One of the Saptarishi, and the sage whose forest hermitage on the Ganga hosted Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana at the start of their exile.
सप्तर्षि · Saptarishi
Credited with hymns of the Rigveda's sixth mandala, Bharadwaja is remembered in the Ramayana as the sage at whose ashram, near the Ganga-Yamuna confluence at Prayaga, the exiled Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana first stopped before continuing on to Chitrakoot.
His name is attached to an early school of Ayurveda and to a lineage of scholarship carried by descendants using his gotra to this day — one of the most common gotra names still claimed across Brahmin communities in India.