yoga represented a trend towards the democratization of yoga insights and religion similar to the Bhakti movement. It eliminated the need for "either ascetic renunciation or priestly intermediaries, ritual paraphernalia and sectarian initiations". This led to its broad historic popularity in India. Later in the 20th-century, states Mallinson, this disconnect of Haṭha yoga from religious aspects and the democratic access of Haṭha yoga enabled it to spread worldwide. Between the 17th and 19th-century, however, the various urban Hindu and Muslim elites and ruling classes viewed Yogis with derision. They were persecuted during the rule of Aurangzeb; this ended a long period of religious tolerance that had defined the rule of his predecessors beginning with Akbar, who famously studied with the yogis and other mystics. Haṭha yoga remained popular in rural India. Negative impression for the Hatha yogis continued during the British colonial rule era. According to Mark Singleton, this historical negativity and colonial antipathy likely motivated Swami Vivekananda to make an emphatic distinction between "merely physical exercises of Haṭha yoga" and the "higher spiritual path of Raja yoga". This common disdain by the officials and intellectuals slowed the study and adoption of Haṭha yoga. A well-known school of Haṭha yoga from the 20th-century is the Divine Life Society founded by Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh (1887–1963) and his many disciples including, among others, Swami Vishnu-devananda – founder of International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres; Swami Satyananda – of the Bihar School of Yoga; and Swami Satchidananda of Integral Yoga. The Bihar School of Yoga has been one of the largest Haṭha yoga teacher training centers in India but is little known in Europe and the Americas. Theos Casimir Bernard's 1943 book Hatha Yoga: The Report of A Personal Experience provides an informative but fictionalised account of traditional Haṭha yoga as a spiritual path. Yoga as exercise Yoga as exercise, of the type seen in the West, has been greatly influenced by Swami Kuvalayananda and his student Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who taught from 1924 until his death in 1989. Both Kuvalayananda and Krishnamacharya combined asanas from Haṭha yoga with gymnastic exercises from the physical culture of the time, dropping most of its religious aspects, to develop a flowing style of physical yoga that placed little or no emphasis on Haṭha yoga's spiritual goals. Among Krishnamacharya's students prominent in popularizing yoga in the West were K. Pattabhi Jois famous for popularizing the vigorous Ashtanga Vinyasa