By about 1509, Nabadwip had changed beyond recognition. What had begun as a closed nightly gathering in the courtyard of Srivasa Pandit had, on Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own instruction, moved into the open; the Chaitanya-charitamrita says that congregational chanting was going on in every household of the town, and that nothing else could be heard in Nabadwip but the words "Hari! Hari!", the beating of mridangas and the clash of hand cymbals. That summary is told, along with the beginnings of the movement, on its own page. What follows here is the episode that ended the town's brief experiment in suppressing it — and the conversation, preserved in unusual detail by Krishnadasa Kaviraja, in which it was ended.
Nabadwip was administered under the Bengal Sultanate, and its magistrate was a qadi, a judge applying Islamic law, remembered in the Vaishnava literature simply as Chand Kazi. The complaints that reached him came from two directions, and the second is the more surprising. Some of the town's Muslim residents petitioned him, angered by the noise. But the Kazi himself later disclosed that he had also been approached by a delegation of five or seven orthodox Hindus — men who had known Nimai Pandita as a promising young scholar and now wanted him removed from the town. Their objections are recorded almost verbatim: that He had abandoned Hindu religious principles and invented a form of worship no scripture sanctioned; that singing and dancing all night were appropriate for the worship of local goddesses such as Mangalachandi and Vishahari but not for this; that since returning from Gaya He had begun singing, clapping, drumming, laughing, weeping, falling down and rolling on the ground, and had made the whole town as mad as Himself; that He had dropped His own name and taken to calling Himself Gaurahari; that nobody in the neighbourhood could sleep; and — the objection that goes to the heart of the matter — that lower-class people were now chanting the maha-mantra, and that a holy name heard by everyone would lose its potency. They asked the magistrate to make Him leave.
The Kazi acted one evening. He came to a house where kirtana was in progress, broke the mridanga with his own hands, and made three statements the biographer preserves: a taunt, that these people had never troubled to follow their own religion before and he would like to know on whose strength they were suddenly following it so enthusiastically; an order, that no one was to perform sankirtana in the streets of the town; and a threat, that he was excusing the offence this once, but that anyone found chanting in public again would have his property confiscated and would be converted to Islam. Then he went home.
The devotees brought the news to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and His first recorded response was not conciliatory: go and perform sankirtana, He said, and today I shall kill all the Muslims. What He actually did was something else. Seeing that the townspeople were now chanting in fear rather than joy, He called them together and gave instructions of a quite different kind. That evening the whole city was to be decorated. A torch was to be lit in every house. He would take responsibility for everyone's protection, and then, He said, let us see what sort of Kazi comes to stop our kirtana.
On the scale of what followed the sources differ, and it is worth saying so plainly. Krishnadasa Kaviraja, writing a compressed account, says the Lord formed three parties: Haridasa Thakura dancing at the head of the procession, Advaita Acharya dancing in the middle, and the Lord Himself dancing at the rear with Nityananda Prabhu moving beside Him. He then breaks off to say that Vrindavana Dasa Thakura has already described the whole incident elaborately in the Chaitanya-bhagavata, and that he will not repeat it — which is why the far larger figures familiar from popular retellings, commonly given as fourteen kirtana groups, come from the earlier biography rather than from the Chaitanya-charitamrita. What both agree on is the character of the thing: a night procession, lit by thousands of torches, moving deliberately through every quarter of the town and converging on the magistrate's house.
The Chaitanya-charitamrita does not idealise the crowd. It records that the sound terrified the Kazi, who shut himself in his room and would not come out; that the people, protected by the Lord and roaring in anger, became reckless; and that some of them wrecked his house and damaged his flower garden. The Lord had not ordered this, and the narrative gives no sign that He approved it. When He reached the house He did not go in. He sat down by the doorway and sent respectable men to ask the Kazi to come out.
The Kazi came, with his head down. What happened next is the reason this episode is remembered rather than the procession. The Lord stood, offered him respect, and gave him a seat — and then opened, in a friendly tone, with a complaint about manners: I have come to your house as your guest, and on seeing Me you hid in your room; what sort of etiquette is that? The Kazi answered candidly that the guest had arrived very angry, and that hiding had seemed the surest way of allowing him to calm down; now that he had, the visit was an honour.
Then the Kazi produced the fact on which the whole conversation turned. The scholar Nilambara Chakravarti, he said, was his uncle by village relationship — a bond he described as stronger than a bodily one. Nilambara Chakravarti was Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's maternal grandfather. That made the Kazi His maternal uncle and the Lord his nephew, and the Kazi drew the conclusion himself: when a nephew is angry the uncle tolerates it, and when the uncle gives offence the nephew does not take it seriously. From that point the two addressed each other as uncle and nephew for the rest of the exchange. Krishnadasa Kaviraja adds an intriguing note — that a good deal of what they said to each other was spoken in hints, and that nobody outside could follow the inner meaning of the conversation.
The Lord's questions did not begin with kirtana. They began with cows. You drink cows' milk, He said, so the cow is your mother; the bull produces the grain that maintains you, so he is your father; how then can you kill and eat your own father and mother, and what religion is that? The Kazi answered as the trained jurist he was. You have your Vedas and Puranas, he said; we have the Koran. It distinguishes two paths, one of increasing worldly engagement and one of decreasing it; on the path of renunciation the killing of animals is prohibited, and on the path of regulated activity it is permitted under scriptural sanction, and therefore not sinful. And he pressed a counter-attack: your own Vedic scriptures sanction the killing of a cow in sacrifice, and the great sages performed such sacrifices.
The Lord's reply granted the premise and denied the application. The Vedas do prohibit cow-killing, and the sacrificial exception depended on a condition: one may take a life for such a purpose only if one can restore it. The sages who performed those sacrifices took old and worn-out cows and revived them by the potency of Vedic mantra, so that what looked like killing was a benefit to the animal. Brahmanas of the present age have no such power, He said, which is why the sacrifice of a cow is among the acts specifically forbidden in the age of Kali. Since you cannot bring the animal back, the killing is simply killing, and the responsibility is yours.
The Kazi, the biographer says, was stunned into silence, considered the matter, and accepted defeat — and then conceded a great deal more than the argument required. What You have said is true, he answered; our scriptures are of recent composition and are not logical or philosophical; I know they contain a good deal of imagination and mistaken idea, and I accept them because I am a Muslim and for the sake of my community, though their support is thin. Whatever one makes of the theological content of this exchange, its recorded shape is that of a debate the Lord conducted entirely from His opponent's premises, and which His opponent conceded without being humiliated in front of the crowd.
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu then smiled and asked the question He had come to ask. Chanting goes on in your city day and night; as a Muslim magistrate you have the authority to stop Hindu ceremonies, and you have stopped enforcing your own order. Why? The Kazi asked to be taken somewhere private. The Lord refused — these are all My confidential associates, speak in front of them — and the Kazi, addressing Him by the name the town used, Gaurahari, told the whole story. On the night he had broken the drum he had dreamed of a form with the body of a man and the face of a lion, roaring, which sprang onto his chest, set its claws on him and said that it would tear him open exactly as he had broken the mridanga; it had spared him because the disturbance he had caused was not yet great, but promised to return if he interfered again. He had woken terrified. Here, he said, and opened his shirt in front of the assembly to show the marks of the claws; the people who saw them, the biographer records, accepted the incident as wonderful. Then his orderlies had come to him one by one, each with the same report: sent to stop the chanting, their faces had been scorched, their beards burned, their cheeks blistered. He had told them to go home and leave the chanting alone. And then the Muslims of the town had come back to complain again, and one of them explained the reason for his own visit: he had taken to mocking the Hindus, who name their sons Krishnadasa and Ramadasa and Haridasa and go about calling "Hari, Hari," and since that day his own tongue had chanted the name without stopping and he could not make it stop. Another man said the same. The Kazi's conclusion was simple and, from a Muslim judge, remarkable: I know that Narayana is the supreme God of the Hindus, and I think within my mind that You are that same Narayana.
The Lord touched him and told him that the three names he had just spoken — Hari, Krishna and Narayana — had wiped out the reactions of all his sinful activity, and that he was now supremely pure. The Kazi wept, took hold of the Lord's feet, and asked for one thing only: that his devotion should remain fixed. In return the Lord asked one charity of him. He wanted a pledge that the sankirtana movement would not be checked, at least in the district of Nadia. The Kazi's answer was framed not as a permission but as a binding instruction to his own line: to as many descendants as are born in my family in future, I give this grave admonition — no one is to stop the sankirtana movement. The Lord rose chanting, the whole assembly rose with Him, and the Kazi walked back with the kirtana party before being sent home.
The aftertaste of the episode has lasted five centuries. The Kazi's tomb still stands at Nabadwip beneath an old champaka tree; Vaishnavas visit it, and local tradition holds that his descendants honoured the pledge for generations. Historians of Bengal read the incident as one of the better-documented instances of accommodation, rather than confrontation, between the new devotional movement and the Sultanate's local administration. Gaudiya Vaishnavas read it differently and more simply. Faced with a legal ban, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu neither obeyed it nor met it with violence: He broke it in public, at scale, with light and sound and enough people that it could not be quietly punished, and then sat down in the dust outside the magistrate's door and talked to him until the ban was withdrawn by the man who had imposed it. The argument He used was not about the rights of Hindus. It was about cows, and then about the magistrate's own dream — and the concession He finally asked for was not for Himself but for a practice, in perpetuity, in a district He was about to leave for good.
