Raghavendra Tirtha

Biography

Raghavendra Tirtha was born as Venkatanatha in the town of Bhuvanagiri, present day in Tamil Nadu into a Kannada Madhva Brahmin family of Gautama Gotra of musicians and scholars. His great-grandfather Krishna Bhatta was a tutor to the Vijayanagara emperor Krishnadevaraya. His grandfather was Kanakachala Bhatta, and his father Thimmanna Bhatta (also known as Thimmannacharya) was an accomplished scholar and musician. After the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire, Thimmanacharya migrated to Kanchi with his wife Gopikamba. Venkatanatha had two siblings—Gururaja and Venkatamba. Venkatanatha's education was taken care of by his brother-in-law Lakshmi Narasimhacharya at Madurai after the early demise of his father, and he subsequently got married.

In 1624, Raghavendra Tirtha became the pontiff of the Kumbhakonam Matha, which was earlier known as Vijayeendra Matha or Dakshinadi Matha, now known by the name of Mantralaya Sri Raghavendra Swamy Matha. Uttaradi Math along with Vyasaraja Math and Raghavendra Math are considered to be the three premier apostolic institutions of Dvaita Vedanta and are jointly referred as Mathatraya.

After a short stay at Kumbakonam, he went on a pilgrimage to Rameswaram, Ramnad, Srirangam, and Mathura. Later, he moved westwards to Udupi and Subramanya, and then to Pandharpur, Kolhapur and Bijapur. At Kolhapur, he is said to have stayed for a long time and at Bijapur, he supposedly defeated many Advaitins and converted them to Dvaita fold. After that, he returned to Kumbakonam. By 1663 he left for Mysore where he got a grant from Dodda Devaraya Odeyar. Finally, he chose to settle down in Mantralayam.

According to tradition, he attained Vrindavana in 1671 in Mantralayam, a village on the bank of river Tungabhadra in Adoni taluk in Andhra Pradesh.