Clip of Paramahansa Yogananda Falsely Shared as Rare Video of Swami Vivekananda

The video shows Paramahansa Yogananda in New York, not Swami Vivekananda as claimed/

A black-and-white video of a man dressed in a turban and a road walking with a group of people is being shared on social media platforms.

The claim: The video is being shared to claim that it shows a rare video of Indian monk Swami Vivekananda in Chicago, USA taken in 1893.

The Quint received a query for this video's verification on its WhatsApp tipline.

(Archives of more claims on social media can be seen here, here and here.)

Is it true?: No, the video shows monk Paramahansa Yogananda in New York.

How did we find out?: We noticed a watermark which reads '[e-mail]' in the viral video.

• Taking a cue from this, we ran a keyword search using the same words.

• This led us to the webpage mentioning the Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) on the University of Southern California's website.

• The page showed an option to browse MIRC's digital library, where we used 'Swami' as a keyword to look for the viral video.

• With this keyword search, we came across a page titled 'Swami Yogananda of India--outtakes' which carried a longer version of the video.

• It mentioned that the video showed Swami Yogananda at New York's Pershing Square and that it was possibly shot in 1923.

• The part of this video which has been used in the viral claim starts at the 34-second mark.

• We then compared a screenshot from the viral video to a photo of Swami Vivekananda.

Conclusion: A video of Paramahansa Yogananda is being shared with the false claim that it shows a rare video of Swami Vivekananda.

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