Nisargadatta Maharaj, born Maruti Shivrampant Kambli in a poor family near Bombay (now Mumbai), lived for many years as an unassuming householder and small shopkeeper. With minimal formal education, he worked various small jobs before running a modest beedi (hand-rolled cigarette) shop, and he married and raised a family while remaining rooted in a simple, devotional milieu. This ordinary social and economic background is essential to understanding his later role, for it shows that his realization did not arise from monastic seclusion or institutional authority, but from within the fabric of everyday life.

The decisive turning point came in the early 1930s, when he met his guru, Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj, a teacher in the Inchegeri/ Navnath Sampradaya, a lineage within the broader Advaita–Nath tradition. Siddharameshwar’s instruction was strikingly simple and radical: to attend single-pointedly to the bare sense of “I am,” the feeling of being, and to reject all other identifications with body, mind, and personal history. Nisargadatta applied this teaching with great earnestness and intensity while continuing his life as a householder and shopkeeper. After some years of such practice, he reported a decisive realization of his true nature as pure awareness, beyond the body–mind and personality.

Following this realization, there was a gradual loosening of his interest in business expansion and worldly concerns, and he lived increasingly simply, though still in the midst of family and commercial life. Teaching did not begin as a formal vocation; rather, seekers began to visit him in the small upstairs room above his shop in Bombay, where informal dialogues unfolded. Over time, these daily conversations, marked by a direct and uncompromising style, became a quiet but potent center of gravity for those drawn to non-dual understanding. His emphasis remained consistently on self-inquiry into the “I am,” on disidentification from the transient body–mind, and on the recognition of one’s true nature as formless awareness.

As word spread, visitors came not only from his own lineage and locality but eventually from many parts of the world. Dialogues from these meetings were recorded and later compiled and translated by Maurice Frydman into the book *I Am That*, which brought Nisargadatta’s voice to a much wider audience. Even as recognition grew, he remained a layman teaching in an informal setting, without elaborate ritual or institutional structure, relying instead on the sincerity of the seeker and the immediacy of direct insight. In this way, a man who began as a rural-born, self-made shopkeeper came to be regarded as a modern exemplar of Advaita, demonstrating that profound realization can flower in the midst of an apparently ordinary life.