Jagannatha Dasa Babaji's relationship with the Datta family — with Bhaktivinoda Thakura himself, and afterward with Bhaktivinoda's remarkable young son — spans nearly two decades and represents one of the most consequential personal connections in the entire modern history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, precisely because of who that son would become.
Meeting Bhaktivinoda Thakura, 1880 #
Bhaktivinoda Thakura first met Jagannatha Dasa Babaji in Vrindavana in 1880 and received from him, on that occasion, extensive instruction in hari-bhakti. The two met again some time later when Jagannatha Dasa Babaji visited the Barddhaman district during the month of Phalguna and stayed at the town of Amalajora; seeing Bhaktivinoda's evident enthusiasm for preaching the holy name, Jagannatha Dasa Babaji was greatly pleased, and stayed through an Ekadashi observance there with kirtana and hari-katha through the night. It was at Amalajora, afterward, that Bhaktivinoda established his Prapanna-ashrama. When Jagannatha Dasa Babaji came to Calcutta in later years he would stay at Bhaktivinoda's own house on Manikatala Street — though, being deeply renounced by nature, he accepted Bhaktivinoda's eager invitations to take prasadam there only occasionally, never as a matter of course.
Calling on a Twelve-Year-Old Astronomer #
The more remarkable episode concerns Bhaktivinoda's son. When Bimala Prasad — the boy who would grow up to be Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura — was twelve years old, he had already become expert in jyotish-shastra, the science of Vedic astrology and astronomical calculation, a precocity described in full on his own page. Hearing of this, Jagannatha Dasa Babaji called the boy to him and asked him to prepare a proper Vaishnava calendar, calculated according to correct astronomical siddhanta — the dates of the appearance and disappearance of the great Vaishnava saints, and the calendar of festivals through the year. Bimala Prasad did as he was asked, to Jagannatha Dasa Babaji's evident satisfaction, and the resulting work became the basis of the Nabadwip Panjika, the Vaishnava almanac still used across the Gaudiya community.
It is a small, easily overlooked episode, but it places Jagannatha Dasa Babaji — a man who by his own account could barely open his eyes or walk unassisted in these years — as the figure whose personal initiative first drew the future founder of the Gaudiya Math into public service, years before his 1900 initiation from Srila Gaura Kishora Dasa Babaji, who was himself, as the next page describes, a disciple in Jagannatha Dasa Babaji's own spiritual line.