The generation of Vaishnavas among whom Gadadhara Pandit grew up had, most of them, come to Nabadwip from somewhere else. Bengal in the fifteenth century moved its learned brahmana families about a good deal, and Nabadwip, as the most celebrated seat of Sanskrit study in the province, drew them in. The family of Gadadhara Pandit came from the far east of the region — from the Chittagong district, in what is now Bangladesh, where they belonged to the group of brahmanas known as Varendra. His father was Madhava Mishra and his mother Ratnavati Devi; he had a younger brother, Baninath; and the family reckoned itself of the Kashyapa gotra.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Year of birth | Saka 1408, or 1486 of the Western calendar |
| Father | Madhava Mishra |
| Mother | Ratnavati Devi |
| Younger brother | Baninath |
| Family origin | Varendra brahmanas of the Chittagong district |
| Gotra | Kashyapa |
Two Accounts of His Birthplace #
The biographies differ on one point of detail, and it is worth registering rather than smoothing over. Some accounts, including the life compiled by Bhakti Ballabh Tirtha Maharaja, place his birth in the village of Beleti in Chittagong in the Saka year 1408 — 1486 of the Western calendar — and say that the family moved to Nabadwip when the boy was twelve. Others have the family already settled on the Ganges bank at Mayapur before he was born, a few doors from the house of Jagannatha Mishra, and describe Ratnavati Devi as being on sisterly terms with Sachi Devi and constantly in and out of her house. The second version is the one that underlies the whole body of stories about Gadai and Nimai as inseparable small boys, and it is the version most Gaudiya Vaishnavas carry in their heads. What all the accounts agree on is that he was born in the same year as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, or within a year of it, and that from a very early age the two were in each other's company.
Nimai and Gadadhara as Boys #
That near-exact contemporaneity matters, because almost nothing else about the two boys matched. Nimai was famously combative. His memory was prodigious, His command of grammar and logic was such that by His teens no scholar in the town would willingly meet Him in argument, and He enjoyed argument for its own sake — the biographies describe Him demolishing a position and then, having demolished it, rebuilding it better than its author had, purely to show that He could. Gadadhara was the opposite kind of person: quiet, grave, physically slight, uninterested in disputation, and — this is the detail every source insists on — indifferent to the ordinary pleasures of the world from childhood. He was drawn instead to the older Vaishnavas of Nabadwip, to the little circle that met at Advaita Acharya's house to read the Bhagavatam and chant the holy names, and that at the time counted for very little in a town whose religious prestige belonged to ritualists and logicians.
Nimai's Question About Liberation #
Vrindavana Dasa Thakura preserves an exchange from those school years that reads, in hindsight, like a joke the Lord was playing on Himself. Nimai, who had a habit of stopping devotionally minded students in the street and tangling them in questions they did not want to answer, asked Gadadhara to define liberation. Gadadhara answered as a student of Nyaya would answer: liberation is the final and absolute cessation of all misery. Nimai proceeded to take the definition apart. The devotees standing by are said to have watched the performance and thought what a thing it would be if such a brilliant young man ever became a devotee — an ambition they had, at that stage, entirely given up on. It is the same pairing that would define the two men for the rest of their lives, with the terms reversed: the one who could out-argue anybody, and the one who never argued at all.
Isvara Puri and the Krishna-lilamrita #
Something else belongs to this period. Isvara Puri, the Vaishnava sannyasi who would later give Mahaprabhu initiation at Gaya, spent some months in Nabadwip during these years, and the accounts say he was struck by the young Gadadhara's detachment and gave him personal instruction in his own composition, the Krishna-lilamrita. It is a small notice, but it places Gadadhara inside the Madhavendra Puri line of devotion well before the sankirtana movement began, and it explains why, when the movement did begin, he needed no persuading.
A Lifelong Brahmachari #
Gadadhara Pandit never married. He remained a brahmachari for his whole life, which in a society where a brahmana's marriage was more or less automatic was a conspicuous thing, and which made possible the shape his later life took — the move to Jagannatha Puri, the vow to remain there, the decades of Deity service with no household to divide him.
The Pleasure Potency in the Panca-tattva #
Gaudiya theology places him fourth among the five features of the Panca-tattva, and defines that place with some precision. Krishnadasa Kaviraja writes that three of the five — Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Nityananda Prabhu and Advaita Acharya — are to be worshipped by all living beings, and that the fourth is to be understood as their worshipper; and elsewhere that Gadadhara Pandit is an incarnation of the pleasure potency of Krishna, with whom no one is to be compared. Kavi Karnapura, in the Gaura-ganoddesa-dipika, is more specific still: the pleasure potency who was formerly the queen of Vrindavana is present in Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's pastimes as Gadadhara Pandit, and something of Lalita, Radharani's closest confidante, has entered him as well. The tradition therefore understands him not as an unusually devoted friend of the Lord but as the Lord's own internal energy in a male brahmana body — the shakti standing beside the shaktiman, which is why the Deity pair worshipped in a great many Bengali temples is not Gaura alone but Gaura-Gadadhara.
Whether or not a reader shares that theology, it is worth noticing what the tradition chose to say it with. It could have located the pleasure potency of God in some visibly extraordinary figure. Instead it located her in a retiring, unassertive boy from the next street who was no good at debate, who never founded anything, and whose entire public career consisted of standing next to somebody else. The friendship that began in those Nabadwip lanes is taken up here.