About this series

The globalisation of yoga and Indian spirituality is usually told as a Western discovery — a story of California studios and counterculture seekers. It was not. It began with a handful of Indian masters who physically crossed the ocean and made the case for their tradition on foreign soil, from a Chicago lecture hall in 1893 to a New York storefront in 1966.

This series profiles twelve of them across the long twentieth century — the monks, householders, and sages whose journeys outward shaped the spiritual life of the diaspora and the West. Each part is reported from primary biographical sources and written as journalism, not hagiography: real dates, real records, and the controversies where they exist.

Twelve parts, published one a day. Read together, they trace a single arc — how India taught the world to sit, to breathe, and to look inward.