Why do you stand with your foot

on Hara’s bosom mother?

With your tongue sticking out as though

you were just a simple girl?

O Saviour of the World,

I understand this hereditary trait –

Did not your mother too stand

on your father’s bosom like this?

Rani Rasmani

In all respects, Gadadhar was a normal, cheerful child, full of mischief and lively good humour. His spirited nature made him a pet of village mothers, and a favourite with playmates. Who could have seen the shape that young Gadadhar’s future would take?

The creation of legends is a natural mark of human reverence for what one feels to be greater than oneself. Legends accumulate embellishments with the passing of generations, as well-intentioned historians repeat stories with their own additions. But legends take time to grow and Gadadhar was born less than 200 years ago – not time enough for legends. So what is related here could simply be fables. But it is important to remember that fables have their own truth.

At the age of fifty-one, Kshudiram Chattopadhyay thought he was too old to have a child, when, on a visit to a neighbouring village, he stopped to rest under the shade of a tree. Lord Rama, Kshudiram later reported, came to him in a dream, in the form of a celestial boy as green as a blade of durva grass. He pointed to the ground some distance away, and said: ‘I have been lying here, neglected and starving for many days. Take me back to your house and serve me.’ He refused to listen to the protests made by Kshudiram about his humble status.

On waking up, Kshudiram found a stone exactly at the spot Lord Rama had indicated in his dream. It was the Shalagram stone, an emblem of Lord Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, who comes to earth in this reincarnation – as dharma, virtue – when adharma, vice, threatens the world.

Kshudiram, a Rama bhakta, a worshipper of Lord Rama, hurried home with it and placed it in the household shrine. Nine years later, on a pilgrimage to Gaya to make offerings to departed ancestors at the temple of Gadadhar – another name for Lord Vishnu – Kshudiram had another dream. While his ancestors partook of Kshudiram’s offerings, a divine effulgence appeared, seated on a throne, and told him he would come to earth as Kshudiram’s son. Again, Kshudiram’s protestations about his humble circumstances were brushed aside. At the same time, in Kamarpukur, Kshudiram’s wife, Chandra Devi, a guileless and simple woman, also had a divine visitation. One night, she reported later, a radiant light in the exact form of her husband appeared beside her – and remained with her through the next day.

Chandra Devi later said:

All of a sudden, the image of Shiva came alive. The most beautiful light began to come from it. Waves of light filled the space around it. It came towards me and swallowed me up. I felt the light enter my body. And I fell down in a faint. When I returned to consciousness, I told Dhani what had happened. But she didn’t believe me. She said it was an epileptic fit. But it was not so, because I felt so well. I knew I was with a child.

Chandra Devi was forty-five at the time. Both Kshudiram and Chandra Devi feared ridicule, therefore they told no one of their experiences. The name Ram appeared in the names of many Rama bhaktas. Kshudiram’s own name ended in Ram, his first child was called Ramkumar, his next, Rameshwar. The child of their dreams, visions and visitations was born on 18 February 1836 at 5.15 a.m. (Bengali calendar: 17 February) and they named him Ramakrishna. But throughout his childhood everybody called him Gadadhar – Vishnu, who carried the mace.

Similar spiritual experiences were recorded by parents of great souls such as Sri Ramachandra, Lord Krishna and Sri Chaitanya. Whatever we may believe about the immaculate conception of Sri Ramakrishna – a remarkable parallel to the birth of Lord Buddha or Jesus Christ – Gadadhar appeared a normal boy, charming, naive and endearing. But he was without the drive and self-assured brilliance that usually marked out the ambitious, destined to forge their names in the world.

He was intelligent and gifted with a sharp retentive memory, but stubbornly opposed to abstractions such as mathematics that did not appeal to his poetic soul. He was an obedient child and well mannered up to a point; he was also strong-willed. Gadai, as he was lovingly called, rebelled against regimentation and rote memorization. Even as a child he seemed to understand the difference between the conventional knowledge of the schoolmaster and the wisdom of the soul. ‘What use is an education,’ he said, ‘that teaches you only to bundle rice in a plantain leaf’ (a priestly educational practice that helps one earn one’s ‘bread’).

All the while during those sylvan years, Gadadhar’s body and mind were being prepared from within for the awesome transformations that were to thrust him into terrifying, unknown, unlimited inner spaces, into which most feared to delve. The process was so subterranean as to be almost invisible to those around him.

However, every now and then, a glimpse of something colossal crashed briefly through the outer personality of the child, which would break the surface like a great whale from the deepest oceans of the soul. As Sri Ramakrishna later said, it was the magnificence of the contrast between the white cranes and the dark clouds that had overwhelmed him. His spirit, he later described, flew up towards the cranes and clouds, and his body fell unconscious. No one could have known at the time that he had attained his first spontaneous samadhi, a state of superconsciousness unknown to the mere mortal, but well-documented by the sages of the past. He was only six years old at that time.

This incident was repeated a few years later on a pilgrimage to the Vishalakshi shrine at Anur, a couple of miles north of Kamarpukur, where he was taken along by village women who enjoyed listening to the young Gadai sing. While singing a hymn in praise of the Goddess, Gadai fell unconscious. It was a small forewarning of the stormy years of awakening which were to come later – when Sri Ramakrishna as the priest of Kali, spent days balanced on the borderline of rapture. The least pretext – a strain of music, a divine name, a familiar face – became a window for his trembling spirit to pass into the luminescence of the inner world.

The close relatives of the boy who came to be known as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, the Great Swan, came with their own share of spiritual power. Sri Ramakrishna said of his father, in later years:

My father spent most of his time in worship and meditation. While he was praying, his chest swelled and shone with a divine radiance, and tears rolled down his cheeks. The villagers stepped aside as he passed, they respected him as a sage.’

Everyone, young or old, was always welcome at Kshudiram’s cottage, that despite poverty and suffering ever radiated a wonderful peace and joy.

The death of his father catalysed in Gadadhar a dispassion that bordered on depression. But where other children might have retreated into dumb unreasoning grief, Gadadhar became thoughtful. It was as though he saw clearly, for an instant, the transitory nature of life. His father’s death transformed Gadai. He became serious and childhood games lost their former appeal. Sri Ramakrishna later recounted how much he wanted to take the begging bowl and join the itinerant monks. But he did not follow that path for fear that it would have broken his mother’s heart.

As time flew by, Gadadhar began to show signs of unusual sagacity. Saints of many religions often show extraordinary wisdom from an early age. At a special ceremony in the midst of a heated argument amongst wise men, eleven-year-old Gadadhar stopped the free flow of philosophical hot air with a few succinct words! For the rest of that night he found himself in a strange and exalted realm where he could not be reached and none could follow. Thereafter, Gadadhar’s spontaneous flights of spirit became more frequent. The divinity struggling to be born within the boy stirred intermittently. And each time it awakened, the umbilical cord that tied Gadadhar to the world of appearances loosened its hold.

Kshudiram was an exceptionally principled man. Originally from Dere, two miles west of Kamarpukur, he had been forced off his ancestral lands with his wife and two children, ruined by a tyrannical landowner who wanted him to bear false witness against a tenant. To Kshudiram, character counted more than cash. Fortunately a friend and benefactor, Sukhlal Goswami, ensured that the Chattopadhyay family had a reasonably comfortable life in Kamarpukur. On Kshudiram’s death, however, the family entered times of privation. The eldest son Ramkumar, a Sanskrit scholar of repute, thereafter, provided for the family.

Ramkumar’s wife died after giving birth to their son Akshay. He was unable to remain in Kamarpukur and needed a change of place while continuing to support his family. Ramkumar left for Calcutta to start a Sanskrit school.

The pressure on Gadai to earn a living increased – but to Gadai, school was not only irrelevant, it was something shameful. The thought of training his mind for skills required to accumulate wealth and worldly honours made him shudder with revulsion. The mind, he said, was created for higher things – to realize God. Yet, even in the midst of sorrow there was time for that particular honesty of childhood that lays bare the pompous hypocrisy of the justifying adult mind.

A conservative neighbour, the trader Durgadas Pyne, often boasted that no male had ever penetrated his women’s quarters, so strict was his family’s adherence to purdah. Yet, Ramakrishna found a way to enter this restricted area where no one was able to guess who he really was till he revealed himself! All this time his mother was anxiously searching for him just as Lord Krishna’s mother was regularly forced to find her mischievous son. The story goes:

Once the boy Krishna, up to his innumerable pranks, disappeared. Yasodha, his mother, was frantic with worry. A friend asked her, reasonably enough:

Why do you worry about the boy? He is after all, the Lord. He will look after himself. Yasodha’s tart reply was: What Lord! It’s my son I worry about.

It is part of our humanity to forget. So, stories of his divine origins notwithstanding, his family had not yet properly understood the passion for renunciation burning in young Gadadhar. Ramkumar felt his youngest brother was over indulged, that he was frittering away the best years of his life singing, modelling clay and playacting. A decision was arrived at and Gadai was sent to Calcutta to study with Ramkumar’s other pupils, while he was also supposed to assist him as best he could.

Unknown to all, once Gadai left the timelessness and safety of village life for the anxious hurry and stumble of the city, Gadai’s special destiny beckoned him faster – one that demonstrated to the modern world, the absolute necessity of ancient values for its health; that would juxtapose the new with the old.

The British were still traders – wealthy traders with armies and incipient governments. They grew more powerful each year, as the European mind perfected its technological impact on the world of matter. While living in the City of Palaces, an imposing European quarter in Calcutta, they held themselves in superior isolation from the largely subservient ‘idol worshipping heathen’, as they called those belonging to the land.

Widow of the enormously wealthy merchant Rajchandra Das, Rani (a maternal pet name; she was not a member of royalty) was widely respected for her shrewdness, generosity, courage and piety. At forty-four, she had already defeated a British attempt to tax fish caught on the River Hooghly. Facing ruin, local fishermen had approached Rani for redress. She bought the monopoly on fishing rights on the Ganga. The British were pleased to sell them to her – as they would tax her canneries. But Rani strung chains across the river to hold up British ships, claiming that shipping frightened the fish and therefore interfered with her rights! Of course, she would give up if the tax on fish was repealed. It was!

Dakshineswar temple, which was to become the home of young Gadai, was the dream of Rani Rasmani, a devotee of the Goddess Kali. Construction had begun in 1847 on 20 acres, partly bought from an Englishman, partly an old Muslim burial ground shaped like the back of a tortoise, which was said in the tantras to be conducive to the worship of Shakti. It took eight years to complete the temple at a cost of nine hundred thousand rupees.

However, close to completion, Rani came up against a major hurdle – she was born a Kaivarta, in a family of fishermen, considered by Brahmins to be of low caste. Therefore, no Brahmin agreed to officiate at her temple!

Until, when consulted, Ramkumar Chattopadhyay, who had by then earned a formidable reputation in Calcutta for his wisdom, learning and foresight, found an equitable solution: the temple was consecrated in the name of Rani Rasmani’s guru who was a Brahmin.

On 31 May 1855, at considerable expense and amidst great festivities, the image of Kali was installed at Dakshineswar. Formally called Sri Sri Jagadiswari Mahakali, the image is popularly known as Bhavatarini, meaning She who takes Her devotees across the ocean of existence. Many professors of the shastras and Brahmins came from distant centres of learning. The Rani was delighted when Ramkumar agreed to be the officiating priest of the Kali temple, on a temporary basis, because his school was not doing as well as he had hoped.

Gadai was eighteen at the time, and while sagacious, given to mystic experiences and accomplished in religious rituals (if not in mathematics), learned willingly at his brother’s school. He was not yet the sagacious Sri Ramakrishna whom the world would revere. Gadai objected to moving to Dakshineswar, and to Ramkumar officiating at a temple constructed by a low-caste woman, no matter how wealthy.

He refused to move with his brother to the temple that was to be his home for the next twenty years – that was to be the safe cradle from which he would undertake his intense mystical journeys. So much so that his brother had to take recourse to the dharmapatra – the leaf of impartiality – a method popular in villages, of making the right decisions. ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ are written on vilva leaves placed in a pot. A child is then asked to pick one. Gadadhar pulled out the ‘Yes’. God had made his wishes known, Gadai had to move. Yet, once at Dakshineswar he insisted on cooking his own meals.

Caste is today considered an unmitigated evil. But to understand Gadai’s objections, one must understand the true nature of caste. The ancient sages started with the fundamental perception that men are not created equal. It was not a value judgement; merely a recognition of the fact that human beings were created with vastly different abilities. Human society was likened to a body. To ask the heart to do the work of the lungs was surely foolishness! Or ask the feet to do the work of the brain. Therefore, each individual must live by his dharma – the God-given law of his nature.

At the dawn of Indian civilization, the caste a man belonged to was determined by his occupation. By the sixth century bc, unfortunately, as is so often the case in human affairs, the fundamentals had been forgotten, conceptual reversals became the air men breathed – and the work a man did had begun to be determined by his caste.

Yet, as we have seen in the case of Rani Rasmani, caste was no barrier to attaining both material and spiritual fruit. In Gadai’s orthodox family, caste was considered as natural a phenomenon and as little to be discussed as the monsoon or the rising of the sun. In objecting to Rani Rasmani, Gadai, who had insisted on the lower-caste Dhani giving him his first bhiksha at his sacred thread ceremony because he had said he would, was now challenged by the transgression not of a repressive hierarchy but the transgression of the divinely ordained nature of things. The time was yet to come when he would transcend all caste boundaries in his quest for union with the Absolute.

If Gadadhar was not yet fully the sage he would become, he was yet a poet with limitless resources of childlike wonder. He was naturally open to the daily rituals of a vibrant temple culture, to the spiritual potency of the sacred Ganga replete with the memories and myths of the race; the sacred river that had sprung from the matted locks of Lord Shiva. His distance from Dakshineswar could not last.

It is often said that when an intimate and lasting relationship of love is forged, the attraction leading to it is felt at first sight. The scriptures say this is a carryover from previous lives. Mathurnath Biswas, Rani’s son-in-law, was a man of the world, a bejewelled, swaggering dandy with a keen business sense, hardly the kind of man to have been attracted to a priest. But below the man of the world lay a sincere devotion to the Divine Mother.

This devotion drew him to Gadai and enabled him to recognize in the boy that special quality, that spark that would erupt like a volcano of spiritual splendour in the years to come. Mathur wanted Gadai to take over the puja in the temple but he was reluctant to do so. Just then Gadai’s nephew, Hridayram, who was to become his closest companion and protector, arrived from Kamarpukur. It was Hriday who cajoled and persuaded Gadai, till he acquiesced to Mathur’s demand. He agreed to perform the rituals to the Goddess if Hriday would take over the care of the ornaments since Gadadhar had a natural aversion to gold, money, jewels.

One day, the priest of the Radhakanta temple accidentally dropped the image of Krishna on the floor, breaking one of its legs. The worship of an image with a broken limb was against the scriptures, therefore Rani was advised by the priests to install a new image. Rani suggested that a new image be made available for worship and, in the meantime, also asked for Sri Ramakrishna’s opinion since she was fond of the image.

In response, Ramakrishna started singing:

Why do you stand with your foot on Hara’s bosom mother?
With your tongue sticking out as though you were just a simple girl?

O Saviour of the World, I understand this hereditary trait –
Did not your mother too stand on your father’s bosom like this?

Then he smiled and asked quite reasonably: ‘What if Rani’s son-in-law had broken his leg? Would she throw him away? Or give him medical treatment?’

To this a devotee remarked that it was a deity’s image that had broken.

Ramakrishna was very amused at this remark and replied: ‘Ah! What a fine understanding. Can He, who is an indivisible whole, be broken?’