Most of the Vaishnavas of the generation in which Gadadhara Pandit grew up had come to Nabadwip from somewhere else. In the fifteenth century, learned brahmana families in Bengal often moved from place to place. Nabadwip, as the most famous seat of Sanskrit study in the province, drew them in. The family of Gadadhara Pandit came from the far east of the region, from the Chittagong district, in what is now Bangladesh. There they belonged to the group of brahmanas known as Varendra. His father was Madhava Mishra and his mother was Ratnavati Devi. He had a younger brother, Baninath. The family considered itself part of the Kashyapa gotra.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Year of birth | Saka 1408, or 1486 of the Western calendar |
| Father | Madhava Mishra |
| Mother | Ratnavati Devi |
| Younger brother | Baninath |
| Family origin | Varendra brahmanas of the Chittagong district |
| Gotra | Kashyapa |
Two Accounts of His Birthplace #
The biographies differ on one point of detail, and we record both versions here instead of smoothing over the difference. Some accounts, including the life compiled by Bhakti Ballabh Tirtha Maharaja, place his birth in the village of Beleti in Chittagong in the Saka year 1408, or 1486 of the Western calendar. They say that the family moved to Nabadwip when the boy was twelve. Other accounts say the family had already settled on the Ganges bank at Mayapur before he was born, a few doors from the house of Jagannatha Mishra. They describe Ratnavati Devi as being like a sister to Sachi Devi and constantly in and out of her house. The whole body of stories about Gadai and Nimai as inseparable small boys rests on this second version, and it is the version most Gaudiya Vaishnavas know. All the accounts agree that he was born in the same year as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, or within a year of it. They also agree that from a very early age the two were in each other's company.
Nimai and Gadadhara as Boys #
This near-equal age matters, because almost nothing else about the two boys matched. Nimai was famous for His love of fighting with words. His memory was amazing. By His teens His command of grammar and logic was so strong that no scholar in the town would willingly meet Him in argument. He also enjoyed argument for its own sake. The biographies describe Him tearing down a position and then building it up again better than its author had, purely to show that He could. Gadadhara was the opposite kind of person. He was quiet, serious, physically slight and not interested in debate. Every source insists that from childhood he did not care for the ordinary pleasures of the world. He was drawn instead to the older Vaishnavas of Nabadwip. They were a little circle who met at Advaita Acharya's house to read the Bhagavatam and chant the holy names. At that time this circle counted for very little in the town, where religious respect belonged to ritualists and logicians.
Nimai's Question About Liberation #
Vrindavana Dasa Thakura preserves an exchange from those school years. Looking back, it reads like a joke the Lord was playing on Himself. Nimai had a habit of stopping devotionally minded students in the street and tangling them in questions they did not want to answer. He asked Gadadhara to define liberation. Gadadhara answered as a student of Nyaya would answer: liberation is the final and absolute cessation of all misery. Nimai then took the definition apart. The devotees standing by are said to have watched this display. They thought how wonderful it would be if such a brilliant young man ever became a devotee. At that stage they had entirely given up hope of this. It is the same pairing that would define the two men for the rest of their lives, with the terms reversed: the one who could out-argue anybody, and the one who never argued at all.
Isvara Puri and the Krishna-lilamrita #
Something else belongs to this period. Isvara Puri was the Vaishnava sannyasi who would later give Mahaprabhu initiation at Gaya. He spent some months in Nabadwip during these years. The accounts say he was struck by the young Gadadhara's detachment and personally taught him his own composition, the Krishna-lilamrita. It is only a short mention, but it places Gadadhara inside the Madhavendra Puri line of devotion well before the sankirtana movement began. It also explains why he needed no persuading when the movement did begin.
A Lifelong Brahmachari #
Gadadhara Pandit never married. He remained a brahmachari for his whole life. In a society where almost every brahmana married as a matter of course, this was very noticeable. It also made possible the kind of life he later lived: the move to Jagannatha Puri, the vow to remain there, and the decades of Deity service with no household to divide him.
The Pleasure Potency in the Panca-tattva #
Gaudiya theology places him fourth among the five features of the Panca-tattva, and defines that place quite exactly. Krishnadasa Kaviraja writes that three of the five, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Nityananda Prabhu and Advaita Acharya, are to be worshipped by all living beings. He writes that the fourth is to be understood as their worshipper. Elsewhere he writes that Gadadhara Pandit is an incarnation of the pleasure potency of Krishna, with whom no one is to be compared. Kavi Karnapura, in the Gaura-ganoddesa-dipika, is more specific still. He says that the pleasure potency who was formerly the queen of Vrindavana is present in Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's pastimes as Gadadhara Pandit. He adds that something of Lalita, Radharani's closest friend, has entered him as well. So the tradition does not understand him as an unusually devoted friend of the Lord. It understands him as the Lord's own internal energy in a male brahmana body, the shakti standing beside the shaktiman. This is why the Deity pair worshipped in a great many Bengali temples is not Gaura alone but Gaura-Gadadhara.
Whether or not a reader shares that theology, it is worth noticing what the tradition chose to say it with. It could have located the pleasure potency of God in some visibly extraordinary figure. Instead it located her in a retiring, unassertive boy from the next street who was no good at debate, who never founded anything, and whose entire public career consisted of standing next to somebody else. The friendship that began in those Nabadwip lanes is taken up here.
