[4] He was born in 1798 to a Mukhopadhyaya family in the village of Phulia, near Shantipur, in the Nadia District of present-day West Bengal.

After travelling through Assam, Tibet, the Himalayas and various other places in India, he had an opportunity to have first-hand knowledge of yoga techniques.

In 1869, Madhavdas joined a large Sadhu community, who elected him as their leader at Vrindavan (now in Uttar Pradesh) in 1881.

He eventually settled in the village of Malsar near Baroda on the banks of the Narmada River in Gujarat, where he taught the secrets of practicing yoga to a few selected and deserving disciples.

[citation needed] A noted researcher of Kaivalyadhama Health and Yoga Research Center, Swami Kuvalayananda, discovered the creation of negative pressure in the colon during nauli, one of the yoga kriyas, for the first time in 1924.