Indradyumna Swami Maharaja
Introduction
Early Life
Missionary activities
Festival of India
Polish Woodstock
Vrindavana pilgrimage
Autobiographical essay
Missionary activities
Following the instruction of his spiritual master to “preach boldly and have faith in the holy names,” Indradyumna left the USA in 1972 journeying to Europe where he helped open new centers in France, Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium. In 1979, at age 29 he took a vow of lifelong dedication to missionary activities as a celibate monk and entered the renounced order of sannyasa as Indradyumna Swami Maharaja. In the same year he founded a traveling festival group that toured all over France sharing India’s spiritual teachings and cultural traditions of music, dance, and food. In the early 1980’s he served as the temple president at the New Mayapur chateau temple and farm near Chateauroux France.Since 1986 Indradyumna Swami Maharaja has been traveling and spreading spiritual teachings throughout the world, including the Amazon jungle, the Zulu tribal areas and Soweto township in South Africa, the tropical islands of Mauritius, and the snows of Eastern Europe and Russia. By founding the highly successful annual Ratha Yatra festival on the Durban beach front in 1989, Indradyumna Swami Maharaja fulfilled a request made by his spiritual master Srila Prabhupada in 1975. On occasion, Indradyumna Swami and his party have faced attacks by extremists such as those in Bosnia and Poland. In 2001 he headed up Food for Life International’s relief effort to provide hot meals to 250,000 tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka. Since 1990 Indradyumna Swami Maharaja's activities have increasingly centered on coordinating massive cultural events each year in Poland and increasingly in other parts of the world such as Australia and Brazil.