In 1918, while still a student, Abhay was married by his father's arrangement to Radharani Datta, also from an aristocratic Calcutta family. The marriage would eventually produce five children and run alongside a pharmaceutical career that took the family from Calcutta to Allahabad -- an ordinary domestic and commercial life that Abhay built even as he kept turning over, in private, an encounter that had already begun to reorder his sense of what mattered most.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Married | 1918, while a college student |
| Wife | Radharani Datta |
| Children | Five, born over the course of the marriage |
| First employer | Bose's Laboratory, Calcutta |
| Own business | Prayag Pharmacy, Allahabad, from 1923 |
An Arranged Marriage in 1918 #
In 1918, while still a student at Scottish Church College, Abhay was married to Radharani Datta in a match arranged entirely by his father. Gour Mohan had spent considerable time weighing eligible families before settling on the Dattas, an aristocratic family connected to the Mulliks, the same mercantile relations who supported the neighborhood's Radha-Govinda temple. Radharani was eleven years old at the time of the marriage, in keeping with the customary practice of arranging a daughter's marriage well before puberty; the couple would not begin living together as husband and wife until several years later. Over the following years the marriage produced five children.
A Reluctant Bridegroom #
Abhay, by his own later account, had not been enthusiastic about his father's choice; he had privately considered another match. He deferred to Gour Mohan out of filial duty rather than affection, and for some time afterward remained open with his father about his dissatisfaction, at one point exploring whether he might take a second wife, as was then socially permissible. Gour Mohan discouraged him directly: it was Krishna's mercy, he told his son, that his wife did not entirely please him, since excessive attachment to family life would only work against his future advancement in spiritual life. Abhay accepted the counsel, and the marriage continued on those terms -- a working domestic partnership rather than a romantic one, run alongside a household that eventually included his aging father, a widowed sister, and her son.
Bose's Laboratory and a Trusted Hand #
After giving up his college diploma in 1920 as a gesture toward Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, Abhay needed employment, and it was Gour Mohan who found it for him. A family friend, Dr. Kartick Chandra Bose, a surgeon and one of the first Indians to manufacture pharmaceutical products previously monopolized by European firms, took Abhay on as a department manager at his Calcutta firm, Bose's Laboratory. Abhay knew little of the business at first, and some longtime employees resented a young manager placed above them, but Dr. Bose vouched for him personally, entrusting him with accounts running into tens of thousands of rupees. It was here, handling ledgers and shipments rather than scripture, that Abhay spent his early twenties -- the same years in which, in 1922, he first met the man who would become his spiritual master, an encounter described in Meeting His Spiritual Master.
Prayag Pharmacy in Allahabad #
In 1923 Dr. Bose proposed that Abhay become his sales agent for northern India, and the two settled on Allahabad, a well-connected railway hub at the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and Sarasvati rivers, as a base of operations. Abhay moved his young family there and opened a small dispensary, Prayag Pharmacy, selling medicines and tinctures manufactured by Bose's Laboratory. He brought in a local physician as an attending doctor who wrote prescriptions that Abhay then filled, splitting the proceeds. Business was steady enough that Abhay bought a car and traveled constantly by train across northern India soliciting new accounts, devoting himself for several years mainly to expanding the pharmacy's reach.
Customers Named Nehru #
Among the regular customers at Prayag Pharmacy were Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal, then rising figures in the Congress movement and residents of Allahabad's well-appointed quarter. Jawaharlal, who Abhay noted always preferred Western-manufactured medicines to Indian ones, once approached him for a political donation, which Abhay gave as a matter of ordinary civic courtesy. It is a small detail, but a telling one: the future founder of a worldwide Vaishnava mission spent a decade of his life as an unremarkable small-town pharmacist, filling prescriptions for the family that would one day lead independent India, with no sign yet of what either man's life would become.
Business by Day, Krishna Consciousness Within #
Abhay kept strict Vaishnava dietary practice throughout these years even while traveling and dressing, when business required it, in ordinary Western shirt and trousers -- declining meat, onions, garlic, and mushrooms at hotels that assumed a traveling salesman would not object. Colleagues who knew him at the time remembered a business-minded man who nonetheless kept a small home temple and spoke often of family expenses and profit margins. Yet the meeting on a Calcutta rooftop in 1922 had not been forgotten; Abhay continued to think back on it during his long train journeys between accounts. The pharmacy years were not a detour from that encounter so much as the ordinary domestic and commercial life against which it slowly worked -- a tension that would eventually resolve into formal discipleship, as told in The Order to Preach in English.