Long before he ever knelt at Narottama Dasa Thakura's feet, Ganga Narayana Chakravarti was already one of the best-known men in Gambhila. He came from a wealthy brahmana family, had a scholar's education behind him, and ran a household school where, tradition says, hundreds of students studied under him at a time. In a Bengal where a brahmana's learning and birth still counted for almost everything, that combination made him a person of real standing — and, when Narottama's following began to grow, one of its sharpest critics.
An Uncomfortable Question of Caste #
The difficulty was not Narottama's teaching, which few could fault, but his birth. He belonged to the kayastha community, not the brahmana class, and had nonetheless begun accepting brahmana disciples of his own — a reversal of the usual order that offended exactly the kind of learned, caste-conscious brahmana Ganga Narayana then was. Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu himself had taught, a generation earlier, that genuine devotion rather than birth was what qualified a person to teach and initiate others, and Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami had set that same teaching down permanently in Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita. Ganga Narayana, like a good many brahmana scholars of his generation, had not yet made it his own. Gambhila — known today as Jiaganj, a few stops from Murshidabad on the bank of the Bhagirathi — was not a backwater where such questions could be avoided; it sat within a district thick with brahmana learning, and a scholar of Ganga Narayana's standing there had every reason to think his objection was simply common sense.
A Friend's Transformation #
What changed his mind, the sources agree, was watching someone close to him take initiation from Narottama and come back a different man — though exactly who that was is a point on which they disagree. One early account, from the family history kept at Gambhila itself, names a close friend and fellow scholar, Ramakrishna Acharya, whose sudden deepening in devotion after initiation left Ganga Narayana unable to explain it away. A separate modern account instead credits the association of Harirama Acharya, another of Narottama's disciples, with opening his eyes. Neither source can be checked against the other directly, and this page does not try to resolve which name is correct; what both agree on is the effect — a proud man watching, at close range, something in a friend's character that his own scholarship could not account for.
Regret, and a Decision #
The change in his friend did not stay a private observation for long. Ganga Narayana began to see his own past criticism of Narottama as an offense rather than a defensible opinion, and the regret that followed, by tradition, grew heavy enough that he resolved to seek out the very teacher he had once dismissed. That resolve, and the unusual way it was finally answered, is told on Initiation on the Bank of the Ganges — the episode by which Gambhila's proudest scholar became one of Narottama Dasa Thakura's most devoted disciples.