Leela Charitra
Biography of Chakradhar Swami
Leela Charitra is a biography of Chakradhar Swami, the guru of the Mahanubhava sect, and is a sacred text of that sect. It was written in the late 13th century by their follower Mhaimbhat with reference from Shri Nagdev Aacharya
The Leela Charitra, was written in Marathi. It was further translated in Hindi by many authors like Late. Shri Vidyadhar Babaji Punjabi and the other one was Dr. Yashraj Shastri.
The Leela Charitra, though written in Marathi, is replete with Kannada words.
Literary and historical significance
The text is widely considered the earliest extant Marathi prose work, predating later hagiographical and saint-poetic traditions in the region. As such, it not only marks the beginning of Marathi prose but also set a template for biographical narratives in regional Indian languages. Scholars note that Leela Charitra provides invaluable information on the social, political, and cultural life of 13th-century Maharashtra.
Cultural insights
Beyond religious content, the text offers detailed glimpses of medieval Maharashtrian society, including caste practices, gender relations, political authority, and social mobility.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Leela Charitra” as biography of Chakradhar Swami. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as biography of Chakradhar Swami. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6516241. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leela Charitra” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.