In a kirtana, the mridanga is the two-headed clay drum that carries the rhythm of the chanting and, by long custom, its sound is considered inseparable from the holy name itself. Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura startled his own tradition by arguing that a printing press, run properly, was a bigger and more effective mridanga than the instrument in anyone's hands. His disciples remembered him calling it a brihad mridanga -- a "great mridanga" -- reasoning that the sound of a drum reaches only as far as a courtyard or a temple hall, while a printed page carries the same message to readers a press could never physically visit, in numbers no group of kirtana singers could ever address in person.
A Father's Instruction Made Into a Mission #
The conviction did not begin with Bhaktisiddhanta. In 1910, his father Bhaktivinoda Thakura wrote to him from Mayapur with an instruction that reads, in retrospect, as a mission statement handed from one generation to the next: "The real service to Sri Mayapur can be done by acquiring printing presses, distributing devotional books, and sankirtana-preaching... I had a special desire to preach the significance of such books as Srimad Bhagavatam, Sat Sandarbha, and Vedanta Darshan. You have to accept that responsibility." Bhaktivinoda had spent decades of his own life doing exactly this on a smaller scale, running the Vaishnava Depository press and the Sajjana-toshani magazine from his home. Bhaktisiddhanta took the instruction and multiplied it by an order of magnitude.
Bhagavat Yantra: God's Machine #
In 1913, still years before he accepted sannyasa or founded the Gaudiya Math as an institution, Bhaktisiddhanta established a printing press in Calcutta and gave it a name that stated his theology outright: bhagavat-yantra, "God's machine." Its first major undertaking was a new edition of Krishnadasa Kaviraja's Chaitanya Charitamrita, the central biography of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, printed with Bhaktisiddhanta's own extensive commentary alongside the medieval Bengali text. After his father's death in 1914 he moved the press to Mayapur and then to nearby Krishnanagar, continuing both the Chaitanya Charitamrita project and his father's Sajjana-toshani without a break.
Why Print Rather Than Preach Only Aloud #
Oral kirtana and lecture remained central to Bhaktisiddhanta's own daily practice and to the Gaudiya Math's public life -- this was never an either-or choice for him. But he saw specific advantages in the printed page that oral preaching alone could not supply. A book did not tire, forget a verse, or need to sleep; it could be read again at whatever pace and depth the reader chose, studied by a skeptical college graduate as carefully as a devotional history by Rupa Gosvami. It could travel to London, Berlin, or Rangoon in a trunk, and reach a reader Bhaktisiddhanta himself would never meet, long after he was no longer alive to give the lecture in person. Once he had accepted sannyasa and begun founding Gaudiya Math centers across India in earnest, he built a press, editorial staff, and distribution network into nearly every one of them, and used the same principle to justify adopting other unglamorous modern technology -- motorcars, loudspeakers, even airplanes for a planned but unrealized preaching tour -- as instruments of bhakti rather than distractions from it.
A Publishing Operation, Not a Sideline #
By the end of his life, Bhaktisiddhanta's presses had produced periodicals in seven languages: the Bengali fortnightly Sajjana-toshani inherited from his father, the English fortnightly The Harmonist, the Bengali weekly Gaudiya (from which the Gaudiya Math itself took its name), a Hindi fortnightly called Bhagavata, a Bengali daily, an Assamese monthly, and an Oriya periodical, alongside a steady stream of book editions of the Gaudiya Vaishnava canon. This was not incidental output from an institution primarily built around temples and preachers; it was one of the institution's core activities, staffed, budgeted, and defended by Bhaktisiddhanta as seriously as any temple's daily worship.
Technology in the Service of Devotion #
The press was one expression of a wider principle Bhaktisiddhanta applied deliberately throughout his mission: yukta-vairagya, a term coined by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's associate Rupa Gosvami meaning "renunciation through engagement." Rather than treating modern technology as worldly and therefore suspect, Bhaktisiddhanta held that any object -- a printing press, a motorcar, a loudspeaker -- became spiritual the moment it was used purely in service to Krishna rather than for personal enjoyment. This let him adopt the latest advances in printing, transportation, and communication without compromising what he considered the unchanged theological core of the Chaitanya tradition, and it is this same reasoning, more than any casual fondness for machinery, that made a printing press the obvious and deliberate choice of instrument for a mission that intended to reach readers a kirtana party never could.
The Conviction Passed Down #
The clearest evidence of how deeply this conviction took root is what his disciple Srila Prabhupada did with it. Decades later, founding the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust to mass-produce his own translations and commentaries for a Western audience, Prabhupada would describe his press in nearly identical language: "ISKCON Press remains our big mridanga and the backbone of our movement." He told disciples plainly that this had been his own guru's settled opinion, not merely a figure of speech borrowed for effect: "My Guru Maharaja used to say that this press is brihad-mridanga... the sound of press goes long, long distance, to long distant places." What began as one press in a rented Calcutta building, named for God, became -- through a direct line of instruction from Bhaktivinoda to Bhaktisiddhanta to Prabhupada -- one of the largest publishing operations in the history of any religious movement. The full catalog of Prabhupada's books, and the story of how that publishing conviction reached its extreme expression, are told in Launching Back to Godhead.
