Ramana's devotees · The engineer

Maurice Frydman: engineer, devotee, and Gandhi's friend

Few lives touched twentieth-century spiritual history at as many points as this one. A Polish-Jewish engineer who fled to India, built Gandhi's spinning wheel, helped free a princely state, sat with Ramana Maharshi, and, at the very end of his life, gave the world one of the great books of non-dual teaching.

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Among the wider circle of Ramana's Western devotees, one figure stands out for the sheer range of what else his life touched. Maurice Frydman was an engineer of real gifts, a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, a serious presence in Ramana's hall at Tiruvannamalai, and, decades later, the patient editor who gave the world one of the most widely read texts of modern Advaita. It is a life that connects some of the twentieth century's most consequential spiritual and political currents in a single, remarkable person.

From Warsaw to Mysore

Born Maurycy Frydman on 20 October 1901 in Warsaw, he trained as an engineer and made his way to India, where by the 1930s he had risen to become managing director of the Mysore State Government Electrical Factory in Bangalore ~ a serious professional post for an émigré engineer to hold. It was from this position of practical accomplishment that he began turning toward the spiritual and political currents that would define the rest of his life, eventually adopting the name Swami Bharatananda as he moved toward renunciate life.

Gandhi's engineer

Frydman became a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and lived for a time at his ashram, and it was here that his engineering training found an unexpected spiritual use: he built the spinning wheel, the charkha, that Gandhi himself used, and went on to design improved versions in the search for the most efficient model for India's needs. He also played a significant part in the so-called Aundh Experiment, helping to draft constitutional reforms for the small princely state of Aundh alongside Gandhi and its ruler; the resulting November Declaration of 1938–39 transferred governing power to the state's own residents, a remarkable act of voluntary self-rule in the last years before Indian independence.

An engineer who built Gandhi's spinning wheel, sat in Ramana's hall, and at the very end of his life became the reason the West met Nisargadatta Maharaj.

A frequent presence at Tiruvannamalai

Alongside his political and humanitarian work, Frydman was a frequent and deeply serious devotee of Ramana Maharshi, part of the same circle of Western seekers who gathered at the ashram from the 1930s onward ~ contemporaries of Paul Brunton, Arthur Osborne and Major Chadwick. He also developed a close relationship with the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, moving, as few others did, between several of the era's most significant spiritual currents without settling permanently in any one camp.

The book that carried Nisargadatta to the world

Frydman's most lasting legacy came late in his life, through his friendship with the Bombay teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj. Frydman recorded, edited and translated their dialogues into English, publishing them in 1973 as I Am That, complete with his own appendix on what he called Nisarga Yoga. The book became, and remains, one of the most influential works of modern non-dual teaching in English ~ a second, quite separate gift to world spirituality from a man who had already built a nation's symbol of self-reliance and helped free a small state from within.

A humanitarian to the end

Frydman's practical compassion did not stop at politics and translation. During the Second World War he helped co-establish the Polish-Indian Library and gave direct assistance to Polish orphans displaced by the war who found refuge in India; in his later years he extended the same support to Tibetan refugees arriving in India after 1959. He died on 9 March 1976 in Bombay, at the age of seventy-four.

Why Frydman matters

Frydman's significance to the story of Arunachala is that of a serious, gifted man who took his devotion to Ramana as one thread among several in a life dedicated wholly to service ~ of Gandhi's India, of refugees with nowhere else to turn, and finally of a teaching he judged worth carrying, with great care, into English. He is proof that the circle Ramana drew was never narrow, and that a life touched by the hill could go on to touch a great many other lives in turn.

Last updated 17 September 2026. Drawing on the documented record and published biographical sources; where a detail could not be independently confirmed, it has been left out.