Nataraja Guru


Nataraja Guru was a disciple of Narayana Guru and himself an Indian social reformer.

Life

P. Natarajan was born in Bangalore in British India on 18 February 1895. His mother was Bhagavathi and his father, Palpu, was a doctor who founded the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana in 1903, of which Narayana Guru was the first president. Natarajan was the third of five children, having both an older and younger brother and an older and younger sister. He received a high-class education in Bangalore, Trivandrum and Kandy before being awarded a Master's degree by Madras Presidency College.
Natarajan had come into contact with Narayana Guru and experienced the gurukul way of life in Alwaye and Ooty before becoming headmaster at Varkala High School, which had been founded by Naryana. It was after a "conference of all religions" at Alwaye that Natarajan founded his Narayana Gurukulam Movement and University for the Science of the Absolute in 1924. K. K. N. Kurup, a historian of Kerala, describes the NGM as "an international order of brotherhood".
In the year that Naryana died, 1928, Natarajan received his blessing to study abroad. These studies lasted five years, during which he obtained a doctorate of letters from the Sorbonne in Paris while also teaching at the Quaker International School in Geneva.
On returning to India, Natarajan spent two years seeking work in various parts of the country because the followers of Narayana were not welcoming to him after the guru's death. In 1935, he returned to the gurukul at Fernhill in Ooty. He spent some time as an Advisor for the princely state of Cochin and established an educational institute in Mysore State before leaving India for Europe once again in 1949. Upon his return in 1951, having also visited America, he was recognised as a guru.
Thereafter, Nataraja travelled widely around the world and, in 1963, established the Brahmavidya Mandiram at Sivagiri in Varkala. He translated into English and wrote commentaries on all the major works of Narayana Guru. He also wrote on a wide variety of subjects, employing throughout a protolinguistic or structural approach.
Nataraja Guru died on 19 March 1973 at the NGM headquarters in Varkala.

Books