The author Swami Sivapriyananda was born in 1939 into a royal family of a princely state in Gujarat. He studied Sanskrit and Pali at graduate and post-graduate levels at Pune University. He also studied for the traditional 'kavyatirtha' of the Bengal Sanskrit Association, Calcutta. After this, he went to England for post-graduate study in Archaeology at the London University. He took sannyasa at Rishikesh in 1974 and since then has visited many ashramas, saints and centres of traditional learning in search of material on forgotten and neglected aspects of Indian religion and culture. At present he lives in Mysore (Karnataka), working on the philosophy and history of the Natha sects.