Married as a boy of eleven by his family in Akbarpur, Uttar Pradesh, he left home a few years later and took up the wandering life of a sadhu, walking without possessions through villages of northern India for decades before any ashram bore his name.

In 1964 devotees built a temple and ashram at Kainchi, in the hills near Nainital, and it became the place most associated with him in his last decade. He asked for little — a blanket, food shared with whoever arrived — and stayed mostly quiet.

A Harvard psychologist named Richard Alpert, dismissed for his psychedelic research, traveled to India in 1967 and met him at Kainchi. Baba gave him the name Ram Dass — servant of God — and the meeting redirected Alpert's teaching for the rest of his life.

He died in a hospital in Vrindavan on 11 September 1973, after slipping into a diabetic coma. Devotees say he had told people for years that he would leave his body that way, and some report seeing him afterward in dreams and visions.