The Magistrate and the Manuscript

At eighteen, Kedarnath Datta began earning his living as a teacher in rural Bengal and Orissa, moving through a string of village and English-medium schools before, in 1866, entering the judicial service of the British Raj. Over the next twenty-eight years he rose from a junior grade to District Magistrate, and along the way, almost incidentally, found the manuscript that would fix the direction of the rest of his life.

Teacher in Bengal and Orissa #

Kedarnath's working life began modestly. In 1858, financial pressure on his young family sent him to Chutimangal in Orissa, where he took a post as an English teacher, first at a village school and then, after passing a qualifying examination, at a school in Cuttack. From 1862 to 1865 he served as the first headmaster of Bhadrak High School. The years brought a small measure of financial stability, and with it time to write, lecture, and study; he began to acquire a local reputation as an intellectual voice among the educated Bengalis of the district. They also brought grief: his first wife, Shyamani, died in 1861, leaving him a widower at twenty-three with an infant son, Annada Prasad. He soon remarried, to Bhagavati Devi, who would become the mother of his thirteen other children and his companion through the decades that followed.

Into the Judicial Service #

In February 1866, with a friend's help, Kedarnath secured a government post as Special Deputy Registrar of Assurances, carrying the powers of a Deputy Magistrate and Deputy Collector, in Chhapra in Bihar's Saran district. For an educated Bengali of his generation, a position in the executive government service was among the most coveted available: it offered financial security, social standing, and a pension, at a cost of long hours and frequent transfers. Over the following twenty-eight years his postings carried him and his growing family through some twenty locations across Bihar, Bengal, and Orissa. He proved himself, by the account of his own superiors, a capable and scrupulously honest officer, and along the way taught himself Urdu and Persian for his official duties and Sanskrit for the devotional study that was steadily becoming his private preoccupation.

An Eight-Year Search for a Manuscript #

It was during a posting to Dinajpur in 1868 that Kedarnath's devotional life took a decisive turn. He had, for some years, been searching for a copy of the Chaitanya-charitamrita, Krishnadasa Kaviraja's sixteenth-century biography of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and a Bengali translation of the Bhagavata Purana, the two texts most central to Gaudiya Vaishnava theology. After a search his later accounts put at eight years, he finally located copies at a publishing house in Calcutta. Reading the Chaitanya-charitamrita, he later wrote, unsettled him before it converted him: "On the second reading I understood that Caitanya was unequalled, but I doubted how such a good scholar with so high a level of prema could recommend the worship of Krishna, who had such a questionable character. I was amazed, and I thought about this in detail... From then on I believed that Caitanya was God." The passage captures exactly the tension that would define his life's work: an educated, skeptical, Western-trained mind working its way, argument by argument, toward the devotional claims of his own tradition rather than simply inheriting them.

Deputy Magistrate at Jagannatha Puri #

Kedarnath's next major posting, from 1870 to 1875, took him to Jagannatha Puri, Chaitanya's own residence for most of his adult life and the seat of the great Jagannatha temple. His official duties there were substantial: he was charged with keeping order among the pilgrims who thronged the temple during festivals, arranging food, lodging, and medical care for them, and investigating threats to public order. In one notable case, he built a legal file against a self-proclaimed avatar named Bishakishana, who claimed divine status, was drawing large crowds with displays of yogic power, and had been accused of exploiting his followers; Kedarnath's investigation led to a conviction and, according to Vaishnava biographers, to the man's own end soon after. Off duty, Puri became the place where Kedarnath's devotional and scholarly life deepened in earnest. He studied Sanskrit intensively under local pandits, worked through core Gaudiya philosophical texts such as Jiva Goswami's Sat Sandarbhas and Baladeva Vidyabhushana's Govinda Bhashya, and founded a discussion circle, the Bhagavat Samsad, where he lectured on the Bhagavata Purana to an audience of local bhadralok. This drew criticism from some pandits associated with the temple's Mukti Mandapa, who objected that he lectured on Vaishnava scripture without having taken formal initiation, but it also marked the beginning of his career as a Vaishnava teacher in his own right. It was also in Puri, in February 1874, that his seventh child, Bimala Prasad, was born - the son who would later be known as Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura.

The Officer and the Devotee #

For the rest of his working life, Kedarnath lived a schedule that fused his two vocations rather than choosing between them. By later accounts of his household routine, he would go to bed at nine or half past, rise at ten in the evening, and write for six hours through the night before a short nap and a rise before dawn to chant. Mornings were given to correspondence, study, and visitors; the working day itself, from ten until five, was given to the bench, where he might hear as many as fifty cases and write a judgment for each. He carried this arrangement for nearly three more decades, retiring from government service on 4 October 1894 at the age of fifty-six, by which time his private writing and preaching had already produced most of the body of work described on the next page, Literary Works.