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Shrii Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar
A short biography

Shrii Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar was born in 1921, in Jamalpur, Bihar, India. Prabhatrainjan was the eldest son, one of his two elder sisters died early, his two younger brothers still lives. His father was a medical doctor attached to the large railway workshop in the small town in the rural north of India.

After having attended college in Calcutta during the early war years, Sarkar took employment with the same railway workshop's audit department, in 1944. By then he had already made his mark as a journalist of various newspapers and periodicals, and as a social commentator in salons of Calcutta.

By the time he had also embarked on his mission as a teacher of tantrik spiritual practices; by the time of the founding of the socio-spiritual organization Ananda Marga in 1955, he had already initiated a large number of seekers into spiritual cult. Now he started to educate and lead members of the new organization in teaching spirituality and morality while engaging in social welfare projects.

As the new organization grew and spread, first to nearby towns and then to other states, Sarkar turned his mind to developing the philosophy and ideology of the new movement, while continuing to direct its various activities. It was to a group of teacher trainees of the organization that Sarkar first spoke of Prout in 1959, and formulated the five fundamental principles of the theory, later published in the final chapter of the book Idea and Ideology.

During the period Sarkar toured extensively throughout India and built the organization into a large-bodied socio-spiritual movement that took hold particularly amongst educated middle class people. By the year 1965 he took long leave from his job and moved the organizational headquarters to the heartland of Rahr at Anandanagar in West Bengal.

Prout is the social side of a total philosophy that blends concepts of spiritual and social liberation. The adoption of social activism by a spiritual
organization created controversy in India, and attempts were made to suppress both Ananda Marga and Prout. The Central Indian Government made several unsuccessful attempts to ban members of Ananda Marga from employment in the public service. In 1971 Sarkar himself was falsely accused of various crimes and jailed for nearly seven years. 

In 1973, he was seriously poisoned by an overdose of barbiturates administered by the jail doctor, after which he went on a protest fast challenging the authorities who were not responding to his repeated calls for a critical inquiry into his whereabouts. The brutal poisoning left Sarkar in bedridden condition with very weak health for the remaining 5 years of his imprisonment. Throughout this period he survived on a diet of a cup of salted yogurt mixed with water twice a day only. Still he managed to lead the organization from inside the jail and remained confident that its growth would only increase as a result of the inhuman treatment administered both to him and his banned organization as a consequence of the emergency rule during those years.

In 1978 all charges against Sarkar were quashed, and he was released in August that year to a tremendous welcoming of a large gathering of his followers from all over the world. If the strategy behind his jailing had been to suppress and root out the movement Sarkar had founded and spearheaded, the attempt had failed miserably. During his incarceration the organization had spread to more than 60 countries, and continued to spread at great speed. In 1977 an international organization called Proutist Universal (PU) had been launched with its headquarters in Copenhagen. The aims of PU are to propagate the ideals of Prout and to support social movements with similar ideals. By the middle 1980's PU and Ananda Marga was established in practically all the countries of the world.

Throughout his life Sarkar continued to work tirelessly for "the suffering humanity" and "the welfare of all". His contributions in the fields of science and philosophy are so vast, that it will still take some time before humanity can properly assess and comprise his historical worth. Sarkar's cremation in 1990 was attended by a large international following at the organizational headquarters at Tiljala, Calcutta.

Copyright Proutist Universal 1999-2000