Whatever behavior great souls exhibit, others follow. Whatever acts they do, whatever standards they set by example, the world pursues.
—SRI KRISHNA IN THE BHAGAVAD GITA, 3.21
CALCUTTA 1938
With his Bombay business in decline, Abhay moved back to Calcutta and rented a two-story house at 6 Sita Kanta Banerjee Lane, a narrow street lined with three-story houses. He turned the ground floor into an office and moved his family into rooms on the second floor. He rented the adjoining building and built a small chemical laboratory for manufacturing distilled water, De’s Pain Liniment (“Good for Relieving Gout, Rheumatism & All Pains”), and other medicines. He hung a signboard out front, ABHAY CHARAN DE & SONS, featuring a painting of himself, the mustachioed proprietor. Business stabilized, but his heart was elsewhere. In the evenings he read his guru’s books and spoke with neighbors about his future mission in the West. Abdullah, his bottle merchant, was receptive to discussions about philosophy and religion. The Muslim businessman had started out poor, worked hard, and now earned a sizeable income.
“How are you going to use your money?” Abhay asked.
“My dear sir,” Abdullah said, “I would like to build a mosque.” Abdullah was a man after Abhay’s own heart.
Some of Sridhar Maharaj’s disciples met with Abhay at his Banerjee Lane residence. Like Abhay, Sridhar Maharaj had also distanced himself from contentious elements in the Gaudiya Math, and now he and his disciples hoped to open an ashram in Calcutta. For twenty rupees a month, Abhay leased them four rooms above his chemical laboratory. Whenever Sridhar Maharaj and other Gaudiya Math monks such as Puri Maharaj and Bhakti Saranga Maharaj visited Calcutta, the rooms in Abhay’s place served as their base of operations. The sannyasis cooked, performed their morning puja, and held classes and kirtans. Abhay lived downstairs with his family, but when the day’s work ended, he mounted the stairs to chant Hare Krishna with his godbrothers.
IN SEPTEMBER 1939, the viceroy of India announced that England—and by extension India—was at war. By April 1942, Japanese forces had routed the British in neighboring Burma and occupied India’s eastern border. The Port of Calcutta, Howrah Bridge, and the city’s Dum Dum Airport all lay within range of Japanese bombers, and throughout 1942 and 1943, constant air attacks created panic among the population. Walking down the city’s streets swarming with soldiers and army trucks, Abhay sidestepped debris from bombings and the impact of a population fleeing danger. Looking up, he saw shattered windows taped over with paper. Gone were the days when children flew kites from rooftops as he had done with his sister, Bhavatarini. Gone, too, were the pigeons that used to fly across the city’s skies. Calcutta was a ghost town. Abhay’s neighbors had packed their bags and left. Native Bengalis with their children in tow, Anglo-Indian families that had proliferated under the Raj, Jewish and Muslim merchants who had prospered in happier days—all had gathered their belongings and departed for shelter in outlying villages. Howrah and Sealdah stations were packed with people trying to get out.
Abhay arranged for his family to relocate to Navadwip four hours north, but his wife refused to leave, saying she preferred to be bombed at home and insisting that Abhay stay with her. When sirens sounded, the few remaining city-dwellers grabbed water jars and took shelter in basements. After the all-clear siren, they surfaced and surveyed the damage. Not far from Abhay’s house was Jamaat Khana, a Muslim religious center. The center had been bombed, and its two cows lay dead on the road. Broken glass and shrapnel littered the streets.40
Newspapers reported the impact of war on other parts of the world. Half of northern France was in flames. German planes had dropped more than 100 tons of explosives on cities across England. Hundreds of thousands lay dead, and millions were walking the streets of Europe homeless. Someone needed to give a spiritual perspective to the madness. His guru’s English-language newspaper, The Harmonist, had not been published in years, and the Gaudiya Math was too steeped in litigation to pursue publication now. Abhay envisioned a magazine that would pick up where his guru’s paper had left off. He had no funds or help, but he also had no choice. He had been charged with a mission, and the moment demanded that he do something.
Abhay designed a logo for his publication: a rectangle around the words BACK TO GODHEAD, with a photo of his spiritual master, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, in one corner and a drawing of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in the other. Abhay secured donations and purchased enough paper to print 1,000 copies, and a forty-four-page first edition of Back to Godhead rolled off the press in the print shop of Surendra Kumar Jain, located in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk district.
An analysis of the war received front-page placement. Godhead and individual souls were both by nature deathless, he wrote, but souls in this world had forgotten their connection to Krishna or God. Having become embodied, immortal souls could never achieve true satisfaction, be it through peaceful efforts or warfare. “We may flee the Japanese bombs,” he wrote, “but material nature will continue her assault with bombs of old age, disease and death.”
In a second edition of Back to Godhead five months later, Abhay wrote that behind hatred and war lay the misimpression that selfhood was defined by place of birth. No one was permanently Indian or American, German or Japanese, he admonished. All beings were spirit souls. When that true identity was lost, people created selfish allegiances based on material criteria—political ideology, color of skin, religion, or place of birth—each with its own interests to defend. “The frenzy of hatred,” Abhay wrote, “is another side of the frenzy of love. The frenzy of love of Hitler’s own countrymen has produced the concomitant frenzy of hatred for others, and the present war is the result of such dual side of frenzy.”
THE DAY WORLD WAR II ended, the streets of Calcutta hummed with trucks carrying allied soldiers from one base to another. Gangs of young Indians whooped and shouted from trams as they crossed and recrossed Howrah Bridge. American officers handed out tins of carrots and other supplies. They were heading home, and the surplus made good parting gifts.
With the war over, India turned its attention back to affairs at home. While united in their determination to expel the British, Indians stood divided over the shape of their post-British future. Gandhi and Congress demanded a unified free nation. The Muslim population, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, head of the All-India Muslim League, called for partition and a country of their own. The conflict turned violent in August 1946, when rioting broke out in Calcutta, and four thousand men, women, and children were killed. Violence spread, and British administrators were forced to admit they had lost control over the Indian subcontinent. The time had come for England to cut her losses.
In early 1947, Britain’s final viceroy to India, Lord Mountbatten, deployed surveyors to draw a geographic line dividing Hindu India from Muslim Pakistan. The rules laid down for the territorial division of the Raj excluded any consultation with its population. The arbitrary partition consequently tore villages in half and triggered the largest human migration in history. More than seven million Muslims trekked to the newly formed nation of Pakistan, while as many Hindus and Sikhs walked to their new Hindu homeland. The two rivers of refugees snaked in opposite directions for hundreds of miles. Attacks broke out up and down the human highway. Helpless to deal with such staggering numbers of refugees, officials stood by and watched the slaughter. More than a half-million people died in a matter of weeks.
Abhay noted what others seemed not to see: The dead bodies lying in piles looked alike. Municipal workers carted away the bodies of men and women whose religious or political affiliations no longer mattered. The one hope for reconciliation had gone unexplored: As God’s children, all were entitled to share their Father’s property in peace. Even Gandhi had minimized a spiritual solution to the conflict, and in Abhay’s estimation, the Mahatma now risked being held accountable for the deadly consequences.
“Dear friend Mahatmajee,” he wrote in a prophetic letter to Gandhi in December 1947, “I tell you as a sincere friend that you must immediately retire from active politics if you do not desire to die an inglorious death.” Abhay reminded Gandhi that he had tried for so many years to achieve freedom for India, but India was now divided. He had wanted to uplift the outcasts, but still they rotted in ghettos and slums. Consider these defeats as a message from God, Abhay advised. Now the illusion of achieving peace through politics has been dispelled. To at last do substantial good, Abhay concluded, “you must give up rotten politics immediately and rise up for the preaching work of the philosophy and religion of Bhagavad Gita.” Abhay proposed that Gandhi retire for one month, during which they would discuss the Gita together. There was no reply. One month later, a radical Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Godse, seething over Gandhi’s failure to achieve a unified India, assassinated him with an automatic pistol.41
THAT SAME YEAR, the sannyasis who resided at 7 Banerjee Lane bestowed on Abhay the honorific title “Bhaktivedanta,” signifying a devotee steeped in bhakti or devotion and one who knew the anta or conclusion of the Vedas: love of God. It was an apt honor, considering Abhay’s unwavering determination to fulfill his spiritual master’s order. Yet the new title also underscored the urgency of doing so soon. He was fifty-one years old and could not afford to postpone the journey West much longer.
Still, there was his family to consider, now expanded to five children: two daughters and three sons. In a final effort to secure finances for his family and mission, he rented a building in Lucknow 600 miles from Calcutta and built a factory that he named Abhay Charan De & Sons. It was a 40,000-rupee gamble, bigger than any he had taken before—and one that did not last long. Within six months, the factory started losing money. Costs were high, income in those austere postwar years was minimal, and Abhay fell behind in the rent.
In November 1947, he wrote to his household servant, Gouranga, who was in Calcutta with Radharani and the De children. “I am fighting, practically staking my whole life,” he wrote and pleaded with Gouranga to come to Lucknow and help him make the new business a success. Gouranga arrived but saw no future in the failing venture. Besides, he argued, Abhay had been away from home too long and had neglected his family. The moment proved to be a turning point for Abhay. Something in the clash of material and spiritual duties led him to make a firm declaration of his intentions.
“I tried to serve them,” Abhay replied, “but up until today they have not become attached to devotional service. So I am no more interested about those affairs. If I see that they are interested about devotional service, then only will I maintain my establishment there. Otherwise, I will not maintain them anymore.”
A mission long overdue had forced its way to the forefront of his priorities. It was a mission that obliged him to assess priorities differently than other men of his generation. His spiritual master had instilled in him a vision of humanity’s potential, a picture of what the world could be if people were educated to recognize their eternal nature—and that calling trumped the needs of family. He and his wife had long since agreed to live their own lives, joined only as far as necessary to maintain the unity of their home and children. They had succeeded for more than twenty years, and for that he respected her and would always be grateful. But time was running out, and he could no longer deny what had to be done. He would maintain his family as best he could—but that was all. The rest of him belonged to his guru.
Gouranga shook his head and returned to the De family in Calcutta. Abhay and Gouranga never saw one another again. In 1948, Abhay closed his Lucknow factory. With the help of some acquaintances in Allahabad, he opened a small factory not far from where his first venture, Prayag Pharmacy, had operated fifteen years before. With the help of his youngest son, Vrindavan Chandra, he manufactured a line of medicines and made sales calls, but the income was always minimal. In 1950, Radharani took her five children and moved back to her father’s house at 72 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Calcutta. Abhay was no longer the man she had married.
“He was always thinking seriously to make more money from business,” recalled Abhay’s nephew, Sudhir Kumar Dutta, “but that would have meant giving more time for business—and he would never give up his writing for that. People accused him, ‘Hey, you are writing religious things and only thinking about God. Who will maintain your family?’ Sometimes he argued with them, ‘Why should I forget about God? This is the real thing, what I am doing. You cannot realize what I am doing.’ ”42
ABHAY’S FACTORY HAD FAILED, his family was dissolving, and one night Abhay dreamed he saw his guru standing before him. “Leave home,” Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati urged. “Become a sannyasi.” Abhay woke in fear. His image of the sannyasa order was “horrible,” he later described. Sannyasis had no place in society. They were social and financial outcasts. Sannyasis were celibate, which did not trouble him: That part of his life was over, and there were simply more important things to do. Still, sannyasis were not supposed to conduct business, and he had to secure funds, print books, build a base of support—creating a worldwide mission would not happen in poverty—and to completely abandon his family. How could he do that?
He sent letters to religious leaders, government officials, educators, social activists, and industrialists, urging them to join him. To the Ford Foundation in Detroit, he proposed creating “an association of the intelligent class of people.” The reply stated, “The Ford Foundation has no program in which specific ideas such as you describe might be included.” Abhay attended a meeting held by an Indian industrialist who promoted harmonious relations between labor and management. In a letter the following day, Abhay suggested the industrialist convert his employees’ lounge into a hall for chanting Hare Krishna. There was no reply.
In February 1952, Abhay responded to an article that had appeared in the American Reporter, addressing East-West economic development. When we speak of development, Abhay wrote the editor, it must be for a higher purpose than financial gain. He offered to “present an analytical study of Bhagavad Gita through the pages of your American Reporter in order to help the American people.” The editor never replied.
ABHAY AGAIN DREAMED OF BHAKTISIDDHANTA, and once more his guru told him to become a sannyasi. The image of himself as a pauper with literally nothing—would that not be a defeat of sorts? What difference was there between failing in a mission and failing to finance such a mission? How many so-called sannyasis had he known in his life who were nothing more than men fleeing a world they were not strong enough to navigate? He refused to become one of those pretend sadhus who used renunciation to cloak their failures. Then, while reading the Srimad Bhagavatam, he came upon a verse: “When I feel especially merciful toward someone,” Krishna declared, “I gradually take away all his material possessions. His friends and relatives then reject this poverty-stricken and most wretched fellow.”43
That deserved some deliberation: poverty as a merciful dispensation.
BACK TO GODHEAD acquired a modest number of subscribers. One, a Mr. Dubey, owned the municipal hospital in Jhansi, 180 miles southwest of Lucknow. In October 1952, Dubey invited Abhay to lecture at one of the city’s meeting halls. Abhay agreed, and after his lecture several guests offered to help if he decided to bring his mission to Jhansi. It would have crossed Abhay’s mind that Krishna may have intended for him to fail in business so that he could build a math in Jhansi from which to launch Bhaktisiddhanta’s mission in the West. With the Gaudiya Math in disarray, maybe the plan was for him to have an institution of his own. He wrote to his middle son, Mathura Mohan, authorizing him to take charge of the pharmacy while he concentrated on opening a math in Jhansi.
One of the attendees at the Jhansi talk, an ayurvedic doctor named Shastri, lived in a two-story building. Downstairs was his clinic, upstairs a one-room residence. Shastri invited Abhay to live with him, and they shared the small space, cooking together and discussing plans for establishing a league of devotees. Shastri would later recall Abhay as having an “iron-will determination and self-confidence about his mission”44 and its prospects: perhaps some day to become a registered political party and support Vaishnava candidates for a seat in parliament or the post of prime minister. In service to Krishna, anything was possible.
In Jhansi, Abhay lectured wherever he was invited: temples, homes, shops, and offices. One day, on a break from his morning writing, he walked the city and found a property that appealed to him. The Radha Memorial, built in 1939, was vacant. Abhay tracked down the owner and convinced him to lease the building and land for religious purposes. Abhay prepared a charter, and the League of Devotees was born.
At first, the project seemed to fulfill Abhay’s vision of a place in India from which to grow his mission abroad. He ran an ad in several Calcutta newspapers:
EDUCATIONAL—Wanted: candidates from any nationality to qualify themselves as real Brahmins for preaching the teachings of Bhagavad Gita for all practical purposes throughout the whole world. Deserving candidates will be provided with free boarding and lodging. Apply: A.C. Bhaktivedanta, Founder and Secretary of the League of Devotees, Bharati Bhawan, P.O. Jhansi (U.P.)
There were no replies.
WHEN HE VISITED HIS FAMILY in Calcutta, Abhay gathered old friends in his father-in-law’s home for talks about Krishna. He invited his wife and children to take part, but they preferred to sit in an upstairs room where Radharani would prepare a pot of tea.
“You have to choose,” he finally told her, “between tea and me. Either the tea goes or I do.”
Under other circumstances, a cup of tea would not have meant much. Although proscribed by Vaishnava custom due to its caffeine content, drinking tea for health reasons was a common practice. Tea as a daily ritual, on the other hand, had begun with the arrival of the British East India Company. There were no four o’clock teas prior to the colonial period, and in the early years of the twentieth century, it was a habit adopted only by Anglicized Indians. Radharani’s capitulation to a distinctly British ritual was more than a flaunting of a religious interdiction: It was a red flag, a message that giving up their way of life to become a Krishna missionary in the West was his fantasy, not hers.
“Well,” she said, taking the threat as exaggeration, “I’ll have to give up my husband then.”
THE BREACH BETWEEN ABHAY AND his wife widened beyond repair on a day of shopping in 1955. In the 1950s, before credit cards and access to global markets, India’s shopkeepers sometimes accepted household goods in lieu of money. Buyers brought objects for barter, and if the merchant had interest, the object was traded for an agreed equivalence in produce. Radharani took one of Abhay’s books, a volume of his sacred Srimad Bhagavatam, and traded it for tea biscuits. On some level she must have known this was sabotage and that their marriage hung in the balance, but for too long she and their children had been relegated to a place behind his many ambitions. If the relationship was going to end, it would be at her instigation. When he asked her why she had sold his book, her explanation was perfunctory: They had run out of biscuits.
And Abhay had run out of patience. Shared memories, a home, and children—none of it was sufficient to hold this relationship together. Why pretend? All that came from pretending was a bitter residue. He had tired of weighing life’s chores on one side of his mental scale and his guru’s call to arms on the other and knowing in advance which way it would tip. He was fifty-eight years old. They had been married thirty-six years. He had done what he could for his family. Getting his sons and daughters married first, before leaving, had been a consideration, but then he reasoned that if he left his family, would the world stop turning? How would staying at home make any difference to them other than financial? They had their own lives to live, the years were dragging on, and the time had come to fulfill his guru’s order. That meant leaving home.
No doubt there would be recriminations. His family would complain bitterly for the rest of their lives, and neighbors and business associates would condemn him. Worldly people would find what he was about to do morally reprehensible, but he no longer had a choice. If others did not agree, that was not his problem. Raising capital, filling out papers, hiring and firing, taking out loans, placating creditors, warehousing goods, paying bills, distributing bottles and jars—for what? Abhay had a higher calling, regardless of his wife’s opinion, and his dharma was not the same as someone else’s. It was not for everyone, what he was about to do. But it was the only path for him.
He packed a small bag. Where to go? He could not return yet to his new headquarters in Jhansi. He first had to get his bearings. He took a brief train ride to the town of Jhargram, where there was a small chapter of the Gaudiya Math. The mahant or head of the math, Paramahamsa Maharaj, had been present at Abhay’s first meeting with Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati and remembered him from that day in 1922. Abhay explained to Paramahamsa Maharaj that his efforts to earn money had failed, and that his family had grown hostile.
“This is my situation,” Abhay said. “Now let me preach the message of Lord Chaitanya.”
FOR THE FIRST FEW DAYS in Paramahamsa Maharaj’s math, Abhay did nothing but chant Hare Krishna on his beads. Then, feeling acclimated to this new chapter in his life, he bought a ticket and returned to Jhansi, ready to build the League of Devotees. But he had been gone too long. In his absence, a women’s group with allies in the Jhansi government had convinced the owner of the Radha Memorial to evict Abhay and turn the building over to them. Abhay was ready to fight the eviction and took the next train to Mathura to consult with his godbrother, Keshava Maharaj.
Bhakti Prajnan Keshava Maharaj was two years younger than Abhay but had received initiation from Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati four years earlier, which made him ecclesiastically senior to Abhay. Like Abhay, Keshava Maharaj had also been active in Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement. In 1919, Bhaktisiddhanta appointed him manager of press operations and editor of the mission’s weekly Bengali magazine, Jnani Nadia. After Bhaktisiddhanta’s passing, and after the onset of lawsuits, Keshava Maharaj left the Gaudiya Math. He entered the sannyasa order in 1941 and established the Sri Kesavaji Gaudiya Math temple in Mathura. It was here that Abhay traveled on learning he had lost possession of the Jhansi lease.
“Help me recover my headquarters so that I may fulfill our spiritual master’s order,” Abhay pleaded. Keshava Maharaj accompanied him by train back to Jhansi, but it took only a day to conclude that the location was too remote.
“Our Guru Maharaj’s vision was to preach in larger cities,” he reminded Abhay, and Abhay admitted that two years of effort in Jhansi had accomplished little. Keshava Maharaj proposed that Abhay return with him to Mathura and that, in exchange for room and board, he take charge of editing the math’s newspaper, Gaudiya Patrika. Abhay agreed and left the Jhansi project in the care of friends, asking them to continue the good work without him.
When another Gaudiya Math monk, Bhakti Saranga Maharaj, learned that Abhay had left home to take up devotional service full-time, he sent Abhay a letter from his math in Delhi. The senior monk published a Vaishnava journal titled Sajjana-tosani (“source of pleasure for devotees”) begun by Bhaktivinode Thakur in 1886. If Abhay agreed to move from Mathura to Delhi, Bhakti Saranga Maharaj would provide him living space, and Abhay could edit both his and Keshava Maharaj’s publications. Abhay saw possibilities in the arrangement. In particular, he knew that under the direction of Bhakti Saranga, Sajjana-tosani had become weighed down by intellectualism. There was Vaishnava truth in its articles, but page after page of truths would not draw readership. Abhay proposed expanding Sajjana-tosani so that it would have a real impact on readers. We should make the magazine more exciting, he suggested, “just to the standard of Illustrated Weekly,” referring to India’s most widely read magazine, “with numerous pictures in order to make it a very popular literature.” His wardrobe may have been down to two worn-out dhotis, but Abhay’s ambitions to spread Krishna consciousness were lavish.
The boldness of Abhay’s plans intimidated Bhakti Saranga and his fellow monks, who sent Abhay a polite letter of eviction. “You project is very lofty,” they wrote, while their own plans, they professed, were less ambitious. As a consequence, “we are suspecting that it won’t be possible for an able and respectable Vaishnava like yourself to stay long.”
Abhay was homeless. He moved about and slept wherever invitations were extended—one week in a local Vishnu temple, the next week at the Kapoor College of Commerce. With his few remaining rupees, he paid for a newspaper ad offering a home study course: “Learn Bhagavad Gita and Become a Strong Man.” There were no takers.