Bharadwaj (composer)

This article is about the surname Bharadwaj. For Rishi Bharadwaja from whom the surname derives, see Bharadwaja.

Bharadwaj (भरद्वाज) (also spelled as Bhardwaj, Bhardwaja and Bharadwaja) is a surname of various people in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Uttaranchal and Uttar Pradesh, but is also found among groups residing in other parts of the country. The appellation belongs to the Brahmin community of Hindus. A significant population of Bharadwajs is found in the Chintpurni region of Himachal Pradesh. 'Bharadwaja' is the gotra (clan) name of some Brahmin and Kshatriya communities in South India, with the Brahmins being the descendants of Rishi (sage) Bharadwaja, and the Kshatriyas being the spiritual disciples of the Rishi. Many Iyengars and Iyers are descendants of Bharadwaja Rishi.

Vedic History and Bharadwajas

(Summarized from The History of India (in 11 volumes) published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1996, except dates, which reflect more recent archaeological and astronomical evidence)

Bharadwajas are descended from Angirasa (c.4000BC), an important descendant of Manu (prior to c.4000BC), the progenitor of the Aryans of India. Angirasa is recorded as a Prophet in the Rig Veda (Chapter 1.1.6.).

Angirasa was the founder of one of the world's five earliest Brahminical families. The other four families were founded by Bhargava, Vasishtha, Atri (Atreya) and Marichi (Kashyapa).

A descendant of Angirasa, Dirghatama (c.3500BC) was born blind, expelled for misconduct and set afloat on the Ganges, but regained his sight later in life and became a scholar. Dirghatama consecrated Bharata of the Paurava dynasty as the Emperor. Emperor Bharata unified the dominions of India under one rule for the first time in history, established his capital at Hastinapura (Delhi) and ancient India was known after him as Bharata-varsha. The poet Kalidasa(c.400AD) celebrates Emperor Bharata's mother in his world famous poem, Shakuntala. Modern India took the name Bharat in 1947.

Emperor Bharata was disappointed in his sons (and killed them all) and adopted Dirghatama's son Bharadwaja as his own. Bharadwaja's son Vithatha succeeded Bharata as Emperor of India. From this time, the descendants of Angirasa took the name Bharadwaja (c.3500BC).

Four generations after Vithatha, the Paurava dynasty lost its supremacy to the House of Ayodhya, which gradually rose in power from about 3500BC to 3250BC, when Rama ruled as King of Ayodhya. But by 3200BC, the Paurava dynasty had regrouped under King Kuru, a descendant of Bharadwaja. The descendants of King Kuru were Santanu, Bhishma, Dhritarashta and Pandu. The sons of Dhritarashta and Pandu and their allied kingdoms fought the famous Maha Bharata war (c.3100BC) and their teacher was Dronacharya, also a Bharadwaja. In the Maha-Bharata war, King Krishna of Dwaraka participated as an ally of the Pandavas, and his prophetic battlefield sermon to Bharadwaja Arjuna the Pandava is known as the Bhagawad Gita.

The destruction, havoc and passions unleashed by the Maha-Bharata war, which in some ways was also the first great Indian civil war, ushered a long period of intense introspection and spiritual scrutiny starting with the Upanishads (intensely philosophical commentaries on the Vedic worship of God as the Creator and the meaning of life and death) and culminating with the beginning of four of the great Indian religious traditions at around the same time in 600BC - Vaishnavism (the worship of God as the protector of Good with the human goal of everlasting union with God through prayer and devotion), Shaivism (the worship of God as the destroyer of Evil with the human goal of attaining the consciousness of God through knowledge of the self and meditation), Buddhism (the Eight-fold Path of deliverance from human suffering) and Jainism (every human action has an equivalent reaction and only strict control of actions can minimize painful reactions).

The contributions of Bharadwajas to the development of the Upanishads (several of which were authored by Bharadwajas) and of Vaishnavism and Shaivism are too numerous to list here. Even the Buddhist history text Mahavagga describes a famous Bharadwaja scholar of Ekanala who was personally convinced by the Buddha to become one of his first disciples. During the period 3000BC-600BC, India was, at times, divided into several dozen states including eleven people-administered republics with no kings. Bharadwajas were kings, prime ministers, administrators or renowned scholars in several of these states. From 600BC to 317BC, most parts of India from the Indus (Punjab) to Patna (Bihar) to Mysore (400 miles south of Bombay, 200 miles west of Chennai and 50 miles from Bangalore) were consolidated into one empire by the Nanda kings, the most famous of whom was Mahapada Nanda.

Bharadwajas and Mauryas

(Summarized from The History of India (in 11 volumes) published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1996)

Janamejaya, the great grandson of the Bharadwaja Arjuna (c.3000BC), spent his career fighting and suppressing the tribes of Gandhara and one of his descendants in that region, the Bharadwaja Paurava King Purusha (Porus) fought the Greek invader Alexander in 326BC. Alexander died three years later from possibly wounds sustained while fighting one of King Purusha's allies. At this time, Kautilya (Chanakya), a Bharadwaja Brahmin of Gandhara was seething in fury at the atrocities committed by the invading Greeks. Chanakya, who authored the Arthashastra (the world's first authoritative book on statecraft) recruited an upstart Nanda prince, Chandragupta, and raised and trained an army under him to overthrow both the Greeks and the Nandas. Chanakya crowned Chandragupta the Emperor of India (317BC) and the great Maurya dynasty was established. Chandragupta's grandson Ashoka the Great (c.250BC) ascended to the throne of India after assassinating nearly a hundred of his half-brothers, and had political dominions stretching from the Oxus River to the Indian Ocean (he named Madurai, 250 miles south of Chennai, after Mathura) and spiritual dominions around the world through state-sponsored Buddhist missionaries sent far and wide. Buddhism became the world's first official state religion under Ashoka with its unique order of monks, monasteries and missionaries and was later copied by Romanized Christianity. Ashoka's four-lion imperial emblem was adopted as the national emblem of India in 1947.

Emperor Ashoka founded the ancient university town of Kanchi Pura (50 miles west of Madras) as one of three major world centers of Brahminical learning and Sanskrit scholarship (the other two being Taxila (Afghanistan) and Nalanda (Bihar)). Later in the emperor's reign, Kanchi was transformed into a major Buddhist center.

Bharadwaja Sungas

(Summarized from The History of India (in 11 volumes) published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1996)

Pushyamitra, a Bharadwaja Brahmin and General of the Mauryan army, assassinated the weak descendants of Ashoka during an army parade in their honor and established the Sunga dynasty (c.150BC). He was able to stop fresh Greek invasions and keep the political administration secular in the best traditions of India. Pushyamitra was succeeded by his son Agnimitra, who is the star of Kalidasa's Malavikagnimitra. Greeks embraced Vaishnavism under the Sungas. The tenth Sunga emperor was assassinated (c.25BC) by his minister using a dancing girl. The resulting chaos coincided with the Kushan (Shaka Hun) invasions from central Asia and the country disintegrated once again into several independent principalities, including those around and north of Kanchi.

Middle Kingdoms – Guptas and Bharadwaja Pallavas

(Summarized from The History of India (in 11 volumes) published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1996)

After the death of the Kushan King Kanishka (78AD), the disintegration of the Kushan dynasty started and the great Gupta dynasty was beginning to be forged from humble beginnings (c.250AD). Around the same time, a Bharadwaja Brahmin, Ashwathama founded the Pallava dynasty in the region north and west of Kanchi. Ashwathama was descended from the Bharadwaja Pallava governors of the region under the Sunga and Maurya dynasties as recorded in Emperor Ashoka's rock edicts. The Pallava dynasty was unique in the region for several reasons, but most importantly, it was a Sanskrit speaking Brahmin dynasty with Sanskrit and Prakrit as the official languages in a region whose population was predominantly Tamil speaking. A descendant of Ashwathama, Virakurcha, was under pressure from Samudra-gupta's expansionary military campaigns in the south and strengthened his position by marrying the daughter of a local Naga chieftain who was ruling Kanchi. With that alliance the Pallava capital was moved to Kanchi Pura, from where the grand Bharadwaja Pallava dynasty ruled as the most powerful kingdom in the Deccan and southern India until 880AD. Several smaller Pallava principalities have been recorded to have existed up to 1300AD.

Although both the Bharadwaja Pallava and the Gupta dynasties were founded around the same time (c.250AD) and had military conflicts between them, the Pallava dynasty had outlasted the Guptas by more than three hundred years. The Gupta dynasty ushered in the Golden Age of India, from the ascension of Chandra-gupta Vikramaditya in 375AD to well after his grandson, Skanda-gupta, who crushed Atilla's invading Huns in 455AD (previously, Attilla had sacked the Roman empire and annexed Rome). The Gupta empire disintegrated due to internal dissensions in 570AD and was succeeded by Harsha-vardhana, whose celebrated reign was recorded by Bana-bhatta's biography Harsha-Charita and the Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang. Harsha was defeated by the Chalukya (modern Maharashtra-Vidarbha) King Pulakesin in c.630AD, who in turn was defeated by the Pallava Narasimha-varma (642AD) and the Chalukya capital was annexed into the Pallava kingdom.

Amid times of incredible prosperity, the Pallava and Gupta dynasties embraced the Agama (symbolic material) forms of worship over the Vedic Nigama (abstract) forms and were prolific builders and architects. Temple architecture was developed for the first time by the Guptas. The first temple built in India was commissioned at Som-nath by Chandragupta Vikramaditya, who also built the only surviving major original architecture of the Guptas, the Maha-bodhi Temple in Gaya at the place of the Buddha's enlightenment. The Guptas may also have contributed to the commissioning of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. They built the original Ram Temple in Ayodhya at Rama's birthplace and the original Krishna Temple in Mathura at Krishna's birthplace. With the exception of the Mahabodhi Temple (c.400AD), all of the Gupta architectural achievements were destroyed by bigoted islamic invaders.

However, all of the Pallava temples, built around the same time as those of the Guptas, remain intact, and they are a wonderful testimony to the combined architectural achievements of the Pallavas and Guptas. The basic Pallava temple architecture design at its core was identical to the Gupta design, but was later improved. The Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsang visited the Pallava capital at Kanchi in 640AD and records the city as six miles in radius, with more than hundred Buddhist monasteries and eighty non-Buddhist temples, the majority of which belonged to Jains. However, today (2002AD) there are 126 major temples in Kanchi which date back to that period, of which 22 are Vaishnava temples and the rest belong to Shaivism. The Pallava Nandi-varma (d.795AD), great-grandson of Narasimha-varma, was a staunch Vaishnava and ruled for 65 years. All the major historical Vaishnava temple monuments standing today, including the Vaikunth-nath and Vara-da-raja Temples in Kanchi, Partha-sarathy Temple in Madras, Ranga-natha Temple at Srirangam (Trichy), Narayan Temple (Melkot-Mysore), and most importantly for Indians of today, the Balaji Temple in Tirumala (Tirupati) were built by the Pallavas.

Bharadwajas and the Tirupati Balaji Temple

(Summarized from Tirumala-Tirupati Devasthanam records and publications)

Bharadwaja Ananth-arya was born to the Vaishnava Brahmin Bharadwaja Keshav-acharya in 1053AD in Melkot (15 miles north of Mysore). Today, an ancient, twenty four-column granite hall marks the spot of his birthplace which, in the 1980s, used to serve as a cow-shed. Acharya Ram-anuja (b.1017AD near Kanchi), who was born to a Shaiva family, converted to Vaishnavism and lived for 120 years. He lies buried at the Ranga-nath Temple in Srirangam. He was fired with an intense missionary zeal to promote the merits of Vaishanava philosophy and to satisfy the spiritual hunger of millions of Indians who were reeling from the bigoted Islamic invasions in the northwest and the bigoted Shaiva Chola rulers in the south who had taken over Pallava lands. Vaishnavas and Vaishnava places of worship were neglected by the rulers of the time. During a sermon at the Narayan Temple (Melkot), he described the state of the Balaji Temple on the remote 3000 feet, seven-range, Venkata mountains (part of the Eastern Ghats of the Vindhya mountains) in Tirupati to his followers as follows, "the temple is in ruins and there is no worship, the forest has moved into the sanctum sanctorum and tigers, elephants, snakes and other wild animals roam freely, there is no water or nor are there any facilities, it is completely uninhabited by humans, and it is a seven-day trek up the wild mountain jungle from the nearest inhabited village to an elevation of 3000 feet to reach the shrine". And then he continued, "who among you will volunteer to rebuild the temple and establish facilitates for pilgrims?". In the audience that comprised of several hundred grown men, the only hand that went up was that of a mere boy, 16-year old Bharadwaja Anantharya. Moved to tears, Ramanuja said, "you are only male here. Henceforth you will be known as Ananth-an-pillai." "An-Pillai" means "masculine-son".

Bharadwaja Anantharya made extensive renovations to the Balaji Temple. He built a trek route up the mountains with rest stops. He developed and established the temple's prayers and rituals (followed to this day) and recruited priests to perform them. After his wedding, his wife joined him in making renovations. When his pregnant wife was helping him dig a lake to provide a water service to the temple and pilgrims, a little boy came to help her and she took his help. When Anantharya saw this, he was angry, because, in his devotional zeal, he wanted none but himself and his wife to create God's lake, and struck the boy on his chin with the crow-bar he was using. The boy bled and ran away. The next morning, when Anantharya opened the temple doors, he saw the deity bleeding from the chin. And he quickly realized that the little boy who came to help his wife was none other than God. Anantharya wept and begged for forgiveness and applied raw camphor to the deity's chin to stop the bleeding. To this day, raw camphor is applied to the deity's chin every day, the 1000-year old crow-bar hangs from a high wall at the temple's entrance, the lake is called Ananth-arya(alwar) Lake and the town of cottages built for pilgrims is called Ananth-arya(alwar) Nagar. Anantharya's 1000-year old granite home and garden outside the temple is a national monument under the protection of the Archeological Survey of India. The Balaji Temple is today the most popular pilgrim shrine in India today, with several hundred thousand pilgrims converging at the shrine every day (several million a day on religious occasions). Even though the temple never really closes for worship, pilgrims need to book their place five years in advance for certain routine temple services.

Present Day

There are approximately 100 million Brahmins in this world today, of whom some 15% are descended from Angirasa Bharadwaja. The family's rich genealogical heritage spanning six thousand years is entwined with the very soul of India and the people of India, and has left a lasting legacy of scholarship, political administration and professionalism.

List of Prominent Bharadwajas

4000BC to 1100AD

• Angirasa (Prophet in the Rig Veda)
• Dirghatama (Guru of Emperor Bharata)
• Bharadwaja (adopted son of Emperor Bharata)
• Bhishma (of Mahabharata)
• Dronacharya (of Mahabharata)
• Arjuna and the Pandavas (of Mahabharata)
• Eknala (one of the first disciples of The Buddha)
• Purushottam or Porus (fought Alexander)
• Kautilya Chanakya (Guru of Chandragupta Maurya and preceptor of the Maurya Dynasty)
• Pushyamitra Sunga (founder of the Sunga Dynasty)
• Agnimitra Sunga (of Kalidasa'a Malavikagnimitra)
• Pallava Dynasty
• Anantharya (instrumental in developing Tirupati Balaji Temple)

1100AD to 1947AD

• (request for Bharadwaja folks to add names - only really prominent names in light of the stature of the list above)

1947AD to Present

• (request for Bharadwaja folks to add names - only really prominent names in light of the stature of the list above)

Appendix - The Puranas and Bharadwajas

Bharadwaja (भरद्वाज) was one of the great sages (rishis) whose accomplishments are detailed in the Puranas.

He was the father of Dronacharya, which makes him the grandfather of Ashwatthama, one of the seven Chiranjeevins (immortals).(Sanskrit: अश्वत्थाम, ashvatthāma) or Ashwatthaman (Sanskrit: अश्वत्थमन, ashvatthamana) who was Dronacharya's only son.

It is said that the Marudwaja gods found him abandoned as a baby. Looking at the plight of the baby and the radiance which shone from his face, they adopted him. Young Bharadwaja was characterized by an insatiable desire to learn. He spent all his time trying to understand the Vedas. The Marudwaja gods taught him all they knew about the Vedas but Bharadwaja wanted to learn more. So he was asked to meditate upon Indra.

It is said that Bharadwaja performed rigorous penance for years resulting in his body becoming weak, and eventually he found it impossible to even sit. The Marut gods were filled with pity for him. One day as Bharadwaja fell down meditating, Indra appeared. Bharadwaja was filled with joy. Indra asked Bharadwaja what would he do if he were given a longer life. To this Bharadwaja replied that he would continue to meditate and learn more about the Vedas.

Indra told Bharadwaja that this was his third life and he had already worn out himself in the previous two lives trying to understand the Vedas. Indra then materialized three mountains, took three handfuls of soil from the mountains, and showed it to Bharadwaja. He said that the three Vedas were like the three mountains, and what Bharadwaja had learnt was the equivalent of those three handfuls, but that did not mean it was small; he had already gained more knowledge than the Gods. Indra told Bharadwaja that Vedic knowledge is endless, and while gaining knowledge is important, spreading it among the people is equally important.

Indra then advised Bharadwaja to invite Shiva and Parvati to preside over a yagna; the completion of which was deemed equivalent to mastering the Vedas. When Bharadwaja approached Kailasa, the abode of Lord Shiva, he was busy in the divine natyam (dance) with Goddess Parvati. Parvati noticed the sage and simply smiled. It is said Bhradawaja had to wait for several days for the natyam to complete and by that time the sage who was waiting was struck with paralysis and collapsed. Shiva and Parvati noticed this and immediately revived the sage back to consciousness and showered him with blessings.

From that day onwards, Bharadwaja decided that spreading the Vedic knowledge among the people and freeing society from poverty, disease, and war were his life's objectives. He traveled far and wide and took many virtuous kings as his disciples. Prominent among them were Abhayavarti and Divodasa. He helped the virtuous kings in times of peril, using his supreme knowledge and the help of the Gods. The Kshatriya disciples of Bharadwaja call themselves with surname varma.

With the help of Bharadwaja, a long period of peace was achieved, where people prospered both physically and spiritually. Bharadwaja was also the adopted son of the Emperor Bharata, the son of Dushyanta and Shakuntala. Though he could have taken over the vast kingdom of Bharata, the great sage Bharadwaja had no interest in worldly affairs. With his advice, Bharata carried out a yagna through which he got a son and so the line which had great warriors before and after that was continued.

Bharadwaja married Susheela and had a son called Garga, who was well versed in the Vedas and the Upanishads. It is said that when Bharadwaja's time in this world came to an end, the celestial Gods showered flowers on the couple and Indra came on his divine chariot, offered his respects to Bharadwaja and took them to heaven.

Biography of Sage Bharadwaja - from Rashtrathana Sahitya - http://www.freeindia.org/biographies/bharadwaj/index.htm