A doctor who quit medicine became the yoga guru nicknamed Swami Propagandananda
Kuppuswami spent ten years as a physician in British Malaya, treating poor patients for free, before deciding medicine healed only the surface. Renamed Sivananda, he settled by the Ganges at Rishikesh and wrote over 200 books. His eagerness to spread yoga with modern publicity earned him a teasing nickname: Swami Propagandananda.
He was born on 8 September 1887 in Pattamadai, in Tamil Nadu's Tirunelveli district, the youngest of three children in a Brahmin family; his father, a revenue officer, was devoted to Shiva. A bright student and keen gymnast, he trained in medicine at Tanjore and ran a medical journal called Ambrosia before sailing for Malaya. In 1923 he gave up practice and went home, and the next year in Rishikesh his guru Vishvananda Saraswati initiated him as a monk. He kept nursing the sick through years of austerities, and in 1927 used insurance money to open a charitable dispensary at Lakshman Jhula.
In 1936 he founded the Divine Life Society beside the Ganges, handing out spiritual literature for free, and its headquarters, Sivananda Ashram at Muni Ki Reti, became his home. More institutions followed: an Ayurvedic pharmacy in 1945, a federation of wandering ascetics two years later, and a forest academy for yoga and Vedanta in 1948. He called his approach the Yoga of Synthesis, blending the paths of action, devotion, knowledge and meditation, and he insisted on a strict lacto-vegetarian diet.
Critics disliked how widely and how modernly he promoted yoga. His Belgian follower André Van Lysebeth explained that Sivananda wanted a practice anyone could do, mixing a few postures with some breathing and meditation. A national tour in 1950 planted branches of his society across India.
His influence travelled mostly through students. Vishnudevananda founded the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, which spread his name worldwide but are separate from the Divine Life Society's ashrams, while Satyananda started the Bihar School of Yoga and Chinmayananda the Chinmaya Mission. Sivananda died beside the Ganges on 14 July 1963, and Chidananda led the society from that year until 2008.
Source: Sivananda Saraswati
