Ranjit Maharaj met Siddharameshwar Maharaj at the age of twelve and remained his student until Siddharameshwar’s death in 1936. For a time he took the robes of a renunciate, until his master sent him back into ordinary life with the instruction to give up renunciation as well. He spent the following decades as a householder in Mumbai, living simply, continuing the investigation his master had set him, mostly unrecognised outside a small circle of Marathi devotees. He did not formally accept a disciple until 1983, when he was seventy.
In the 1990s Western students began to find him through the wider Inchagiri network, the same lineage that had produced his guru-brother Nisargadatta. From 1996 until shortly before his death in November 2000 he travelled to Europe and America to teach, while keeping up his regular talks in Mumbai. His samadhi shrine stands at Banganga, beside his master’s.
The teaching
His style was plain question and answer. Visitors asked, he replied in short, blunt sentences, often with an analogy pulled from daily life, and he repeated the same handful of points until they landed. The world is appearance, the way a dream or a film is appearance. The body is an instrument you are working through, never what you are. And no practice manufactures the final reality, because you are already it; what is needed is the conviction that comes from understanding the master’s words, taking them in, and letting every other identification drop.
His teaching is in some ways even more direct than Nisargadatta’s. There is no graduated method, no preliminary discipline, only the standing instruction to forget what you take yourself to be. Whatever can be perceived or conceived, he said, is not you. What remains when all of that is set aside is the simple recognition: That you are.
The talks he gave to Western visitors between 1996 and 2000 were recorded, transcribed, and published, so the late flowering of his teaching is unusually well documented for a teacher who spent sixty years in obscurity.
Where to start
- Illusion vs. Reality: the collected dialogues, transcribed from recordings made between 1996 and 2000. Direct, repetitive in the best sense, and self-contained; open it anywhere.
- The lineage site’s biography: the fullest account of his life, maintained by the Inchagiri community that publishes his books and his master’s.
- A full satsang on film: recorded in Brittany in 1998, in English. The voice and manner carry as much of the teaching as the words.
- The teachers around him: Siddharameshwar Maharaj, his master, and Nisargadatta Maharaj, his guru-brother, each have pages tracing the same lineage from a different angle.
