About this stamp
A Saint from Jamnagar
India Post issued this ₹5 stamp on 25 January 2019 for Mahamati Prannath, the seventeenth-century saint and reformer revered by the Pranami followers of the Nijanand Sampraday. He was born Mehraj Thakur on 26 October 1618 in Jamnagar, Gujarat, the fourth of five sons of Keshav Thakur, a Diwan of the Jamnagar state, and Dhanbai.
At twelve he began to attend the discourses of Shri Devchandra, who saw in him the one to carry on his work of awakening souls, called jagni. After Devchandra’s death, Mehraj took up that task and became known as Mahamati Prannath.
Travels and Reform
He travelled across India and to Muscat, Basra and Bandar Abbas, speaking to people in their own languages. He founded the shrine of Shri Mahamangalpuri Dham in Surat and, at the Kumbh in Haridwar in Samvat 1735, urged the assembled saints to worship one Supreme Lord instead of many deities. He sought to unite saints against Aurangzeb’s tyranny, gave the Tartam Mantra to women, some of whom became preachers, and spoke against caste divisions and the treatment of widows.
Panna and the Kuljam Swarup
In Samvat 1740 he met Maharaja Chhatrasal, under whose protection the shrine of Padmavatipuri Dham was established at Panna. During his eleven years there he spoke the Tartam Vani, or Kuljam Swarup: fourteen books in 18,758 verses, mostly in Hindustani, written down by his followers and drawing on Gujarati, Sindhi, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hindi. He stressed the oneness of the Hindu and Muslim faiths and called his teaching Nijanand Dharma. He died in Samvat 1751 and passed his mission to Chhatrasal. According to India Post, his followers today number more than five million, in India, Nepal, Bhutan and further afield, with about six hundred centres.
On the Stamp
The stamp shows a portrait of Mahamati Prannath in a turban, framed in an oval. It was designed by Alka Sharma; 400,320 were printed by wet offset at the Security Printing Press, Hyderabad.
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