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When asked about the date of his birth
the Master replied blandly that he was never born!
Writing a biographical note on Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
is a frustrating and unrewarding task. For, not only the exact date of
his birth is unknown, but no verified facts concerning the early years of his
life are available. However, some of his elderly relatives and friends say that
he was born in the month of March 1897 on a full moon day, which coincided with
the festival of Hanuman Jayanti, when Hindus pay their homage to Hanuman, also
named Maruti, the monkey-god of Ramayana fame. And to associate his birth with
this auspicious day his parents named him Maruti.
Available information about his boyhood
and early youth is patchy and disconnected. We learn that his father,
Shivrampant, was a poor man, who worked for some time as a domestic servant in
Bombay and, later, eked out his livelihood as a petty farmer at Kandalgaon, a
small village in the back woods of Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. Maruti
grew up almost without education. As a boy he assisted his father in such
labours as lay within his power -- tended cattle, drove oxen, worked in the
fields and ran errands. His pleasures were simple, as his labours, but he was
gifted with an inquisitive mind, bubbling over with questions of all sorts.
His father had a Brahmin friend named
Vishnu Haribhau Gore, who was a pious man and learned too from rural standards.
Gore often talked about religious topics and the boy Maruti listened
attentively and dwelt on these topics far more than anyone would suppose. Gore
was for him the ideal man -- earnest, kind and wise.
When Maruti attained the age of eighteen
his father died, leaving behind his widow, four sons and two daughters. The
meagre income from the small farm dwindled further after the old man’s death
and was not sufficient to feed so many mouths. Maruti’s elder brother left the
village for Bombay in search of work and he followed shortly after. It is said
that in Bombay he worked for a few months as a low-paid junior clerk in an
office, but resigned the job in disgust. He then took petty trading as a
haberdasher and started a shop for selling children’s clothes, tobacco and
hand-made country cigarettes. This business is said to have flourished in
course of time, giving him some sort of financial security. During this period
he got married and had a son and three daughters.
Childhood, youth, marriage, progeny --
Maruti lived the usual humdrum and eventless life of a common man till his
middle age, with no inkling at all of the sainthood that was to follow. Among
his friends during this period was one Yashwantrao Baagkar, who was a devotee
of Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj, a spiritual teacher of the Navnath
Sampradaya, a sect of Hinduism. One evening Baagkar took Maruti to his Guru
and that evening proved to be the turning point in his life. The Guru gave him
a mantra and instructions in meditation. Early in his practice he
started having visions and occasionally even fell into trances. Something
exploded within him, as it were, giving birth to a cosmic consciousness, a
sense of eternal life. The identity of Maruti, the petty shopkeeper, dissolved
and the illuminating personality of Sri Nisargadatta emerged.
Most people live in the world of
self-consciousness and do not have the desire or power to leave it. They exist
only for themselves; all their effort is directed towards achievement of
self-satisfaction and self-glorification. There are, however, seers, teachers
and revealers who, while apparently living in the same world, live
simultaneously in another world also -- the world of cosmic consciousness,
effulgent with infinite knowledge. After his illuminating experience Sri
Nisargadatta Maharaj started living such a dual life. He conducted his shop,
but ceased to be a profit-minded merchant. Later, abandoning his family and
business he became a mendicant, a pilgrim over the vastness and variety of the
Indian religious scene. He walked barefooted on his way to the Himalayas where
he planned to pass the rest of his years in quest of a eternal life. But he
soon retraced his steps and came back home comprehending the futility of such a
quest. Eternal life, he perceived, was not to be sought for; he already had it.
Having gone beyond the I-am-the-body idea, he had acquired a mental state so
joyful, peaceful and glorious that everything appeared to be worthless compared
to it. He had attained self-realisation.
Uneducated though the Master is, his
conversation is enlightened to an extraordinary degree. Though born and brought
up in poverty, he is the richest of the rich, for he has the limitless wealth
of perennial knowledge, compared to which the most fabulous treasures are mere
tinsel. He is warm-hearted and tender, shrewdly humorous, absolutely fearless
and absolutely true -- inspiring, guiding and supporting all who come to him.
Any attempt to write a biographical not
on such a man is frivolous and futile. For he is not a man with a past or
future; he is the living present -- eternal and immutable. He is the self that
has become all things.
