God, Guru, or Accused? The Uncomfortable Questions Swirling Around Sadhguru

A dead wife, families tearing themselves apart, and a forest allegedly bulldozed for an ashram. Why won't these questions go away?

Jaggi Vasudev — better known to his tens of millions of followers as Sadhguru — is one of the most famous spiritual figures alive. He speaks at Davos. He advises governments. He has built a global movement around yoga, environmentalism, and the promise of inner transformation.

He is also a man with a great deal of questions he has never satisfactorily answered.

At the heart of the scrutiny is American investigative journalist Be Scofield, whose reporting on Sadhguru and his Isha Foundation is methodical, forensic, and deeply uncomfortable reading for anyone who has ever bought into the guru's carefully constructed image. Her work cuts across three distinct areas — a suspicious death, allegations of psychological control, and some rather glaring environmental hypocrisy — and together they paint a portrait of an institution that has grown too powerful, and too well-protected, for ordinary accountability to reach.

The Wife Who Became a Miracle

It begins, as so many of these stories do, with something that cannot be undone.

In 1997, Sadhguru's wife Vijaykumari — known as Vijji — died. According to the Isha Foundation, she attained Mahasamadhi: a rare and exalted yogic state in which an enlightened soul consciously departs the physical body. A miracle, in other words. A cause for reverence, not investigation.

Her father saw it rather differently. He filed a First Information Report — a formal police complaint — alleging murder and dowry harassment.

What makes the case so difficult to resolve is the cremation. Vijji's body was burned within hours of her death. Her parents, who had been urgently asking for her body to be left untouched, were still travelling when it happened. By the time they arrived, there was nothing left to examine. No body, no forensic evidence, no possibility of a post-mortem.

Scofield's argument is blunt: the *Mahasamadhi* story didn't just reframe a death as a miracle. It ensured that the death could never be properly investigated. Whether by design or convenience, the spiritual alibi and the destruction of evidence arrived at exactly the same moment.

The Families Left Behind

Decades on, the Isha Foundation has grown into a vast operation centred on a sprawling yoga centre in Coimbatore. And the complaints coming from outside its walls have kept coming.

Scofield has given a platform to families who say they have, in effect, lost their children to the ashram — not through any physical barrier, but through something harder to prove and equally hard to escape. Sleep deprivation. Isolation from family. Relentless physical labour. The gradual erosion of a person's individual will, replaced by total devotion to the institution.

These aren't fringe accusations. In late 2024 and into 2025, a retired professor took the matter to the Madras High Court, claiming his two adult daughters were being psychologically manipulated into remaining at the ashram. The Indian Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the women were there of their own free will — but Scofield's reporting asks a harder question: in an environment deliberately engineered to reshape how a person thinks, what does "free will" actually mean?

The Forest He Built His Empire On

Here is where it gets particularly awkward.

Sadhguru is celebrated internationally as an environmental champion. His *Save Soil* campaign drew enormous attention. His *Cauvery Calling* initiative raised hundreds of millions of pounds for tree-planting. He is, by any measure, one of the most prominent green voices on the global stage.

And yet, local activists and legal petitions have long alleged that the Isha Yoga Centre itself was built on protected forest land — land that sits within elephant corridors. The man urging the world to save its trees, the argument goes, may have cleared some rather important ones to build his own ashram.

Then there is the money. *Cauvery Calling* and *Save Soil* are non-profit ventures sustained by enormous public donations. Critics, amplified by Scofield's reporting, have raised serious concerns about financial transparency — arguing that because Sadhguru carries such spiritual prestige, his organisations are shielded from the kind of rigorous auditing that any other NGO of comparable size would face as a matter of course.

What It All Adds Up To

Scofield's investigation is not a single explosive revelation. It is something more methodical than that — a slow accumulation of unanswered questions, inconsistencies, and institutional patterns that, taken together, describe an organisation that has learned to use spiritual authority as armour against scrutiny.

To Sadhguru's followers, none of this lands. Scofield is viewed as a bad-faith actor, a Western critic with an agenda, someone determined to tear down something sacred. That view is sincerely held by millions of people.

To his critics, however, the story is simpler: a powerful man has spent nearly three decades ensuring that certain questions never get a proper answer. High-production documentaries get made. Narratives get reinforced. And somewhere, in a police filing from 1997, a father's allegation sits unresolved.

The questions are still there. They haven't gone anywhere.

And as long as journalists like Scofield keep asking them, neither will the story.