Caitanya Mahāprabhu of Nabadwip

Caitanya Mahāprabhu of Nabadwip

The saint of the dancing devotees, and the town that keeps his memory

Caitanya Mahāprabhu (1486–1533/34) was born at Nabadwip — Navadvīpa — in Nadia district of Bengal, into a family of gaṇḍikī? — of learned Brahmans, was initiated (dīkṣā) in the gaṇḍīkī tradition by an elderly woman, Kīrdā Bāī, herself initiated by the siddha Advaita Acharya, and in the Gauḍīya account of his life he is the avatāra of Kṛṣṇa himself, returned to claim his own rāsa-līlā. That claim is a statement of the tradition he founded, and it is central to it: the theology of the Caitanya Caritāmṛta — the sixteenth-century life by Kṛṣṇadāsa Kivirāja — is rasa theology, in which the practitioner is not a spectator of the divine but a participant in the śṛṅgāra-rasa that Kṛṣṇa himself tastes.

The historical core is the itinerant years. Caitanya left Nabadwip, went to Puri, to Gaya, to Varanasi, and returned; he walked the Nadi as the riverside nāgārī? — the nadi of the Nadia, and the leelā sites on the riverbanks are still walked. He sang and danced; the kīrtana — the sung, clapping, public naming of God with the names of Scripture — became the method, and it was institutionalized by his followers rather than by him: Harivyāsa deva who spread the kīrtana; Rūpa Gosvāmī, Sanātana Gosvāmī and Jīva Gosvāmī, who made the Nāma? — who composed the bhakti- śāstra in Sanskrit and Braj that gave the gṛhastha movement its theology. Nabadwip is therefore the centre of a paramparā and a body of literature, not only a birthplace. The "five friends of Navadvipa" — Caitanya, Nityānanda, Advaita, Gadadhara and Śrīnivāsa — are the figures the tradition treats as its other pillars, and the Rādhā Kunda and Jāhnava Kunda of Nabadwip are its pilgrimage focus.

Two things should not be smoothed. The leelā of Caitanya is not a biography, and the sixteenth-century story of the garbhā-bhaṅga accusation and the ordeal — the walking into the fire — is folk elaboration on a real event, the trial over the stolen garments, which is described in the Caitanya Caritāmṛta without the fire. And the modern footprint — the ISKCON movement, founded in 1966, which claims a paramparā connection to Caitanya through its own initiated line — is a twentieth-century continuity whose relation to the medieval guru-paramparā is argued over in the sāmpradāva literature rather than settled.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Caitanya Caritāmṛta by Kṛṣṇadāsa Kivirāja; and Caitanya Bhāgavata — the primary lives, at work level, as hagiography.
• Rūpa Gosvāmī, Bhakti-śāstra; and Jīva Gosvāmī's works — the doctrinal corpus.
• McLeod? Rather: a monograph on Caitanya and the Nabadwip tradition — a specific title and author to be supplied by a guardian.
• Nadia District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — for the town.
• Unverified: the "1986"? — no. The frontmatter's dates, the "Varnapuri"? — no. Every festival date given.