Akhoy Kumar (A.K.) Mozumdar (1864–1953) was an Indian-born lecturer and writer of the New Thought Movement during the first half of 20th-century United States. He had enjoyed a large following of students and regular readers of his books and pamphlets until he was denaturalized in a decision on American immigration law which reached the United States Supreme Court in 1924."If man thinks and acts, is not the thinker and actor God? If God is all life, then all lives are God. The creative power is the very nature of the being of the Creator; hence the creative power is God. Life is the Creator, and will never be reduced to the level of its own creation. The creature will forever be ensouled with the creative activity, and move and act according to the inner impulse of the Creator. By thinking with the mind of the one life, you become conscious of being the thinker. At the back of your every action you should find yourself. You are spirit and therefore spiritual. The permanent substance is underneath all forms. The forms are made of the everlasting substance. This knowledge sets a man free."
The son of an attorney, A. K. Mozumdar was born in a small village about twenty miles north of Calcutta, India, July 15, 1864. He was the youngest child, having eight older brothers and one sister. The Mozumdars were a well established, high caste family. Mozumdar's mother was a very devout woman who seemed to anticipate her youngest child's career as a deep spiritual teacher when she named him Akhoy Kumar, meaning "Son of God."
Young Mozumdar was always very close to his mother and she led her son carefully through his early inward struggles. After her death, when Mozumdar was 16, he left the family home and spent several years traveling throughout India, studying under several gurus (holy men, spiritual teachers). He even traveled as far as Bethlehem in search of enlightenment about Christianity. As a young person in India, Mozumdar came under the influence of Arumda, an enlightened teacher. It was he who told the young man that his destiny was to teach in America.
While in China and Japan in 1902 and 1903, Mozumdar's hunger to learn more about Christianity coupled with the encouragement of Arumda led him to seek transportation to the United States. Finally he was able to secure steerage on a tramp steamer, eventually arriving in Seattle, Washington, in 1903.
In 1905 Jennie and Charles Clark, leaders in Seattle's Queen City Theosophical Society, reported in the Theosophical Quarterly Magazine that Mozumdar, "a Hindu Brother,... has spoken for us for several weeks to full houses." His lecture for April 3, 1905, was "God and Creation." The Clarks wrote that Mozumdar "calls his teachings 'universal truth.'"
Mozumdar's first books were written while he lived in Spokane. The first, The Life and the Way, was published in New York in 1911 and a greatly expanded version was printed three years later. This was the primary textbook used by his followers throughout his long career. In the twenties, however, he made extensive revisions and additions, republishing the text in pamphlet form.
Teacher's Manual of the Universal Message, was printed in Spokane in 1915. This handbook was used for many years by those students who went out and started teaching centers in other communities. After these first publishing efforts, Mozumdar produced many pamphlets, articles and seven other full-length books. All of them present his masterful insight into life and religion.
In 1913 Mozumdar became the first Indian-born person to earn U.S. citizenship, having convinced the Spokane district judge that he was in fact Caucasian and thereby met the requirements of naturalization law then restricting citizenship to "free white persons".
Ten years later, however, as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, stipulating that no person of East Indian origin could become a naturalized United States citizen, Mozumdar's citizenship was revoked. A decision on his appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the revocation. He remained, however, in the United States until his death in San Diego in 1953, as he was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.His talks were practical, direct and realistic. Some lecture titles were, "What Did Jesus the Christ Give That No Other Teacher Gave?," "Dynamic Meditation," "The Mystery of All Mysteries – The Great Within," "Your Mind – Its Power and Mysteries." He continually tried to point the way for individuals to live a longer, happier, healthier, more harmonious life.
In the book Beyond Biofeedback by Dr. Elmer and Alyce Green (Delacorte Press, 1977, page 280), Alyce Green gives some personal information about her introduction to New Thought back in the 1940s by Dr. John Seaman Garns, a gentleman in Minneapolis who had a center and school "for the express purpose of building a bridge between psychology, religion and science [called the School of Psychology and Divine Science]." Dr. Garns had a Ph.D. from Drake University and taught for many years at the University of Minnesota.
Speaking of Dr. Garns's school, Alyce Green wrote: "Other lecturers and teachers were brought to the center. I remember one especially well, [A.K.] Mozumdar, a man from India who had been one of Dr. Garns's teachers. He was in his early nineties, but you would never have known it from his black hair and alert eyes and the grace with which he danced a waltz with me at a center party. Like Dr. Garns, Mozumdar had his own miracles of precognition and healing to tell, but the sharpest memory I have of him is when he told me to ‘develop the will.' I was going down the broad stairs at the center as he and Dr. Garns were coming up, engaged in an animated conversation. As we were about to pass he suddenly turned, looked at me with his piercing black eyes, and said, ‘The will! Develop the will,' then resumed his conversation and continued up the stairs."
A School of Expression teacher and one time President of the International New Thought Alliance(1941-1943), Dr. John Seaman Garns was an expert in the field of business leadership and management training, and said that “Real leaders are ordinary people with extraordinary determination.”
Dr. Garns was a close friend of Mozumdar's. "Mozumdar's course plunged me at once into a laboratory method of doing things with expedition and power," he wrote. "I had expected theory, I got practice; I looked for philosophy, I got operative science. I had shopped around with courses of instruction before. They all seemed like kindergarten work; Prince Mozumdar's is like a postgraduate course. I cannot thank him enough for the push his lessons gave me toward action and reality, away from bookish theories."
"Whatever Mind conceives and projects with Conviction it inevitably Produces." ~ John Seaman Garns
"It is the teaching that teaches mankind, and not the teacher," Mozumdar wrote in Spokane in 1915. "Love and devotion to a personal teacher are merely incidental, because human nature tries to express its gratitude to those through whom it receives a spiritual uplift. If a teaching has any value, the farther it is removed in years, the greater becomes the devotion and idealization of its adherents. As time rolls on, the personal peculiarities of a teacher are forgotten and the teaching takes the place of idealization."
A. K. Mozumdar
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