By the end of the 1930s, the Gaudiya Vaishnava community that had shaped A.C. Bhaktivedanta's spiritual life for well over a decade recognized something in him that went beyond ordinary discipleship. In 1939 a group of elders and scholars honored him with a formal title. Five years later, working entirely alone and in the middle of a world war, he acted on the responsibility that title implied by launching a magazine that has been printed, on and off and then continuously, ever since.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Title conferred | 1939, by elders of the Gaudiya Vaishnava community |
| Meaning | Bhakti ("devotion") plus vedanta ("the culmination of Vedic knowledge") |
| Magazine founded | 14 February 1944, Calcutta |
| First issue | 44 pages, printed despite a wartime paper shortage |
| His role | Sole writer, editor, financier, printer-contact, and distributor |
| Status today | Still published by his followers, in a range of languages |
The Title Bhaktivedanta #
In 1939, A.C. Bhaktivedanta was still a working pharmaceutical businessman in Calcutta, supporting a family while devoting his free hours to writing, lecturing, and assisting the Gaudiya Math press. That year, elders within the Gaudiya Vaishnava community honored him with the title "Bhaktivedanta." The word combines bhakti, devotion, with vedanta, the culmination of Vedic knowledge, and it recognized both halves of what those elders had already observed in him: a scholar's grasp of Sanskrit philosophy joined to a practicing devotee's discipline. He would carry the title for the rest of his life, eventually placing it before the sannyasa name he received two decades later.
Answering a Standing Order #
The title arrived alongside an older, unfinished obligation. Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati had urged him for years to carry Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's teachings to the English-speaking world, and shortly before his own passing in 1937 had told him directly, "You try to preach whatever you have learned from me in English, and that will do good to you and the people who will hear you." By the early 1940s, with his guru gone and the Gaudiya Math itself splintering into rival factions after his death, A.C. Bhaktivedanta had no organized press behind him and had to decide what fulfilling that instruction would look like on his own. His answer was to start a periodical from nothing, in his own front room.
A Magazine Born in Wartime Calcutta #
On 14 February 1944, marking the anniversary of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati's appearance day, A.C. Bhaktivedanta launched the first issue of Back to Godhead, an English-language fortnightly presenting the teachings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. He had conceived, written, and typed the manuscript himself on a manual typewriter, then run into a wartime paper shortage severe enough that his chosen printer initially could not supply him at all; he eventually secured permission to print a first issue of forty-four pages. The title stated its argument plainly — that the purpose of human life is to turn the mind back toward Krishna, back toward Godhead — and the first issue took on subjects as large as the causes of war and the illusory nature of material happiness, written while Calcutta itself sat under wartime blackout and, at times, air raids.
Stopped, Then Revived #
The magazine's finances gave out almost immediately. After only two issues, A.C. Bhaktivedanta had to stop printing for lack of money. He did not restart it for eight years, until February 1952, after moving his family to Allahabad, and later carried it with him to Jhansi during his attempt to establish the League of Devotees, where his first disciple, Acharya Prabhakar, helped him keep it going. Looking back on those years, he later wrote plainly to a disciple, "I was printing this paper and almost distributing free, and some of them were paying me subscription and some of them not. But I was trying my best at my cost" (letter to Rayarama, 12 June 1968).
No Staff, No Funding, No Shortcuts #
Whichever city he was working from, the operation never changed shape: he wrote nearly every article, edited the copy, negotiated with printers, and then distributed the finished issues himself. There was no sales force. When he later printed and sold the magazine in Delhi, he would go from tea stall to tea stall, sometimes spending an hour or more just to sell a single copy. He absorbed the financial loss personally whenever sales fell short of costs, and did so for the better part of two decades before he ever set foot in America, where he would need to build a movement from an equally standing start.
A Fortnightly That Became a Worldwide Institution #
Back to Godhead survived every one of these interruptions. His followers relaunched it again in October 1966, soon after he founded his mission in New York, printing early American issues on a second-hand mimeograph machine, and have kept it in continuous print since, now issued in a range of languages. He never lost sight of what he wanted it to become: "I am awaiting for the day when this paper will take the shape of Life Magazine or similar other magazines, in the matter of its popularity," he wrote in 1968, and two years later put the ambition even more starkly — that it "should be published not in hundreds and thousands, but in millions." The magazine remains one of the more visible parts of the wider body of literature he built over his lifetime, cataloged today at prabhupada/books. What began as one man's fortnightly, stopped twice for lack of funds and restarted twice by the same man's persistence, outlasted every circumstance that threatened to end it.
