Swami Ranganathananda

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

He was born on 15 December 1908 at Trikkur, a village near Thrissur in Kerala, and joined the Order at Mysore in 1926, aged eighteen. What follows is a map of the twentieth century's worst years drawn by someone who kept turning up in them. Rangoon from 1939, as the war closed in. Karachi from 1942 — and from there, during the Bengal famine of 1943, he arranged the shipping of 1,250 tons of rice across India to Calcutta. New Delhi from 1949, working among Partition refugees in the camps outside the capital. Then Calcutta from 1962, and Hyderabad after that. And all through it, lectures. He spoke for decades to civil-service probationers, defence trainees, scientists and students, in their own vocabulary — the Upaniṣads presented as a discipline of thought rather than a matter of belief, which is why audiences of engineers sat still for him. The Message of the Upanishads and Eternal Values for a Changing Society came out of that work; so did his commentary on the Gītā. He became the thirteenth President of the Ramakrishna Order, and the Mission's work under him was recognised with the Gandhi Peace Prize. He died in 2005, at ninety-six. A long life, a lot of rice, and a body of exposition that treats the reader as capable of following an argument to the end.

The turn it rests on

He made Vedānta sound like a discipline of thought rather than a matter of belief.

What was taught

Interpreted the Upanishads alongside modern science and management for lay audiences worldwide.