He was a saint, and he was also a husband, a father of three and a grandfather. Who was in Neem Karoli Baba’s family, where they lived, and where his children and grandchildren are today.
The short answer: Neem Karoli Baba, born Lakshmi Narayan Sharma in Akbarpur near Tundla in Firozabad district, was a married man with three children. His father was Durga Prasad Sharma and his mother Kaushalya Devi, who died when he was small. He was married at about eleven to Ram Beti Sharma. They had two sons, Anek Singh Sharma, who settled in Bhopal and died in 2021, and Dharm Narayan Sharma, a forest department ranger who lived in Vrindavan and also died in 2021, and a daughter, Girija Devi Bhatele, who lives in Agra and heads the family trust. His grandson Dr Dhananjay Sharma, a retired doctor in Bhopal, keeps a portion of his ashes, and Dharm Narayan’s six daughters live across north India and Mumbai. In 2026 a disagreement within the family over the ancestral house in Akbarpur reached the Firozabad district administration, which set up an inquiry.
By Deepa Pant, Contributor, Haldwani. About the author ↓
Most people who bow to the blanket-wrapped murti at Kainchi Dham are surprised to learn that Maharaj-ji had a wife, children and, today, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He never hid it. He simply did not talk about it to devotees, and the devotees’ books mostly leave the family out. This page puts together what his family and the Hindi and national press have said about them, with the date and source for each part. For the rest of his life, from the pond in Gujarat to his death in Vrindavan, read the story of Neem Karoli Baba.
The names come from Amar Ujala’s profile of 6 September 2026 and its Firozabad reporting of 26 August 2026, and from the Press Trust of India report carried by Business Today on 10 September 2026. Where a spelling differs between reports, we say so below.
Lakshmi Narayan Sharma was born, most likely in 1900, into a prosperous Brahmin family in Akbarpur, a village in what was then Agra district and is now the Tundla tehsil of Firozabad. His father, Durga Prasad Sharma, owned land. His mother, Kaushalya Devi, died when he was very young, Amar Ujala reports, and the family house is still known locally by her name, Kaushalya Bhawan.
That house is the family’s anchor. It stands on a plot of about 4,000 square feet at house number 154 in Akbarpur, a two-storey building that, according to the PTI report, still holds Baba’s meditation room, a kitchen and dining area, a guest room and a bedroom. ETV Bharat, visiting in February 2025, found a small temple with his statue nearby and, opposite it, the rest house where he stayed on later visits. The Uttar Pradesh tourism department is now developing the village as a stop on a Neem Karoli Baba circuit, and in September 2026 its three-day tour ran from Lucknow through the Neeb Karori ashram to Akbarpur and on to Vrindavan.
Lakshmi Narayan was married at about eleven, a figure given in the Encyclopedia of Hinduism and by Amar Ujala. His wife was Ram Beti Sharma, also from a Brahmin family; the PTI report calls her Rambeti. Like most child brides of her time, she moved into her husband’s family home in Akbarpur.
He did not stay. Within a few years he had left to live as a wandering sadhu, first in Gujarat and then for many years at Neeb Karori in Farrukhabad district, where he took the name the world knows. The family’s own account, given by his grandson to ETV Bharat in July 2025, is that he was gone for about thirteen years and that they had given up hope when he walked back in. It was his father who brought him home, and from then on Ram Beti ran the household while her husband came and went.
She raised the three children largely on her own. One devotee website, citing a conversation with one of her granddaughters, says she kept the family going with quiet discipline, saw the children through school, and in time moved with the family to Raja Mandi in Agra. The same source says she died on 15 June 1995, which would be the anniversary of Kainchi Dham’s first consecration; we found no press report confirming the date. The PTI report adds that she was once president of the family trust that now looks after the Akbarpur house.
The surprising thing in the family’s memories is how ordinary a father he could be. Dr Dhananjay Sharma told ETV Bharat that, however famous Maharaj-ji became, he did not walk away from the household. He would be away for most of a month and come back on the first day of the next, to make sure the house had what it needed, and he would ask every member of the family, the youngest included, what they were short of. The family, he said, never once saw him asleep.
The family has its own stories too, and they read like the devotees’. Dr Sharma recalls a family wedding in Agra that Baba left in a temper over the quality of the sweets; that same night, the family says, a senior police officer in Lucknow reported Baba at his house. Another story is about a labourer on the building site of one of his sons’ houses in Lucknow, who scolded the old man for letting his grandson walk home alone after dark. Baba did not argue. He asked the labourer to take the boy home, and in time the man became part of the household. These are family accounts, told with love, and we give them as that.
He also stayed with his children. In 1970 he spent about ten days at his elder son’s house in Arera Colony, Bhopal, Aaj Tak reported in April 2026, went around the city and spent a night at the Nevri temple. Three years later, on his last journey, it was his younger son who took him to see a heart specialist in Agra.
The elder son, Anek Singh Sharma, made his home in Bhopal. Amar Ujala and the PTI spell the name Anek; Aaj Tak and some other outlets write Aneg. It was Anek Singh, according to the family, who brought a portion of his father’s ashes to Bhopal after the cremation in Vrindavan in September 1973, and the family has kept them there ever since.
Amar Ujala reports that he died in November 2021. Aaj Tak, in April 2026, quoted his son as saying his father had died about four years earlier at the age of 97, which puts it at roughly the same time. His son is Dr Dhananjay Sharma, of whom more below.
The younger son, Dharm Narayan Sharma, worked as a ranger in the forest department and spent his later life in Vrindavan, the town of his father’s ashram and samadhi. He is the son who appears in the most famous account of Baba’s last days: the devotee Ravi Khanna, in the record he dictated in November 1973, describes Baba going with his son Dharm Narayan to a heart specialist in Agra on 10 September 1973, the day before he died. The story of that journey, from Kainchi to Agra and Mathura and the hospital in Vrindavan, is told in full in our account of Neem Karoli Baba’s life.
Dharm Narayan died in April 2021; Dainik Jagran reported his passing on 27 April 2021. He had six daughters, and the PTI report says it was he who appointed Sanjay Gupta as secretary of the family trust.
His daughter, Girija Devi Bhatele, lives in Agra; some reports call her simply Girija or Girija Bhatele. She is the one of his children still living, and according to the PTI report of September 2026 she heads the family trust, the Shri Neem Karoli Maharaj Trust, which manages the Akbarpur house. Amar Ujala names the trust differently, as the Shri Thakur Hanuman Ji Trust; it may be the same body under its formal and its everyday name, and we have not been able to settle which is which.
Dr Dhananjay Sharma, Anek Singh’s son, is the family member the press talks to most. He is 68, retired from the medicine department of Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal, and lives in Arera Colony, the Free Press Journal reported in September 2026. He was fourteen when his grandfather died and says most of what he knows came from his father, his mother and his grandmother. He keeps the portion of the ashes his father brought to Bhopal, worships a Hanuman murti that Baba gave him, and says the family regards Baba as a form of Hanuman himself. The family set up a trust in Baba’s name in Bhopal about two years ago, and he told the paper that the Chief Minister had allotted it land near Ratibad for an ashram where the ashes will one day be enshrined. The makers of the 2026 film Hanuman Ansh showed him the film before release and had his consent; he has called its portrayal of his grandfather accurate.
The six granddaughters are the daughters of Dharm Narayan Sharma: Sunita Sharma of Vrindavan, Archana Sharma of Delhi, Vandana Sharma of Mathura, Bhavna Rawat of Mumbai, Ritu Tiwari of Delhi and Richa Rawat of Gurugram, as Amar Ujala listed them.
In August 2026, with interest in Baba at a peak after the film, the house in Akbarpur became the subject of a disagreement inside the family. We set out what each side has said, as reported, and nothing more; the matter is with the district administration.
As of the last report we found, on 10 September 2026, the committee had not announced any finding. We will update this section when it does.
The places tied to his name are looked after by different bodies. The temples at Kainchi, Kakrighat and Bhumiadhar belong to the Shri Kainchi Hanuman Mandir and Asram Trust, which states that it has no authorised agents of any kind, as we explain in our page on staying at Kainchi Dham. The family’s own trust looks after the Akbarpur house, and the Bhopal trust is planning its ashram near Ratibad.
What ties them together is the man in the blanket. At Kainchi his marble murti, installed on 15 June 1976, sits over a kalash of his ashes; in Bhopal another portion has been kept in a family home for fifty-three years. If you are going to Kainchi to pay your respects, our Haldwani to Kainchi Dham guide covers the drive and the day, and the foundation day plan explains what changes on 15 June, the day the temple marks its consecration.
If you are a member of the family and something here is wrong or missing, write to us through the contact page and we will correct it.
Yes. He was married at about eleven, in Akbarpur in Firozabad district, to Ram Beti Sharma. He left home soon afterwards to live as a sadhu, but returned to the family at his father's request and kept in touch with his wife and children for the rest of his life.
Ram Beti Sharma, also written Rambeti. She ran the household in Akbarpur and later Agra while he travelled, raised their three children, and was at one time president of the family trust. One devotee website, citing a granddaughter, says she died on 15 June 1995; we found no press report confirming the date.
Three: two sons and a daughter. The elder son, Anek Singh Sharma, settled in Bhopal and died in 2021. The younger son, Dharm Narayan Sharma, a forest department ranger, lived in Vrindavan and died in April 2021. The daughter, Girija Devi Bhatele, lives in Agra and heads the family trust.
Dr Dhananjay Sharma, son of the elder son Anek Singh Sharma. He is a retired doctor from Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal, lives in Arera Colony, and keeps a portion of his grandfather's ashes, which the family plans to enshrine in an ashram near Ratibad. Baba also has six granddaughters, the daughters of Dharm Narayan Sharma.
The family is spread across north India. His daughter lives in Agra, his grandson in Bhopal, and his six granddaughters in Vrindavan, Delhi, Mathura, Mumbai and Gurugram. The ancestral house in Akbarpur, near Tundla in Firozabad district, is managed by a family trust.