Person · Marathi poet-saint · India
Samarth Rāmdās
Also known as Samarth Ramdas — Sajjangad
The 17-century Marathi bhakti poet-saint Samarth Ramdas (1608-1681), the author of the Dasbodh (The Teacher's Instruction, c.1654) — a 20-chapter Marathi verse treatise on Vedanta, bhakti, and the duties of a householder and ruler. Ramdas was the spiritual advisor of Shivaji (c.1672 onwards), who had sought his blessing before his 1674 coronation at Raigad. Ramdas's teachings on dharma-yudha (righteous warfare) and his network of 1,100 maths (monasteries) across Maharashtra are credited with providing the ideological framework for the Maratha kingdom. The samadhi of Ramdas is at Sajjangad near Satara, which he had received from Shivaji as his permanent residence. The Dasbodh is one of the three major Marathi texts (with Dnyaneshwari and Tukaram's Abhangs) that defines Maharashtrian Hindu literary identity. The annual Ramdas Jayanti each April draws Marathi pilgrims to Sajjangad.
- Date
- 1608–1681
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Patron dynasty
- Maratha
- Condition
- living pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 17.650, 73.860
About the place
Placed at Sajjangad near Satara, the fort where he spent his last years under Shivaji's protection and where his samadhi is.
Connections (2)
- Court associationTukārām
Tukārām and Rāmdās were contemporaries in the same country and are the two poles of Marathi devotion: one a trader who wrote that he wanted nothing and was suspicious of organisation, the other a Rāma devotee who founded hundreds of maths and wrote a manual on how to run them.
- Court associationRaigad
Shivaji's coronation at Raigad in 1674 required a Banaras pandit, Gagā Bhatta, to be brought south to certify a kshatriya lineage for a family the Deccan brahmins regarded as cultivators — which is the clearest available statement of what a new state had to do to become legitimate. Samarth Rāmdās, whose Dāsbodh reads like a manual of organisation and leadership rather than a devotional text, is traditionally placed as his counsellor, and Sajjangad lies inside the territory the forts held.
On these journeys
Sources
Ramdas literary tradition; Maratha-period histories and Sajjangad institutional memory.
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