Sri Anirvan was an Indian/Bengali/Hindu monk, writer, Vedic scholar and philosopher.. He was widely known as a scholar and his principal works were a Bengali translation of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine and the three volume treatise Veda Mimamsa.
Background
Ethnicity:
Sri Anirvan was born in the town of Mymensingh, then a part of British India and now in Bangladesh.
His birth name was Narendrachandra Dhar. He was the son of Rajchandra Dhar, a doctor, and Sushila Devi. He was a spiritually and intellectually inclined child, who by age 11 had memorized the Astadhyayi of Pāṇini and the Bhagavad Gita. He was named Baroda Brahmachari after going through the sacred thread ceremony..
Education
He won a state scholarship as a teen and completed university IA and BA degrees at the University of Dhaka and an MA from the Sanskrit College of the University of Calcutta.
Career
Some time after 1930, Nirvanananda changed his name to Anirvan and ceased to wear the ochre swami's robes. He travelled widely in North India, eventually returning to Assam and establishing an ashram in Kamakhya near Guwahati. However, he continued to travel. In the 1940s, he lived in Lohaghat and Almora. Madame Lizelle Reymond documented some of this period in My Life with a Brahmin Family (1958) and To Live Within (1971). During this time, Sri Anirvan translated Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine into Bengali (as Divya Jeevan Prasanga); this book, his first, was published in two volumes between 1948 and 1951.
In 1953, Sri Anirvan moved to Shillong in Assam. His reputation as a Vedic scholar grew; and he wrote both in Bengali (chiefly) and in English (he was also fluent in French) on various aspects of Hindu philosophy (particularly Samkhya, the Upanishads, the Gita and Vedanta) and the parallels between Rigvedic, Puranic, Tantric and Buddhist thought. His magnum opus, Veda Mimamsa, was published in three volumes in 1961, 1965 and 1970. This work won him the Rabindra award.
Though Sri Anirvan was a saint, he studied subjects such as Marxism, nuclear science and gardening; yet he called himself a simple baul.
Views
Hindu idealism, Hindu philosophy