Dayaram

[2] Dayaram, along with Narsinh Mehta and Meera, is considered a major contributor during the Bhakti movement in Gujarati literature.

He was born as the second son of Prabhurām and Mahālakṣmī into a Sāṭhodarā Nagar Brahmin family who belonged to the Śāṅkhāyaṇa śākhā of the R̥gveda.

His siblings, elder sister Ḍāhīgaurī and younger brother Maṇiśaṅkar, died at the age of nine and two, respectively.

Dayārām as a boy was mischievous; he and a group of friends would tease women collecting water at the river and throw stones at their pots.

The chief robber was a Marāṭha named Mānājī Angre who demanded five hundred rupees as ransom for Dayārām.

In Tirupati at the shrine of Bālājī the Mahant or head of the shine was in the habit of kidnapping and extorting money from pilgrims.

Once in Baroda, his disciples Raṇachoḍbhāī and Girijāśaṅkar were singing his poems accompanied with tambūrā and tablā in public in Dayārām's presence.

While Dayārām remained a bachelor throughout his life, he found companionship at the age of forty-six with Ratanbāī, a forty-five-year-old former child widow of a goldsmith caste.

When he later died in 1853, he left her one thousand rupees worth of gold jewelry, but the ornaments were stolen by his relatives instead and she spent the last fourteen years of her life in poverty.

Once when his guru Puruṣottamajī Mahārāja of Bundi-Kotah came to Ḍabhoi rumours reached him that Dayārām was short-tempered and should be banned from the local temple.

Every day he would eat thirty to forty betel leaves, and would only wear the finest and most expensive clothes.

Dayārām's narrative poems based on Puranic and Vaiṣṇava hagiographic lore are considered of inferior literary quality.

Dayārām is also generally considered to have composed Gujarati translations of the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gīta and Braj Bhasha works of Sūrdās.

His vocabulary is a mix of words, with tatsama forms dominating, however Dayārām still uses Perso-Arabic loanwords which were later eliminated from literary language in the nineteenth century.