Pandurang Shastri Athavale who died on October 25,2003 at the age of 83, has left behind a 20 million strong world-wide network of followers who reach out in service to the community around them. They do so because they are ‘moved’ by devotion.  In the course of their work, they discover who they are in the universal scheme of things. And in the end they arrive at ‘true’ knowledge of life’s purpose. They are all practitioners of Swadhyaya.They are known as Swadhyayis.

In the 1950s, young Athavale was invited to lecture on the Vedas at an inter-religious conference in Japan. He impressed his audience but when asked how to *live* a life based on the Vedas, he was flummoxed. It was then that he determined to demonstrate that a Vedic life can be actively lived. He began teaching at his father’s school and attracted mostly the educated middle class. He soon picked 19 of his promising students and bid them to live among ordinary people of Gujarat. They were to do nothing more than live and observe among ordinary people going about their lives, the while remaining aware of what they learnt during Athavale’s lectures.

The Swadhyaya movement is said to have begun there. The 19 observers are said to have experienced all the three yogas prescribed by the Bagwad Gita: bhakti or devotion, karma or action and gnana or knowledge. One first intuits and realises that the God-principle resides in him. If so, it must reside in every living thing and therefore we are all connected. From there, acting ‘self-lessly’ is effortless, for service to others is also service to oneself. This conviction is at the root of the Swadhyaya movement.