Whenever and wherever there is a decline in dharma
and a rise of a-dharma—at that time I descend.
—SRI KRISHNA IN THE BHAGAVAD GITA, 4.7
CALCUTTA, 1912
The scaffolding of metal bars and bamboo poles spiraled 200 feet into a moonlit sky. Soon the Victoria Memorial—Britain’s architectural declaration of dominance over India—would be finished in white marble, and the cobweb of supports would be dismantled. Before that happened, sixteen-year-old Abhay Charan could not resist scaling it to the top.
Streets were quiet at this late hour. Do Not Enter signs lined the construction site, but rules had never held Abhay back before. He ducked under the barricade, climbed the crisscross of beams hand over hand, reached the wood-planked summit, and stared out over the city to the Hooghly River, a tributary of the mighty Ganges. The Hooghly’s tides ran rapidly, sometimes producing head waves that capsized small boats.
Abhay gazed out over Bengal. From his classes at the local Higher Secondary School, he knew that 150 years before and about eighty miles upstream there had been a great battle to determine India’s future. There, at the town of Plassey, the last Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Ud Daulah, attacked British forces commanded by Robert Clive. Unknown to the Nawab’s men, Clive had bribed their commander-in-chief, and the British quickly won the day. Clive’s victory at Plassey was followed by a rapid expansion of British power, and by the mid-nineteenth century Great Britain ruled India.
To maintain control over such a massive nation, the British fomented hostility between Hindus and Muslims by forcing them to live apart. On October 16, 1905, Abhay’s home province of Bengal was split into segregated neighborhoods. The British appointed Muslim governors in Hindu provinces, Hindu magistrates in Muslim districts, and positioned the Crown as the central government ruling them all. The division succeeded in creating tension between neighbors but also an outburst of anger against British domination. Young Indians, including Abhay, rallied to calls by nationalists to fight for India’s freedom. Anti-British riots broke out almost daily in Abhay’s teen years. His participation in the volatile independence movement had his father, Gour Mohan De, worried, particularly since Abhay’s mother had recently passed away, and Abhay was needed at home more than ever.
From atop the Victoria Memorial, he watched the Hooghly’s tides flow swiftly out of the city, down to the Bay of Bengal, and beyond to Europe and America. His image of the United States was shaped by photos in India editions of Look and National Geographic that revealed mountainous skyscrapers under construction, Model Ts cruising down paved highways, airplanes setting speed and distance records, electric vacuum cleaners and washing machines, and other miracles of technology—all blending into what Brahmin priests called maya, the illusion of materialism. That was America: maya’s capital across the ocean at the other end of the globe.
It would take more than fifty years before Abhay set sail across those waters. He was not impatient. For now, India was in trouble. His own people needed him. He climbed down from the scaffolding, waves crashing in the distance, and headed home, back to school and family and the tumult of a nation awakening to an uncertain future.
IN THE EARLY YEARS OF the Twentieth century, the British Raj controlled India with a firm hand, and separation between rulers and ruled was strictly enforced. The only Indians allowed in British restaurants or officers’ clubs in those days were servants who entered by side doors, donned white jackets, ladled soup out of antique silver dishes, and kept their thoughts to themselves. Abhay’s family, the Des, had made their peace with British rule. They lived on Harrison Road in the north end of Calcutta, away from the urban center, where British administrators dictated India’s affairs. The north district, home to Chaitanya Vaishnavas4—Krishna worshippers such as Abhay’s family, who followed Chaitanya’s example of constantly chanting Krishna’s names—bordered several Muslim neighborhoods. Despite the embarrassment of this segregation, there was a workable hegemony. Hindus and Muslims did business together, and their children played as friends. Harrison Road included a block of buildings owned by the aristocratic Mullik family, a mercantile clan that had traded gold and salt with the British for more than two hundred years. In a previous generation, one of the Mullik men had married a De woman, and on Harrison Road their descendants built homes.
Abhay and his family lived across from the Mullik community temple, and the temple deities were Abhay’s first vision coming into the world. After he was born, his father, Gour Mohan (1849–1930), and his mother, Rajani (c. 1866–1912), recited mantras for his body and soul. They dabbed his tongue with a drop of date sugar and carried their son to the temple so he could gaze at the brass deities of Radha and Krishna, God in female and male forms. Sweet sensations and divine visions: a good start in life. The family’s astrologer drew up Abhay’s chart. At age seventy, he predicted, this child will become a religious leader and build 108 temples around the world. There are no records describing how the family reacted to this prediction, but it must have delighted Gour Mohan, who was an orthodox Vaishnava determined to see his son cultivate the habits and character of a devout Krishna worshipper.
Gour Mohan was a hardworking man whose cloth shop generated enough income to keep his middle-class home stocked with ghee, rice, and potatoes, and provide dowries for his four daughters. Abhay’s mother cared for the family’s six children and filled their home with the spicy aromas of traditional cooking. Once the curried vegetables, milk sweets, and other dishes were ready, she placed portions on a brass tray and carried it across the road to the Mullik temple, where she bowed and offered the food with prayers. By age three, Abhay was reciting prayers along with her and thinking the deity of Krishna had beautiful slanted eyes. If a grain of rice fell on the ground, he picked it up and touched it to his forehead as a gesture of respect for prasadam, God’s mercy in the shape of food.5
Abhay had a high forehead, doe-like eyes, large ears, and flared nostrils. When provoked, he furrowed his eyebrows and pursed his full lips, and Rajani would supplicate this or that divinity to spare him from evil. Sometimes the young boy’s haughty nature took over. In response to a rebuke from his teacher, five-year-old Abhay picked up a kerosene lamp from her desk and threw it to the ground. When Abhay spied a toy gun in an outdoor market, he insisted his father buy it. Gour Mohan obliged, then Abhay insisted on having a second—“one for each hand”—and lay down in the street kicking his feet until Gour Mohan acquiesced. His parents grew alert to their son’s moods. They had named him Abhay Charan, wanting him to be both abhay, fearless, and charan, surrendered to the charan, or feet, of God. The fearless part seemed to come naturally, as though he understood, even as a child, that obstacles were to be expected in the material world.
To nurture Abhay’s devotion, Gour Mohan hired a musician to teach him the mridanga, a two-headed drum used in temple ceremonies. The three-foot-long clay cylinder hung from the musician’s neck by a thick cord, and he beat the large and small heads with rapid hand movements. Abhay could barely reach both ends of the drum at the same time, but he took to the mridanga like a professional. “What’s the point?” Rajani asked her husband. “He’s just a child.” But Gour Mohan looked to the future, to a time when Abhay would fulfill the astrologer’s predictions and make a sound the world would hear.
GOUR MOHAN FOLLOWED A STRICT schedule. He woke before 7 a.m., bathed, set out on morning chores, and returned home by 10 a.m. For the next three hours, he recited prayers, read scripture, and worshiped the family deities with incense, flowers, and prayers. This puja or worship was his father’s real business, Abhay would comment in later years. After a light lunch, Gour Mohan walked to his shop for an afternoon of meetings with customers. At 10 p.m., he put a bowl of rice on the floor for rats that would otherwise eat his merchandise, locked the front door, and returned home to continue his worship. The gentle murmur of mantras and the tinkling of a handheld bell woke Abhay. He tiptoed downstairs, not wanting to disturb his mother, and soon father and son were in the kitchen cooking up puffed rice as a snack before sleep.
Electricity had not yet been installed in Calcutta, and motion pictures would not become an industry in India until 1912, so there was little to distract Abhay from creating his own adventures. On sunny days, he took his younger sister, Bhavatarini, by the hand and climbed to the flat roof of their home to launch paper kites into the air.
“Pray to Krishna,” Abhay told her, “pray the kites will fly.”
Abhay pretended to be their family physician, Dr. Bose, and cured Bhavatarini of imaginary troubles with potions and poultices made of garden soil. They acted out stories learned from their grandmother: the story of Prince Rama rescuing Princess Sita from demon king Ravana, or the story of sage Viswamitra defeating envious King Vasistha with the power of his devotion. Abhay’s favorites were stories about Krishna, the mischievous child of Vrindavan village, who stole his mother’s yogurt and made jokes at everyone’s expense and demonstrated mystic powers by lifting a hill or bringing down ogres who occasionally attacked the village.
Five-year-old Abhay dreamed of one day traveling to the town of Puri on the Orissan coast, 300 miles to the south. He thrilled to his father’s descriptions of the annual festival there called Rathayatra—the “journey of the chariots”—that drew millions of pilgrims. On this day only, Gour Mohan explained, pujaris or attendants in Puri’s renowned Jagannath temple were allowed to lift the three massive wooden deities of Krishna from their altars. So heavy were the deities of Krishna and his brother and sister that it took twenty men to place them on the forty-foot-tall Rathayatra chariots. Thousands of pilgrims then pulled the chariots through the streets with long, thick ropes. Everything sprang from Krishna, Gour Mohan told his son, and if he chose to appear before his devotees in the form of a wooden deity, was that not his right? And if from time to time he wished to parade through the streets to see his devotees, no matter how big or heavy he was, who could stop him?6
Abhay wanted a cart of his own, but when Gour Mohan took him to the market he found the cost of a good quality miniature prohibitive. Abhay stood on the street crying, which prompted an elderly woman walking by to ask what the problem was. Gour Mohan explained his son’s wish. “I have such a child’s cart,” she said and escorted them to her nearby home, where Gour Mohan paid a nominal sum for her three-foot-tall chariot. Father and son bought paint and screws, and back home they restored the colorful columns, reinforced the wooden wheels, and installed six-inch wooden Jagannath deities on the bridge. Abhay rallied the neighbors, and Harrison Road held its own Rathayatra festival. Not unlike how they are today, Bengali communities at that time were very much like a village with a deep sense of community. Arms raised, he instructed his friends to pull the chariot down the street, beat miniature mridangas, and play little brass kartal hand cymbals while he led the chanting: “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.” The procession ended at the Mullik temple, where parents added to the festivities by handing out fruits and sweets.
That night Abhay slept with the wooden cart next to his bed and woke from time to time to touch it, amazed that he possessed a Rathayatra chariot of his very own. Gour Mohan expected great things from his son, but even he could not have imagined that one day Abhay would lead ten-ton Rathayatra carts down the streets of cities around the world.
At age six, Abhay asked his father for Radha and Krishna deities to worship—a rewarding moment for Gour Mohan. He and his wife had performed samskara rituals of passage for just this time when their son would see the rightness of devotion to God. Yes, of course, Abhay could have his own deities. Particularly now, in the opening years of the twentieth century with Christian missionary activity at its height, Abhay’s faith had to be strong. The missionaries were polite for the most part, but beneath the veneer of cordiality lay a harsh message: Hindus were not truly civilized. If ever they wished to rise to a respected place in the world, they had to renounce their backward religious practices, especially worship of “idols.” And of all “idols,” missionaries condemned Krishna as the worst of all.7 In the words of British Supreme Court judge Sir Joseph Arnould, “It is Krishna the darling of 16,000 Gopees [cowherd women]; Krishna the love-hero . . . who . . . tinges the whole system with the stain of carnal sensualism or strange, transcendental lewdness.”8
Gour Mohan did not discuss such things with his children, but he worried that they would succumb to the propaganda. The compulsion to do so would be strong, since his children heard the condemnation of deities not only from the missionaries but from school teachers, neighbors, and the British administrators who controlled their lives. Vaishnavas were “uneducated natives,” the message went. Worshipping statues of Krishna made of marble and wood embodied everything the Europeans found distasteful about India. The stigma of idolatry hung like an invisible placard around the necks of the faithful.
Of the Europeans’ many complaints, “idolatry” was by far their main objection to Hinduism. “Whatever plausible argument may be advanced for image-worship,” one missionary wrote, “we believe if history teaches anything, it teaches that such worship materializes and debases the human mind, gives most unworthy views of God, and in the case of the vast majority leads to a fetishism which in principle is identical with that of the most barbarous tribes. Till India rises above this idolatry, she will never have her proper place in the world.”9
Not only Europeans, but the Hindu intelligentsia, too, favored moving the nation away from its “idolatrous” past through English education. Reformist Rammohun Roy and other eminent leaders approached the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Sir Edward Hyde East, to tell him of their desire to form “an establishment for the education of their children in a liberal manner as practiced by Europeans.” Abhay’s mother wanted her son to have such an education and learn the ways of the world.
“Our son should become a British lawyer,” she told her husband, “even if it means he must go to London to study.” Gour Mohan would hear nothing of it, since living in England would expose their son to European habits.
“He will learn drinking and woman-hunting,” Gour Mohan said, and the topic never came up again.
Those were days when such allurements tempted an entire generation of young Indians, and Gour Mohan was determined that at least this one child would learn to resist. Attaining adulthood as a Vaishnava meant walking away from the pleasures that seduced weaker minds. He felt responsible for fostering a higher standard in Abhay than the “pounds-shillings-pence” materialism of the British. He would see to it that his son grew up knowing there was a God behind the miracle of creation, a God who lived in Abhay’s heart, ready to guide him and provide whatever he needed in life. The society of English barristers had nothing to offer.
TO ALL APPEARANCES, Abhay Charan’s early life was comfortable and headed toward the predictable future of a middle-class Bengali Vaishnava. When he was eight, his father enrolled him in Mutty Lal Seal Free School at the end of Harrison Road. Abhay dressed in traditional dhoti and kurta and walked with other boys in a group, carrying schoolbooks and lunch in a stainless steel tiffin. Occasionally, they stopped to let British officials pass by in horse-drawn carriages, the boys’ world on one side of an invisible line and the British on the other.
In 1916, at age twenty, Abhay entered Scottish Church College, where he majored in English, philosophy, and economics. When he was twenty-one, his father arranged for him to marry a girl from their neighborhood: eleven-year-old Radharani Datta, although they would not live together for several years, as was the custom. Abhay did not find her appealing and wanted to marry another young woman. Gour Mohan had ambitions for Abhay, whom he envisioned one day becoming a great spiritual figure, and he discouraged the idea.
“My dear boy,” he said, “I advise you not to do this. It is Krishna’s grace that your fiancée is not to your liking. This will help you to avoid becoming attached to wife and home, and that will be beneficial in the matter of your future advancement. Don’t be worried about her. If she wants to remarry, she can do so. I shall arrange for you to become a sannyasi, and you will be free to preach.”10
Because he wanted to encourage his son to focus on his own spiritual path and not become overly involved in family life, Abhay’s father decided to take matters into his own hands. Gour Mohan proposed they visit the girl’s family and saw that she was indeed very beautiful, the kind of girl who risked becoming an anchor for his son. So he insulted her.
“Does your daughter dance?” Gour Mohan asked the girl’s father. In conservative Vaishnava circles, implying that a girl “danced” equated to calling her a prostitute. The girl’s father was outraged.
“Sir, we are not like that,” he replied with suppressed anger. “We do not teach our girls dancing.” With that, the interview was at an end. Gour Mohan had effectively quashed any hopes Abhay might have had for another wife. It was a Machiavellian strategy: better his son marry a plain girl, someone from whom separation, when it came, would be less stressful.
Gour Mohan’s ambitions for his son reflected the esteem in which the Vaishnava community held their spiritual leaders. No more revered citizens existed in traditional India than the sannyasis, the holy persons whose interest was the well-being of others. Part priest, part educator, part life counselor, sannyasis had served as advisors to emperors. They had brokered peace between warring kingdoms, functioned as court of last appeal for civil and religious disputes, and exemplified a holy life. As far back as could be traced, sannyasis had determined the course of India’s history.
“I accepted my father’s advice,” Abhay described in his later years. “Consequently, I was never attached to my wife or home, which resulted in [the freedom to] devote myself fully to Krishna consciousness.”11
ON APRIL 13, 1919, a crowd of Sikhs gathered in a garden in Amritsar, Punjab, to celebrate a traditional religious festival. Convinced an insurrection had begun, British soldiers opened fire with rifles and machine guns. Ten minutes later, a thousand civilians lay dead. The massacre provoked riots, which led to further government retribution. Gandhi appealed to the nation for a nonviolent response. Twenty-three-year-old Abhay answered Gandhi’s call to nonviolent protest by refusing to accept his degree from Scottish Church College. He also followed Gandhi’s example of replacing British shirts and pants with domestic handspun khadi clothes. For the next three years, Abhay volunteered as a local organizer for Gandhi’s campaign. At age twenty-five, he began working in the laboratory of his family’s physician, Kartick Chandra Bose.
In 1922, one of Abhay’s closest friends, Narendra Mullik, met monks from the Gaudiya Math, a Vaishnava institution, and the monks invited him to meet their guru. Like other well-to-do residents of Calcutta, Narendra was willing to support religious organizations if they were honorable, but honor was not always obvious. Many sannyasis came knocking at his door looking for donations. Who could tell what their motives were? Maths, religious schools, abounded, and the monks charged with raising funds looked more or less alike. There was every chance his money would be wasted supporting a place for loafers who sponged off innocent Hindu families. The greater danger was inadvertently giving money to monks who indulged in sex or ate meat. Celibacy and a meat-free diet were behavioral requirements for Vaishnavas. Narendra’s friend, Abhay, always had good advice to offer, and Narendra asked that he accompany him to the math and provide a second opinion.
Abhay declined. From childhood, he said, he had seen cheaters dressed like monks exploit his father’s charitable nature. They took Gour Mohan’s donations, stepped outside his door, and lit up marijuana cigarettes. Some of his family relations ran a boarding house for single men. Abhay recalled seeing one of these boarders dressed in saffron robes gulp down a cup of tea, finish a cigarette, and then grab his waterpot and staff and head out the door to collect his daily “sadhu’s” donations. Abhay had no patience for such people.
“I’m not going,” he told Narendra. There were more pressing matters. Orders in his pharmacy were waiting to be filled, supplies needed to be restocked, there were customers to serve, meetings of Gandhi’s movement to organize, and simply no time for listening to another so-called guru spout off.
“Come on!” Narendra insisted. As a courtesy to his friend, Abhay agreed to be dragged along.
They arrived at a building on Ultadanga Junction Road in north Calcutta. A sign over the door announced that the one-story structure was headquarters of the Gaudiya Math, “the monastery of Greater India.” Abhay and Narendra climbed a worn marble staircase to the roof. Air conditioning was scarce in those days, and public events were often scheduled on rooftops, where evening breezes offered relief from the day’s heat. Monks greeted the two guests and brought them to the front of the gathering to meet the head of their mission. Even seated, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakur’s stature was obvious to Abhay: This was not another pretend sadhu. He seemed at least six feet tall and sat ramrod straight. His forehead was broad and high, his color fair. He wore the traditional robes of a sannyasi: two red-dyed lengths of cloth, one wrapped around his waist, the other draped over his shoulders. Three strands of small wooden tulasi beads looped around his neck. Two stripes of white clay ran from the bridge of his nose to his shaved head—the full uniform of a devout Krishna worshipper and, in Bhaktisiddhanta’s case, acharya of the Gaudiya Math.
Vaishnava community elders elevated a candidate to the exalted position of acharya, head of a recognized lineage of teachers, based on mastery of scripture and personal character.12 Historically, some acharyas received their appointment as a result of family affiliation, for there was a sentiment that virtue and ability were inherited. If, for instance, a man’s father and grandfather had served with distinction, it was assumed he possessed comparable talents. In Bhaktisiddhanta’s case, both criteria applied. He was son of the late Bhaktivinode Thakur, respected former head of the Vaishnava community and prolific author and poet, and in his own right, Bhaktisiddhanta demonstrated the character and wisdom of a true acharya.
Abhay and Narendra touched their foreheads to the ground in the traditional way of greeting a holy person. Something about Abhay must have impressed itself upon Bhaktisiddhanta, as barely had Abhay stood up when Bhaktisiddhanta said, “You are an educated young man. Why don’t you take Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s13 message and spread it in English to the Western world?”
IN YEARS TO COME, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada would describe that he hesitated when his guru issued the instruction that changed his life. Leave everything and travel to the West? How could he do that? Of course, Abhay knew quite a bit about Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. His father and mother had raised him as a Chaitanya follower, and since childhood he had been chanting Hare Krishna as Mahaprabhu had taught, but aside from an astrologer’s questionable prediction, nothing in the profile of Abhay’s life suggested he would become a religious leader. He and his wife, Radharani, had a one-year-old daughter and were planning to have more children. He earned an honest living and paid his bills and left the religious grandstanding to others.
More to the point, Abhay followed Gandhi and believed the real key to moving India forward was freedom from British rule. For hundreds of years, Bengal’s Hindus and Muslims had lived in relative peace. It was the British who set one religion on the other and turned neighbors into enemies. When it came to choosing between religion and nationhood, to Abhay’s twenty-six-year-old mind, Gandhi’s movement came first. Rid India of the Raj, and her millennial wisdom will have a platform for expression.
“Sir,” Abhay said. “Who will hear Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s message as long as we are a dependent nation? Let us first achieve our independence, then we can spread Indian culture.”
Bhaktisiddhanta disagreed. Mahaprabhu’s message did not depend on politics. Real independence, he said, meant freeing the soul from the shackles of illusion. Doctrines of impersonalism and voidism pervaded India’s thinking. These dangerous ideas decrying the personhood of God were the true enemies, not the British. Until people were trained to know the difference between the body and soul and the soul’s ultimate fulfillment in love of God, they would never know peace. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had given the formula: Chant Hare Krishna, follow the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, and the sun of Krishna will rise to illumine a dark time.
It was indeed a dark time. In 1920, a visit by the Prince of Wales had turned into a four-day riot. Shops were pillaged, and any Europeans seen in public were attacked. Just weeks before Abhay’s meeting with Bhaktisiddhanta, a mob stormed a police station in the town of Chauri Chaura, beat twenty-two officers to death, and burned their bodies. Nationalism had released poisonous resentment, and civil disobedience was careening out of control. As much as Abhay had convinced himself Gandhi held the torch of truth, he could not stand by that conviction after hearing Bhaktisiddhanta speak about respiritualizing the world. By comparison with such a global mission, Gandhi’s plans for a politically independent country seemed stunted and trifling. Up to that moment, Abhay’s perspective had been primarily Indian. Bhaktisiddhanta was proposing something greater, something universal.
And deeply troubling. “The West” implied America, from all accounts a most unpleasant place where everyone ate meat, drank alcohol, and frequented speakeasies where women, it was told, exposed their legs! God only knew what else went on in such places. Americans were the wealthiest, the most heathen, and yet the most influential people on earth. Certainly if the Americans took up Mahaprabhu’s mission, it could spread anywhere. But what were the odds of that ever happening?
Americans had been overtly hostile toward Hindus for more than half a century. Particularly after World War I, America’s isolationism intensified, and the nation had little use for foreigners or their strange customs. Over the past thirty years, some teachers had gone there hoping to sway opinion and reverse America’s image of Indian religion. Swami Vivekananda addressed the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and founded the first Vedanta Society in the United States, but his teachings minimized devotion to Krishna. Bhakti was “a little love,” he said, that must be abandoned on the way to higher realization.14 Paramhansa Yogananda went to America in 1920 and espoused a similar strain of monistic Hinduism. “God’s omnipresence is your omnipresence,” he told his audiences. Almost without exception, Hindu teachers who had made the journey to America all condemned worship of a personal God as philosophically naïve. American church leaders for their part made little distinction among these teachers. They were all “non-Christians,” and everything they said was anathema.15 Hindus worshiped cows and snakes and topless goddesses, and whatever philosophy they might use to justify such practices was not worth hearing.16
Nothing in this grim portrait suggested that the message of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu would find a warm welcome. If America’s isolationism and xenophobia were not enough to dissuade Abhay from accepting Bhaktisiddhanta’s challenge, he had only to read the daily papers: India was exploding. Was this the moment to abandon his country?
Despite his attraction to nationalism, something in the brief exchange with Bhaktisiddhanta quickened Abhay’s pulse. They had not spoken long—maybe an hour—but in that short space of time, Bhaktisiddhanta managed to refute Abhay’s assumptions that God took a backseat to politics and that independence offered a lasting solution to India’s woes. India suffered from lack of a spiritual revolution, Bhaktisiddhanta argued, and campaigning for political independence merely distracted from the more critical campaign launched by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu to reinstate God in his creation. British rule was irrelevant: Not only India, but all of humanity needed liberating.
Something more had occurred. “It was in my very first darshan” or meeting, Abhay later wrote, “that I learned how to love.”17 In his guru’s presence, elements of Abhay’s Vaishnava training—compassion, a call to service, a vision of divinity in the heart of every creature on earth—coalesced. It did not take a lifetime of suffering to qualify for such an epiphany. Abhay had seen enough of the material world by age twenty-six to know it was not a hospitable place. He loved his mother but could not stop her from dying. He loved his family, but nothing would stop them from dying eventually. Nothing lasted in this world—but the soul was never destroyed. Only now, in the presence of someone who lived outside material time, did he begin to see the implications of that truth for the entire world.
Abhay’s transformation into modern history’s greatest missionary of love for Krishna did not occur in a flash: It would evolve over the next forty years. But when he met his guru, something irrevocable occurred that raised the curtain on the rest of his life.
THE NEXT DAY Abhay walked into the office of his employer, Dr. Kartick Chandra Bose, and resigned. Bose had been the De family’s doctor for more than twenty years and had watched Abhay grow up. The elder physician appreciated the personal touch Abhay always brought to their customers, such as answering requests for pricing with handwritten letters, but Bose also recognized how headstrong Abhay could be and knew better than to question his plans.
“I understand your attraction to this teacher,” Bose said. “Still, you are a family man. I will give you a franchise to my company’s products. Sell wherever you like, whenever you like. The commissions will be more than your current salary, and you will still have time for these pursuits.”
Abhay weighed his options. What was work or money or even family compared to the instruction he had received on the roof of the Gaudiya Math? Bhaktisiddhanta had opened his eyes to the meaning of Krishna devotion, and taking Krishna’s message to the West was no trifling matter. It would not happen between sales calls. Still, Bose had a point. No one travels abroad without funds, and pharmaceuticals had potential. India was ripe for Indian-made goods, and Bose’s prices were better than those of the British. Maybe he could save some money and then go West. Abhay agreed to Bose’s offer to start a franchise.
The talk with his wife did not go as well. Radharani did not share her husband’s enthusiasms, political, religious, or otherwise—and here he was, telling her Gandhi had it wrong and that he would be going to the West. There are no witnesses or diaries from which to assess her reaction to Abhay’s meeting with Bhaktisiddhanta, but when they married, it is likely she did not envision becoming a missionary’s wife.
BHAKTISIDDHANTA SARASWATI exercised extraordinary influence over his followers. Not only did his erudition and exemplary behavior elicit a large following, he also solidified followers’ allegiance with exciting, innovative plans for a global mission. Historically, all Vaishnava acharyas innovated one way or another, usually in response to evolving social and political conditions, but those innovations had taken place inside India. No previous acharya had confronted the role of Vaishnava faith on a global scale, since the world had never before been so interdependent. In the late 1800s, Bhaktisiddhanta’s father, Bhaktivinode Thakur, predicted that one day there would be Vaishnavas from every country of the world, but he did not actively pursue creating such an international community, apart from sending copies of a brief Chaitanya biography to literary figures and educational institutions abroad.18 It was his son, Bhaktisiddhanta, who saw the possibility of an actual worldwide movement.
Not just the possibility but the necessity of such a movement informed his leadership of the Gaudiya Math. The ground rules of humanity were evolving. Cultures were no longer isolated. Now what happened in one place affected the lives of people halfway around the world. Wars were reconfiguring the geography of continents, political theories were revolutionizing the economic structure of nations, and technology was binding people together in accelerating networks of travel and communication. For the first time in history, ideas had global consequences. The Vaishnava community would either recognize that and evolve with the times or remain irrelevant to the rest of the world.
Consequently, he did things no acharya had ever done before. He traveled in cars, contrary to the tradition of sannyasis only traveling on foot. He sent disciples to Europe, counter to the injunction that no Hindu should cross “the black ocean.” He wore a watch, which Brahmins frowned upon as ostentatious; opened city temples instead of forest ashrams; and spent huge sums on tented festivals that featured elaborate dioramas and electric lighting to facilitate late night attendance. These public programs drew huge crowds. On October 25, 1930, the newspaper Liberty reported that more than 100,000 people attended the Gaudiya Math’s Govardhan Puja, the festival that celebrated Krishna lifting Govardhan Hill as an umbrella to protect his village from a torrential rain. To feed the large crowd of attendees, Bhaktisiddhanta commissioned a “hill” to be built from more than 1,008 fresh vegetarian dishes and several tons of steamed rice. Even greater crowds turned out for the Gaudiya Math’s annual Theistic Exhibition. Each year between 1928 and 1936, attendance surpassed one million visitors. The Theistic Exhibition took up more than a square mile of tents, displaying nearly one hundred exhibits on developments in medicine, education, agriculture, arts and crafts, child welfare, sports, music, drama, and film. Bhaktisiddhanta used these displays to capture public attention. Then, once guests were hooked, he excited their devotional curiosity with crafted figures (dioramas) of Krishna’s incarnations, artifacts belonging to Vaishnava saints of the past, rare devotional books, and a stone-and-brick map of India’s holy places—all housed in a half-acre-wide tented museum.19
Conservative religious leaders were shocked. They decried the production of such entertainments and accused him of betraying the renounced order. Not so, Bhaktisiddhanta replied, citing Vaishnava commentaries that defined real renunciation as using everything for Krishna’s service.20 “The Ganges shifts,” he explained. “Its course changes all the time. If you bathe in a dry bed, arguing, ‘This is where we have always bathed,’ what can be said for you?” Conservatives were not moved.
Even more objectionable to them: Bhaktisiddhanta initiated non-Brahmins as his disciples. Only men born in Brahmin families, conservatives argued, qualified for initiation. Lower castes had never been allowed to take part in the diksha ceremony. The prohibition was purely political, since nothing in India’s scriptures supported such discrimination, but it had kept caste Brahmins in power for generations. If a Vaishnava businessman returned from traveling abroad, for instance, he was considered unclean and obligated to pay a Brahmin in gold to perform purifying rituals. The Brahmins kept lists of clients for promotional purposes. “As your family priest,” the pitch might go, “I must remind you to perform this rite on the anniversary of your grandfather’s death.” This had been going on for centuries. In effect, Bhaktisiddhanta threatened their commercial livelihood.
Hostility against Bhaktisiddhanta escalated when he added empowerment of women to his list of outrages. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu taught that all souls were prakriti, or female in relation to God. For Bhaktisiddhanta, this meant gender was not a consideration on the path of devotion,21 and unlike the dominant Hindu orthodoxy, he extended full and equal rights to women and awarded them initiation regardless of their family or caste. Several of these women disciples became scholars who contributed articles to his publications. Bhaktisiddhanta’s nondiscrimination policies not only defied caste powerbrokers, they also reversed entrenched social customs and exposed Indian misogyny. Other than outright sedition, he could not have found more contentious issues on which to base his movement.
With each adjustment made to render devotional life accessible to the modern world, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati added to his reputation for controversy. On January 29, 1925, at the start of a one-month pilgrimage, he and his followers were attacked by an angry crowd of caste Brahmins wielding bricks, stones, and glass bottles. A disciple, Vinode Bihari Brahmachari (Keshava Maharaj’s name prior to entering the renounced order) took his guru inside a building where they swapped clothing. Bhaktisiddhanta, disguised in his disciple’s white cloth, escaped. No one was killed, but Bhaktisiddhanta instructed organizers to hire police escorts for subsequent public programs.
HERE, ABHAY REALIZED, WAS A teacher willing to take risks if it helped modernize Krishna worship, which explained the impressive caliber of his disciples. They were not lost or without a rudder, these men and women of the Gaudiya Math; many had university degrees and challenging careers. Bhakti Pradip Tirtha Maharaj was twenty years Abhay’s senior, a graduate of Calcutta University and an initiated disciple of Bhaktisiddhanta’s father, Bhaktivinode Thakur. Pradip Tirtha’s wife died in 1919, and the following year he became Bhaktisiddhanta’s first sannyasi disciple, after which he traveled across East Bengal to spread Chaitanya Vaishnavism. Another disciple, Bhakti Raksak Sridhar Maharaj, studied law prior to joining Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. He began attending Bhaktisiddhanta’s lectures in the early 1920s, and after his wife and mother passed away, he joined the Gaudiya Math full-time. In 1930, he, too, was awarded the sannyasa order. Born in 1898, Bhakti Pramode Puri Maharaj was a university student when he first met Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati in 1915. For the next thirteen years, he transcribed his guru’s lectures and conversations, oversaw their publication, and was revered for his meticulous deity worship. Other disciples were medical students and government employees. Two came from Germany. Another joined at age twenty-four after ending his career as a wrestling champion. N.K. Sanyal was a well-regarded history professor whose understanding of Krishna philosophy was so profound that Bhaktisiddhanta remarked, “Although a householder, he is the guru of sannyasis.” There were hundreds of these educated, accomplished disciples affiliated with Bhaktisiddhanta’s many maths across India.
Abhay spent every free hour in the company of the Calcutta Gaudiya Math community. During evening classes, he participated in conversations about Vaishnava theology. These included topics such as the qualities of consciousness: sat-chit-ananda (eternity, self-awareness and bliss); the cycles of kala (time) and the kalpas or ages of the universe; prakriti, the elements of creation, and devas, empowered beings who controlled them. They discussed the structure of matter, from subatomic particles to the outer limits of the material universe as revealed in the Vedas. They compared the three features of absolute truth: all-pervading brahman, localized paramatma in the hearts of all beings, and Bhagavan: Krishna, the Supreme Person. They analyzed how conditioned souls were covered by forgetfulness and the best methods for extracting them from their cosmic slumber.
Conversations in these gatherings included a comparative analysis of the yoga systems, the many types of yogic powers, and the preeminence of bhakti yoga, devotion to God. They discussed foundational texts such as Bhagavad Gita, as well as esoteric texts such as the writings of the Goswamis of Vrindavan and the tenth canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam, where Krishna’s personal life was summarized. They ventured into esoteric territory, such as the ecstasies experienced by residents of the eternal world. Their deepest discussions entered the inner sanctum of Vaishnava theology to a place even beyond God: to Radha, the feminine Godhead. An understanding of Radha, Abhay learned, was the unique contribution of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who embodied her love and devotion.
Along with other students of the Gaudiya Math, Abhay studied rasa, the theology of love for God as achieved through the practice of bhakti yoga. The word rasa has several meanings. The most common is “taste” or “essence.” A traditional Indian dinner, for instance, contains several rasas, or flavors: sweet, salty, spicy, pungent, and so on. When applied to devotion, the word rasa signifies a shade or flavor of loving exchange.22 Devotees situated in shanta rasa, or the neutral stage, appreciate God with a mood of awe and veneration as the merciful deliverer of fallen souls. The aspiration of such devotees is to study scripture, live in a peaceful place, keep company with saints, and always think of the eternal form of Krishna. Examples of these devotees include yogis who meditate on paramatma, the Supreme Being present in their hearts. In the eternal world, where everything is sentient, even Krishna’s flute and the cows of Vrindavan experience this form of neutral love.
Devotees who feel an active, affectionate attachment to Krishna are described as serving in dasya rasa, a reverential mood of servitude. Devotees in this rasa take shelter in and feel protected by God. Some popular personalities in this mood are Hanuman, the monkey-like warrior-servant of Lord Rama, and Arjuna, hero of the Bhagavad Gita. Devotees in dasya rasa can face all kinds of adversity calmly, knowing they are protected by Krishna. In dasya rasa, devotees honor Krishna as their superior.
In sakhya rasa, friendship, devotees love Krishna as their equal. The mood of a sakha, or friend, is playful, someone who jokes and shares adventures with the Supreme Being. In this friendly mood, Krishna’s identity as the Supreme Being and source of all creation is subdued and secondary to the spontaneous interactions between Krishna and his friends. The cowherd boys of Krishna’s village exemplify this form of love.
Devotees who feel a sense of responsibility for God’s well-being, who treat him as a parent would a child, are situated in vatsalya rasa. Devotees in this parental mood care for Krishna as though he is not self-sufficient, but needs their care and attention. God for these devotees is no longer the providing Father but a dependent Child. Krishna’s mother and father, Nanda and Yashoda, embody this mood of parental love.
The devotees that embody these rasas bow before the position of the gopis, the cowherd women of Krishna’s village, who have no concern for guidelines, responsibilities, or restrictions. Their feelings of conjugal affection for Krishna, madhurya rasa, ignore all social constraints. Their love is unfettered, unconcerned with anyone’s opinion and without regard for consequences. The gopis belong to Krishna—heart, body, and soul.
IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY TREATISE Bhakti-rasamrita-sindhu23 by Rupa Goswami, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s chief disciple, Abhay read that the journey to love of God begins with shraddha or faith, which aptly described his reaction on meeting Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati. Faith in a teacher and in the validity of devotional life leads to sadhu-sanga, the company of dedicated practitioners. In time and with bhajana-kriya or consistent spiritual practice, the aspiring lover of God achieves anartha-nivrtti (cessation of unwanted habits), which in turn stimulates nistha (firm practice) and ruci (a taste for devotional life). Having reached these stages of progress, the sincere candidate rises to asakti (attachment to Krishna). From there, the path is open to experiencing bhava (ecstatic emotions) and finally prema (love of God).
In his discussions with members of the Gaudiya Math, Abhay found not the dry piety of institutional religion but something much more exciting. Krishna consciousness, as presented in his guru’s institution, was more like a roiling volcano of the soul’s ecstatic love of God, nurtured in stages of spiritual awakening.
AS THE ACHARYA OR CUSTODIAN of this distinguished school of devotion, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati taught his students with what he called “aggressive grace,”24 which included a rigorous daily schedule. At 4 a.m. a large bell rang in each of the dozens of Gaudiya Maths around India to wake students-in-residence from their sleep. They showered, dressed in clean robes, and gathered in the temple room to sing prayers. A disciple then read excerpts from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s biography, and at 4:30 a.m., they attended morning services. Disciples chanted on their beads until 7 a.m. when a light breakfast was served. After their meal, residents went off to morning duties such as administration, publishing, and programs in local homes and institutions. At noon, all returned for midday services and lunch, which Bhaktisiddhanta sometimes personally supervised. At 2 p.m. residents sat for ista-ghosti, a time for questions and answers about issues of philosophy and scriptural interpretation. Then afternoon duties, followed in the evening by another temple service, more singing, and a lecture by Bhaktisiddhanta. Evening programs were attended by guests and visitors, and it was then that married and working disciples such as Abhay arrived.
In his lifetime, Bhaktisiddhanta established sixty-four maths, creating for the first time an institution of Vaishnava culture. Previously, Krishna devotees worshiped in their homes and went on pilgrimages to holy sites where sadhus offered free instruction. Bhaktisiddhanta’s institution facilitated the more rigorous education required for missionaries who were expected to travel both inside India and abroad. “There is no use in constructing maths merely to facilitate eating and sleeping,” he wrote. “They need be built only for broadcasting harikatha [the message of Krishna], which will benefit ourselves and others.”25 So far no one had fulfilled the mandate of bringing Krishna to the rest of the world, but Bhaktisiddhanta had no doubt it would happen.
Gaudiya Math residents vowed to chant 100,000 names of Krishna daily on prayer beads (the equivalent of sixty-four rounds of beads or approximately seven hours of prayer every day). For initiated disciples living and working outside, sixteen rounds was the prescribed minimum. For those living outside but not yet initiated, the minimum was four rounds. All initiates pledged to follow the basic behavioral guidelines: no meat, fish, or eggs in the diet; no sex outside marriage; no intoxicants; and no gambling.
The Gaudiya maths were less retreats per se than monastic army bases for training missionary monks to rescue souls caught up in maya’s matrix. “I wish that every selfless tenderhearted member of the Gaudiya Math be prepared to shed two hundred gallons of blood,” Bhaktisiddhanta wrote, “for the nourishment of the spiritual body of every individual in human society.”26 When residents of the maths presented themselves in public, Bhaktisiddhanta insisted they dress in traditional Vaishnava fashion for easy recognition. This included neck beads and lines of white clay on foreheads and noses and, for the men, shaved heads.
Life in the Gaudiya Math was a constant intellectual exercise, based on rigorous study and dialogue. Underlying the emphasis on scriptural study was Bhaktisiddhanta’s conviction that in the near future devotion to Krishna would expand beyond India—and that books would be the medium of such global transmission. “The Gaudiya literature will be translated into all the languages of the world by the agents of divine mercy at the appointed time,” he prophesied.
Abhay’s role in helping fulfill that prediction was nearly a half-century away.
IN 1923, ABHAY AND HIS wife and child moved to Allahabad, a twelve-hour train ride northwest from Calcutta. The modern, paved, and well-lit city was home to many affluent European and Indian families. Abhay settled in Allahabad’s older section, with narrow streets and a large Bengali population. The city, also known by its traditional name, Prayag, was a popular place of pilgrimage, situated at the confluence of three sacred rivers: the Ganges, Yamuna, and Saraswati. For business, Abhay rented a small shop in the commercial center of town and called it Prayag Pharmacy, specializing in medicines, tinctures, syrups, and other products manufactured by Dr. Bose’s Laboratory. He rented an apartment with several rooms for his family. His father, Gour Mohan, now seventy-five, came to live with them. A year later, Abhay’s wife gave birth to their second child, a son whom they named Prayagraj.
From Allahabad, Abhay traveled by train to visit customers and solicit new business. He was frugal and had no qualms over sitting in cheaper, unreserved seats. In 1925, he took a sales trip to Agra, renowned for the Taj Mahal and only forty miles south of Vrindavan, Krishna’s childhood village. He had heard stories about Vrindavan all his life, and the temptation to visit was irresistible. He boarded the third-class compartment of the Taj Express, crowded with urban civil servants in cotton shirts and pants, Punjabi men wearing colorful turbans, and a swarm of men and women in saris and dhotis. An hour later, he stepped down at Mathura station and paid a tanga driver to take him six miles north to Vrindavan.
IN YEARS TO COME, as a result of Abhay’s mission, Vrindavan would grow into a thriving city hosting visitors from every country. In 1925, it was still a hard-to-reach village. Cars those days were a rarity in Vrindavan. Pilgrims traversed the village on foot or bicycle or, for longer distances, in oxcarts and horse-drawn wagons. Many of the visitors were Krishna bhaktas like himself, for whom Krishna was not a religious figure but a friend living in their hearts. A visit to Vrindavan for such devout souls meant coming home. Well-to-do visitors rented furnished rooms in guesthouses, while pilgrims of more modest means stayed in dharmsalas, hostels that provided a rope mattress, a blanket, and a meal for a few pennies per day. Where they stayed mattered little. Pilgrims were prepared to sleep on the banks of the Yamuna if necessary, since anywhere in Vrindavan was shelter for Krishna’s devotees.
Tradition held that Krishna had appeared on earth 5,000 years before and that, when he descended from the eternal world, his home, Vrindavan, came with him. From a shastric or scriptural perspective, there was no difference between the earthly Vrindavan and the eternal Vrindavan. When Krishna left the world 125 years later, forests and vines took over the earthly Vrindavan and obscured the bathing ghats and other sacred sites. Excavation began in the early sixteenth century, when Chaitanya Mahaprabhu sent his chief disciples, the Six Goswamis, to resuscitate the village for future generations. The Goswamis solicited funds from wealthy landowners, rebuilt the holy places, and salvaged Vrindavan from obscurity. In 1570, the Goswamis’ reputation inspired Emperor Akbar to pay them a visit. One historian notes that “such a marvelous vision was revealed to him [in the Goswamis’ company] that he was fain to acknowledge the place as indeed holy ground.”27 The Goswamis identified the lost sacred sites, oversaw construction of temples and schools, rebuilt roads and public facilities, collected Sanskrit texts, wrote books of their own, and developed what had been abandoned woodland into one of India’s most important religious centers.
By the late seventeenth century, the Goswamis had passed away. The temples and roads they built fell into disrepair, and the village’s original beauty could be seen only through the eyes of love. “Don’t judge Vrindavan by the external manifestation,” Abhay would one day write. “When your eyes are smeared with the salve of love, then you can see Vrindavan.”28
HE ENTERED THE VILLAGE and sprinkled dust from the ground onto his head, as was the custom. He watched stray dogs and cows wander about and noted crumbling stone parapets that lined Vrindavan’s dusty roads. Abhay saw through “eyes smeared with the salve of love” and beheld Vrindavan’s hidden splendors. “The ponds and lakes are filled with multicolored lotus flowers, swans and water-birds,” wrote a seventeenth-century poet-scholar who saw Vrindavan with his own eyes of love. “In some places the ground is made of precious jewels, emeralds and rubies, and the trees are made of gold and crystal.”29 When the sun beat down during Krishna’s time 5,000 years before, Vrindavan’s trees—including kadamba trees, which blossomed at the sound of monsoon thunder; fifty-foot-tall, medicinally rich neem trees; and peepal trees, whose heart-shaped leaves rustled in the slightest breeze—spread their limbs to shade all who passed. Brijbasis, as Vrindavan residents were called, caressed them, and the bark of these holy trees was worn smooth from generations of such affection.
The Yamuna River flowed gently around the village. “Yamuna’s waters are sweet as grape-sugar-milk,” wrote Rupa Goswami in the 1600s. “She is filled with golden lotus flowers. Jewel-fish splash in her waters. Along her fragrant banks wander wide-eyed does.”30 Cows meandered along the banks of the Yamuna, and Abhay recalled the word of Srimad Bhagavatam—“The beautiful, fatty cows of Vrindavan are of various colors: red, black, green, yellow, and ash. In their joy over the nearness of Krishna, Vrindavan’s cows gush milk that runs in rivulets on the ground, and homes overflow with the bounty.”31
Krishna was commemorated in every corner of Vrindavan. Here is the place, pilgrims enthused, where Krishna braided Radha’s hair and decorated her with red kunkuma powder. And there, they announced, is the spot where the creator god Brahma bathed Krishna in apology for doubting his divinity. Ahead is Govardhan Hill, which Krishna lifted like an umbrella to protect his friends from torrential rains. Abhay listened to these many accounts and walked through a forest sheltering long-necked egrets, red-faced sarus cranes, and pheasant-tailed jacanas. When he emerged from the forest, a group of locals were seated roadside, singing songs of praise to Krishna. The lead singer stretched his hand toward heaven, sorrow and yearning palpable in his voice. Abhay had known such prayers all his life, yet here in the place where Krishna lived they came alive. He walked down dirt roads, looking for a place to spend the night.
“Go to the Madan Mohan Temple,” a Brijbasi advised. “There are rooms there.”
The themple sat on a rise overlooking the village and surrounding forests. A young monk in robes and shaved head brought Abhay a plate of fruits and vegetables from the midday offering. Seventy years later, the monk still lived in Madan Mohan Temple.
“From the time Bhaktivedanta arrived until the time he returned home,” the monk recalled, “he did not go shopping. He chanted on his japa beads or stood on the edge of our hill and looked out over the Yamuna River.”32
God is everywhere, but Vrindavan is his home and Abhay was tempted to stay, but he knew he could not, given the urgency of his guru’s instruction to bring Krishna consciousness to the West. There was no place in the circumference of that order for early retirement. To sit back and chant for one’s own liberation while the suffering souls of Kali Yuga spiraled faster and faster into violence and oblivion—that was not the way of a true Vaishnava. Krishna’s devotees were para-duhkha-duhkhi, said the sages. Their only suffering was seeing the suffering of others.33 So he climbed into a horse-drawn tanga, arrived back at Mathura station, bought his train ticket, and returned to Allahabad, where he rejoined family and home and the precarious balance of the material and spiritual. For the next several years, he manufactured medicines and ointments, delivered orders, fixed leaks, bought his growing children new clothes, and contemplated the enormity of his mission.
IN JANUARY 1928, one of Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati’s leading sannyasi disciples, Bhakti Pradip Tirtha Maharaj, arrived in Allahabad and came to Abhay’s Prayag Pharmacy. This was the same sannyasi who had convinced Abhay’s friend, Narendra Mullik, to meet Bhaktisiddhanta in Calcutta. Pradip Tirtha Maharaj and a group of brahmacharis (celibate students) had come to establish a temple, and Abhay offered to help. Together they raised funds and opened a math on South Mallaca Street within walking distance of Abhay’s pharmacy.
Each evening, Abhay closed his shop, walked to the math, and spent the evening studying, playing mridanga, and chanting. The ways of math life included memorizing verses from the Bhagavad Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam and mastering a repertoire of Vaishnava songs. Consecrating prayers to memory came naturally to him. One of his favorite was by seventeenth-century Vaishnava poet Narottama Das Thakur.
O Lord Hari,34 I have wasted my life.
I obtained a human birth but failed to worship you, O Radha and Krishna.
By this neglect, I have knowingly drunk poison.
Divine love descended from the eternal realm in the form your Holy Names.
Why have I never felt any attraction for chanting?
Day and night my heart burns from the fire of worldliness
Yet I take nothing to relieve the pain.
Dear Lord, please do not push me away with Your reddish lotus feet
For who is my beloved except You?
Senior members of the Gaudiya Math admired Abhay’s singing. His voice carried such sincerity that they may have thought it strange coming from someone so new to their company. It was heartfelt and unguarded and more stirring than a thousand lines of philosophy. He chanted all the time. He chanted when walking to his pharmacy in the morning. He kept his bead bag on his desk and chanted before and after meals. He chanted while traveling to appointments, while running chores, and whenever there was a lull in conversation. Talks with customers and suppliers quickly shifted to talks about Krishna and the chanting of Krishna’s names. He would take a conversation with guests and veer into reciting verses in praise of chanting.
As soon as I utter Krishna’s Name my tongue dances
And I want to possess innumerable tongues.
This Divine Name is so sweet
That it releases all chains within me
And my heart knows no more bounds.
When the Holy Name enters my ears
I long for millions of ears.
I forget all else and am giddy with love of the Name.
Oh! I could never fully describe the sweetness
Of these two syllables: Krish and na!35
O.B.L. Kapoor, a research scholar at Allahabad University, remembered Abhay from those early days. “I saw him playing on mridanga at the time of kirtan,” Kapoor recalled. “We became acquainted, acquaintance turned into friendship, and friendship into brotherhood.” Kapoor remembered filling a prescription at Abhay’s pharmacy. When Abhay handed over the vial, Kapoor joked, “I wish you would give me the tonic you take, the tonic of Krishna prema—love for Krishna.”
“I have no Krishna prema,” Abhay said, “but I do know the formula.”
“Let me know,” Kapoor asked, “if it’s not a secret.”
“No, it’s not a secret,” Abhay replied, and he sang a prayer by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.
In a humble state of mind
Thinking oneself lower than straw in the street
More tolerant than a tree
Devoid of all false prestige,
Ready to offer respect to others—
In such a state of mind
One can chant the Holy Name of the Lord constantly.
“I shall preach this formula the whole world over,” Abhay said.
“At that time, I couldn’t understand what he meant,” Kapoor admitted years later. “I thought he was making a casual pronouncement without any plan in his mind.”
IN A COPY OF THE Gaudiya Math’s english-language magazine, The Harmonist, Abhay read that Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati would be leading a pilgrimage to Vrindavan in October of 1932. Prayag Pharmacy demanded every moment of Abhay’s time, but he would not pass up a chance to spend a day or two with his guru.
As with all of Bhaktisiddhanta’s programs, organization for the pilgrimage was precise. An advance team arrived with hundreds of tents, bedding for at least 1,000 pilgrims and supplies for the equivalent of a small town. The site of the pilgrimage was Koshi, a village outside Vrindavan where Krishna’s father, Nanda Maharaj, had constructed his treasury 5,000 years before. The camp was divided into sections arranged in a semicircle. Men and women were assigned their separate quarters, sannyasis were allocated their area, and a deity of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu was installed in the main tent where Bhaktisiddhanta would lecture. At night, gaslights and campfires illumined the campground.
Abhay arrived by train from Allahabad and climbed onto a rickshaw. The road was crowded with pilgrims arriving on camels, horsedrawn wagons, and bullock carts. The rickshaw glided to a halt in Koshi. Abhay received his tent assignment and heard a disciple, Keshava Maharaj, announce that a group would leave soon to visit the famous Vishnu temple named Sesa-sayi. Pilgrims had their choice of either joining the group and going to the temple, or remaining in Koshi to hear Bhaktisiddhanta lecture. Abhay had no interest in sightseeing. He had come to hear his teacher speak.
He entered the main tent and sat with a small group of disciples who had also stayed back to hear Bhaktisiddhanta’s lecture. “It is Krishna who is the only Superlord over the entire universe and, beyond it, of Vaikuntha, the transcendental region,” Bhaktisiddhanta began. “As such, no one can raise any obstacle against his enjoyment.” It was a sophisticated talk, delivered in scholarly language, and several guests wandered out, leaving a handful of senior disciples and Abhay, the only uninitiated person still in attendance. Bhaktisiddhanta noted his presence, but there was no exchange between them.
Two days later, Abhay returned to Allahabad. In later years, he admitted not having understood all of Bhaktisiddhanta’s philosophical points but thinking Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s mission was in the right hands.
IN ALLAHABAD, NAYANANDA DAS, a young brahmachari, made housecalls with other disciples of Bhaktisiddhanta, soliciting donations for their teacher’s books and temples. “We would often be out late into the night,” he recalled, “but Abhay always opened his door to us. He gave us his own room, and he slept in the living room. He had not yet requested formal initiation, but still he chanted sixty-four rounds each day on his beads.”36
Nayananda and the disciples reported to Abhay that Bhaktisiddhanta had agreed to lay the cornerstone for a new Allahabad temple and would be awarding initiations at that time. For Vaishnavas, initiation was a transformative moment. The disciple placed his life in the hands of the guru, and the guru agreed to liberate the disciple from further births in the material world. If the disciple fell away, the guru was prepared to come back into the world to save him. To qualify for such a sober promise, the candidate for initiation vowed to study hard and lead a clean life.
It was clear to Abhay that Bhaktisiddhanta did not award initiation casually, as did teachers who wanted to increase their following and the money that came with it. Bhaktisiddhanta was quite capable of turning away candidates for initiation if they failed to grasp its importance. At one lecture, a businessman who had made a monthly pledge to the Gaudiya Math sat down next to Abhay and whispered a question into Abhay’s ear. Abhay leaned forward to hear more clearly. Bhaktisiddhanta saw them and stopped speaking.
“Baba,” he said, addressing the donor. “Do you think you have purchased me with your monthly one-hundred-fifty rupees?” Then to Abhay he said, “Why don’t you come up here and speak instead of me?” Gandhi may have impressed himself at one time on Abhay, but here was a model worth emulating, an acharya whose strength was untrammeled by politics, finances or anything else of this world.
Abhay’s reaction to hearing that Bhaktisiddhanta would conduct initiations was immediate. “I wish to be included,” he announced to Atulananda, president of the Allahabad Math.
BHAKTISIDDHANTA SARASWATI ARRIVED IN NOVEMBER 1932, and Atulananda listed the many services Abhay had rendered on their behalf, such as raising donations, participating in speaking programs, and leading melodic kirtans.
“Yes, I remember him,” Bhaktisiddhanta said. “He came to see me in Kosi. He sat and listened and did not go away. I marked him.”
On the day of the initiation ceremony, monks shoveled soil into a four-foot square and decorated the sacrificial mound with colored dyes and incense. Brahmins recited verses from scripture. Bhaktisiddhanta chanted on loops of beads, handed them to his new disciples, and announced their initiated names.
“Your name,” he said to Abhay, “is Abhay Charanaravinda: Abhay Charan, who has taken shelter at Krishna’s lotus feet.”37 Go on with your devotional studies, Bhaktisiddhanta told his new disciple, but not with the selfish intention of seeing God.
“Rather,” Bhaktisiddhanta advised, “act in such a way that God will want to see you.”
Some time later, Bhaktisiddhanta lectured to a crowd that had assembled for a parikrama or walking tour of Mayapur, the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.
“Guru Maharaj was looking out at the large crowd of devotees,” Nayanananda Das Babaji recalled. “Then he turned his head toward the left side where I was standing. He was looking intently at someone behind me and became silent for a long moment. I turned and saw that the person with whom he was making eye contact was Abhay Charanaravinda Prabhu.”
“I have a prediction,” Bhaktisiddhanta announced. “However long in the future it may be, one of my disciples will cross the ocean. That devotee will bring back the whole world.”38
IN FEBRUARY 1935, disciples gathered to celebrate Bhaktisiddhanta’s sixty-second birthday. The celebration of a guru’s birth was called Vyasa-puja, since the guru represented Vyasadev, compiler of the Vedic scriptures. Abhay was invited to address the audience assembled in the Bombay math.
“While others were yet in the womb of historical oblivion,” Abhay told the crowd, “the sages of India had developed a different kind of civilization, which enables us to know ourselves. They had discovered that we are not at all material entities but that we are all spiritual, permanent, and non-destructible servants of the Absolute.”
He continued his Vyasa-puja offering, stressing the importance of cultivating this spiritual dimension of life under the guidance of a qualified guru. He concluded by telling the crowd, “Although we are like ignorant children in the knowledge of the transcendence, still His Divine Grace, my Gurudev, had kindled a small fire within us to dissipate the darkness of empirical knowledge, and we are so much on the safe side that no amount of philosophical argument of the empiric schools of thought can deviate us an inch.”
From his years of study and devotional service, Abhay had become an eloquent, philosophically astute devotee, and for this occasion, he had written a poem that was published in Bhaktisiddhanta’s newspaper, The Harmonist. One verse in particular caught Bhaktisiddhanta’s attention:
Absolute is sentient
Thou hast proved,
Impersonal calamity
That hast moved.
The simple couplet captured the essence of Bhaktisiddhanta’s campaign to expose the fallacies of mayavada or impersonalist philosophy. “Whatever he writes,” Bhaktisiddhanta told his editors, “publish it.”
WHILE ABHAY’S DEVOTION blossomed, his pharmaceutical company was losing money. “He is a very honest man,” Abhay’s partner told their employer, Dr. Bose. “In good faith, he extended credit to his accounts, but they are defaulting on payments.” The debts had reached 10,000 rupees, a fortune in those days.
“I can’t go on giving him money,” Bose said. He called Abhay, and they agreed the best solution was for Bose to take over Abhay’s accounts and let him go.
Abhay saw the setback as an opportunity to open his own pharmacy in Bombay. It seemed to be the right choice: No sooner did he open his own shop than a larger manufacturer, Smith Institute, requested that he act as their sales agent. Abhay accepted, calculating that he could earn money selling products from both his own company and Smith Institute. Two sources of income would be better than one for financing his journey to America.
Abhay’s supervisor envied his successes and lied to company officials, claiming Abhay was stealing their accounts. The accusations were false, but they led to Abhay’s dismissal and a transfer of his accounts to the supervisor’s son. These constant fluctuations in Abhay’s income did not sit well with Abhay’s wife. Abhay and Radharani no longer had the expense of maintaining Abhay’s father, who had passed away in 1932, but they now had three children, and bills were mounting. From Radharani’s perspective, the family’s well-being was no longer Abhay’s chief concern, and when he hosted gatherings in their home, she did not attend.
In November 1935, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati led a pilgrimage to Vrindavan, and Abhay joined him. By now, Abhay had become a respected member of his teacher’s institution. They walked together around the periphery of Radha Kund pond, one of Vrindavan’s most holy sites, and Bhaktisiddhanta confided a dread he had not shared with others. Frictions had arisen among some of his disciples.
“Agun jvalbe,” Bhaktisiddhanta said in Bengali. “There will be a fire.”
His students were to be respected for their devotion and hard work, and as Vaishnavas, they were dear to Lord Krishna, but a few had chosen to fight over seniority and the right to live in more spacious rooms and buildings.
“When we were living in a rented house,” Bhaktisiddhanta said, recalling the early days of his mission, “we were happier. Then we were given this marble palace in Baghbazar,” referring to the Gaudiya Math’s new headquarters in the prestigious area of north Calcutta that was home to Bengal’s aristocracy, “and ever since there has been this friction between our men: who will occupy this room, who will occupy that room. Everyone is planning in different ways. It would be better to sell the marble from the walls and print books.” Then he offered a prophetic instruction.
“If you ever get money,” Bhaktisiddhanta told Abhay, “print books.”
IN DECEMBER 1936, two weeks before he passed away, Bhaktisiddhanta sent Abhay a letter reiterating his instruction at their first meeting. “I am fully confident,” he wrote, “that you can explain in English our thoughts and arguments to the people. This will do much good for you as well as your audience. I have every hope that you can turn yourself into a very good English preacher and convey the novel impression of Lord Chaitanya’s teachings to the general public.”
A week later, Bhaktisiddhanta issued his final wishes to disciples. “All of you please preach this message. Work together for this single purpose. Do not abandon this goal even in the face of hundreds of dangers, insults, or persecutions. Do not lose your spirit if you see that the majority of people cannot accept the principle of selfless service to the Supreme Lord. The doctrines of Krishna bhakti may at first seem startling, perhaps even perplexing,” he said, “but every human being is knowingly or unknowingly struggling to eliminate the dualities which interfere with direct experience of eternity.”
In succinct, precise terms the great acharya had summarized for followers the essence of the human condition. What made life worth living? Why should anyone bother getting up in the morning if not because some hope existed for “a direct experience of eternity”? Like the shackled dwellers in Plato’s cave who had never seen the multidimensional outside world, embodied souls experienced only a two-dimensional shadow of the glories of creation. Everyone had experiences: How many people actually understood what they meant or what lay beyond sensory limits? Human experience was compromised by imperfect tools of perception and faulty analysis—the “dualities” or shortcomings that came with being eternal souls housed in temporary bodies.
“Our only obligation,” Bhaktisiddhanta concluded, “is to help them go beyond those dualities and enter the world of eternal fulfillment. And never abandon your chanting. Please. Always chant the name of the Lord while remaining humbler than a blade of grass and more tolerant than a tree.”39
Bhaktisiddhanta passed away on January 1, 1937, and the schism among Gaudiya Math leaders widened. The late founder had instructed disciples to form a twelve-man governing body, but soon after his demise, a senior disciple positioned himself to be the successor acharya. Another began signing properties over to himself as trustee, arguing that Bhaktisiddhanta had not been the rightful owner of Gaudiya Math assets. They belonged to God, he told the courts, and their ownership could not be dictated by anyone except the current trustee: himself. The litigation escalated. To cover legal costs, Gaudiya Math officers sold off Bhaktisiddhanta’s cherished printing presses. One of the disputants broke his sannyasa vows, took up with women, and the institution splintered even further. Some members left in disgust while others continued serving the cause by founding their own maths and initiating disciples.
Abhay kept out of the politics. His sole interest was executing his guru’s instruction to go West, not conspiring for power or position. He respected those godbrothers who worked hard to perpetuate Bhaktisiddhanta’s mission, and there were many—only a few of the senior people were causing trouble—but Bhaktisiddhanta had given Abhay a particular assignment. If other disciples were not available to join him on the journey to America, then he would take it alone.
He did not prefer to break away or form his own project. But if necessary, he would.