In 1922, a college friend's persistence brought Abhay, reluctant and skeptical, to a Calcutta rooftop to meet a sadhu he had no intention of taking seriously. Within minutes the sadhu -- Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura, founder of the Gaudiya Math -- had told him, unprompted, to spread Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's teaching in English. It was the beginning of a relationship that Abhay would later say he accepted that same evening, though it would be another eleven years before any formal ceremony confirmed it.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Date | 1922 |
| Location | Bhaktivinod Asana, Ultadanga, Calcutta |
| Introduced by | Narendranath Mullik, college friend |
| Spiritual master met | Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura (1874-1937) |
| Institution | Founder of the Gaudiya Math |
| Predecessor | Son of the Vaishnava reformer Bhaktivinoda Thakura |
A Reluctant Visit to Ultadanga #
In 1922, Abhay's college friend Narendranath Mullik kept pressing him to visit a sadhu who had settled at an ashram on Ultadanga Junction Road. Several of the Mulliks had already gone and come back impressed, and Naren wanted Abhay's opinion to confirm their own. Abhay resisted. He had grown up watching a steady procession of self-styled holy men pass through his father's house -- some sincere, many not, a few openly disreputable -- and told Naren plainly he had no interest in paying respects to another one. Naren insisted the man was a serious scholar, and Abhay finally relented, walking with him to a building marked Bhaktivinod Asana, the Calcutta center of the Gaudiya Math.
Why Don't You Preach in English #
The sadhu was Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura, founder of the Gaudiya Math and the son and successor of the Vaishnava reformer Bhaktivinoda Thakura. Abhay and Naren were shown up to a rooftop where Bhaktisiddhanta sat with a few disciples and guests, and before the two young men had finished offering their obeisances or exchanging a single pleasantry, Bhaktisiddhanta spoke first.
You are an educated young man. Why don't you take the message of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and spread it in English?
It was not a question so much as a charge, delivered to a stranger in the first seconds of a meeting neither of them had asked to have. Abhay, dressed in the white khadi of a Gandhi sympathizer, was startled -- and also, immediately, drawn in.
Abhay's Objection: Independence First #
Abhay did not let the remark pass unchallenged. He put to Bhaktisiddhanta the same argument circulating among nationalist-minded students across Calcutta: that a colonized people had no standing to export their culture to the world. "Who will hear your Chaitanya's message?" he asked. "We are a dependent country. First India must become independent. How can we spread Indian culture if we are under British rule?" It was a serious question, not a provocation, reflecting exactly the position Abhay had absorbed from Subhas Chandra Bose and the independence talk of his college years, described in Education and Early Influences: that spiritual culture was a luxury nations could afford only after securing political freedom.
Bhaktisiddhanta's Answer to the Challenge #
Bhaktisiddhanta's reply, as Vaishnava biographers record it, did not dispute the facts of British rule or its injustices. Instead he set the question aside as resting on a false premise. Krishna consciousness, he said, was not a project that depended on which government happened to hold power at a given moment; it addressed the eternal position of the soul, a truth that did not wait on the outcome of any nation's politics. To make one's own nation, rather than one's relationship with God, the object of ultimate devotion was, he argued, itself a form of illusion, whatever the moral merits of the independence cause. Real benefit to humanity lay in restoring people's forgotten relationship with Krishna; political self-rule, however just a cause, could not by itself accomplish that. He spoke partly in English and partly in Bengali, quoting the Bhagavad-gita's instruction to surrender to the Supreme Personality of Godhead above all other duties, and the Srimad-Bhagavatam's verdict that religious practice pursued for any motive short of pure devotion is ultimately deficient.
Defeated, and Glad of It #
Abhay had been raised in a Vaishnava household and knew this territory well enough to recognize that Bhaktisiddhanta was not improvising a clever debating point but restating, with unusual force and clarity, the settled conclusions of scripture and the disciplic line he represented. He later described the effect plainly:
I was so much struck with wonder. I could understand: here is the proper person who can give a real religious idea.
He and Naren stayed talking with Bhaktisiddhanta for more than two hours before finally taking their leave. Walking back onto the dark Calcutta street afterward, Naren asked what he thought. "He's wonderful," Abhay replied. "The message of Lord Chaitanya is in the hands of a very expert person."
A Guru Accepted in the Heart #
Abhay did not take formal initiation that evening, or for more than a decade afterward -- marriage and business kept him from the kind of full commitment the Gaudiya Math's renounced preachers had made, a tension he recognized in himself even as he walked away from that first meeting. But something had already been settled. Recalling the encounter many years later, he put it this way:
I immediately accepted him as spiritual master. Not formally, but in my heart.
The distinction mattered. Formal initiation -- the ritual by which Abhay would eventually receive the name Abhay Charanaravinda -- was still eleven years away, an episode covered in The Order to Preach in English. But the substance of the relationship, in the account he gave later in life, began on the Ultadanga rooftop in 1922: an internal recognition of a guru that preceded, by more than a decade, any external ceremony confirming it.
Who Was Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati #
Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura (1874-1937) was the most consequential Gaudiya Vaishnava reformer of his generation, continuing and extending the work of his father, Bhaktivinoda Thakura, who had spent decades restoring the intellectual and social respectability of a tradition that had drifted, in many quarters, into disreputable practice. Bhaktisiddhanta founded the Gaudiya Math as a network of preaching centers across India, trained a generation of scholar-preachers regardless of their caste of birth, and held that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's teaching was meant not for one nation or sect but for the entire world. It was this last conviction, more than any specific argument about politics, that he was pressing on a skeptical young stranger the moment Abhay sat down before him. The full lineage this meeting placed Abhay within is described on this site's page on the Gaudiya Vaishnava sampradaya.
