Manibhai Haribhai Desai (1897–1989), known as (Shri) Yogendra was an Indian yoga guru, author, poet, researcher and was one of the important figures in the modern revival and transformation of hatha yoga, both in India and United States. He was the founder of The Yoga Institute, the oldest organized yoga centre in the world, established in 1918. He is often referred as the Father of Modern Yoga Renaissance. He was one of the figures responsible for reviving the practice of asanas and making yoga accessible to people other than renunciates.

Yogendra innovated modern methods to teach yoga, initiating research in yoga, particularly in the field of yoga therapy. He authored several books on yoga and started the journal Yoga in 1933. He was also a poet, writing under the pen name 'Mastamani'. He translated Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali into Gujarati.

Yogendra was born as Manibhai Desai in an Anavil Brahmin family on 18 November 1897 in a village near Surat, Gujarat. He was affectionately called Mogha ("priceless one") in his childhood. His father Haribhai Jivanji Desai was a school teacher. His mother died when he was three years old.^{[citation needed]}

At the age of eighteen in 1916, after distinguishing himself in the Amalsad English School, Yogendra attended St. Xavier's College in Bombay. He felt homesick and fell into depression and lost his interest in studies. At the urging of his roommate, On 26 August 1916, Yogendra visited the Dharamshala of Paramahamsa Madhavadasaji at Madhav Baug, regardless of his robust suspicion of sannyasis and sadhus. However, in Paramahamsa ni Prasadi (1917), he wrote that his misgivings disappeared "as our eyes met" and as it turns out, Madhavadasaji was equally struck by Yogendra's qualities as a capable disciple.

After a period of courtship through letters, Yogendra left his college and went to Madhavadasaji's Ashram in Malsar, near Vadodara in late 1916. He received special attention and it was clear that he was being educated and groomed to be Madhavadasaji's successor. Yogendra learned Yoga, much of the teaching being on the practical and pragmatic use of Yoga and its application in sickness and suffering. His training in the Ashram was centered around yogic 'natural health cures' administered to patients in the ashram's sick ward. Yogendra left the Ashram after more than two years.

On 25 November 1918, Yogendra established The Yoga Institute at the residence of Dadabhai Naoroji at Versova Beach in Bombay (now Mumbai). A year later in 1919, Yogendra left for Europe and the United States, with the aim of popularizing Yoga and set up a branch of the institute, The Yoga Institute of America at Harriman in New York. His system of asanas, which helped to create the modern yoga movement, was influenced by the physical culture of Europeans such as Max Müller, author of the 1891 book Physical Religion. Yogendra began the process of "domesticating" hatha yoga, seeking scientific evidence for yoga's health benefits. This helped to undo the negative image of yoga and asana practice.

In US, among the people Yogendra met was Benedict Lust, one of the founders of naturopathic medicine. Benedict Lust saw the value of Hatha Yoga for his work and studied it with him. Yogendra stayed there working with a number of Avant-garde doctors such as John Harvey Kellogg and Benedict Lust. Along with the early experiments on yoga, he finished his first books while in US, Light on Hatha Yoga and a volume on Rabindranath Tagore.

He went back to India less than 5 years later; he tried to return to the USA, but was thwarted by the restrictive immigration legislation of 1924.