A. K. Mozumdar

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Akhoy Kumar Mozumdar (1864-1953) was a lecturer and writer of the New Thought Movement during the first half of twentieth-century America. Mozumdar once enjoyed a large following of students and regular readers of his books and pamphlets.

Contents

[edit] Biography

A.K. Mozumdar was born near Calcutta, India, the son of an attorney father and a deeply religious mother. As a young man he travelled extensively in India, China and Palestine in search of spiritual understanding. Arriving in Seattle in 1903, he worked to improve his English language skills and addressed curious audiences. Three years later he moved to Spokane, Washington, where he established the Society of Christian Yoga. He later travelled around the country and established centres in other cities as well. His magazine Christian Yoga Monthly, was published in his Oakland, California centre. While in Spokane, Mozumdar wrote his principal work, The Life and the Way, which he later condensed into a series of booklets.

In 1911 Ralph deBit (1883-1964, named "Vitvan" by Mozumdar) became his student. Later deBit wrote books, lectured and founded a movement that survives today as the School of the Natural Order in Nevada.[1]

In late 1918, towards the end of World War I, Mozumdar enlisted in the Army and was sent to officer training school at Spokane’s Gonzaga University. Shortly after his training began the armistice was signed, and Mozumdar was honourably discharged.

Moving to Los Angeles in 1919, Mozumdar’s lecture schedule and list of publications lengthened. Each year he was on the road many months, conducting classes and seminars in many American cities. His books were read widely, and he now identified his movement as the New Messianic World Message.

Mozumdar’s memorial service was conducted by his friend Ernest Holmes, founder of the Religious Science movement and author of The Science of Mind. He was interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California.

[edit] Teachings

In his lectures, booklets, pamphlets and eight larger books Mozumdar taught students that their human existence was intimately interwoven with a divine existence. He declared that making conscious contact with that divine side – alternately termed God, the "animating power back of our mind and body," "fundamental principle," "all-pervading creative life," etc. – was essential for achieving happiness, prosperity and solutions to life’s challenges. His techniques to facilitate this contact were based upon his definition of this animating power or God.

"If man thinks and acts, is not the thinker and actor God? If God is all life, then all lives are God. The creative power is the very nature of the being of the Creator; hence the creative power is God. Life is the Creator, and will never be reduced to the level of its own creation. The creature will forever be ensouled with the creative activity, and move and act according to the inner impulse of the Creator. By thinking with the mind of the one life, you become conscious of being the thinker. At the back of your every action you should find yourself. You are spirit and therefore spiritual. The permanent substance is underneath all forms. The forms are made of the everlasting substance. This knowledge sets a man free."[2]

One of Mozumdar’s favorite injunctions was, "Your power to conceive God is God." Establishing contact with that Superconscious Self brings all things within reach. Mozumdar said his students could use their "awareness of their innate divinity" to obtain career success, friends, spouse, health and healing. "Our objective life is a reflection of our mental life; what we choose to believe shapes our experience." There was nothing supernatural about these practices, he felt; all existence is real, and all phenomena will ultimately be explained by science.[citation needed]

"While Mozumdar's teaching is popular ... it shows us what happens when a thinker immersed in Hindu lore completely accepts a world-affirming position. What happens is an identification of the Hindu conception of a divine universal Self with the Hebrew conception of a divine creative power. To Mozumdar the ultimate God is not uncreative bliss, as in the view of Sankara, but creative power, as in the Hebrew tradition. Yet this creative Power, he declares, is the same as the universal Self. Here the universal Self, we should note, is not a finite Ideal, as in Greek philosophy, but the infinite Substance of the world." [3]

[edit] Impact on U.S. immigration law

In 1913 Mozumdar became the first Indian-born person to earn U.S. citizenship, having convinced the Spokane district judge that he was in fact Caucasian and thereby met the requirements of naturalization law then restricting citizenship to "free white persons." Ten years later, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court decision stipulating that no person of East Indian origin could become a naturalized American, Mozumdar’s citizenship was revoked. A decision on his appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the revocation. Shortly before his death, after some loosening of naturalization laws, Mozumdar again qualified for U.S. citizenship. These court cases are still relevant to American immigration law, especially as those laws pertained to "race."[4]

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ About the School, School of Natural Order
  2. ^ Mozumdar’s The Life of Man, pp. 1, 3, 7, 27, and The Conquering Man, p. 41, as synthesized by Wendell Marshall Thomas in his 1930 study Hinduism Invades America, published by Beacon Press, p. 253 ff.
  3. ^ Hinduism Invades America by Wendell Marshall Thomas (Beacon Press, 1930)[page # needed]
  4. ^ In re Mozumdar, 207 F. 115 (E.D. Wash. 1913); United States v. Akhay Kumar Mozumdar, 296 F. 173 (1923); and Akhay Kumar Mozumdar v. United States, 299 F. 240 (1924).

[edit] External links