After taking up babaji life, Srila Gaura Kishora Dasa Babaji spent the greater part of five decades as a mendicant, moving chiefly between Vrindavan and Nabadwip and absorbed in chanting the names of Radha and Krishna. Wikipedia describes him as having become "famous for his teachings on the process of bhakti yoga and for his unorthodox avadhuta like behaviour as a sadhu." Almost none of that teaching survives as a documented text; what survives instead is a body of anecdote, recorded by his disciples and by others who observed him, describing conduct so free of ordinary social and material convention that Vaishnava literature classifies it as avadhuta — a manner of life considered to fall outside ordinary designations of caste, status, or possession.
| Years in Vrindavan | Roughly three decades, by one account, serving the deities of Vraja |
| 1897 | Traveled from Vrindavan to Nabadwip; there given the title "Bhajananandi" |
| 1908 | Lost his eyesight; stopped traveling and remained in one place, chanting |
Decades of Bhajan Between Two Holy Cities #
According to the biography at gaudiyahistory.iskcondesiretree.com, he spent about thirty years in Vraja mandala, living on madhukari — food gathered by begging from house to house — sleeping beneath trees, and offering obeisances to the residents, and even the trees and flowers, of Vrindavan as manifestations of Krishna's presence. In 1897 he traveled to Nabadwip, where he was given the title "Bhajananandi," a term for a renunciant absorbed wholly in devotional chanting rather than in preaching or scholarship. There he continued the same life: dancing on the banks of the Ganges calling out the name "Gaura," lying at times in states his disciples described as unconscious absorption, and visiting the groves along the river that Gaudiya Vaishnavas identify with the pastimes of Radha and Govinda.
An Avadhuta's Freedom From Convention #
The same source describes his personal habits in some detail: he owned nothing beyond a strand of tulasi beads and a hand-held chanting bead bag, sometimes went without even these, wound a knotted cloth to use as a substitute rosary, wore a single strip of cloth or, at times, none, and for clothing used discarded loin-cloths taken from corpses left at the cremation ground on the Ganges bank. He lived at times under an overturned, broken boat, and is said to have deliberately scattered fish bones near a hut he was using for bhajan, so that passers-by would take him for a fish-eater and leave him undisturbed. Bhaktivinoda Thakura, according to this same account, held him up as an example of "nirapeksha," or indifference to material honor and dishonor alike, saying his renunciation was "beyond belief."
Concealing His Own Learning #
A recurring theme in the reminiscences of his disciples is that Gaura Kishora Dasa Babaji gave every outward appearance of being unable to read or write, while being regarded by those close to him as deeply learned and self-realized. Vaishnava tradition holds that this was a form of deliberate humility rather than genuine illiteracy — a refusal to let his own scholarship become an object of pride or public notice — though no source consulted here supplies independent proof either way; it is presented here as his disciples' understanding, not as an established biographical fact.
Documented Glimpses of His Character #
A number of specific incidents recur across the secondary biographical literature. When his disciple Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati offered, after his blindness set in around 1908, to take him to Calcutta to see an eye specialist, he is recorded as refusing outright: "Never! I will never go to the material world." When his disciple asked how he had once reached the Yogapitha, Lord Chaitanya's birthplace, alone in the middle of the night, he would say only, "One person brought me across the river, that's all" — leaving Bhaktisiddhanta to conclude it could only have been Krishna. He is also recorded as having declined an invitation to the palace of the Maharaja of Kashimbazar, suggesting instead that the Maharaja give away his wealth and come live with him in a simple hut. These accounts come down through Vaishnava biographical literature compiled from the recollections of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati and his associates, not from independent contemporary documentation, and are reported here in that spirit — as tradition's memory of the man, rather than as verified incident reports.
"Renunciation Personified" #
A traditional Gaudiya Vaishnava verse of homage to him, still recited today and translated by Srila Prabhupada in a lecture at Los Angeles on 1 December 1968, captures how his own spiritual grandchildren remembered him:
I offer my respectful obeisances unto Srila Gaurakisora dasa Babaji Maharaja, who is renunciation personified. He is always merged in a feeling of separation and intense love of Krishna.
It was this same renunciant, in Initiating Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, who in 1900 accepted the scholarly son of Bhaktivinoda Thakura as his disciple.