Founding the Gaudiya Math

Bhaktivinoda Thakura died on 23 June 1914. Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati's guru, Gaura Kishora Dasa Babaji, died the following year. Within twelve months, Bhaktisiddhanta had lost both the father who had guided him to his guru and the guru who had given him initiation, the two figures around whom his religious life had been organized for two decades. Most of Bhaktivinoda's other followers were householders, unable to take up a full-time missionary life, and Bhaktisiddhanta later described himself, in the aftermath, as nearly alone with a mission that seemed to exceed his means. What followed, over the next two decades, was one of the more ambitious institution-building efforts in modern Gaudiya Vaishnava history: the Gaudiya Math.

Alone With an Unfinished Mission #

After his father's death, Bhaktisiddhanta relocated the family's Calcutta press to Mayapur and then to nearby Krishnanagar, took over editorship of Bhaktivinoda's journal Sajjana-tosani, and completed the publication of the Chaitanya Charitamrita his father had begun. The deaths of his father and guru had also left the Chaitanya tradition, as he saw it, without any formal sannyasa order of its own. Established lineages such as Shankara's Advaita order, and the Vaishnavas of South India in the line of Ramanuja, had long-standing sannyasa institutions, but Gaudiya Vaishnavism, in the roughly four centuries since Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, had never formally instituted one. In 1918 Bhaktisiddhanta traveled to South India to study the tridanda sannyasa order maintained in Ramanuja's ashrams, and resolved to become the first sannyasi of Gaudiya Vaishnavism since Chaitanya's own associates.

Taking Sannyasa Before a Photograph #

There was, however, no living Gaudiya Vaishnava sannyasi from whom he could receive the order. On 27 March 1918, before leaving for Calcutta, Bhaktisiddhanta sat down before a photograph of Gaura Kishora Dasa Babaji and conferred sannyasa upon himself, since the guru who might otherwise have given it was no longer living. From that day he wore the dress of a Vaishnava renunciant and took the name Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Goswami Prabhupada. The photograph he sat before, and the circumstances of his guru's death the previous year, are described on Gaura Kishora Dasa Babaji's page on disappearance and legacy.

A Question Never Raised Within His Own Lineage #

The unconventional manner of the act, a sannyasa administered by no one but the recipient, has been a point some Vaishnava historians have debated since, questioning whether self-administered sannyasa can be considered formally valid by classical standards, given that the order is traditionally conferred by a living sannyasi guru. Within the Gaudiya Math itself, and within the ISKCON lineage that descends from it, the question has never been treated as a live one: Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati's sannyasa, and the authority it carried, were accepted without dispute by his own disciples and by every generation of theirs since.

Building a Mission From a Rented House #

In December 1918 Bhaktisiddhanta inaugurated his first center, called the Calcutta Bhaktivinoda Asana, at a rented house on Ultadinghi Junction Road in North Calcutta. Registered the following February under the name of Bhaktivinoda's own earlier society, the Vishva Vaishnava Raj Sabha, it became known simply as the Gaudiya Math after its Calcutta branch and the weekly Bengali magazine, Gaudiya, that Bhaktisiddhanta launched to carry its message; the center itself took the name Sri Gaudiya Math in 1920. From this single rented house, over the following two decades, the mission grew into an institution with sixty-four branches across India, stretching from Assam and Calcutta to Delhi, Varanasi, Mathura, Vrindavan, and Madras, and three centers abroad, in London, Berlin, and Rangoon.

The Scale of the Ambition #

A Vaishnava tradition four hundred years old, which had never organized itself into a formal missionary institution, was within two decades running dozens of monasteries, training initiated preachers, publishing periodicals in seven languages, including Bengali, English, Hindi, Assamese, and Oriya, and sending representatives to lecture before British officials and German academics in Europe. Bhaktisiddhanta himself framed the ambition in terms of technology as much as theology: where the mridanga drum played in kirtana could be heard for a street or two, he described the printing press he had built as a brihat mridanga, a "great drum" whose sound, through the printed page, could carry the teachings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu around the world. He initiated some twenty-five disciples into the sannyasa order he had founded and used every contemporary medium available to him, print, public kirtana processions, English-language periodicals, invitations to colonial officials, to spread a message he insisted must reach beyond caste, nationality, and social respectability alike.

A Lion Guru's Legacy #

His sharp public criticism of what he called a "society of cheaters and the cheated," aimed at hereditary caste privilege, professional reciters of the Bhagavatam, and imitation devotional movements, earned him among his followers the title acharya-keshari, "lion guru." The wider guru-lineage this mission stood within, and continues within today, is set out on this site's guru-parampara chart. By the time of his death in January 1937, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati had built, from a rented house and a handful of disciples, the largest organized missionary institution Gaudiya Vaishnavism had ever produced, and had already begun looking toward its expansion beyond India. Among the young men who would carry that expansion forward, unknown to him in his early Calcutta years and not yet formally his disciple, was a Calcutta businessman named Abhay Charan De.