German Swami or Gauri Bala.
German Swami. picture taken at Mahen’s house. Charles Circus.
German Swami Gauribala Giri of Jaffna (1907-84) was, by all accounts, an enigmatic colorful figure known throughout Sri Lanka for decades. His playful antics and iconoclastic ways often disguised another side less well known to the public, for he was also an erudite student of the Philosophia Perennis whose theories concerning Sigiriya and Kataragama were decades ahead of the more conventional wisdom of professional academics."
Swami Gauribala had been born in Germany in 1907 to an upper class family as Peter Joachim Schoenfeldt.
