Satyananda Giri, also known as Acharya Swami Satyananda Giri Maharaj, was an Indian monk and chief monastic disciple of Kriya Yoga guru Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri. He was born on November 17, 1896, in Malkha Nagar of Bikrampore, which is currently located in Bangladesh. Satyananda's father, Mohinimohan Mazumder, was one of the founding fathers of Calcutta Deaf and Dumb School, and the family used to live on the school premises. Satyananda met his childhood friend and brother-disciple, Paramahansa Yogananda, when he was 11 years old and Yogananda was 14 years old.

Satyananda was the eldest of Mohinimohan's seven children. He studied at the Mitra Institution of Calcutta and was proficient in Bengali, Sanskrit, Hindi, English, and Oriya. He graduated with a B.A. with honors in Philosophy from the University of Calcutta and later became a part of the Giri branch of the Swami Order, of which his guru Sri Yukteswar was also a part. Satyananda and Ananda Mohan Lahiri, his school classmate and good friend, worked together at Yogananda's Ranchi school. In his later monastic life, Satyananda served as the leader of several yoga training institutions in East India. He passed away on August 2, 1971.

Satyananda was a disciple of Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri in India. Yogananda began a school with seven children at Dihika, a small country site in Bengal, India. A year later in 1918, Sir Manindra Chandra Nundy funded the school, and it was moved to Ranchi, India. Yogananda called the school Brahmacharya Vidyalaya. Satyananda joined the Ranchi Brahmacharya School which Yogananda started and his close friends, Dhirananda and Satyananda, supported.[1][3]

In 1920, Yogananda left to spread Kriya Yoga to the United States and then Yogananda called Dhirananda in 1922 to come to help.[1][citation needed] At Yogananda's request, Satyananda became the Principal and Secretary and ran the school from 1922 to 1942.

During his tenure as director of the school, the Maharaja’s estate went into bankruptcy. He could not help anymore like before. Teachers of the school resolved to ask help from Yogananda and accordingly Satyananda wrote to him for help, but he was himself in financial trouble in the USA. Satyananda donated his salaries of the entire period (twenty years) and saved Ranchi School. Often he called Ranchi his blood-built institution.

Yukteswar Giri trained Satyananda at his Puri Karar Ashram in 1919 when they lived together and subsequently appointed him as the "leader of the East". He also appointed Satyananda at his Puri Karar Ashram as the "Ashram Swami" (the monk of the hermitage) for the Puri Karar Ashram.

Satyananda lived in the hermitages at the Karar Ashram, Puri (from 1919 to 1921), at Ranchi (from 1922 to 1941), and at Sevayatan (from 1943 to 1971). He had more than three thousand devotees in India and abroad, but his three disciples were Brahamachari Yogadananda (since deceased), Manabendra Of Guwahati (Assam) and Kalyan Sengupta (presently practising at Calcutta High Court).