Ramana's devotees · The West arrives

Ramana's Western devotees: how the world found him

In 1934 a book appeared in London that changed everything ~ and the West began to arrive. The story of Brunton, Chadwick, Osborne and the remarkable Westerners who left their countries for a hill, and wrote Ramana down for the world.

Add hero image ~ /images/articles/ramana-western-devotees-hero.jpg

← Part of Who Was Ramana Maharshi

For the first three decades of Ramana's life at Arunachala, the world that gathered around him was almost entirely Tamil, and then Indian. And then, in 1934, a book appeared in London that changed everything ~ and the West began to arrive. The story of how a silent sage on a South Indian hill became known to English readers, and of the remarkable Westerners who left their countries to sit at his feet and then wrote down what they found, is a story worth telling in its own right. For it is largely thanks to them that you, reading this in English now, have heard of Ramana Maharshi at all.

Paul Brunton and the book that opened the door

The turning point has a name: Paul Brunton, an English journalist and seeker who came to Ramana in 1931 in the course of a journey across India. Ramana, as was his way, said almost nothing to him. But something in the encounter marked Brunton permanently, and in 1934 he published A Search in Secret India ~ a vivid, popular account of his travels that culminated in his meeting with the “Maharishee” on the hill. The book was a sensation. For countless Western readers it was the first they had ever heard of Ramana, and it sent a stream of them ~ seekers, writers, the merely curious ~ making their way to Tiruvannamalai. It is not too much to say that the worldwide knowledge of Ramana begins with this one book. (Brunton later went his own way and is a complicated figure; but the door he opened never closed.)

Major Chadwick ~ the soldier who stayed

Among those who came because of Brunton's book was a retired British army officer, Major A. W. Chadwick, who arrived in 1935 ~ and simply never left. He settled at the ashram, was given the name Sadhu Arunachala, and lived out the rest of his life there, one of the most beloved of the Western devotees. Ramana entrusted him with running the Veda Patasala, the school of Vedic chanting. His memoir, A Sadhu's Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi, is a warm, plain-spoken, first-hand record of daily life with Bhagavan ~ the account of an unsentimental English soldier who found, at the foot of an Indian hill, the thing he had not known he was looking for, and the good sense to stay for it.

Arthur Osborne ~ who carried the teaching to the world

If Brunton opened the door, Arthur Osborne did more than perhaps anyone to make Ramana's teaching permanently available to the West in a serious, faithful form. Osborne settled at Tiruvannamalai, became the first editor of the ashram's journal, The Mountain Path ~ still published today ~ and wrote what became one of the standard biographies, Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge, as well as editing collections of Ramana's works. Where Brunton was a populariser and eventually a wanderer, Osborne was a steady, devoted servant of the teaching, and a great deal of what English readers reliably know of Ramana passed through his careful hands.

Brunton opened the door; Chadwick stayed and remembered; Osborne carried the teaching, faithfully, to the world.

The wider circle

These three are the best known, but the circle was wide and remarkable. S. S. Cohen, an Iraqi-born Jew, settled at the ashram and wrote Guru Ramana. Maurice Frydman, a Polish-Jewish engineer of extraordinary gifts ~ who would later midwife another spiritual classic, Nisargadatta Maharaj's I Am That ~ was a frequent and deeply serious devotee. The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson came, and was present near the end. Writers, scholars, seekers of every European and American stripe found their way to the hall: some for an afternoon, some for the rest of their lives. Even the novelist Somerset Maugham visited, and is thought to have drawn on Ramana for the holy man in his novel The Razor's Edge, carrying an echo of the sage into popular Western fiction.

Why they matter

It would be easy to treat the Western devotees as a footnote to the “real” Indian story. That would be a mistake. Their significance is enormous and twofold. First, it was they who wrote Ramana down for the world ~ the books, the journal, the biographies, the records of the Talks ~ so that his one question could travel far beyond the Tamil country and outlast the generation that had sat with him in the flesh. And second, their very presence in that hall ~ Englishmen and Americans and Europeans, of every background and none, sitting alongside Tamil villagers and receiving the same wordless grace ~ was itself a demonstration of the teaching's heart: that the Self Ramana pointed to belongs to no nation and no religion, that it is simply, everywhere, what we are. The West did not merely discover Ramana. In coming to him, it helped show what he had always said.

Last updated 11 October 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees; where an account is traditional, it is told as such.