Marriage and Household Life

Marriage came to Nimai in the ordinary way and at the ordinary age. The bride was Lakshmipriya, also called Lakshmidevi, the daughter of Vallabhacharya of Nabadwip, from a respectable brahmana family of the town. The Chaitanya-charitamrita places the marriage after the death of Jagannatha Mishra, so Sachi Devi, a widow with little money, arranged it. The biographies say the match was proposed after Sachi Devi saw her son and the girl meeting near the Ganges. They record the wedding as a simple and entirely traditional one. Nimai was in His middle teens, and His wife was younger still.

The Teaching Journey to East Bengal #

What followed was just as ordinary. Nimai was a young brahmana pandit with a school of His own, and He had a widowed mother and a wife to support. He needed an income, and teaching grammar in Nabadwip did not provide much of one. So Nimai did what many Bengali scholars of that time did. He travelled east, into what is now Bangladesh, to teach and to seek the support of wealthy men there. The sixteenth chapter of the Chaitanya-charitamrita records that the journey had three purposes. They were to get financial help, to continue His own study, and to introduce sankirtana, which was important for what was to come. Even at this stage, before the transformation at Gaya, there are signs in the record that He was already teaching people in East Bengal to chant.

The Meeting With Tapana Mishra #

On this journey He met Tapana Mishra, a brahmana who was troubled about the goal of life and came to Nimai for guidance. Nimai instructed him in devotional service and told him to go and live at Varanasi. The instruction seems strange until one knows what happened later. Years later, when Mahaprabhu came to Varanasi as a sannyasi to challenge the Mayavadi scholars of that city, He took His meals in Tapana Mishra's house. Tapana Mishra's son Raghunatha served Him there. The tradition reads the episode as an early example of the Lord arranging His own future circumstances well in advance.

The Snakebite and the Death of Lakshmipriya #

While Nimai was still in East Bengal, Lakshmidevi died at home in Nabadwip. The Chaitanya-charitamrita states that she was bitten by a serpent. As he often does, Krishnadasa Kaviraja leaves the phrase open. Gaudiya commentators have long read it as the serpent of separation, meaning that she could not survive being parted from Him. She was very young. In a few short years the household had lost a father, an elder son and a daughter-in-law. Nimai returned to that household, and to a mother whose grief the biographers describe as it was, without any attempt to soften it.

The Second Marriage to Vishnupriya #

It was Sachi Devi who insisted on a second marriage. Nimai agreed to it out of respect for her, not out of any desire of His own. The bride this time was Vishnupriya, daughter of Sanatana Mishra. Sanatana Mishra was a scholar of high standing who held the position of raja-pandita, court pandit. His household was far richer than that of the widow Sachi Devi. So the marriage was a much grander occasion than the first. Vaishnava accounts describe at length the procession, the assembled pandits, and the astonishment of Nabadwip that the most brilliant young scholar in the town should be marrying into its most distinguished family.

Nimai as a Householder #

The household life that followed lasted only a few years, and the tradition remembers these years with a special tenderness. As a grihastha, Nimai taught in the morning and came back to a house where His mother and His wife waited. He argued with pandits in the street. In every outward detail His life was quite ordinary. This was the last period in which He belonged to anyone in the ordinary human way. Vaishnavas note that, by every account, He was an attentive son and a considerate husband, and that nothing in His conduct as a householder was lacking or half-hearted. This matters to the tradition because of what came next. When He renounced it all at twenty-four, walking out at night without a farewell, He was not abandoning a life that had disappointed Him or a family He had failed. He was giving up something that was still whole.

Vishnupriya Devi in Separation #

Vishnupriya survived Him by many decades. Vaishnava literature records that she remained in Nabadwip after His departure, living in great austerity. She worshipped a Deity of her husband and chanted on tulasi beads. For each round she completed, she set aside one grain of rice, and in the evening she cooked only what she had counted out that day. In Gaudiya Vaishnavism she is honoured not as a wife who was left behind, but as the living form of bhakti in separation. This is the mood in which Mahaprabhu Himself would live for the last years of His life at Puri.