The religious history of Bengal abounds in very many important figures of which, however, two have acquired iconic status: Krishna Chaitanya and Sri Ramakrishna. While separated in history by about 400 years, their lives and teachings reveal remarkable parallels, though obvious differences are not hard to detect. In good measure, the importance of such figures springs from the fact that they represent the two most popular and significant religious traditions to have been historically experienced in Bengal: Vaishnava devotion and Sakta-Tantric praxis respectively. Both appeared at critical junctures in Bengal’s provincial history and were instrumental in reviving a religious culture in some crisis. Some texts and traditions attach much value to the fact that in both instances, this recovery or revival of Hindu religious life and culture occurred under conditions of alien rule—in the first instance under Turks and Pathans and in the second, British colonialism. Such perceptions were to prove creative and powerful since the abundant literature that celebrates the two lives also associates them with the liberation of a nation under siege, the freeing of a people hitherto held captive by alien and oppressive ways of life.
At least two well-known authors and commentators from the colonial period—Brahmo poet and songwriter Trailokyanath Sanyal alias Chiranjiv Sharma (1868–1915) and writer–scholar Girijashankar Raychaudhuri (1885–1965)—have advanced the claim that but for Chaitanya’s unleashing of a religious revolution, creating a new social space, and bringing an easy and unencumbered spiritual life to the common people, the Bengali–Hindu community would have failed to survive the ‘tyranny’ of Islam and the Muslim ruling classes. The Bengali literary historian Dineshchandra Sen proudly designated a certain period in the history of medieval Bengal as ‘the age of Chaitanya’ and similarly, some others—for instance, D.S. Sarma (1883–1970)—have identified the advent of the renaissance in modern India not with the coming of the new episteme from the West or the birth of the English-educated intelligentsia, but with the old-world charisma of the barely literate Ramakrishna. In 1885, the Viswavaishnava Sabha, an institution founded by modern followers of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, launched the Chaitanya era that stood in competition not only with the Gregorian calendar but also with the Saka era and the Vikram Samvat. It is also important not to overlook the fact that both Chaitanya and Ramakrishna have inspired movements now with a global presence and which, in interesting ways, have reworked older Indian traditions in order to effectively meet modern day challenges.
In keeping with the tendency common in colonial Bengal, there were recurring attempts to draw analogies between the life of Chaitanya and those of well-known contemporaries from Europe with whom Anglophone Hindu Bengalis had grown sufficiently familiar. A similar strategy was employed to read developments occurring in India in the light of those occurring in early modern Europe. The Indian Civil Service member Romesh Chandra Dutt (1848–1909) believed that there occurred in 16th-century India an ‘Enlightenment’ and found Chaitanya to be its most remarkable product. In his introduction to Kavi Karnapur’s Chaitanya Chandrodaya Nataka, Indologist Rajendralal Mitra found Chaitanya’s social message comparable to that of the protestant reformer Martin Luther. Dineshchandra Sen was quite upset with French Indologist Sylvain Levi’s (1863–1935) unwillingness to favourably compare Chaitanya to the Buddha, hastening to add that as a Bengali it was but natural for him to reveal a passionate and even fanatical devotion to Chaitanya. Sisir Kumar Ghosh, the author of a multi-volume biography on Chaitanya, argued that in Chaitanya’s time, converting to Vaishnavism required the courage and conviction comparable to abandoning parental Hindu society in favour of the rebellious Brahmos of the 19th century. On one occasion, such enthusiasm drew him into a controversy with Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901) and Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar (1869–1912), well-known figures from contemporary Maharashtra who strongly resented Ghosh’s insinuation written in the Vishnupriya Patrika (1895) that it was the Brahmin Chaitanya’s grace that transformed Tukaram, allegedly a ‘lower-caste’ man, into a pious and respectable poet–singer. Interestingly, whereas in our colonial history there soon developed considerable friction between social reformers or agitators and those who were political, this was strategically glossed over when it came to projecting the historical standing or relevance of Chaitanya. Only a few years after its foundation, the Indian National Congress refused to allow the Social Conference to hold its annual meetings at venues chosen by the Congress itself. The Congress argued that meddling with social issues only divided the nation, whereas focusing on the common enemy, the British colonial state, unified it.
Such formulations do not appear to hold true for 19th-century readings of the life and message of Chaitanya. Several anti-colonialist political mobilizers who had little claim to either understand or advance the cause of social reform chose to read Chaitanya primarily as a social reformer. In this category, we may include Surendranath Banerjee (1848–1925), Sisir Kumar Ghosh (1840–1911), and, to an extent, even Bipinchandra Pal (1858–1932). Speaking with the advantage of hindsight it could be argued that their interest in so projecting Chaitanya originated in the politically informed dual premise: first, that the act of social reform by Chaitanya ipso facto represented the weakening of established hierarchies of caste, leading to the greater enfranchisem*nt of the lower classes into a growing community with a shared common ideology; second, such work contributed towards the formation of a nascent nationhood, even in Chaitanya’s day. In this instance, evidently, the expanding frontiers of a social community were made to overlap with those of the political. Closer to our time, Nirad C. Chaudhury found Chaitanya to have uniquely revolutionized contemporary Bengali life, significantly shaped its present, and futuristically prepared it for greater challenges. A closer scrutiny, however, puts such presumptions under considerable doubt.
Chaitanya’s Religion
In the 1920s, among the many significantly revisionist claims that he made, Melville T. Kennedy ruled out the possibility of Chaitanya being a social reformer. This offers an interesting contrast not only to modern-day Indian perceptions—which, under the spell of a nationalist rhetoric, saw him as an active crusader against caste—but also to conclusions arrived at by colonial ethnographers who had no cause to be influenced by such rhetoric. W.W. Hunter, for example, argued that but for its opposition to caste, which he deemed to be progressive in character, Chaitanya’s movement was essentially passive in character and even reactionary in its advocacy of abstract meditation and asceticism. Serious reflection on both these statements will, however, persuade us to qualify these in some important ways. First, Hunter seems somewhat off the mark in suggesting that Chaitanya was actively opposed to the institution of caste but no less so in claiming that the Gaudiya movement was quintessentially marked by an emphasis on abstract meditation and asceticism. We shall briefly return to the question of Chaitanya’s attitude to caste; for now suffice to say that Hunter’s characterization collapses the distinction between the two broad levels of Vaishnava religious life, one that was essentially based on high textuality and complex processes of mental cognition and the other that was more spontaneous, emotionally charged, and largely free of textual references. As with other religious orders, the Gaudiyas too were divided into renouncers and householders; and renunciation itself came in two forms: that which was purely mental and that which combined mental acts of renunciation with the physical and the formal. Even the famed Goswamis of Vrindavan were not ascetics in the strict sense of the term, even though they led lives of reclusion and extreme renunciation. Many important Gaudiya leaders of both Chaitanya’s generation and thereafter, among which the names Nityananda, Srinivas, and Shyamananda readily come to mind, travelled in the opposite direction, giving up the life of sanyas to turn into householders. It would also be an error to think that Goswami theology was unqualifiedly accepted by the ordinary Vaishnava, even more so if, within our definition of the ‘Vaishnava’, one were to also include Boshtoms and Bairagis, quite numerous by count, but following a social and religious life perceptibly different from that found among upper-caste Vaishnavas. For the former it was not so much the religious ideology that mattered as the new social space that was created, somewhat by default.
Kennedy’s thesis poses a different kind of problem. First, we are left wondering just what he might have meant by the terms ‘reform’ and ‘reformer’. Going by Kennedy’s reading, if one was to take Chaitanya to be a ‘religious reformer’, it would be only reasonable to ask just what elements of contemporary Hindu religious ideas or practice did he wish to reform. There are a variety of problems embedded in the conceptual categories of the kind Kennedy chooses to use. For one, it could be quite justly claimed that ‘reform’ and ‘reformers’ are terms of quite recent origin which ill-fit Chaitanya and his times. In modern Hinduism, the act of reform was a perceptibly self-conscious act that originated in new concepts of history and society. To put it briefly, the urge to ‘reform’ was derived from a greater emphasis on human initiative and instrumentality and nurtured by new notions of time, in some ways quite untypically Hindu. By the mid-19th century, the Western-educated Hindu had begun to reckon with linear notions of time as against the circular or cyclical, which was traditionally known to Brahmanism, and took positivist history itself as the chronicle of linear and irreversible human progress. A deistic world view, which is what influenced the earliest ‘reformers’, spoke of an idle Creator God who took no further interest in his creation, leaving the responsibility entirely to human mediation. Generally speaking, the Hindu-Brahmanical view of time and change was cosmic, not historical, and it really did not allow ample space for human initiatives to regulate human life and existence. Pre-modern Hindu culture did acknowledge the need for change but did not see it as born of human will and agency. Hence, while an urge for changing or correcting irrational ideas or practices did constitute a part of pre-modern Hindu self-understanding, this was not necessarily understood as an act of self-conscious reform. To the best of my knowledge, there are no terms in the pre-modern vernaculars of south Asia that truly capture the essence or import of the terms ‘reform’ or ‘reformer’ as these came to be understood in modern India. It was the modern historian or scholar who called figures such as Kabir, Nanak, or Chaitanya ‘reformers’ or their work as ‘reform’, not their contemporaries.
Kennedy’s error also appears to lie in associating Chaitanya with institutionalized reform, whether social or religious in nature, resting on a carefully prepared agenda and distinctly new notions of an anthropomorphic, man-centred universe. Organized work aiming at human welfare and a this-worldly concern for a democratic brotherhood appear to be less his aims when compared to the ultimately transcendental and other-worldly nature of Krishna worship. Chaitanya was neither a preacher nor a publicist and, in hindsight, his true aim appears to have been to regroup men and women united by some common but elementary religious principles and practices. It was more a religious phenomenon that he created, rather than religious ideology.
Contrary to what is often claimed, Chaitanya did not specifically aim at contesting popular, non-Vaishnava religious traditions. A common perception appearing in several texts is that he helped combat Sakta-Tantrik ‘excesses’. The Jagai–Madhai episode, to which we have referred before, is sometimes seen as the typical Vaishnava chastisem*nt of Sakta debauchery. On the contrary, though ecstatically absorbed in Krishna worship and solely preaching Krishna Bhakti, Chaitanya showed an ecumenical reverence for other Hindu deities and divinities. In Nabadwip itself, while dramatically re-enacting the sports of Krishna in the company of his followers, he is known to have paid respect to the Sakta-Tantrik Goddess. In later life, too, when touring south India, Odisha or Mathura–Vrindavan, he stopped by important religious shrines, paying reverence to a host of local deities, gods, and goddesses falling outside the Vaishnava pantheon. Chaitanya Charitamrita reports Chaitanya specifically instructing Sanatan never to speak ill of other divinities or religious traditions. This is quite consistent with Chaitanya Bhagavata’s warning that one who made an arbitrary distinction between divinities or avatars was the true sinner.
In his classic history of medieval Bengal, Jadunath Sarkar listed the following positive changes produced by the Chaitanya movement: decline in Sakta-Vamachar practices and the drinking of intoxicating spirits, the spiritual advancement of the lower classes, a greater prestige for Sanskrit, and closer links between Bengal and the rest of India. None of these, however, directly followed from Chaitanya’s work even when he is cast in the image of a crusading reformer. On the contrary, Chaitanya and his religion had to put up with a degree of hostility from local ruling houses. We are reliably informed by Diwan Kartikchandra Ray in his Khitish Bangshabali (A Genealogy of the Ruling Family of Nadia, 1875)—an account of the ruling house of Krishnanagar—that Maharaj Krishnachandra (who reigned between 1728 and 1782), a powerful potentate of 18th-century Bengal, though otherwise indifferent towards Vaishnavism, remained so hostile to the Chaitanya cult itself that images of Chaitanya had to be hidden from public view in his kingdom.
The problem with delineating the religious views of Chaitanya is that other than the Ashtaka (eight verses) that he is said to have composed, all else comes to us through tendentious reporting in hagiographies. In the case of Chaitanya Charitamarita, there are practical difficulties in separating the views of Krishnadas Kaviraj from those of Chaitanya. Thanks to some careful textual comparisons made by modern scholars, we now know that much of what Kaviraj claims to have been the words of Chaitanya himself are actually reproductions from works later produced by the Goswamis or from other sources. Thus, Chaitanya’s instructions to Sanatan Goswami are partly taken from Brahma Samhita and the Krishna Karnamrita (Devotional Verses in Praise of Krishna, c.pre-14th century), texts discovered by Chaitanya in the south, and the rest from the following works: Laghubhgavatamritam (short commentary on the Bhagavat Purana, c.16th century) and Bhaktirasamritasindhu by Rup Goswami, and Sarvasamvadini Tika (commentary on the six sandarbhas by Jiva Goswami, c.16th century) by Jiva Goswami. Similarly, Chaitanya’s exchange of views with the Vedantin Prakashananda is essentially derived from Jiva’s Tattvasandarbha (Discourses on Metaphysics, 16th century). Modern scholarship has found Krishnadas Kaviraj also guilty of misrepresentation; whereas he claims Ramanand Ray’s ‘Ramananda Samvad’ (a dialogue that took place between Ramananda and Chaitanya) to have been derived from Swarup Damodar’s Kadcha, Bimanbihari Majumdar has sufficiently established this to be a plagiarized version of Kavi Karnapur’s Chaitanya Chandrodaya Nataka (14 verses from Act VII). The Samvada also uses the works of Rup and Sanatan and Krishnadas’s own Govindalilamrita. The ‘Ramananda Samvad’, however, is not wholly a fabrication. We know from extant sources that some years after the dialogue took place, Chaitanya’s emissary to the south, Pradumnya Brahmachari, requested Ramananda to repeat it to him.
It could be argued that on one level, passing off Goswami theology as Chaitanya’s own is essentially not misreporting since the source of that theology was none other than Chaitanya himself. On close reflection, even this does not quite seem to be the case. In his Vrihatbhagavatamritam (extended commentary of the Bhagavat Purana), Sanatan Goswami does not acknowledge having received direct theological instruction from Chaitanya; rather, the work projects Chaitanya not as the Supreme Deity identifiable with Krishna as Nabadwip devotees would have it, but only the ideal Krishna devotee. It is quite noticeable that Goswami literature is, on the whole, somewhat reluctant to acknowledge Chaitanya as a direct source of Gaudiya theology. Other than making namsakariya, the Goswamis seldom refer to his personal religious views or teachings. In some cases, as in Rup’s Ujjvalanilamani or Jiva’s Danakelikaumudi (a play on the love sports of Radha and Krishna), even this is conspicuously absent. Raghunath Das Goswami, who knew Chaitanya quite intimately at Puri, devotes to him only three verses out of 20 in his Stavabali (Prayer Verses, c.16th century). The Gaudiya ritual compendium, Haribhaktivilas, has no special instructions for worshipping Chaitanya, for, in theory, there could not possibly be two Bhagavatas (Supreme Lord), as Krishna already occupied that place.
Chaitanya’s Ashtaka (also called the Sikshastaka), which appears in the Antya Khanda (Part III), Chapter 20 of Charitamrita, makes for interesting reading. Of these, those listed as numbers five to seven are particularly significant. Verse number five, perhaps the best known of these, advises Vaishnavas to inculcate certain religious–ethical values and attitudes, not dogma. The ideal Vaishnava is expected to be as humble as the blade of grass which is perpetually trampled by foot or as tolerant and forbearing as the tree which does not protest the fact that its products are exploited so widely and gratuitously. Further, he is expected to respect those who have not been treated respectfully, but, above all, always engage in singing the praise of the Lord. In verse number six, Chaitanya is seen declaring that he coveted neither riches nor mass following or beautiful worldly objects; all that he sought was the grace of Krishna. The following is a loose translation of verse number seven which is especially interesting:
O son of Nanda, I have always been your slave but caught up in the whirlpool of successive births and deaths. Rescue me from this (condition) and treat me as a mere particle of dust of your lotus-like Divine Feet.(Chaitanya Charitamrita)
It is worth noting how in this verse, Chaitanya appears to be associated with two qualities which are conventionally not associated with him: first, the palpable desire to serve Krishna not in the capacity of a lover (madhurbhava) but that of a servant (dasyabhava). This suggests that the idea of an androgynous Chaitanya anxious to savour Radha’s love for Krishna was an idea later foisted upon older sentiments of dasyabhava. The other feature, no less surprising, is the desire for attaining mukti or salvation, to be altogether freed of the karmic cycle of births and deaths. It is commonplace that even an ordinary Vaishnava, much less Chaitanya himself, preferred perpetual Bhakti to mukti. Verse eight (numbered 10 in some versions) resorts to the idea of feminization but with a difference.
I know of no other God but for Krishna: whether he holds me in his embrace or kicks me away from Him is entirely His Will. He who is involved in amorous play with many women is free to treat me the way he likes. Regardless of what he chooses to do, he will always remain my God. (Chaitanya Charitamrita)
The above evidently represents the gendering of devotion and reinforces a woman’s servitude to a male God. We are not even sure if this typically indicates Chaitanya’s ‘Radhabhava’ or that of an ordinary gopi (gopibhava) since this alone does not exhaust the range of moods associated with Radha in Vaishnava conventions which include jealously, pique, and offended anger. An argument often offered in explanation is that ‘Radhabhava’ in Chaitanya was primarily associated with his life in Puri. This casts some doubt on the chronology of events, for Chaitanya is said to have revealed his identity as Radha to Ramananda Ray very early into his ascetic life (sometime in 1510). Going by the account in the Charitamrita, this was also the only instance of Chaitanya himself revealing the moods of Radha to a devotee (Ramananda); the others seem to have come upon this by inference.
It is quite evident from a perusal of our sources that Chaitanya did not make Bhakti contingent on the observance of everyday rites and usages. The socially or ritually inferior man was just as entitled to the adoration of Krishna as the respected Brahmin. Krishna worship admitted no distinction between men and women on the basis of their birth; the distinction, if any, was between those who worshipped Krishna and those who did not. On the occasion of the first Rath Yatra at Puri (1512) that he attended, Chaitanya described himself as a faceless bhakta, stripping himself of all social or vocational identities.
I am not a Brahmin, nor a Kshatriya king, not even a Vaishya or Shudra. I am not a brahmachari nor a grihastha, a yati or a man who has retreated to the final stage of vanprastha. I am but the servant of those who look upon themselves as Krishna’s servitors. This Krishna, the paramour of the gopis, represents Universal Bliss, the very Ocean of Supreme Delight. (Chaitanya Charitamrita)
In Chaitanya’s perception, sincere devotion to Krishna constituted the primary foundation of faith. There is a particularly instructive episode recorded in Chaitanya Charitamrita about Chaitanya’s encounter with a Brahmin at Srirangam, who was devotedly reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. This Brahmin lacked learning and could not comprehend the import of what he was reciting; by his own admission, he was simply following the orders of his guru. And yet, tears of ecstasy flowed down his cheeks as he read aloud descriptions of the rival armies facing each other in the battlefield of Kurukshetra. When asked just what had produced in him such fits of ecstatic delight, the Brahmin said that even as he carried on with the narration, he could clearly see the warrior Arjuna mounted on his chariot and the Lord Himself standing beside him as the charioteer. Chaitanya comforted the Brahmin by calling him an adhikari, a man who truly deserved to be blessed by such godly vision. There are other interesting episodes too of Chaitanya discouraging his followers from taking to a routine religious life. Murari Gupta narrates the instance of a follower named Shuklambar Brahmachari who remained dissatisfied even after completing a tour of major pilgrim spots such as Mathura and Dwarka. To this, Chaitanya is said to have responded by pointing out that even jackals were known to roam around in those places; the important thing, therefore, was to arouse Krishna Bhakti within oneself.
Murari also informs us that Chaitanya was displeased with his following a strict spiritual regimen and that he had little regard for adhering to a religious life governed by the shruti. While engaged in a theological debate with Madhvite ascetics at Udupi, Chaitanya is known to have ruled that those who followed the paths of Karma (ritual activism) and Jnan (gnosis) could not possibly be bhaktas or devotees. Prima facie, this appears to run counter to the tendency gathering momentum since the 14th century of bringing about a creative fusion of Jnan and Bhakti or, for that matter, the concept of jnankarmasamuccaya by virtue of which the pursuit of ritualism had been integrated with a path of speculative meditation. Chaitanya’s paramaguru, Madhavendra Puri, as we may recall, was by initiation an advaitin and yet strongly drawn to Krishna Bhakti. Chaitanya himself may be said to have inherited the mystical qualities of Madhavendra for whom dark bellowing clouds in the sky would evoke thoughts of Krishna himself. Sridhar Swami, the author of the most popular commentary on the Bhagavat Purana and to whom Chaitanya remained consistently loyal, was both an advaitin and a worshipper of Narasimha, an emanation of Vishnu. Without there being some overlap between Jnan and Bhakti, it would have been practically very difficult for Chaitanya to attract several Dasnami monks, as he is known to have done. The Goswamis, however, were quick to seize upon the progressive reconciliation between the two streams. In his Bhaktirasamritasindhu, Rup Goswami appears to question the possibility of salvation following from spontaneous grace alone. In this view, Bhakti itself was a sadhana, a spiritual praxis that required some degree of self-disciplining. After him, the philosophical works of Jiva aimed at attaining a synthesis that may be aptly called ‘Vaishnava Vedanta’.
Three other popular conceptions about the life and work of Chaitanya need to be suitably qualified. First, that the religious democracy such as the one Chaitanya tried to bring about was matched by an open disregard for social conventions; second, that Chaitanya himself put a philosophical gloss to his religious teachings; and third, that he had no capacity for organization and leadership. The third view was first put forward by Sushil Kumar De and has been contested quite often since, not without justification. In the earlier discussion on the life of Chaitanya in its historical context, we have noted how Chaitanya was successfully able to pick on the right men to carry out chosen missions or tasks without seeming to put much thought and effort to matters. There is, thus, the instance of Chaitanya sending two of his early acquaintances, the Goswamis Lokenath and Bhugarbha, on a reconnaissance mission to Vrindavan, well before he himself visited it. Modern scholars have similarly read tactful intentionality behind Chaitanya’s recurring imperious and, at times, violent mood swings while at Nabadwip.
Going by extant sources, Chaitanya himself was no less instrumental in propagating the idea that he was indeed an incarnation of Krishna. It is quite plausible that such declarations were made quite deliberately and not in a state of unmindful religious ecstasy. Taken together, Chaitanya Bhagavat and Murari Gupta’s Kadcha, the most authoritative sources on Chaitanya’s early life in Nabadwip, list at least six such instances. Further, Vrindavan Das lists 10, Murari seven, Krishnadas Kaviraj four, Lochandas five, and Jayananda two instances of Chaitanya placing his feet on the heads of his devotees and followers, some of whom (like his mother and Advaita Acharya) were much older in age. This would have constituted gross violation of social conventions but for the possibility that Chaitanya was performing these acts only to instil in his followers faith and confidence in his leadership which was, in some ways, trying to counter both Brahmin orthodoxy and hostility from the state. Some hagiographic works also reveal a very audacious and immodest Chaitanya, instructing his followers to set up his images and icons to be revered and worshipped; reportedly, he did so to his wife, Vishnupriya, Pandits Gadadhar and Gauridas, and to one Jadav Kaviraj of Kulai village in Burdwan. The idea of the residents of Nabadwip anxiously awaiting the arrival of a redeeming avatar and Chaitanya’s eventually being seen as one fits rather well into this argument. Also, this is worth contrasting with his attitude in Puri or Vrindavan where he was reportedly embarrassed by people regarding him as an avatar. It may be reasonably argued that by the time he visited or was actively settled at these sites, Chaitanya had already won a huge following and had been widely proclaimed as the Divine descended on earth. There is an interesting episode that occurred while Chaitanya was visiting Mathura and Vrindavan, narrated by Krishnadas. Some local people who claimed to have seen strange lights appear on the surface of the water in Kaliya Lake, a site connected to the miracle plays performed by the child Krishna, proclaimed that these indicated yet another avataric descent of Krishna. Ironically enough, Chaitanya is believed to have dispelled their belief with the argument that this was some hallucination and that Krishna could not be expected to incarnate in the age of Kali. Arguably, this somewhat shakes the very foundation of Goswami theology.
Historian Amar Nath Chatterjee has suggested that Chaitanya inaugurated the doctrine of acintyabhedabheda (inconceivable unity in difference) around the year 1510, which we are more apt to associate with the likes of Jiva Goswami. The year 1510, as we have earlier noted, coincides with Chaitanya entering the life of sanyas, but more importantly, in order to settle on this date, one has to assume not only his thorough grounding in metaphysics but also the penchant for putting a philosophical gloss on his teachings, neither of which Chaitanya appears to have had. Krishnadas Kaviraj, as is only too well-known, claims that on his tour of southern India, Chaitanya strongly disputed the philosophical positions of both the non-dualists at Sringeri Math and the dualists at Udupi. We also know from Chaitanya’s reported meeting with Prakashananda at Kashi that the former firmly rejected Sankara’s theory of vivartavada, which took creation to be merely an appearance and not a real act of transformation (parinamavada) occurring in the Brahman. This looks unlikely, to say the least. In all probability, this was more Kaviraj’s personal reading of the matter than faithful reporting. That the Bhakti theology of Chaitanya was ill at ease with Sankara’s reading of the Creator and creation cannot be doubted, but this need not have arisen in some acute philosophic disputation. Bhakti dualism is very likely to have quite spontaneously reacted to the monistic views of the advaitins which dissolved the hiatus between the subject and object of devotion.
Here, I cannot think of a better parallel than the one located in the life of Sri Ramakrishna himself whose dissatisfaction with non-dualism was not tantamount to an outright rejection, but was practically tied to the question of adhikaar: natural predispositions and the state of spiritual preparation in an individual. Here, again, the discomfiture with Advaita was not born of any philosophical debate or disputation but sheer spontaneity. I am willing to hazard the guess that Chaitanya’s unhappiness with a monistic view of the world resulted not so much from philosophical reflection as from the instinctive anxiety of the devotee keen to practically separate the adoring human self from the transcendental object of adoration. There is ample reason to believe that Chaitanya had no formal training in philosophical studies or disputation, even though he may have been personally anxious to acquire this. If biographer Murari Gupta is to be believed, Chaitanya issued stern warnings to his disciples against taking to speculative discourses; it is only apt to recall that veteran Advaita Acharya was assaulted for persisting with the path of gnosis.
It is important nevertheless not to overlook persistent attempts at reconciling the views of Sankara with those of his subsequent critics. The researches of Bimanbihari Majumdar refer to an anonymous, late medieval tract by the name of Sarvasampradaya Bhedasiddhanta (a text determining the differences between various Vedantic sects or communities, n.d.) which attempts to locate meeting points between mutually conflicting philosophies and shows Chaitanya to be a follower of the dvaitadvaita philosophy of Nimbarka. Admittedly, the philosophy of bhedabheda which, like that of dvaitadvaita, juxtaposes duality with non-duality, was known to the followers of both Nimbarka and Bhaskara, and the term ‘achintya’ too had been adopted earlier by Nimbarka himself. On the other hand, sources do not reveal any significant influences on Chaitanya’s life from Nimbarka sources, though such a lack may have also resulted from sectarian rivalry.
It is quite evident that one way or another, every critic of Sankara had to operate within the framework of reference set by him and Chaitanya’s differences with the non-dualist view of Reality is but a continuation of an older trend. After him, it was not so much the bhakta who tried to address the problems raised by the non-dualist, but the non-dualist who tried to synthesize Jnan and Bhakti—meditative cognition and emotive devotion. The advaitin-turned-bhakta Madhusudan Saraswati, believed to have been a native of Bengal itself, best exemplifies this trend. It is important also not to lose sight of the fact that as a school of thought, pure dualism did not really develop after Madhva.
In his Chaitanya Charitamrita, Krishnadas Kaviraj appears to have captured, in essence, Chaitanya’s instinctive dislike of both pedantry and philosophical disputation. Krishnadas sounds extremely unhappy at the fact that hitherto philosophers had merely engaged themselves in polemic, always seeking to substitute the views of others with their own. This took them away from reflecting adequately on the parama karana (first cause). Krishnadas concludes, in a manner that perhaps echoes Chaitanya’s own sentiments, that he would rather go by what the mahajans had to say. The perpetually warring schools of Hindu philosophy had no practical value for him.
Finally, it is only apt to recall that in his ascetic days at Puri, Chaitanya fully endorsed the importance of abiding by social conventions, in respect of both himself and his followers. He supported Haridas and Sanatan, both of whom considered themselves to be ritually polluted and made the decision to not enter the Jagannath temple. Personally, he shunned even the smallest indulgence, disappointing many a follower who had lovingly brought him gifts. Also, he appears to have been extremely careful about following the conduct expected of a sanyasi and in this matter, relying greatly on the vigilant Swarup Damodar. Chaitanya would agree to be hosted by a non-Brahmin but always ate food cooked by a Brahmin. In Puri, he lived with the ‘Shudra’ Chandrashekhar but dined with the Brahmin Tapan Misra. The only exception he is known to have made was when he agreed to be fed by a Sanodiya Brahmin of Vrindavan, notwithstanding the fact that the Sanodiya Brahmin community was taken to be ritually inferior, despite being Brahmins. In this instance, Chaitanya agreed to make the exception on account of the fact that this particular Brahmin had once served the venerable Madhavendra Puri. This raises an interesting issue with regard to the ritual life or status of a sanyasi. In colonial India, the Vedantin monk Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) is known to have defended his defiance of all taboos related to food and drink arguing that as a sanyasi, he ceased to be governed by rituals and social rules. The interesting issue at stake here is whether in the intervening historical period, rules of sanyas had appreciably changed or whether there were different standards applicable to the Brahmin Chaitanya and the Kayastha Vivekananda.
That the devotee need not be known by his jati standing was a view that Chaitanya insisted upon, to be repeated by Ramakrishna in his time. But this also conceals certain realities. For one, given the fact that a life of devotion was typically associated with the householder, it is quite safe to presume that this is also where rules of smarta ritual commensality applied the most. In the context of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, the Haribhaktivilas was a text for the domesticated Vaishnava, not the renouncer or the ascetic. Ramakrishna, too, warned his devotees that laxness with social rules or ritual conduct was permitted only for the jnani, not the bhakta. With both Chaitanya and Ramakrishna, devotional life within the community of devotees who shared a religious emotion was only a part-time release from the structured, routine-bound, and ritualized quality of everyday life. Spiritual democracy was hardly, if ever, meaningfully complemented by the social.
Sexuality, Women, and Chaitanya
In his classic study of biographical sources on Chaitanya, Bimanbihari Majumdar claims that there were at least 16 women among the followers of Chaitanya and Jayananda’s Chaitanya Mangal, as we have noted, adds another 27. Since these women cannot always be identified by names, it is difficult to guess what their exact relationship may have been to Chaitanya. It is quite possible that among the 16 identified by Majumdar were figures such as Malini Devi, wife of Sribas, and Sita Devi, wife of Advaita, who were respectful of Chaitanya or the Vaishnava way of life without formally converting to Vaishnavism. For instance, we do not know if they sought initiation, which would be an acceptable clue as to whether or not they were formally counted among the Gaudiya Vaishnavas.
In hindsight, it would appear as though Chaitanya related to women in various ways, depending upon their age or social standing. At the residence of Sribas in Nabadwip, Chaitanya insisted that his wife and children pay formal obeisance to him, and it may be assumed that Malini Devi was present at some of the dramatic enactments carried out by Chaitanya and his close followers. At Santipur, he was feasted by Sita Devi and at Puri, hosted by the wife of Vasudev Sarvabhaum. There is no reason to believe that these women did not make themselves visible before Chaitanya, as might have been the case with other male strangers. Presumably, therefore, Chaitanya had no inhibitions about socializing with women considerably older in age. Especially from the Chaitanya Bhagavata, we also know of the pranks that the young Viswambhar played upon girls of a comparable age, tormenting and teasing them in various ways. The problem, apparently, was with adult women, especially at an age when Chaitanya himself had attained adulthood. Vrindavan Das tells us that the young Viswambhar would scrupulously avoid even sighting a parastree, far less fall into a conversation with them. This may have partly arisen in a growing sexual self-awareness but equally due to the Brahmanical fear and disdain for female sexuality. Arguably, this has little to do with his accepting sanyas which occurred only towards the closing years of his life in Nabadwip. While the Srikhanda Vaishnavas led by Narahari Sarkar made him the subject of explicit erotic attention from the local women of Nabadwip, Chaitanya himself is not known to have returned such feelings. It has been suggested by scholars such as Tony K. Stewart that Chaitanya almost instinctively turned away from women and was actually troubled and embarrassed by them.
On the other hand, we have some reason to believe that even after several years into his sanyas, rather than ‘turn away’ from women, Chaitanya feared that he had still not fully conquered his own sexuality. Chaitanya Charitamrita reports his confessing to a devotee, Pradyumna Misra, that the temptations of the flesh still affected his mind and body, subsequently adding that it was but a rare man who would remain unaffected by the sight of a woman. We have noted how Chaitanya remained quite sensitive to public perceptions of his life and teachings as a sanyasi in Puri. There is the instance reported by Krishnadas Kaviraj of how Chaitanya had grown very fond of a young boy who happened to be the son of a beautiful widow. Perhaps this became the subject of some local gossip since, having got wind of this, Swarup promptly advised Chaitanya to stay away from the boy for fear of a public scandal. Especially if Chaitanya’s chastisem*nt of Haridas Junior had preceded this episode, there was all the more reason for him not to be accused of following double standards. Haridas Junior, it may be recalled, had been permanently banished from the presence of Chaitanya for simply having begged some rice from a woman and ended his life at Prayag, having failed to win the forgiveness of Chaitanya.
And yet, there was something rigidly ascetic about Chaitanya’s later life. Though many are inclined to dismiss Govindadaser Kadcha as a reliable source, there is something interesting that this text reveals. In the course of his meeting with Ramananda Ray, Chaitanya is reported to have told him that a man’s passionate longing for a woman was not love and that true love would arise only in a state of mind which made no distinction between a man and woman. Some sub-traditions within Vaishnavism have chosen to call this state sahaja or natural.
This brings us to the related issue of just how popular and dissenting cults read or understood the religious world of Chaitanya. Many of these, especially those originating in the district of Nadia, took Chaitanya to be their founding father. Two instances that readily come to mind are those of the Kartabhaja sect—who take their founder, Dulalchand, to have descended from Krishna and Chaitanya—and the Balahari sect, who have conferred a similar status on their founder, Balaram. Sudhir Chakravarti, who has spent a lifetime researching popular cults in Bengal, tells us that even Muslim Marfati Fakirs equated Chaitanya with Allah/Rasul. In popular perception, Chaitanya proved attractive to such dissenting cults since he represented a strong challenge to Brahmanical orthodoxy. Historically speaking, however, this view is more romantically inclined than real. It would be more accurate to say that in the post Chaitanya era, many quotidian social groups read the life and teachings of Chaitanya as tendentiously as upper-caste members within mainstream Vaishnavism. To reiterate a point made before, the former were drawn far more powerfully to the seemingly rebellious idea of detaching one’s caste standing from the question of religious entitlement than by theology alone. They also found some hope and legitimacy in the fact that a Brahmin himself (Chaitanya) should uphold this social rebellion, at least in principle.
There is a common tendency in academic scholarship and outside, to identify linkages between the parakiya sadhana of mainstream Vaishnavism—essentially a mental exercise but which could involve a female ritual partner—and tantric deha sadhana of the Bauls, Fakirs, and Sahajiyas based on sexo-yogic practices. Prima facie, it would seem as though dissenting and deviant popular cults drew upon the laxness and ambiguities underlying mainstream Vaishnavism and interpreted these to their own advantage. There are many Sahajiya tracts that portray not only Chaitanya himself but some of his closest followers such as Narahari Chakravarti, Paramananda Puri, Swarup Damodar, Pundarik Vidyanidhi, and Jagadananda Das as active practitioners of Sahajiya sadhana, albeit concealed from public view. Bengali literary scholar Ahmed Sharif, writing in the Bangla Akademi Patrika (1964), found Chaitanya himself to be one such practitioner. A recent study on Chaitanya (Tuhin Mukhopadhyay’s Lokayata Chaitanya, 2014) confirms this perception. The view that Chaitanya may have been bisexual in his habits does not seriously challenge this perception since sexo-yogic practices could, apparently, also be practised between two people of the same sex. It is also well-known that Sahajiya tracts have similarly viewed pre-Chaitanya figures such as Jayadev, Vidyapati, Chandidas, and Lilasuka, each of whom has been associated with a designated female ritual partner. With regard to Chaitanya specifically, reference is often made to an incident that occurred in Puri. Reportedly, when invited to a meal by his host Vasudev Sarvabhaum, Chaitanya consumed a quantity of food that would have sufficed to feed as many as 10 to 12 men put together, at least that was the view of an eye witness, Amogha, the son-in-law of Sarvabhaum. In Krishnadas Kaviraj’s account, on hearing Amogha complain thus, Sarvabhaum’s wife is said to have cursed her daughter, Shati (Shashthi?) to a widow’s life, for she could not bear to have an honoured guest such as Chaitanya treated so disrespectfully. However, Bimanbihari Majumdar tells us how a Baul acquaintance of his narrated a radically different version of the same story. In this version, the curse was provoked not by Amogha’s rudeness but the suspicion that he was beginning to view with jealousy Chaitanya’s secret liaisons with his wife, Shathi, in yugal sadhana. This version of the story also occurs in the Sahajiya tract Chaitanyaprematattwa Nirupana (A Discourse on the Theology surrounding Chaitanya, n.d.). Predictably, Majumdar found this interpretation utterly ruinous of social norms.
And yet, taking such appropriation or ascriptions at their face value tends to overlook some important doctrinal and psychological differences between mainstream Vaishnava practices and their popular variants. For one, Gaudiya Vaishnavas and Sahajiyas understand love and lust (prem and kama respectively) quite differently. For the Gaudiyas, the difference was qualitative, as between iron and gold; for the Sahajyas, this was not quite so. Rather, through an alchemic process which is taught only to the initiated, kama progressively turned into prem. Sahajiyas, furthermore, have no gods and for them, Radha–Krishna are but abstract principles to be mentally realized, not deities to be externally worshipped. Unlike what is done in manjari sadhana of the Gaudiyas, Sahajiyas do not seek to vicariously serve Radha and Krishna; on the contrary, they create or reconstitute a meditative body that makes it possible to feel their combined presence in them.
It would be an error if we assume that the idea of Chaitanya leading a secret sex life emanated from the Bauls, Sahajiyas, or other dissenting cults alone. Jayananda, though never a part of the Gaurnagari group of Narahari Sarkar, would have us believe that even when Chaitanya was in Nabadwip, women of virtually all social classes called upon him in the dead of the night and would pleasure him, assuming the mood that gopis had once adopted towards their paramour, Krishna. On the other hand, both Chaitanya Bhagavata and Kavi Karnapur’s Mahakavya state that on the night immediately preceding his accepting sanyas, Chaitanya was in the company of Gadadhar. An anonymous verse in the anthology Gaurapadatarangini refers to Chaitanya as the grihastha and Gadadhar as the grihini, a relationship which early padabali poets such as Murari Gupta and Sivananda Sen also endorse. In his Amiya Nimai Charit, Sisir Kumar Ghosh describes Gadadhar occupying Vishnupriya’s place and massaging Chaitanya’s feet. In Chaitanya Charitamrita too, Gadadhar is referred to as Laxmi and Pandit Jagadananda as Satyabhama, the wedded wives of Vishnu and Krishna respectively.
Not all quotidian cults took to the Vaishnava ways of life or specifically to the teachings of Chaitanya. In the late 19th century, the Matua cult was a notable exception. Historian Tanika Sarkar also narrates the case of the Balakdasis, a rural cult that principally included peasants, petty traders, artisans, and fishermen. When compared to the Gaudiyas, the Balakdasis appear to have adopted a more realistic and pragmatic strategy, assuring devotees of tangible benefits following from an unflinching devotion to the cult and its leadership. Thus, boatmen were assured of a safe passage through turbulent rivers, peasants from failing crops, and, more generally, protection from ill health and disease. Anthropological research reveals how peasant and tribal communities preferred to go by a religion that yielded the coveted results. Surajit Sinha’s study of the Bhumij tribal communities in Chota Nagpur reveals how the local population preferred a Sahajiya practitioner over a Gaudiya preacher of the Nityananda clan. While the latter preached a somewhat abstruse doctrine, the former also taught the secrets of prolonged sex. At least for rural cultures or communities, the Gaudiya insistence on devotion for the sake of devotion (ahetuk) does not appear to have carried much appeal.
Chaitanya himself had little to do with the two controversies that affected the Gaudiya community after him. First, there was the recurring debate over whether Radha’s relation to Krishna was parakiya or swakiya. Was Radha the wedded wife of Krishna or the wife of another man with whom Krishna had developed an illicit relationship? From the perspective of rasa theory, doctrinally important to Gaudiya theoreticians, both aesthetic pleasure and the passionate fulfilment of love could be better derived not from sanitized relationships but from the wilful abandonment of social conventions and structures. There is a popular Sahajiya story which narrates the tale of two lovers who fell out of love once wedded. In substance, even Gaudiya theology agreed with this view. In some Bengali traditions, Radha was even taken to be Krishna’s maternal aunt, thereby implying both scandalous promiscuity and incest. It is generally believed that Goswamis Rup and Jiva were persuaded to switch their preference from parakiya to swakiya, following considerable resentment among Vaishnavas in Vrindavan, especially those outside the Gaudiya sect. However, the supporters of parakiya appear to have grown stronger with the advent of early 18th-century theoreticians such as Viswanath Chakravarti, a resident of Vrindavan, and his Odiya pupil, Baldev Vidyabhushan. The doctrinal aspects of this issue were debated twice successively at the court of Jaipur in 1719 and 1723, but apparently with no practicable solution. Clearly dissatisfied with this turn of events, Raja Jai Singh Kachwaha of Amber sent an emissary, Krishnadev Sarvabhaum, to Bengal in the hope that he might be able to establish the swakiya position there. However, as available evidence reveals, Krishnadas was defeated by a team of local scholars headed by one Radhamohan Thakur, the guru of Maharaj Nanda Kumar, who was later to compile an early Vaishnava anthology, the Padamritasamudra (An Anthology of Vaishnava Verses, c.18th century).
Chaitanya himself had no reason to be embroiled in this debate, for his intensely ecstatic ‘Radhabhava’ would more strongly postulate a parakiya nayika . His position, it might be quite justifiably argued, comes alive in a song by the modern Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), in which Radha reminds Krishna that the viraha that separates them was not confined to one life but doomed to remain in perpetuity.
Baldev Vidyabhushan was implicated in yet another controversy concerning the issue of a formal affiliation for Chaitanya Vaishnavas. The Kachwaha ruler, Jai Singh, was keen to assume the position and posture of a righteous Hindu king at a time when Mughal authority was visibly on the wane. So he insisted that the Gaudiyas bring about some self-discipline by affiliating themselves with any one of the traditionally acknowledged four Vaishnava sampradayas—Sri, Rudra, Sanaka, and Brahma, associated with Ramanuja, Vishnuswami, Nimbarka, and Madhva respectively. Perhaps he was also persuaded by rival sampradayas who had the Raja’s ear. This required Gaudiyas to produce an independent commentary on the Brahma Sutra (a fundamental text on the metaphysics of the Brahman in sutra form, 5th century bce–3rd century bce), establishing their own philosophical position. Up to that point in time, the Goswamis had resisted the idea of an independent commentary since they took the Bhagavat Purana itself to fulfil that necessity. All the same, Baldev’s decision to affiliate the Gaudiyas to the Madhva sampradaya is surprising, to say the least, on account of visible doctrinal differences separating the two. For one, the Madhavites were plain dualists as against the bhedabheda position of the Gaudiyas, but even otherwise, they paid no attention to Radha. Even assuming that this affiliation was more strategic in nature than doctrinal, we are still not clear as to what strategic advantages this might have brought to the Gaudiyas. The Madhvas, after all, are not known to have wielded any special influence at the Amber court. The decision is all the more surprising on account of the fact that while on the tour of south India, Chaitanya himself is reported to have contested the philosophical position of the Madhvas at Udupi. On the other hand, it would be useful to remember that such an affiliation had been earlier suggested by Kavi Karnapur in his Gauraganoddesdipika and that Baldev himself had been a Madhva follower in his early life.
The Colonized Bengali and Chaitanya
When seeking to explain the continued appeal of Chaitanya and his teachings in colonial India, the dominant thesis today is that this was but a function of colonialism itself and the visibly altered social and intellectual environment that it produced. Such explanations rightly draw attention to the typically Evangelist–Orientalist–Colonialist perceptions of Chaitanya, of the larger religious world of Vaishnavism, and to the discursive influences that these produced in the minds of the Western-educated Hindu intelligentsia in Bengal, for whom a convenient and popular shorthand is the term bhadralok. This discourse established certain views about Vaishnavism and Chaitanya which proved hard to shake off, since these readily met certain contemporary discursive needs.
By the late 19th century, there was a growing appreciation of Vaishnavism as a religious system in comparison to other faiths of indigenous origin such as Saivism and Saktaism. John Beames (1837–1902), writing in the journal Indian Antiquary (1873), found it to be ‘a great improvement on the morbid gloom of Siva worship, the colourless negativism of Buddhism and the childish intricacies of ceremonies which formed the religion of the ordinary Hindu’. Subsequently, Sir Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) found Vaishnavism to be the only religious system that possessed the ‘elements of genuine religion’, for in his perception ‘there could be no true religion without personal devotion to a personal God’. Sir Monier’s judgement was, in good measure, determined by his own religious convictions, for he was also to write quite condescendingly about how—notwithstanding signs of superstition and hideous idolatry—Vaishnavism came closest to (Protestant) Christianity and hence, was the only religion capable of laying claims of being the ‘real’ religion of Hindus. This stands in some contrast to the unqualified vilification of Vaishnavism by the early missionaries in ethnic Bengal as, for example, by William Ward (1769–1823). A third related idea, also articulated by Sir Monier, was that a god such as Krishna was most required in India for he clearly evinced an interest and sympathy with the mundane and the suffering. In Indian writings of the period as well, Krishna does often emerge as a playful, compassionate, less demanding god. In an important study, historian Krishna Sharma draws our attention to how some Orientalist scholars, particularly Horace Hayman Wilson (1786–1860), wrongly took Bhakti as an undifferentiated system of beliefs and practices, equating it typically with the saguna, emotive bhakti of Chaitanya.
From such discourses, it might be argued that it was also possible to derive two other influential and enduring tropes: first, the thesis of an unmitigated degeneration and ‘decline’ within the world of Bengal Vaishnavism and second, the propensity to separate Chaitanya as an exemplary religious leader from the movement that grew around him and after him. Evangelists, Orientalists, or colonialist ethnographers had praise for Chaitanya but a strong dislike for his spiritual successors, particularly for the social world of post-Chaitanya Vaishnavism which they took to be tainted by corruption, moral laxness, and promiscuity among lower-class recruits, as well as ecclesiastical tyranny imposed by an upper-caste religious leadership. In his two-volume work, Bharatvarshiya Upasak Sampraday (The Theistic Communities of India, 1871, 1883), the quasi-Brahmo author and educationist, Akshay Kumar Dutta (1820–1886) even anticipated W.W. Hunter’s ethnographic observation that degenerative Vaishnavism in Bengal was entirely a post Chaitanya phenomenon.
In an influential work published very recently (Varuni Bhatia’s Unforgetting Chaitanya, 2017), the significance attached to Chaitanya in colonial Bengal is sought to be mapped on two related and yet palpably different registers: the romantic–nationalist and the religious–reformist. In both cases, Chaitanya’s life and teachings are seen to be crucial for the ‘re-imaginings’ of Bengal and of India that was to constitute the emerging bhadralok rhetoric in the 19th century. It was thus that Chaitanya was identified with the quintessential upper-caste Bengali, whether in terms of his speech patterns, food habits, or sartorial preferences. Arguably, this helped the ‘recovery’ of an older and exemplary cultural icon and rescued the naively remiss Bengali from the sins of collective amnesia. On a related level, he was taken to be the quintessential social and religious reformer who disabused his countrymen of a blind faith in gross superstition and non-egalitarian practices. For the reformist bhadralok, this amounted to imagining a longer and more continuous history of reformism by reading back into a prominent religious figure from the past but more importantly, to restore agency for the colonized themselves. In 19th-century Bengal, several members of the Hindu intelligentsia were heard saying that Indians had to give back to the West in equal measure what they had taken from it. In Swami Vivekananda’s perception, an advanced knowledge of material civilization that had been learnt from the West had to be reciprocated by India’s spiritual excellence; for Vaishnava author and publicist Sisir Kumar Ghosh, it was more specifically a matter of answering Christ with Krishna.
Bhatia also makes two other interesting points about how bhadralok appropriation of Chaitanya and Ramakrishna, occurring in and around the same period, differed subtly in some respects. First, whereas the life and teachings of Ramakrishna appeared discursively useful and attractive to this class as the ‘other’, Chaitanya was constructed in the mirror image of the bhadralok themselves; and second, while Ramakrishna’s appeal lay essentially in his identification with the pre-modern world of innocence and folk culture, Chaitanya was seen carefully steering a middle course between the ‘high’ culture of Sanskrit scholasticism and the ‘low’ tradition of folk religion.
Its intrinsic merits notwithstanding, there remain certain conceptual and methodological problems embedded in Bhatia’s formulation. While the continuing appeal of Chaitanya and of the Vaishnavism he preached could well be explained in the light of the heuristic categories Bhatia employs, such categories nevertheless appear to be largely valid for the specific community of the Western-educated, politically sensitized Hindu intelligentsia of colonial Bengal. In my earlier study of Ramakrishna and his urban devotees in colonial Calcutta, I have argued that while the preaching and parables of Ramakrishna were often twisted out of their contexts by some of his politically self-conscious bhadralok followers, this does not also explain his popularity with a wide cross section of visitors and devotees, not all of whom would have been drawn to an anti-colonialist rhetoric. I have argued instead that they were attracted to the saint for a great variety of motives, some of which were purely existential. It is important also to acknowledge that the social and cultural category of the bhadralok is itself sufficiently amorphous or ill-defined to be represented by the English-educated alone. To me, its social constituency appears to be undoubtedly larger and certainly growing to also include intermediary castes who had also begun taking to English education or even the non-English-educated gentry of which the rural Brahmin would certainly be an important component. Within the world of colonial social ordering itself, it would be hard to imagine a Western-educated Hindu holding public office but denied the status of a bhadralok simply on account of his not belonging to the upper-bracket castes Brahmin, Baidya, or Kayastha.
A typical instance which readily comes to mind is that of Deputy Magistrate Adhar Lal Sen, a man belonging to the ritually inferior jati of Suvarnavaniks but a close friend of the Brahmin Bankimchandra and among Ramakrishna’s well-known devotees. An important limitation within current studies related to the social and intellectual history of colonial Bengal is precisely the failure to engage with the class that was semi-literate, not located in the urban metropolis of Calcutta and yet a part of the power structure that visibly determined the functioning of daily life in villages and mufassil towns. It would be an error to imagine that in colonial Bengal, the fate of Gaudiya Vaishnavism was in no way influenced by these classes. More importantly though, within the framework of a work such as the present one, the history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism has to be equally explained in terms of the pre-colonial times not familiar with European theories on egalitarianism or of the burgeoning nationalist sentiment. At this point, it would be worth asking just what led Muslim poets and scribes of Sylhet and Chittagong, the Bauls, Fakirs, or Sahajiyas spread more spatially throughout Bengal to speak so effusively of Chaitanya and of his religion or, for that matter, for several respectable people to volunteer for a life of poverty and mendicancy. Of the numerous Vaishnava saints and mahants listed by Haridas Das in his biographical sketches, most lived in a state of self-denial and penury. Lokenath Goswami, to whom we have referred often before, had to sell off all his family assets before commencing that journey.
The problem with Bhatia’s categories is also that, at times, they split open into mutually incongruent segments. Thus, the compounded category of ‘religious–reformist’ would rarely hold true for a Vaishnava individual or for a designated class of Vaishnavas. Within this complex conceptual category, there would appear to be reformers who were not religious enthusiasts and religious enthusiasts who did not quite take to institutional reform. In the former category we may put the school teacher and political worker from Barisal, Aswini Kumar Dutta (1856–1923). Dutta was initiated by Bejoykrishna Goswami (1841–1899) of the Advaita lineage and yet his Bhakti Yoga (1897) is essentially a set of moral instructions delivered to his students, emphasizing caution in food habits and male continence. In the latter category one may include both Sisir Kumar Ghosh and Bipinchandra Pal. Ghosh and Pal spent a good part of their lives in political work and journalism; both also had Brahmo antecedents. But here, the similarity ends. Ghosh, unlike Pal, was not formally initiated into some form of Vaishnavism, even though he contributed substantially to its propagation, even composing some padas of his own under the signature Balaram Das. However, unlike Ghosh, Pal’s interest lay not so much in specifically representing the Vaishnavism of the kind taught by Chaitanya but to situate his life and teachings within the broader, resurgent Hindu cultural identity, trying to ideologically combat the Christian West. Pal produced several articles and at least two important works in this genre: An Introduction to the Study of Hinduism (1908) and a work published posthumously, Europe Asks: Who is Krishna? (1939). Importantly, Pal exhibits none of Ghosh’s penchant for an emotively charged Bhakti. It occurs to me that he is indeed the first and, perhaps, the only quasi-Vaishnava theoretician for the Gaudiyas in colonial Bengal to write in English and interpret the deity Krishna not in the light of traditional Vaishnava canon but Hegelian philosophy. In Pal’s understanding, deeply influenced as it was by Hegelian idealism, the absolute realized itself in and through the world-process. Interpreting the theology of an androgynous Chaitanya, he was to write thus: ‘The Enjoyer goes out of Himself to the object of His Enjoyment and taking it up, He comes back to Himself—to be Himself and to fulfil Himself.’
Bhatia’s formulation needs to be qualified in two other respects. First, the work of ‘reform’, as determined by her, is internal to Gaudiya Vaishnavism alone, as one might typically find in the work of Kedarnath Dutta Bhaktivinod. Bhaktivinod was primarily concerned, as were some other Vaishnava spokespersons of the time, with the weeding out of ‘spurious’ Vaishnavas, and his reformist efforts established new social and religious hierarchies and new structures of power instead of eliminating such structures entirely. In substance, Dutta’s work took Bengal Vaishnavism back to a renewed veneration for the upper-caste guru instead of dispensing with this office altogether. This is perceptibly different from the general reformist discourse of the 19th-century bhadralok, shared by Brahmos and Hindus alike, and which, under the influence of Anglican Protestantism, frowned upon the offices of both the ritualist and the guru. Second, there is the fact that by the 1890s, ‘reform’ itself—whether in its passage through a legislature controlled by ‘alien’ and ‘unsympathetic’ bureaucrats or championed by non-Hindus such as Behramji M. Malabari (1853–1912)—came to be viewed with deep suspicion by the politicized Hindu intelligentsia. Quite significantly, the question of social legislation itself came to be linked to the growing demand for greater Indian representation in legislature. In 1890–1, upper-class Hindu society in Bengal arose in near revolt against introducing even minor legal amendments to the age of consent, even drawing some ire from reformer and philanthropist Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891) who took this to be unduly interventionist. Vivekananda found initiatives of reform as taken in contemporary India to altogether overlook ‘grass root problems’ and prove wantonly ‘destructive’ of the social order. By the close of the 19th century, both reform and the reformer were visibly under some cloud.
There is little reason to doubt that for some bhadralok ideologues, reading political messages into the life and teachings of Chaitanya, however tendentiously framed, was symptomatic of a new self-understanding. Inasmuch as cultural resources of the past had to be tactfully employed to reinforce the present, there did not appear to be as comparable a figure as Chaitanya, who could be creatively integrated into contemporary needs. We have earlier noted how episodes from Chaitanya’s life—as, for instance, his combative encounter with the Muslim Kazi of Nabadwip—were given contemporary political meanings. However, this tends to overlook the fact that the valorization of Vaishnava religion and culture in the larger context of a growing nationalist rhetoric was not always contingent in acknowledging the mediating role of Chaitanya. While Ramakanta Chakravarti claims a direct co-relationship between a growing nationalist discourse and a weakening criticism of Vaishnavism or of Chaitanya, there is good reason to argue that a certain species of contemporary bhadralok writing remained uncomfortable with ideas and values associated with both.
Perhaps the most important exception here was Bankimchandra himself. Bankim was associated with a Vaishnava family and even his popular fiction abounds in characters who take to Vaishnava devotional singing. Importantly, however, Bankim also invokes at some important places a deity that resembles the warrior Krishna more than the playful pastoral hero of Vrindavan. In the novel Anandamath (1882), the valiant santans who seek to overthrow oppressive and unjust rulers, sing the glory of the four-armed Vishnu, the slayer of the wicked demons, Madhu and Kaitabha. The same novel critiques Chaitanya for spreading an enervating sentimentality and unmanliness in men expected to engage with the enemy in open combat. The theory associating the Chaitanya cult with effeminacy appeared in diverse contemporary and near contemporary sources, sometimes with ironical results. Tagore, who disapproved of the excitable and hysteric sentimentality in popular Vaishnavism was himself critiqued for aiding and abetting it. Vivekananda once warned his favoured disciple, Sister Nivedita, to stay off the Tagore family (read Rabindranath) for fear of spreading ‘erotic venom’ among people who actually needed to be awakened by the martial call of the bugle, not put to sleep by the soft sounds of the khol or the kartal. In his Banglar Itihas (1914, 1917), archaeologist and epigraphist Rakhal Das Banerjee (1885–1930) strongly supported the thesis of Vaishnava effeminacy, only to be repeated more recently by Mayadhar Mansingh in his history of Odiya language and literature (Odiya Sahityer Itihas, 1962). Interestingly enough, Sisir Kumar proves something of an exception here. In an article that first appeared in Sri Sri Bishnupriya Patrika in 1893 and now appended to his Amiya Nimai Charit, Ghosh admits that his first response to the teachings of Chaitanya was that its effusive sentimentality better suited the woman rather than the man. From this position, however, Ghosh appears to have progressively transitioned to a devotional culture heavily suffused with sentimentality. In his quasi-dramatic work, Kalachand Gita (1888), of the several characters who seek the grace of Krishna, only Sajalnayana (literally, the woman with welling tears in her eyes) attains Him. It is not at all improbable, as Bhatia argues, that through his writings, Sisir Kumar was able to forge linkages between a nationalist rhetoric and a devotional tradition. On the other hand, there is not enough evidence to claim that the Vaishnava devotional community proved to be an inspirational and effective model for nationalist integration.
The life and teachings of Chaitanya was a subject that frequently appeared in the modern Bengali press; these were also a matter of animated discussion among some contemporary social and religious groups as for instance, the Derozians, Brahmos and Indian Christians.
Some of the positive assessments of Chaitanya and his religion came from Derozians. Thus, Kissory Chand Mitra (1822–1873) and Shoshee Chandra Dutta (1824–1885), both products of the Hindu College, wrote in the Bengal Magazine (1872) and India Past and Present(1884) respectively, to claim that this religion was indeed a new idea in Hinduism that repudiated caste and did not insist on renunciation. However, there were also more critical voices. Bholanath Chunder (1822–1910), also from this college and born into a Suvarnabanik Vaishnava family, found the public obsession with Krishna worship to be incompatible with the intellectual reputation that Bengal as a province or the Bengalis as a people carried: ‘On the streets of Calcutta,’ he complains, ‘there are more images of Krishna and the emblems of Sita than perhaps the whole length of the Doab—and this in Bengal which is at the intellectual leadership of India.’ Chunder’s extensive tours of north India took him to Mathura and Vrindavan, enabling him to leave behind an absorbing, if also a somewhat puritanical, account of Vaishnava life in that region.
The reaction of early Christian evangelists to Chaitanya and Vaishnavism is too well-known to be repeated here. Suffice to say that much of this was a complex combination of ideological predispositions and acute observation. For instance, we gather from the Baptist missionary William Ward (1769–1823) that a substantial percentage of the Hindu Bengali population in Bengal was Vaishnava by faith even though the exact constituents of that faith are not very well defined. Ward also tells us how women of ‘ill fame’ in colonial Calcutta commonly professed the faith of Chaitanya so that they may be allowed decent funeral rites at death. Early educational surveys of Bengal conducted between 1835 and 1838 by William Adam (1796–1881) reveal that Vaishnava women were among the most literate, an accomplishment that appears to have been encouraged by an increasing turn from orality to textual culture over time. Missionary accounts of this period also vitally shaped Hindu public opinion, even among the upwardly mobile and neo-educated jatis. That Chaitanya should be associated with the morally suspect Radha–Krishna cult was an embarrassment for both evangelists and Hindus deeply impressed with their cultural reporting. Ward was scandalized upon discovering that in popular Hindu temples, Krishna was invariably found in the company of his mistress, Radha, and not his wives. By the mid-19th century, Hindu converts to Christianity were to echo such perceptions. Rev. Lal Behari Dey (1824–1894), also from a Suvarnavanik Vaishnava family, has left behind captivating accounts of quotidian Vaishnava life based on actual observation. Dey was both amused and a trifle concerned at how among ‘lower class’ Vaishnavas—Boshtoms, Babajis, and their female companions—raucous singing and hysterical emotional outbursts were taken to be a measure of spiritual perfection. In theological matters too, he had reason to be dissatisfied with Vaishnavas. For one, he doubted if Chaitanya could qualify to be called an avatar at all since his descent was clearly not foretold by any divine mandate. A true incarnation, Dey was to argue, would have been heralded by some prophecy, as was the case with Jesus. A tract published by the Church Missionary Society in 1892 titled Chaitanyatattwabodhika (Determining the Essence of Chaitanya’s Theology, n.d.) by one Haradhan Mukhopadhyay reinforces this perception. Mukhopadhyaya’s critique focused on the alleged shortcomings of character and temperament in Chaitanya, particularly on his tendency to quickly fly into a rage, often leading to perpetrating violence on others. Such qualities, Mukhopadhyay observed, ill fitted an avatar. A more penetrating accusation and one which may have offended the Vaishnavas even more was the theory that Chaitanya’s disregard for jati was born not out of any genuine ideological conviction but only a clever ploy devised to attract lower-class recruits. In his 1925 study of the Chaitanya movement in Bengal, Melville T. Kennedy devoted an entire chapter to a didactic comparison between Vaishnavism and Christianity, which one of his reviewers chose to completely ignore. Outside this didacticism, Kennedy’s pressing concern was that Chaitanya Vaishnavism did not develop the concept of the sinner nor did it speak of the ways in which men might work towards redeeming their sins. Such matters, he argued, were quite unreasonably left to God’s grace.
Of the Indian converts to Christianity in 19th-century Bengal, only the poet Madhusudan Dutta (1824–1873) was enthused by the Vaishnava tradition and even admitted as much. Best known for his creative retelling of a story from the Ramayana, the Meghnadh Bodh Kavya (The Slaying of Meghnad, 1861), and for his pioneering experiments with blank verse, Dutta also exhibited a keen appreciation and understanding of Vaishnava mythology and literary canons. After he had produced the dramatic poem Brjangana Kavya (Verses Based on Life at Vraj or Vrindavan 1861) based on Radha–Krishna lore from Vraj country, a Goswami from Shantipur came visiting him one day at his Khidirpore (Calcutta) residence and was quite devastated to find the author to be a Christian. Reportedly, the Goswami went back a deeply saddened man, comforting himself with the thought that he had indeed sighted a pious Vaishnava who had been for some reason cursed to lead the life of a Christian. Dutta himself had the presence of mind to chide the veteran Brahmo leader Rajnarayan Basu (1826–1899) for his failure to separate literary ideals from the social or the religious. On 29 August 1861 he wrote thus to Basu:
I think you are rather cold towards the poor lady of Braja. Poor man! When you set down to read poetry, leave aside all religious bias. Besides, Mrs. Radha is not such a bad woman after all. If she had a ‘Bard’ like your humble servant from the beginning she would have been a very different character. It is the vile imagination of poetasters that has painted her in such colours. (Madhusudan Granthavali, the Collected Works of Madhusudan Dutta)
As a sympathetic understanding of Krishna’s much abused lover, this perhaps stands unparalleled in 19th-century Bengali literature. Dutta was also to confess that whereas he cared ‘two pins’ for the religion of the Hindus, the ‘grand mythology of his ancestors’ moved and inspired him.
The Brahmo reaction to Chaitanya and Vaishnavas is said to have begun with Raja Rammohun Roy (1774–1833). In hindsight, though, this looks more a matter of the pre-existing sectarian rivalries between Vaishnavas and Saktas. There are apocryphal stories in circulation about how an orthodox Vaishnava would not condescend to use the term ‘kali’ for ink because it was reminiscent of the fearsome Sakta goddess Kali, preferring to use the Persian word, syahi, instead. There is also the celebrated and quite instructive exchange between the well-known Sakta-Tantrik practitioner Ramprosad Sen (1717–1775) and his Vaishnava contemporary Aju (Ayodhya) Gossai (Goswami). Reportedly, while Ramprosad bemoaned the world and world-processes as a gigantic hoax wrought upon man by beguiling Maya, Aju Gossain saw the phenomenal world as an abode of ananda or pure bliss; put more bluntly, it is a place where one might enjoy some revelry and fun. This perceptible difference in approach and understanding was quite characteristic of the Sakta and Vaishnava views of Hindu metaphysics and soteriology. The former produced more polarized perceptions of life, swinging between life affirmation and negation, and its overarching approach to life was often marked by a depressing obsession with the sheer ‘fragility’ and ‘meaninglessness’ of all life or the utter helplessness of man before the capricious and mysterious play of the Divine, which could neither be understood nor foretold. Rammohun’s Brahma Sangit (Brahmo prayer songs) repeatedly speak of bibek and bairagya, withdrawal and renunciation, and adopt an almost alarmist approach to the inevitability of death. By contrast, the Vaishnava attitude was more life-affirming and it fancied that sensuality and love which one human being showed towards another could more effectively grow into a love for the Divine. There are at least three known instances of Chaitanya himself or one of his important followers substituting names denoting a morose concern with human unhappiness or suffering by those that indicated mirth and contentment. Chaitanya changed the name of one of the female attendants at Sribas’s house from Dukhi (unhappy) to Sukhi (happy). Similarly, Jayananda was the name given to one who was previously called ‘Guiyan’ (in all probability, a pejorative term). In Vrindavan, Jiva Goswami renamed Dukhi Krishnadas as Shyamananda.
Rammohun’s critique of Vaishnavism was grounded in both ethical and theological objections. Referring to the episode of the infant Krishna stealthily stealing butter and cream, as narrated in the Bhagavat Purana, he once complained to his Baptist friends at Serampore of how even the sweeper of his house would not dream of committing such a dastardly act. His theological objections, in particular, were directed against Vaishnava idolatry, towards the high reverence for the guru, and implicitly, perhaps, towards the tendency to freely recruit lower-class men and women into spiritual life. Rammohun’s own penchant for Vedantic jnan effectively ruled out the possibility of recruiting lower castes and for a long time into its history, as we may justly recall, the Brahmo Samaj was identifiable as both an upper-caste constituency and a male-centric organization. Rammohun’s debates with Gaudiya Vaishnavism are memorialized in two successive tracts called Goswamir Sahit Vichar (Polemics with the Goswami, 1818) and Pathyapradan (Prescribing the Right Course of Treatment, 1823) in which he plainly ridiculed the veneration of figures such as Krishna and Chaitanya. The latter work also brings out the polemical side to his writings. Sometime around 1822–3, Nandalal Tagore, son of Haramohan Tagore of the Pathuriaghata branch of the Tagore family, engaged an employee of the Fort William College in Calcutta, Pandit Kashinath Tarkapanchanan (1788–1851), to produce a tract contesting the ‘heretical’ religious views of Rammohun. The tract was called Pashandapidan (Persecuting the Heretic). To this, Rammohun promptly replied by way of his Pathyapradan, citing the Tantric work Tantraratnakar (a relatively modern Tantric text, n.d.), to state that the Vaishnava trio of Chaitanya, Advaita, and Nityananda were actually demons reborn as humans! It appears to have escaped Rammohun altogether that his religious views agreed with those of the Vaishnavas in two vital respects: first, in its emphasis on monotheism and second, in its life-affirming quality.
The Brahmo Samaj after Rammohun reveals an ambivalent position towards the Gaudiyas. On the one hand, an effusion of Bhakti sentiments is known to have gripped the Brahmos under Keshab Chandra Sen (1838–1884), with Keshab himself assuming the moods of Chaitanya (Chaitanya-bhava) at Monghyr in 1868. Bipinchandra Pal once wrote to say that but for Keshab, modern Bengal may not have adequately respected Chaitanya. The Brahmos were the first group in modern Bengal to actually organize sankirtan processions, anticipating even the neo-Vaishnavas themselves. One such event was organized on 24 January 1868 with as many as 400 Brahmos attending. On 16 Aghrayan 1792 (Saka era), corresponding to the months of November–December in 1870 ce, the Dharmatattwa, a Bengali journal started by Keshabchandra, began serializing a feature called ‘Life and Religion of Chaitanya’ (Chaitanyer Jeebon O Dharma); one of his loyal followers, Trailokyanath Sanyal alias Chiranjiv Sharma, produced in 1884 a two-part narrative on the life and times of Chaitanya titled Bhaktichaitanyachandrika (a quasi-dramatic text in praise of Chaitanya, 2 vols., 1884). Sanyal’s work employs an interesting narrative strategy wherein the author poses himself as a contemporary of Chaitanya in Nabadwip and claims to provide eyewitness accounts of major episodes occurring in the life of the saint. The rapid effusion of Bhakti, however, also contributed to split the Brahmo Samaj a second time in 1878 since it allegedly encouraged personalized Bhakti, with Keshab increasingly assuming the position of the venerable saint and guru, and authoritarianism that was resented by the younger, politically more sensitized Brahmos. Sibnath Sastri (1847–1919), one of the major architects behind the schism of 1878, speaks approvingly of devotional collectives such as the nagar sankirtan but not of ecstatic Bhakti. A more surprising note of dissent to Keshab’s experiments with Bhakti appears in the writings of his cousin and most trusted lieutenant, Protap Chandra Mozoomdar (1840–1905). Mozoomdar bitterly complains of how Vaishnava Bhakti emotionalism had emasculated a good many ‘unripe minds’ in Keshab’s church with kirtan parties degenerating into ‘mobbish assemblies’.
It is something of an irony that while the Brahmo Rammohun appears as the first major critic of Chaitanya and Vaishnavism in modern India, the Brahmo Samaj after him provided the Chaitanya movement with the earliest and many illustrious recruits. Among those who, notwithstanding their Brahmo past, took to a piously Vaishnava life were Aswini Kumar Dutta, Sisir Kumar Ghosh, Manoranjan Guhathakurta, Tarakishore Raychaudhuri, and Bipinchandra Pal. Most of these figures took initiation under Bejoykrishna Goswami who was instrumental in introducing Bhakti to the Brahmo way of life and cast a significant influence on Keshab himself. Brahmo theologian Hemchandra Sarkar wrote an influential work titled Gaudiya Vaishnavharma O Chaitanyadev (Gaudiya Vaishnavism and Chaitanya, 1932) in which he showed Chaitanya to have carried out important changes in the everyday religious and cultural life of the Hindu Bengali.
It might also be justly argued that the Bhakti experiments of Keshab or the neo-Puranism of Bankimchandra and Bipinchandra Pal were, on one level, correctives to the position once adopted by Rammohun himself. There were, however, unrelenting critics too. Writing in the popular Bengali journal Sahitya (1896–7), Brahmo Umeshchandra Batabyal (1852–1892) viewed Chaitanya as a paranoid figure who had developed signs of madness after his first marriage. Batabyal was also among those who took Vaishnavism to be a residual aberration from degenerating Buddhism and even portrayed Radha herself as a promiscuous Buddhist nun.
A relatively unexplored aspect to the study of Chaitanya and Vaishnavism in colonial Bengal is the response from Ramakrishna and the movement that grew around him. In part, the explanation may lie in perceiving Ramakrishna as a Sakta-Tantrik figure and Vivekananda as primarily an advaitin, not expected to take much interest in the rival tradition of Vaishnavism. Such perceptions are easily contested by turning to sources, of which Sri Sri Ramakrishnakathamrita (The Gospel of Ramakrishna) by Mahendranath Gupta is easily the most valuable. For one, there is the issue of Ramakrishna’s Vaishnava ancestry. His father was a devotee of Raghuvir, a synonym for Rama, and Ramakrishna’s siblings were given names beginning with the prefix ‘Ram’, such as Ramkumar or Ramsila. Second, by one estimate, in the Kathamrita itself, there are over a dozen instances of Ramakrishna referring euphorically to the ‘mahabhava’ of Chaitanya, to his extreme renunciation, and his conquest of worldliness. Closer to our time, there have been at least two serious attempts at comparing the religious views of Chaitanya and Ramakrishna: first by A.K. Majumdar in Chaitanya: His Life and Doctrine (1969), followed by Rabindra Kumar Dasgupta in the work Sri Ramakrishner Chaitanya O Ramprosad (Chaitanya and Ramprosad in the Eyes of Ramakrishna) (2015). Dasgupta has gone to the extent of claiming that Chaitanya and Ramakrishna were but the two faces of the same person.
Ramakrishna recalled with delight Chaitanya revealing the ecstatic moods of Radha, even chiding the novelist Bankimchandra for expressing some reservations on this score. The Kathamrita also records how, on his visit to Vrindavan, Ramakrishna himself was taken to be a manifestation of Radha by local followers. Not surprisingly, some of his bhadralok devotees viewed the saint as ‘Chaitanya of the 19th century’, a perception occasionally affirmed by Ramakrishna himself. Two popular plays launched on the contemporary Bengali stage, both dealing with the life of Chaitanya—Chaitanya Lila (The Divine Sports of Chaitanya, 1884) and Nimai Sanyas (The Ascetic Life of Chaitanya, 1885)—were authored and directed by the well-known playwright and Ramakrishna devotee Girishchandra Ghosh (1844–1912). Interestingly though, bhadralok validation of the lives and work of these two figures also reveal subtle differences in approach and strategy. When speaking of Chaitanya, Sisir Kumar Ghosh pointedly refers to Chaitanya’s birth in a highly educated community; Mahendranath Gupta, on the contrary, is crestfallen upon gathering that ‘Thakur’ (Ramakrishna) has no use for books. In the first instance, arguably, the intention was to situate the ‘reformist’ Chaitanya in the tradition of ‘high’ learning; in the second, it was to pronounce the vacuity of formal learning, especially that produced in a culturally alienating environment and colonial educational institutions. The Kathamrita takes some pride in reporting how the Western-educated community of Calcutta felt itself humbled in the presence of a semi-literate Brahmin priest.
His great attachment to goddess Kali or fleeting experiments with esoteric Tantric sadhana did not come in the way of Ramakrishna warmly socializing with his Vaishnava visitors, some of whom such as Radhikamohan Goswami of Santipur, belonged to distinguished Vaishnava spiritual lineages. There were recurring kirtan recitals at Dakshineswar as also at other places in Calcutta which Ramakrishna visited, and such performative aspects of devotion were, without a doubt, an important part of his religious life. Ramakrishna was a regular visitor at the annual Panihati Vaishnava festival associated with Nityananda and Raghunath Das Goswami. Between 1882 and 1884, he is known to have visited at least four important Vaishnava icons and institutions within the close vicinity of Dakshineswar: Kansaripara Haribhaktipradayini Sabha, Gadadhar Patbari at Ariadaha, Shadabhuja Gauranga (the six-armed image of Chaitanya) at Garanhata, and Jorasanko Harisabha. On the other hand, he had two strong points of criticism directed against the Gaudiya Vaishnavas. First, he disliked the exaggerated humility and self-denial in the Vaishnava, always seeking God’s forgiveness and redemption for his frailties and sins. His position in the matter, also often articulated before the Brahmos, was that the devotee ought really to stand by the belief that having taken the Divine Name, no sin could possibly touch him. Second, somewhat surprisingly, there is at least one instance of his favourably comparing the intellectual Bhakti of the Gita to that of the emotionally charged Bhakti in the Bhagavat Purana—surprising, that is, for a man who otherwise took ‘Radhabhava’ to be an exalted state of love for the Divine. He compared the Bhakti of the Bhagavat, which privileged the clandestine but selfless love of the gopis, to the enticingly coquettish foreplay of the public woman. By comparison, devotion found in the Gita was pure and chaste, exhibited as it was by the faithful and chaste wife. Indeed, some of Ramakrishna’s devotees were heard complaining against singing Radha–Krishna love songs at home since, reportedly, its effects on wives and children was far from salutary.
In most ways, Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s most eminent pupil, carried forward his master’s views on Chaitanya and on Vaishnavism. For Vivekananda, Chaitanya was best understood as the founder of a movement that placed the greatest emphasis on undiscriminating human love and bonding:
His love knew no bounds. The saint or the sinner, the Hindu or the Mohammedan, the pure and the impure, the prostitute the streetwalker—all had a share in his love, all had a share in his mercy … his sect is the refuge of the poor, of the downtrodden, the outcast, of the weak, of those who have been rejected by all society. (Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda)
Speaking at Madras immediately upon his return to India in 1897, Vivekananda found Chaitanya’s influence to be truly pan-Indian in scope and character, penetrating all areas that had come under the influence of Bhakti Marga. In 1899, responding to questions put to him publicly, the Swami was to also observe that the Gaudiya movement had made way for a wide range of Hindu converts to re-enter the Hindu fold. It was Chaitanya and his movement which had saved Hinduism from extinction, Vivekananda concluded.
In Vivekananda’s perception, the error with Chaitanya’s methods, as also those of his spiritual successors, lay in following the tactically disastrous strategy of universalizing the path of love (madhurbhava). In the hands of the common man and woman, the Swami alleged, this was likely to be seriously misapprehended and abused. Evidently, the implication here was that discrimination was a function of class; the lowly and the uneducated could not possibly tell lust from love. On the whole, the Swami did validate the path of Bhakti or else he would not have chosen to write on Bhakti Yoga as devotedly as he wrote on Jnan Yoga and on Karma Yoga. And yet, he found Bhakti to be marred by the lack of discrimination. Somewhat echoing his master, Vivekananda sincerely recommended that Bhakti be suitably tempered by Jnan.
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