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his younger days, had been introduced to him in the early 1950s by his uncle, the Maharaja of Tehri Garhwal. The spirituality of the Swami was of an esoteric kind, in that he believed that there was a marriage of ideas between the higher levels of physics and the higher planes of spirituality at an axiomatic a priori level %u2013 a point of view which a later generation of physicists was to concur with. This led to a view that an engagement with the material world was very important in the field of education %u2013 and practical knowledge and skills had to be imparted to students - a view that is rare among spiritualists who treat these two spheres as divorced from each other.Swamy Jnanananda was born as Bhupathiraju Lakshminarasimha Raju in Goraganamudi village near Bhimavaram in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh on 5 December 1896. He was married to Somavathamma in 1916 but, inspired by the life of Gautama Buddha, he renounced the world and lived the life of a bachelor. Influenced by Theosophical Society he left home and reached Belur Math in Calcutta in 1917. After staying there for a few months he went into the forests of Nepal and meditated there for some time. Later he spent a decade in the holy sites of the Himalayas such as Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Manasarovar. Swami Jnanananda went to Germany with an interest in Physics in 1926 as Einstein's theory of relativity had caught his attention. Though he had no formal grounding in the subject he completed his graduate studies in a remarkably short time and went on to earn a D.Sc for his work on X-Ray spectroscopy. Later he shifted to England and joined the University of Liverpool under Sir James Chadwick, Nobel Laureate in physics, and continued his work in spectroscopy. He returned to India in 1948 at the invitation of Jawaharlal Nehru to join the National Physical Laboratory of India. On the persuasion of PVG Raju and at the request of the Vice-Chancellor, he joined Andhra University in 1954 to set up a Nuclear Physics Department. 88