Lakshman Shastri was born in a Marathi Deshastha Brahmin[1] family in 1901 to Balaji and Chandrabhaga Joshi, in the village of Pimpalner, tahsil sakri, Dhule district in the present-day state of Maharashtra.
In Wai, he studied Sanskrit, Hindu dharma and Indian philosophy at the Pradnya pathshala, a renowned Vedic school.
[3] It was during one of those internments that Mahatma Gandhi, troubled by respectable Brahmin priests shying away from officiating at the intercaste marriage of his son Devdas, a Vania, or merchant class boy, to Lakshmi, the daughter of C. Rajagopalachari, a Brahmin, and later the second Governor General of independent India approached the young Joshi for his opinion on whether such a marriage was against Hindu dharma.
This treatise was based on six lectures he delivered at the University of Pune, where he traced the evolution of "Vedic" culture and its influence on modern India.
He wrote a critique arguing that modern Indians became conflicted between meeting material needs and attaining spiritual enlightenment, thus fostering a collective weakness, disharmony and allowing caste differences to prevail.
In Wai, he also opened a hostel for students of the Dalit castes, a factory for making hand-made paper and a printing press.
In that same year, he edited the Dharmakosha, which encompassed twenty-six volumes and 18,000 pages, encoding the basic texts and commentaries on the varied aspects of dharma and dharma-shastras from 1500 BC to the 18th century.
He also wrote Hindu Dharmachi Samiksha, in 1940, critically examining the concepts and foundation of Hinduism, and Jadawad, in 1941, a survey of the history and development of materialism in Indian and Western philosophical traditions.