Prem Rawat
US-based international author and peace activist
Prem Pal Singh Rawat (born 10 December 1957), formerly known as Maharaji, is an Indian international speaker and author. His teachings include a meditation practice he calls "Knowledge", and peace education based on the discovery of personal resources such as inner strength, choice, appreciation and hope.
Prem Rawat is the youngest son of Hans Ram Singh Rawat, an Indian guru and the founder of the Divya Sandesh Parishad, later known as Divine Light Mission (DLM). After his father's death, eight-year-old Prem Rawat assumed his role. At 13, he traveled to the West and took up residence in the United States. When young adults took interest in his message, the movement grew by tens of thousands. Many in the news media were perplexed by his youth and claims of divine status; he was also criticized for a lack of intellectual content in his public discourses, and for leading an opulent lifestyle.
Prem Rawat's marriage at the age of 16 to a non-Indian severed his relationship with his mother. At that point, the Indian branch of DLM controlled by his mother split from DLM everywhere else; at that point it was established in 55 countries. In the early 1980s, he began to discard references to religion in his speeches and closed the ashrams.
“Prem Rawat” enters the record as uS-based international author and peace activist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Prem, Rawat and US-based can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q965199. VIAF identifies the subject as 72635462. The Library of Congress control number is n50019973. 3 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prem Rawat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.