The Disciples of Sri Ramakrishna SWAMI SHIVANANDA
Swami Shivananda, more popularly known as Mahapurush Maharaj, was personality of great force, rich in distinctive color and individual quality. His leonine statue and dauntless vigor, his stolid indifference to praise or blame, his spontaneous mood and his profound serenity in times of storm and stress, invested with a singular appropriateness his monastic name which recalls the classical attributes of the great God Shiva. He was born sometime in the fifties of the nineteenth century on the eleventh day of the dark fortnight in the Indian month of Agrahayan (November-December). The exact year of his birth is obscure. (It is inferred that he was born on 16 November 1854) The Swami himself with his characteristic indifference to such matter never remembered it. His father had indeed prepared an elaborate horoscope for his son, but the latter threw it away into the Ganga when he chose the life of renunciation. His early name, before he took orders, was Taraknath Ghosal. He came of a respectable and influential family of Barasat. One of his ancestors,
