In a quiet courtroom in Spokane, Washington, in the spring of 1913, a federal judge was faced with a question more philosophical than legal: What is whiteness? The man before him stood serene and composed, clothed in a traditional Indian kurta, his skin a warm brown, his accent unmistakably foreign. Akhoy Kumar Mozumdar, the son of a Bengali lawyer, claimed he was white—or, at least, white enough to belong in America.
Decades later, the mystic’s life would be remembered in bursts of wonder and contradiction. In Frederick G. Lieb’s Sight Unseen: A Journalist Among the Occult, Mozumdar is described as if lifted from a spiritual fantasy, a man who defied age and disease, whose fingers emanated cosmic rays and healed the afflicted. Lieb swore that eight years after their first meeting, Mozumdar looked even younger. But before he was a miracle worker, before he became a casualty of America’s anxious obsession with race, Mozumdar was a boy with a vision—though the vision may have belonged to his mother.
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