Swami Sundaranand

Swami Sundaranand (April 1926 – 23 December 2020) was an Indian Yogi, photographer, author and mountaineer who lectured widely in India on threats to the Ganges River and the loss of Himalayan glaciers due to global warming.

Sundaranand died on 23 December 2020 at a private hospital in Dehradun. He was aged 96. He had been diagnosed with COVID-19 and had recovered earlier in October.

Nicknamed "the Sadhu Who Clicks" because of his photography, he was also a noted mountain climber, having scaled over 25 Himalayan peaks, and climbing twice with Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Sir Edmund Hillary paid his respects to Swami Sundaranand in the 1980s at his Gangotri hut. Of the Gangotri glacier, Swami Sundaranand says:

Since 1948, he has lived by the Ganges in Gangotri, at 10,400 feet, in a modest hut (kuti) which his master Swami Tapovan Maharaj later bequeathed to him on his death in 1957. There, Swami Sundaranand has lived in solitude and through the severest of winters without any comforts or conveniences. He has witnessed up close the gradual shrinking of the Gangotri Glacier from which the Ganges springs forth, and has chronicled his devotion to the natural beauty of the Indian Himalayas as an accomplished photographer. A museum devoted to environmental protection and spiritual guidance, containing Swami Sundaranand's Himalayan photography, is now in the planning stages. It will be located in Gangotri on the property of Sundaranand and his master.

As an ascetic, he took the brahmacharya sadhu vow in 1948 and daily devotes his life to rigorous meditation and other spiritual practices. He continues to be a principal advocate for the ecological preservation of the Himalayas, the Ganges and its source at Gangotri.

Swami Sundaranand has lived in Gangotri since 1948, when he became a renunciate, and arrived there from Andhra Pradesh. In his words: "A lot has changed since then. Although the air is cold here, the sun is harsh. It's becoming hotter every year. People say it is global warming. I say it is a global warning."

Swami Sundarananda was a student of the reclusive yoga master Swami Tapovan Maharaj (1889–1957), who wrote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries about yogic life in the Himalayas in the classic yoga book Wanderings in the Himalayas (Himagiri Vihar). Sundaranand lived with Swami Tapovan in the then inaccessible area of Gangotri, at the source of the Ganges, which is considered one of India's most sacred places.