Swami Ramdas

Vittal Rao was born on 10 April 1884 at Hosdurg in what is now Kerala. He lived as a householder and worked in a spinning mill and later as a petty official — an ordinary man with a family, not a prodigy monk. The restlessness underneath that life grew until, in 1922, his father initiated him into the Ram mantra. He left home, took the name Ramdas, and walked India as a wandering sadhu with Ram Nam as his only practice and God as his only refuge.

The wandering years are told in In Quest of God. He slept in temples and on station platforms, begged his food, was cheated and sheltered, and found that the Name, repeated without a gap, slowly ate the sense of a separate doer. Ram was not a distant deity. Ram was the Self, and Ram was the next face. Cheerfulness was not a temperament; it was what remained when the burden of ‘me’ was offered.

He returned to Kerala and, with Mother Krishnabai (Mataji), founded Anandashram at Kanhangad in 1931. The ashram was not an escape from the world. Its motto was universal love and service. Ramdas spoke of himself in the third person — ‘Ramdas’ — as a child of God, and received whoever came. The books that followed (In the Vision of God among them) are simple because the path he taught is simple: the Name, surrender, and the vision of God in all.

He entered mahasamadhi on 25 July 1963. Anandashram still stands at Kanhangad. The method has not aged: keep the Name on the breath, offer what comes, and bow inwardly to the one in front of you.