poland, and in 1921 to Berlin, where she became an actress and dancer.

[5][6][7][8][9] In 1926, attracted by a notice in a bookshop in Tallinn, she went to hear Jiddu Krishnamurti at a Theosophical Society meeting in the Netherlands;[9] his chanting of Sanskrit mantras around a campfire had a powerful effect on her.

In Berlin, she worked as an actor in The Blue Bird, touring Europe, and accepted a proposal of marriage from the banker Herman Bolm, on condition she could first go to India; he agreed and paid for the trip.

At the Theosophical Society in Adyar (Madras, now Chennai), dancing "an Indian temple dance", she met Jawaharlal Nehru, starting a long-term friendship, and the Indian film director Bhagwati Mishra, who gave her a part in Sher-e-Arab (Arabian Knight): the 1930 premiere made her a film star in India, under a new stage name, Indra Devi.

She was the first foreign woman among his students in the yogasala in the Mysore Palace, studying alongside B.K.S Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois who went on to become world-famous yoga teachers.

[6][15] The classes began with 20 minutes of relaxation in shavasana, followed by bridge, shoulderstand, gentle backbends such as cobra pose, lotus position (including leaning right forward into Yogamudrasana), and headstand, against a wall for beginners.

She was hoping to stay in Kashmir to teach yoga in a centre to be run by the Cambodian monk Bellong Mahathera, but her mother called her back to Shanghai, where Devi's house was being requisitioned by the army in the Chinese Civil War.

She claimed later that she had wanted to return to India, but she obtained a United States visa, and sailed on the troopship USS General W. H. Gordon to San Francisco at the end of 1947.

[18] In California, assisted by her experience as a diplomat's wife with a patrician manner and the natural confidence of the wealthy, she met the author and philosopher Aldous Huxley and Krishnamurti, giving her access to spiritually-inclined Americans; an especially valuable contact was the diet and health guru Paul Bragg, who advised film and stage stars.

[23][24] Elliott Goldberg gives a different explanation for her success, attributing it to her packaging of yoga for women as a "beauty secret, youth elixir, and health tonic".

[a] Also among her students were Ramon Novarro, Robert Ryan, Yul Brynner, Jennifer Jones, and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who brought Iyengar to the West.

[31] Devi's biographer, Michelle Goldberg, describes Yoga for Americans as having "a chipper, secular practicality perfectly calibrated for Eisenhower's America.

[6][33] In 1960 she visited the USSR, seeing Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) for the first time in 40 years, and meeting the government ministers Andrei Gromyko and Alexei Kosygin at the Indian ambassador's reception at the Sovetskaya Hotel.