🇮🇳 Jaggi Vasudev

He was born in 1957 in Mysore, then the capital of the State of Mysore, to Dr B. V. Vasudev, an ophthalmologist with Indian Railways, and Susheela. He studied at Demonstration School, Mysore, and earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Mysore in 1973. His childhood was unremarkable, except, he has often said, for a habit of disappearing into long silences in the garden, and a fascination with snakes and waterfalls that he attributes to his earliest spiritual stirrings.

He spent his twenties running a poultry farm and then a small construction business in Mysore, and is on the record describing himself as a sceptic of religion in those years. On 23 September 1982, at age twenty-five, he sat on a rock at Chamundi Hill and, by his own account, had an experience of self-realisation that lasted four and a half hours. Within months he had wound up his business, sold his motorbike to a friend, and begun travelling on a Yezdi 250 to teach yoga in small towns around Mysore and the Western Ghats.

He founded the Isha Foundation in 1992 with the establishment of the Isha Yoga Center at the foot of the Velliangiri Hills in Coimbatore. The Inner Engineering programme, drawing on classical hatha yoga and kriya practices, has since been completed by more than ten million people across more than 150 countries, in person and through Isha's online platforms. He has been criticised by some traditional yoga lineages for repackaging classical practice into branded modules; his defenders argue that he has democratised access to what was previously reserved for monastics.

In 2017 the Foundation unveiled the Adiyogi statue — a 112-foot bust of Shiva, certified by Guinness as the world's largest bust — at the Isha Yoga Center, inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The structure became a pilgrimage site and a cultural symbol of contemporary Indian Hinduism, drawing millions of visitors annually. A second, smaller Adiyogi was later installed at the Isha Institute of Inner Sciences in Tennessee, USA, where he had begun building a parallel American base from the early 2000s.

He has emerged as a global speaker on consciousness, ecology and policy — addressing the World Economic Forum at Davos, the United Nations General Assembly, the Oxford Union, the U.S. Congress and Wharton Business School. His campaigns Rally for Rivers (2017) and Save Soil (2022) drew both major institutional partnerships and academic scepticism about the underlying science, particularly the soil-organic-carbon claims, which several Indian and international soil scientists publicly contested.

He is also among the most scrutinised gurus of his generation. In March 2024 the Madras High Court launched an inquiry into the Isha Foundation following a habeas corpus petition filed by a retired professor whose two adult daughters had become monks at Isha. The Supreme Court later set aside the High Court order. Earlier controversies have included questions over the Foundation's environmental clearances near elephant corridors, alleged land disputes with local farmers in Coimbatore, and the 1997 death of his wife Vijaya Kumari (Vijji), which followed his account of her mahasamadhi and a brief police inquiry that was closed without charges.

He lives mostly between the Isha Yoga Center in Coimbatore and the Isha Institute of Inner Sciences in Tennessee. He continues to ride motorcycles — including a hundred-day, thirty-thousand-kilometre solo trip across continents during the Save Soil campaign — and to write, with more than half a dozen books in print, several of them New York Times bestsellers. He has one daughter, the classical singer Radhe Jaggi, from his marriage to Vijji. He has not remarried.