Advaita Acharya's wife was Sita Thakurani, the daughter of Sri Nrsimha Bhaduri, and she is honoured throughout Bengal in her own right rather than merely as the Acharya's consort. Vaishnava literature treats her as an incarnation of Yogamaya, the Lord's internal potency in its arranging aspect, and the episode for which she is best remembered is entirely characteristic of that role: she was among the first outside the immediate family to go and see the newborn Mahaprabhu.
The accounts describe her setting out for Mayapur when word came that a son had been born to Jagannatha Mishra and Sachi Devi, taking with her the things one takes to a newborn — ornaments, cloth, turmeric, sandalwood, garlands, and gifts for the mother. She is said to have understood immediately what she was looking at. It was Sita Thakurani who gave the child the name Nimai, after the nimba tree beside the house, on the reasoning that a name drawn from a bitter tree would protect Him from the attention of evil spirits. The name stuck for twenty-four years, and Bengal still uses it.
The household she and Advaita Acharya kept at Shantipura became one of the two or three principal centres of the movement, and its function was distinct from the others. Srivasa Angan at Nabadwip was where the sankirtana began; Puri was where the Lord finally settled; Shantipura was the place of refuge and of hospitality — the house the Lord was brought to after sannyasa, where Sachi Devi could reach Him, where devotees travelling between Bengal and Puri stopped. The Chaitanya-charitamrita has Mahaprabhu eating there repeatedly, and the domestic scale of those descriptions, with Sita Thakurani cooking and the household filling up with devotees, is part of why the place is remembered warmly.
They had several sons. The eldest, Acyutananda, was a devotee of note from childhood and is recorded in the Chaitanya-charitamrita as having, while still a boy, corrected an adult on a point of doctrine with a directness that astonished the company. Krishna Mishra, Gopala, Balarama, Svarupa and Jagadisha are also named in the various lists, though the sources differ on the number and the order.
Here the honest account of the family must record a division, because the tradition itself does. Not all of Advaita Acharya's sons continued in their father's line. Some departed from his teaching, and the later Gaudiya literature refers to them with real sorrow as having abandoned the path he had established; the split ran deep enough that the descendants of the two branches were afterwards distinguished from one another, and Vaishnava writers of the following generations treat the matter as one of the tradition's genuine griefs rather than as an embarrassment to be concealed. Acyutananda and those who remained with him are honoured; the others are not. It is a hard footnote to a family otherwise remembered for its hospitality and its devotion, and it belongs in any account that means to be truthful.
Sita Thakurani is also credited in Bengali Vaishnava tradition with a teaching role of her own. Women of the devotee families are described as coming to her, and she is remembered as having instructed them — a pattern that recurs in the tradition with Jahnava Mata a generation later, and one that the Gaudiya line has been notably readier to accommodate than most contemporary Indian religious movements were. Her samadhi and the family Deities are at Shantipura, and the site is still visited.
What the household at Shantipura contributed to the movement is best seen by asking what would have been missing without it. The sankirtana movement was, for its first years, a young men's affair conducted at night with the doors shut, and it drew on the energy of people in their twenties. Shantipura supplied something else — an established, respected, materially settled Vaishnava household headed by an elderly couple of unimpeachable standing, which could receive the Lord after His renunciation, could reconcile a grieving mother to what her son had done, and could give the whole movement a kind of social credibility that a courtyard full of ecstatic young men could not have generated on its own.
