Background
Purohit was born in Badnera, Vidarbha, India to a wealthy Maharashtran Brahmin family.
Purohit was born in Badnera, Vidarbha, India to a wealthy Maharashtran Brahmin family.
University of Calcutta.
As a child he became proficient in Marathi, English, and Sanskrit. He was well educated, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy at Calcutta University in 1903 and a law degree from Deccan College and Bombay University. Purohit says this meeting "was love at first sight," and Natekar, who later took the monastic name Bhagwan Shri Hamsa, became Purohit"s guru.
In 1923 his guru directed him to embark on a mendicant pilgrimage the length and breadth of India.
Begging bowl in hand, he passed several years in this way. He travelled to Europe on an extended visit in 1930.
He translated the Bhagavad Gita into English, and this translation can be viewed here. He also avoids mentioning the Caste system.
Where the original Gita mentions the different castes he interprets this as different occupations within society.
He also worked with West. B. Yeats during 1935 and 1936, on Majorca on the translations in The Ten Principal Upanishads (1938, Faber and Faber). Yeats included him in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935. He represents a very important but largely unremembered link between the generation of Swami Vivekananda and the Post World World War II society in which eastern thought has become an accepted element of spiritual life.