There are two entirely separate populations at Neyyar Dam on any given morning, occupying the same lakeside and largely unaware of each other. One is queuing for boat tickets with children. The other has been awake since before five, sitting in silence.
February 1978
The Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Dhanwantari Ashram was inaugurated in February 1978 on a wooded tract beside the reservoir, by Swami Vishnudevananda — a disciple of Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, and the man who carried that lineage abroad.
Vishnudevananda is an interesting figure to have chosen this spot. He had spent much of the 1960s and 1970s establishing Sivananda centres in the West, and he is remembered for a strain of activism that sat oddly with the popular image of a yoga teacher — flying light aircraft over conflict zones on peace missions among them. The Neyyar ashram became the movement’s principal Indian base.
What it does
The ashram is best known internationally for its teacher-training programme, which draws students from around the world for intensive residential courses, alongside shorter yoga vacations open to visitors.
The daily shape of it is classical and demanding rather than recreational: a pre-dawn start, satsang with meditation and chanting, two long asana sessions, karma yoga — assigned work around the ashram — and two vegetarian meals, with no eating between them. Silence at certain hours. The point is not comfort.
It follows its own schedule and its own rules, and it is a residential institution rather than an attraction. Anyone wanting to stay or attend should contact the ashram directly and well ahead; turning up at the gate as a sightseer is not the way in.
Why here
The siting makes more sense the longer you look at it. A wooded tract at the edge of a protected catchment, an hour from a state capital with an international airport, on the shore of a large body of quiet water backed by forested ridges — that is close to an ideal specification for a residential retreat that needs to be both remote and reachable.
It also arrived at a particular moment. The dam had been finished twenty years earlier, in 1958; the crocodile centre had opened the year before, in 1977; the lion safari park was still seven years away. The ashram landed in the middle of Neyyar’s transformation from irrigation works into destination, and it is the one element of that transformation that has neither faded nor emptied out.
Sharing a lakeside
The juxtaposition is the thing most worth noticing on a visit, and it costs nothing. Within a few hundred metres of each other you have a 1958 masonry dam wall, a forest sanctuary of some 128 square kilometres, a family attraction park, and an internationally known centre for classical yoga — none of them planned in relation to any of the others.
For an ordinary day visitor the practical upshot is small: the ashram is not somewhere to wander into, and its students are not part of the scenery. But knowing it is there changes the register of the place a little. The queue for the boat is not the only thing happening at Neyyar Dam, and it is not even the oldest.