Steve Jobs ordered 500 copies of this guru's autobiography for his own memorial
Paramahansa Yogananda sailed to Boston in 1920 as a delegate to a religious congress and stayed for three decades. He dined at Coolidge's White House, packed lecture halls, drew FBI surveillance, and wrote Autobiography of a Yogi, which has sold more than four million copies.
Born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur in 1893, he was the fourth of eight children of a senior railway official, and the family moved between Lahore, Bareilly and Kolkata. As a teenager he sought out holy men across India. At 17, in 1910, he met Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri and trained under him for ten years at Serampore and Puri, graduating from Serampore College and taking monastic vows in 1915 as Swami Yogananda Giri. Two years later he opened a boys' school combining modern lessons with yoga, later moved to Ranchi; it grew into the Yogoda Satsanga Society of India.
His lineage sent him west to spread Kriya Yoga. After a two-month voyage on The City of Sparta he spoke at the Boston congress, founded the Self-Realization Fellowship, toured the continent in 1924 and in 1925 set up headquarters in Los Angeles. Admirers included the soprano Amelita Galli-Curci and Mark Twain's daughter Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch, and in 1927 Calvin Coolidge received him, making him the first prominent Indian hosted at the White House.
America was not uniformly welcoming. British and American authorities, uneasy about Indian independence politics, kept a confidential file on him from 1926 to 1937. In Miami in 1928 the police chief barred his events, and a British consular officer explained that locals regarded him as a coloured man at risk of violence. A former colleague sued him in 1929 over wages, and decades later a paternity claim was dropped after DNA tests at two laboratories found no family link.
The Los Angeles Times called him the century's first superstar guru. His book, published in 1946, was a favourite of Elvis Presley. By his death in 1952, the fellowship had more than 100 centres in India and the United States, and yoga experts regard him as the father of yoga in the West.
Source: Paramahansa Yogananda
