Agehananda Bharati (1923-1991) was born in Vienna, Austria on April 20, 1923, with the name Leopold Fischer. Leopold Fischer’s path to becoming Agehananda Bharati began at an early age, when he first started developing interests in religious life and Indian culture. As a child, Fischer served as an altar boy and planned to be a priest later in life. As a young adolescent, however, he became frustrated and disillusioned with the way he saw Catholicism being practiced. As he began to turn away from the Catholic Church in his teenage years, he increasingly turned towards exploring his interest in Indian culture.

Fischer first developed an interest in India as an eight-year-old boy, when he had the opportunity to talk to Indians who had traveled to Vienna to attend the city’s famous medical school. The visiting students taught him pieces of different Indian dialects, and he, in turn, would help them with their German. His talent for learning languages was quickly apparent. Within the next several years, he would learn five Indian dialects, and in his adult life he would eventually learn more than 15 modern and classical languages.

Upon entering secondary school, Fischer continued to seek out ways to learn more about India. At age 13, he joined his school’s India Club and began formally studying Hindi and classical Sanskrit. These studies proved to be more than just an academic pursuit; they were also part of his personal and spiritual development. Bharati would later write that by age 15, he knew he wanted to leave the Christian tradition and embrace Hinduism.

The elective Indian studies Fischer pursued at secondary school became his academic focus at the University of Vienna, where he majored in Indic Studies, Sanskrit, and comparative linguistics and minored in anthropology, ethnography, and philosophy. His studies were interrupted in 1943, however, when he was conscripted into the German Army.

The German Army placed Fischer in a specialized role that made use of his detailed knowledge of Indian languages and culture. He was assigned to be an interpreter with the Free India Legion, a unit made up of Indian prisoners of war and Indian-born students who were living in Germany at the time of the war. The Free India Legion was conceived of as a way for the Germans to attack British holdings in India by rallying Indians around the cause of fighting for Indian independence, though ultimately this was not strongly pursued, and the Legion was mostly engaged in non-combat roles. After experiencing the rigid personal and intellectual restrictions of military life and the Nazi occupation of Austria, Fischer became even more resolved to dedicate himself to learning about India and Hinduism.

Following the war, Fischer returned to the University of Vienna to complete his degrees in 1948. Immediately afterwards, in January of 1949, he set off to India, to learn more about the culture he admired through firsthand experience and to become a monk in the religion he had first devoted himself to as a teenager. After some time working at the University of Delhi as a lecturer on German language and literature, and some initial experiences with the Ramakrishna Math order of Hinduism that ultimately left him wanting, he decided his path was to become a monk in the Dasanami Sannyasi order. His ethnicity and outsider status, however, made many religious figures resistant to the idea that he should be made more than a novice in the monastery. Refusing to accept such a limiting position, Fischer traveled to a place where devout members of the monastery who had already fulfilled certain duties could pay a sacrificial fee to become a sannyasi, a monk in a stage of life in which worldly attachments are renounced in order to dedicate oneself to spiritual pursuits.

In 1951, Leopold Fischer was initiated into the Dasanami Sannyasi monastic order and was given the name Agehananda Bharati. The name Agehananda means “bliss through homelessness”, which Bharati soon experienced during his required religious pilgrimage, in which sannyasi travel 1,500 miles, from northern to southern India, barefoot and begging for their food. In addition to being a transformative spiritual experience, this journey also provided Bharati with cultural insight that most Western anthropologists could not hope to gain. Bharati would draw from this knowledge upon returning to the academic world to teach.

From 1951 to 1954, he worked as a reader in philosophy at Banaras Hindu University, and in 1955, he was a visiting professor of comparative literature at the Nalanda Institute for Buddhist Research and Pali. After several years of learning and teaching in India, Bharati decided to travel further eastward for his next teaching job. He taught Sanskrit and Indian philosophy in Thailand from 1955 to 1956. From there, his travels took him to Japan to tour as a visiting professor, to British Columbia to work as a guest professor, to Seattle to work as a research associate, and finally to Syracuse, New York in 1961, to work as an assistant professor at Syracuse University. Though he would continue to travel occasionally throughout his life, Syracuse became his permanent home.

Bharati spent the next ten years as a professor at Syracuse University’s anthropology department, teaching some of the subjects in which he was most well versed. During this time, he also wrote his two most celebrated books. His autobiography, The Ochre Robe, was first published in 1962, and the work he called his magnum opus, The Tantric Tradition, was published in 1965. Both works were met with acclaim, which helped Bharati gain international attention, as did the papers he presented at prestigious universities, the guest lectures he gave in other countries, the original anthropological research he conducted in India and East Africa, and the numerous other writings he published during this time period.

In 1971, Bharati was named chair of the anthropology department, and he would serve in that position until 1977. Bharati’s time at Syracuse University continued long after he left the chair position. He continued to teach, both in Syracuse and around the world as a guest lecturer, for many years. In 1987, he received a Fulbright Scholar Award, on which he traveled to universities in West Germany to teach anthropology and Indian culture. In January of 1991, he was named the Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies at the Maxwell School.

A few months later, on May 14, 1991, after a lifetime of study, travel, and education, Agehananda Bharati died of cancer.