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 — a respectable brahmana family of the town. The Chaitanya-charitamrita places the marriage after the death of Jagannatha Mishra, so it was Sachi Devi, a widow of limited means, who arranged it. The biographies describe the match being proposed after Sachi Devi observed her son and the girl meeting near the Ganges, and record the wedding as a modest, entirely conventional affair. Nimai was in His middle teens; His wife was younger still.

What followed was equally conventional. A young brahmana pandit with a school of His own, a widowed mother and a wife to support, needed an income, and teaching grammar in Nabadwip did not provide much of one. Nimai therefore did what many Bengali scholars of the period did: He travelled east, into what is now Bangladesh, to teach and to solicit the patronage of wealthy men there. The Chaitanya-charitamrita's sixteenth chapter records that the journey had a threefold purpose — to secure financial assistance, to continue His own study, and, significantly for what was to come, to introduce sankirtana. Even at this stage, before the transformation at Gaya, there are indications in the record that He was already teaching people in East Bengal to chant.

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

While Nimai was still in East Bengal, Lakshmidevi died at home in Nabadwip. The Chaitanya-charitamrita states that she was bitten by a serpent — and Krishnadasa Kaviraja, characteristically, leaves the phrase open, since 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. Nimai returned to a household that had now lost, in a few short years, a father, an elder son and a daughter-in-law, and to a mother whose grief the biographers describe without any attempt at consolation.

It was Sachi Devi who insisted on a second marriage, and Nimai who agreed to it out of deference to her rather than out of any desire of His own. The bride this time was Vishnupriya, daughter of Sanatana Mishra, a scholar of considerable standing who held the position of raja-pandita — court pandit — and whose household was materially far above that of the widow Sachi Devi. The marriage was accordingly a much grander occasion than the first, and Vaishnava accounts dwell on 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.

The household life that followed lasted only a few years, and it is these years that the tradition holds in a particular kind of tenderness. Nimai as a grihastha — teaching in the morning, returning to a house where His mother and His wife waited, arguing with pandits in the street, quite unremarkable in every outward particular — is the last period in which He belonged to anyone in the ordinary human way. Vaishnavas note that He was, by every account, an attentive son and a considerate husband, and that nothing in His conduct as a householder was deficient 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 intact.

Vishnupriya survived Him by many decades. Vaishnava literature records that she remained in Nabadwip after His departure, living in great austerity, worshipping a Deity of her husband and chanting on tulasi beads, setting aside one grain of rice for each round completed and cooking in the evening 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 personification of bhakti in separation — the mood that Mahaprabhu Himself would embody for the last years of His life at Puri.