Radhanath Swami Maharaj

Radhanath Swami, born Richard Slavin in 1950 to a working-class Jewish family in a Chicago suburb, traveled one of the most vividly documented spiritual journeys of any teacher in this carousel: from a nineteen-year-old civil rights activist and counterculture hitchhiker to a wandering mendicant across the Middle East and the caves of the Himalayas, and eventually to one of ISKCON's most respected senior leaders, chronicled in his bestselling memoir "The Journey Home."

From Haight-Ashbury to the road to India

As a teenager, Slavin was active in the civil rights movement while also drawn into the counterculture emerging around him, growing his hair, visiting the hippie epicenter of Haight-Ashbury, and searching for meaning beyond conventional American life. In the summer of 1970, at age nineteen, he left home to travel, hitchhiking across Europe and the Middle East — through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan — before arriving in India, where he lived for over a year as a wandering ascetic, sleeping in Himalayan caves and forests, studying under an extraordinary range of teachers including Swami Sivananda, Swami Rama, Anandamayi Ma, Neem Karoli Baba and Swami Muktananda, and even briefly encountering figures as varied as the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa during his travels.

Meeting Srila Prabhupada

In 1971, this searching finally led Richard Slavin to Srila Prabhupada, whose teaching of Krishna consciousness he ultimately embraced as the culmination of his long journey. He returned to the United States, serving as a cowherd and temple worker at a West Virginia farming community, and was formally initiated by Prabhupada in 1973, receiving the name Radhanath Das. In 1979 he shifted from pastoral temple service to pioneering ISKCON's educational outreach on American college campuses, before taking sannyasa, formal renunciation, in 1986 and returning to India to build what would become his life's major institutional work.

Building ISKCON Chowpatty in Mumbai

Radhanath Swami's most significant and enduring institutional achievement has been the transformation of a modest, makeshift Krishna temple at Girgaum Chowpatty in Mumbai, established in 1988, into the thriving Sri Sri Radha Gopinath Temple community that today serves thousands of devotees across the globe. Alongside the temple itself, he has directed major humanitarian initiatives including a free midday meal program that, at its peak, served over a million vegetarian meals daily to schoolchildren across India, and helped found the Bhaktivedanta Hospital in Mumbai, extending his temple community's reach well beyond formal religious practice into large-scale public health and hunger relief.

A widely read memoir and a broader public profile

Radhanath Swami's 2009 memoir, "The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami," found an unusually broad readership well beyond ISKCON's own devotee community, drawing praise from figures including yoga teacher B.K.S. Iyengar and Harvard Divinity School's Francis X. Clooney, who described the book as offering rare, personal insight into what it means to devote oneself to Krishna consciousness. As a longtime member of ISKCON's Governing Body Commission since 1996, Radhanath Swami continues to guide temple communities across Maharashtra and parts of Europe, while remaining, as one fellow devotee has put it, a figure widely respected across the broader ISKCON community for the depth and candor of the spiritual journey his own writing has made so publicly available.