A boy married at eleven in a village near Agra, a sadhu standing in a pond in Gujarat, a name taken from a railway halt, and the Hanuman temples that brought half the world to a bend in a Kumaon road. His whole life, with the sources for each part.
The short version: Neem Karoli Baba was born Lakshmi Narayan Sharma, most likely in 1900, in Akbarpur village near Tundla, then in Agra district and now in Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh. He was married at about eleven and left home in his teens. He spent six or seven years as a sadhu by a pond at Vavaniya in Gujarat and then many more in a cave at Neeb Karori in Farrukhabad district, the village that gave him the name the world knows. At his father’s request he came home and raised two sons and a daughter, then spent the rest of his life on the move between Hanuman temples he founded, among them Hanumangarhi in Nainital in 1950 and Kainchi Dham, whose first temple opened in June 1964. He died in a hospital in Vrindavan in the early hours of 11 September 1973. He wrote almost nothing down, so his story comes to us through the Kainchi temple trust, his family and the memoirs of devotees, and those sources do not always agree.
By Deepa Pant, Contributor, Haldwani. About the author ↓
Most people in Haldwani grow up with Neem Karoli Baba as a framed picture: an old man wrapped in a checked blanket, smiling, usually on the wall of a sweet shop or above a taxi dashboard on the road to Bhowali. The picture is everywhere. The man behind it is harder to pin down, and the reason is simple. He gave no lectures that anyone recorded, wrote no books and kept no diary except a notebook in which he wrote the name of Ram, page after page. What we have is what other people wrote about him.
Three kinds of source carry his story, and it helps to know which is which before you start.
We have kept those three apart all the way through. Where the sources disagree on a year or a place, you will see both versions. Where a story is a devotee’s account, we say whose, and we do not dress it up as fact. That leaves some edges rough. We think that is more honest, and closer to the man, than a smooth legend.
The trust’s account begins with a village called Akbarpur, “in erstwhile district Agra (presently under district Firozabad)”, and a prosperous Brahmin family in which a son was born at the beginning of the last century and named Lakshmi Narayan. Akbarpur sits in the Tundla tehsil of Firozabad, a few kilometres off the Agra road, and Amar Ujala and the Press Trust of India both placed it there when they reported from the village in August and September 2026.
Two details are worth knowing because you will meet the other versions online.
The name. The trust and every Hindi paper we read give his birth name as Lakshmi Narayan Sharma. Some English reference works, and the English Wikipedia following them, give it as Lakshman Narayan Sharma. The trust is the better source, and “Lakshman” may have crept in from the name he later used as a sadhu, Lakshman Das.
The year. No birth certificate survives in public. ETV Bharat, reporting from Firozabad in August 2024, gave 1900, on the lunar date Margashirsha Shukla Ashtami, which falls in November or December. Most other sources say “around 1900” or “the early 1900s”. Some pages put him in an Akbarpur in Ambedkar Nagar district in eastern Uttar Pradesh; that is a different town, and the family, the trust and the district’s own reporting all point to the Akbarpur near Tundla.
His father, Durga Prasad Sharma, owned land. According to Amar Ujala’s long profile of 6 September 2026, his mother died when he was very small. The family house in Akbarpur still stands and is known locally as Kaushalya Bhawan; ETV Bharat found a small temple with his statue nearby and a rest house opposite where he stayed on later visits.
Child marriage was ordinary in rural Uttar Pradesh at the time, and Lakshmi Narayan was married at about eleven, a figure given both in the Encyclopedia of Hinduism and by Amar Ujala. The marriage did not hold him. The trust says that “during mid adolescence” he left home, walking away from the family’s wealth to live as a wandering sadhu. Ram Dass’s compilation dates the leaving to around 1911, which would make him about eleven, and Jaya Prasada also writes that he left at about eleven. The trust’s “mid adolescence” suggests a few years later. Either way he was a boy.
Where he went first is barely recorded. Amar Ujala, alone among the sources we found, says he travelled through Rajasthan to Rajkot, where the head of a temple wanted to make him his successor and the other sadhus objected, and that he moved on. The next place every account agrees on is a village in Saurashtra.
The village is spelt half a dozen ways: Babania, Babaniya, Bavaniya, Vavaniya. It lies in Maliya taluka of Morbi district in Gujarat, about forty kilometres from Morbi town, and Gujaratis know it as the birthplace of the Jain teacher Shrimad Rajchandra. Here, the trust says, the young sadhu lived under a Vaishnav saint for six or seven years and gave himself to yogic practice. This is where he took the name Lakshman Das.
He also acquired a nickname that people in Vavaniya still use. He spent long hours in the village pond, the talaiya, sometimes standing neck-deep, and so he became Talaiya Baba. Jaya Prasada records the devotee tradition that village women saw him dive and stay under far longer than anyone should. He installed an image of Hanuman beside the pond, and a temple stands there now. Around 1916, the trust says, he handed the temple to a woman saint named Ramabai and walked north.
It is the first appearance of the pattern that ran through the rest of his life: arrive with nothing, start a Hanuman shrine, attract people, hand it on, leave.
Neeb Karori is a village in Farrukhabad district, near the Buddhist site of Sankisa, on the slow single line that runs from Farrukhabad to Shikohabad. The sadhu Lakshman Das lived here long enough for the village to give him the name the world now knows, and for the village to take his name in return.
How long he stayed depends on whom you ask. The trust has him arriving around 1916 and leaving in 1934 or 1935. The present chief priest of the Neeb Karori temple, speaking to IANS in September 2026, said 1912 to 1935. The Neem Karoli Baba Ashram in Taos, New Mexico, says about twenty years, until 1938. What all of them describe is the same life: an underground cave dug for him, where he did his sadhana; a havan kund that is still there; and a Hanuman murti that, by the priest’s account and the Taos ashram’s, he shaped with his own hands. A Hanuman temple was later built over the cave, and the Farrukhabad district administration lists it today as Neem Karori Dham, open all day except from noon to 2 PM.
The train story is the most retold thing about him, and it belongs to devotee tradition. In the version in Ram Dass’s Miracle of Love and on the Taos ashram’s site, the young sadhu, hungry and without a ticket, sat in a first-class compartment. The conductor found him, pulled the chain and put him off near Neeb Karori. He sat down under a tree. The train would not start. Engineers were called, nothing worked, and someone suggested the sadhu might have something to do with it. Officials came to him, apologised and asked him to board again. He agreed on two conditions: that a station would be built for the village, whose people walked miles to catch a train, and that sadhus would be treated with more respect. The moment he got on, the story goes, the train moved.
The trust adds that the incident was written up by K.M. Munshi in Bhavan’s Journal; we could not find the issue. What can be checked is the railway itself. On the Farrukhabad to Shikohabad line today there is a station called Nibkarori and, a few minutes further on, a halt named Baba Lakshman Das Puri, under half a kilometre from the ashram. Whether either was built because of him is tradition, not record. That a halt on an Indian Railways line carries a sadhu’s name is plain fact.
The name. In Hindi the village is Neeb Karori, and that is what people in Uttar Pradesh and Kumaon called him: Neeb Karori wale Baba. The spelling “Neem Karoli” spread mostly through his Western devotees in the 1960s and 1970s and stuck in English; the trust writes Neem Karauli. Patrika, which collected his names in 2023, says he used Neeb Karori himself and signed with it.
At some point his father found him. The accounts agree on what followed, if not on when: at his father’s request Lakshmi Narayan came home and took up the life of a married householder. Ram Dass’s compilation says so, Amar Ujala says he went back and met his family responsibilities, and Jaya Prasada writes that he lived as a householder for some years and then left again. None of them gives a year for the return.
He had two sons and a daughter, and his descendants are part of public life in Firozabad, Agra, Vrindavan and Bhopal today. They are his sons Anek Singh Sharma and Dharm Narayan Sharma and his daughter Girija Devi Bhatele, and we tell Neem Karoli Baba’s family story, from his wife Ram Beti to the grandchildren, on a page of its own. What matters for his story is that the family never lost him. His younger son was beside him on the last night of his life, in a hospital in Vrindavan.
The trust puts his later way of life in one striking sentence: he never stayed long anywhere. Even at Kainchi, Vrindavan, Hanumangarhi or Bhumiadhar, his stays ran from six months to two and a half years, and more often from ten days to a month. Only in the last two and a half years of his life did he settle, more or less, between Kainchi and Vrindavan.
Part of the confusion around him comes from the fact that every region knew him by a different name. These are the ones with a source behind them.
The trust says Maharaj-ji had been coming to the Kumaon hills since the 1930s and that the stories of his leelas there began to circulate around 1940 and 1941. Jaya Prasada puts his move from the plains to the hills in the 1940s.
One story from those years matters because of where it leads. In 1942, the trust recounts, a young man from Kainchi named Purnanand Tiwari, walking home at night from Nainital, met a figure wrapped in a blanket on the road who called him by name, told him a truck would come along to give him a lift, and said they would meet again in twenty years. It is a devotee account, told by the trust. Hold on to the twenty years.
The first temple of his in the hills that you can still visit is Hanumangarhi, on a ridge just above the Nainital to Haldwani road, a few kilometres short of Tallital. Its manager, M.P. Singh, told News18 in June 2025 and Open magazine in September 2026 that Baba came to the hill in 1950, when it was a burial ground for children that people avoided, built a hut and installed a small Hanuman. A large Hanuman followed in 1953, a Ram temple in 1955 and a Shiva temple in 1956 and 1957. If you drive up from Haldwani to Nainital you pass right below it, and it is known for its view over the plains at sunset.
Two more places belong to these years. At Bhumiadhar, about 4 km from Bhowali on the road to Gethia, a local man named Puran Singh gave Baba his house and the land around it on 11 December 1961. The trust says Baba set up a small ashram there and that it was from Bhumiadhar that he began “the search for Kainchi”. A Hanuman murti brought from Jaipur was installed there in 1965. And at Kakrighat, on the Kosi river north of Khairna on the Almora road, he chose for a Hanuman temple the place where an older saint of the hills, Sombari Maharaj, had lived. The trust runs both today, along with Kainchi.
On 25 May 1962, the trust records, Baba was being driven back to Nainital from Ranikhet with two devotees, Tularam Sah and Siddhi Ma. At Kainchi, where the road makes two sharp bends that look like an open pair of scissors, he stopped the car and asked for Purnanand. Twenty years after the night on the Nainital road, Purnanand came.
Baba crossed the stream, which the trust calls the Kshipra and most maps call the Shipra, into the forest on the far bank. It was a spot with a history of its own: Sombari Maharaj had meditated and kept a sacred fire there, and a sadhu called Premi Baba had lived there after him. Baba asked for a platform to be built over the old fire pit. That platform is where the Hanuman murti stands today.
How the land was secured is one of the places the sources part. The Taos ashram, Open magazine and the English Wikipedia say it was leased from the forest department; a Navbharat Times report cited on Wikipedia says Purnanand donated it. Both may be partly true for different parcels. What nobody disputes is the date that matters: the first temple at Kainchi was consecrated in June 1964, and the Hanuman murti’s pran pratishtha on 15 June is why 15 June is Kainchi’s foundation day. It is not, as some pages claim, the anniversary of his death.
The other shrines came one by one, each consecrated on a 15 June in a different year: Lakshmi Narayan, then a Shiva shrine with Parvati, Ganesh and Kartikeya, then Vaishnavi Devi in the kirtan hall. The last one Baba consecrated himself was Vindhyavasini Devi, on 15 June 1973, three months before he died. The trust also records a prediction devotees treasure, that the fame of this small place in a valley would one day spread across the world. More than sixty years on, with more than a lakh of people arriving on a single foundation day, it is hard to argue.
If you want to see it for yourself, our Haldwani to Kainchi Dham guide has the route up NH 109 through Bhowali and a realistic plan for the day, and how far Kainchi is from Kathgodam, Nainital and Pantnagar is set out against the official figures.
Kainchi was one of many. By the count of the Neeb Karori temple’s priest, quoted by IANS in September 2026, Baba founded about 108 Hanuman temples; other sources say simply over a hundred. Not all have founding dates on record, but these do.
He was as well known for feeding people as for building temples. Dada Mukerjee, the Allahabad professor who hosted him for years, described the camp Baba ran at the 1966 Kumbh Mela at Allahabad, where thousands were fed every day. At Kainchi the tradition survives in the malpua prasad handed out from five in the morning on every foundation day.
He owned almost nothing. The trust describes his blanket as an ordinary plaid one, and Amar Ujala, looking for the story behind it in 2026, found no single verified reason why he always wore it, only many explanations from devotees. He said little, and he moved on before anyone could build a court around him.
His teaching, as his devotees remember it, fits on a postcard, and the Taos ashram prints it on one: love everyone, serve everyone, remember God, tell the truth. Some versions add feed everyone. He liked to say sab ek, all one. The trust says he wrote the name of Ram in a diary every day, dating each page, and told people that every task gets done through Ram’s name. He had devotees sing the Hanuman Chalisa again and again, and many of them came to see him as an ansh, a part, of Hanuman himself. Amar Ujala, careful as ever, notes that this is belief, not something anyone can prove; it is also the title of the 2026 film.
What strikes most people who read about him is who he let in. Rich and poor sat together, Hindus and Muslims and Christians came, and, by Amar Ujala’s account, he did not demand that people give up their habits before he would see them. Siddhi Ma, the devotee who travelled with him on the day he chose Kainchi, became the steady centre of his ashrams in Kumaon, and her life, written by Jaya Prasada, is one of the better windows on his.
That openness is still the spirit of the place, and the rules at the temple are few: modest clothes, no photography of the murti, phones away. Our page on the dress code and the photography rule at Kainchi Dham has the detail, and there is no paid queue and no ticket, as we explain in the piece on Kainchi Dham registration and darshan booking.
For most of his life Maharaj-ji was known across north India and almost nowhere else. That changed with one American.
Ram Dass. In 1967 Richard Alpert, a psychologist who had been dismissed from Harvard in 1963 over his experiments with psychedelics, travelled to India restless and sceptical. A young American sadhu, Bhagavan Das, took him to Kainchi. By Ram Dass’s own telling, the old man in the blanket told him, unprompted, that he had been thinking about his mother the night before, and that she had died of a disease of the spleen, which was true and which no one in India could have known. Alpert went back to America as Ram Dass, the name Maharaj-ji gave him. His book Be Here Now, published in 1971, sold in the millions and sent a generation of young Westerners to look for the man in it. He later gathered devotees’ stories into Miracle of Love, still the best-known book about Baba in English.
The others. From the spring of 1970 until 1973, several hundred Westerners had his darshan, by the count in Parvati Markus’s history of that circle. Among them were the kirtan singer Krishna Das, who learned to sing the Hanuman Chalisa at Kainchi; Mirabai Bush, who was with him from 1970 to 1972 and later co-founded a centre for contemplative practice in the United States; the psychologist and writer Daniel Goleman; and a young doctor, Larry Brilliant. Brilliant told Tricycle in 2023 that Baba sent him to Delhi to join the campaign to wipe out smallpox, that the World Health Organization turned him away again and again before it took him on, and that he went on to work in the campaign, which saw the world’s last case of the deadliest form of smallpox, in Bangladesh, in October 1975. Brilliant and Ram Dass later founded the Seva Foundation, which has worked on blindness in India and Nepal.
The famous names, briefly. Three stories are told about Baba and Silicon Valley, and only one is quite right as usually told.
Closer to home, the cricketer Virat Kohli and the actor Anushka Sharma came to Kainchi with their daughter on 17 November 2022, recited the Hanuman Chalisa and stayed about two hours, Dainik Jagran reported, and visited the Vrindavan ashram in January 2023. Visits like theirs, and the 2026 film, explain a good part of today’s crowds.
The best record of his final days is an account dictated on 13 November 1973 by a devotee, Ravi Khanna, who was with him throughout. It has one date wrong in its opening line, so we follow its days of the week, which fit the calendar. The trust and the Taos ashram fill in the rest.
The trust tells of a diary. In the notebook where he wrote Ram’s name each day, Baba filled the page for 9 September and the page for 10 September, dated the page for 11 September and left it blank, and handed the notebook to Siddhi Ma. Devotees read it as a sign that he knew.
On Sunday 9 September 1973, at about half past two in the afternoon, he left Kainchi by car with a few devotees. Ravi Khanna does not name the station where they boarded, only that they bought tickets for Agra and travelled overnight. On Monday 10 September, in Agra, with his younger son, he saw a heart specialist at a medical college. The cardiogram was reported normal. That evening, at about nine, tickets were bought for Kathgodam, for the journey home to Kainchi.
He did not get there. On the train he decided to get off at Mathura and go to Vrindavan instead. Around midnight, on the station steps at Mathura, he collapsed, shaking and in a cold sweat. A taxi took him the few miles to Vrindavan, to the Ramakrishna Mission hospital. Doctors gave him injections and put an oxygen mask on him. He pulled it off, saying it was no use, asked for water, and repeated the words Jagdish Hare, Lord of the universe. He died in the early hours of Tuesday 11 September 1973, about 1 AM by Ravi Khanna’s account and about 1:15 AM by the trust’s. It was Anant Chaturdashi. The Taos ashram describes it as the night of 10 September; it is the same night. Biographies give the medical cause as a diabetic coma.
His body was taken to the Hanuman temple of his Vrindavan ashram and cremated there the same day on a sandalwood pyre. A samadhi mandir was built over the spot, and the Taos ashram notes that its design deliberately borrows from the temple, the mosque, the church, the gurdwara and the pagoda. His ashes went in several directions: a kalash to Kainchi, portions into sacred rivers, and, his grandson told Aaj Tak in April 2026, a part that the family has kept in Bhopal ever since.
The trust preserves one more remark, from the saint Devraha Baba, on hearing the news: that Maharaj-ji had played this kind of trick many times before. Devotees have taken comfort in it for fifty years.
At Kainchi, devotees decided within a year to build a small samadhi temple over the kalash of his ashes. The trust says construction began in 1975; the Taos ashram and Amar Ujala say 1974. Both agree on the day it was finished: his marble murti, carved in Jaipur, was installed on 15 June 1976. It is the figure in the blanket that pilgrims bow to today.
The September anniversary is kept at Vrindavan with a mahasamadhi bhandara; in 2026, the fifty-third, thousands came. The June anniversary at Kainchi has become one of the largest gatherings in the hills: ETV Bharat counted 1,19,228 devotees on 15 June 2026, with the first ten thousand through the gate before six in the morning. Our guide to the foundation day traffic plan and shuttles covers how the district manages that day.
The ordinary days have grown too. The district’s cameras counted more than 47 lakh arrivals in the eleven months to June 2026, and our Kainchi Dham crowd calendar breaks that count down month by month. In August 2026 a low-budget Hindi film about his early life, Hanuman Ansh, directed by Vishal Chaturvedi, became an unexpected hit, and Uttarakhand made it tax-free after Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami watched it on 5 September. By early October weekend crowds at Kainchi had passed 40,000 a day, and on 6 October 2026 the Kumaon Commissioner’s meeting agreed in principle on compulsory registration and a daily limit; our page on Kainchi Dham registration tracks where that stands, and the weekend parking rules explain what the crowds mean for your car.
In Uttar Pradesh his birthplace is being drawn into the story too. In September 2026 the state tourism corporation ran a three-day tour from Lucknow to the Neeb Karori ashram, Akbarpur and Vrindavan, following his life in the order he lived it.
You can trace almost his whole life on the ground, and the Kumaon part of it fits in a single day from Haldwani. For drive times from Kainchi to Kakrighat, Hanumangarhi and the lakes around them, see our guide to places to visit near Kainchi Dham.
One thing to know before you plan: you cannot stay at the Kainchi ashram, whatever some websites say. Rooms in Bhowali, Bhimtal, Nainital and Haldwani are compared in where to base yourself for Kainchi Dham.
If you hold a source that settles any of these, we would like to see it. We will update this page when the trust or the family publishes more.
His birth name was Lakshmi Narayan Sharma, the name the Kainchi temple trust and the Hindi press use. Some English reference works give Lakshman Narayan Sharma. As a sadhu in Gujarat he took the name Lakshman Das, and he became known as Neeb Karori or Neem Karoli Baba after the village in Farrukhabad district where he lived and meditated for many years.
In Akbarpur village near Tundla, which was in Agra district at the time and is now in Firozabad district, Uttar Pradesh. The year usually given is 1900. Pages that place him in Akbarpur in Ambedkar Nagar district have confused two different towns.
The name comes from Neeb Karori, a village on the Farrukhabad to Shikohabad railway line where he lived in a cave for many years, roughly between the mid-1910s and the mid-1930s. Devotees tell of a train that would not move after he was put off it there. The spelling Neem Karoli spread through his Western devotees; in Hindi he is usually Neeb Karori Baba.
He died in the early hours of 11 September 1973, Anant Chaturdashi, at the Ramakrishna Mission hospital in Vrindavan, after falling ill at Mathura station on the way back to Kainchi from Agra. He was cremated the same day at his Vrindavan ashram, where his samadhi mandir stands. A kalash of his ashes is enshrined at Kainchi Dham, under the marble murti installed on 15 June 1976.
He first stopped at Kainchi on 25 May 1962, according to the temple trust, and asked for a platform to be built where the Hanuman murti now stands. The first temple was consecrated in June 1964, and the installation of the Hanuman murti on 15 June is why 15 June is Kainchi Dham's foundation day.
His devotees remember a short teaching: love everyone, serve everyone, remember God and tell the truth, with feeding people often added. He repeated 'sab ek', all is one, wrote the name of Ram every day and had devotees sing the Hanuman Chalisa. He left no books or recorded talks; his teaching survives in what devotees wrote down.