Namdev was born around 1270 in Narsi Bamani in Maharashtra into a family of the Shimpi, or tailor, caste, and later settled at Pandharpur, home to the temple of Vitthal that stands at the center of the Varkari pilgrimage tradition. Hagiographic accounts, compiled well after his lifetime and mixing legend with biography, describe an early life given over entirely to devotion rather than to his family's trade, and record a formative episode in which the young Namdev, left to offer milk to the temple image of Vitthal, refused to leave until the god had actually consumed it, and the story holds that the image did. Whatever the historical core beneath such stories, Namdev is remembered as one of the earliest poets to compose devotional songs to Vitthal in the Marathi vernacular rather than in Sanskrit, work that later Varkari sant-poets, Tukaram most explicitly among them, treated as the foundation their own compositions built on.
Tradition also connects Namdev to a formative meeting with Jnaneshwar, another founding figure of the Varkari tradition, and the two are frequently paired in later Varkari memory as the movement's earliest generation. His hagiography, compiled across several later centuries by different communities, is not a single stable text, and modern scholars caution that separating a historical core from centuries of accumulated legend is difficult for a figure this early in the Varkari written record, unlike his younger successor Tukaram, whose own verses survive in something closer to their original form.