Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, known in his early life as Mahesh Prasad Varma, was born on 12 January 1918. His birth is associated with the region of the Central Provinces of British India, an area that later came to be known as Madhya Pradesh. This temporal and geographical setting situates his life at a crossroads of colonial and emerging postcolonial India, a context that subtly informed the reception of his later spiritual teachings.

The sources differ on whether his birthplace is to be identified specifically as Raipur or as Jabalpur, both within that broader region. What can be stated with care is that his origins lie in what is now Madhya Pradesh, India, during the period when it formed part of the Central Provinces under British rule. Within such a landscape, marked by both traditional Indian spiritual currents and the pressures of modernity, his early life unfolded and provided the soil from which his later articulation of Transcendental Meditation emerged.