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.[citation needed]

Contents

[edit] Biography

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]

[edit] Teachings

"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]

"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 the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, stipulating that no person of East Indian origin could become a naturalized American, Mozumdar’s citizenship was revoked.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.[4]

[edit] Major Works

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  • The Triumphant Spirit
  • The Conquering Man (also translated into Swedish by Eric O.G. Olson, Den segrande människan)
  • The Mystery of the Kingdom
  • The Commanding Life
  • Christ on the Road of Today
  • Key to the New Messianic World Message
  • Christ Speaketh
  • Today and Tomorrow
  • Open Door to Heaven
  • The Life and the Way

[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

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._K._Mozumdar"