By the time Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had grown into a married scholar in Nabadwip, His father Jagannatha Mishra had died, and the household Ishan Thakur served had narrowed to Sachi Devi alone. It was in these years, according to the Chaitanya-bhagavata, that one of the most specific images of Ishan Thakur's service survives: before Mahaprabhu and Nityananda Prabhu sat down to eat together in Sachi's house, it was Ishan Thakur who brought the water to wash their feet - an ordinary household task performed for two figures Gaudiya Vaishnavas worship as the very center of the Panca-tattva.
A Branch on the Chaitanya Tree #
Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami later placed Ishan Thakur formally on record for exactly this closeness. In Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita's Adi-lila, he pictures Mahaprabhu's associates as an immense tree with a trunk, branches and sub-branches spreading in every direction, and works methodically through the list, naming devotee after devotee by their place on it. Ishan Thakur is counted as the fifty-eighth branch, listed in a single line alongside Srinatha Mishra, Subhananda, Sriram, Srinidhi, Sri Gopikanta and Misra Bhagavan - a bare mention by name, exactly the kind of passing reference that makes Srila Prabhupada's purport to the verse so valuable. It settles, as plainly as any source available, which household Ishan Thakur actually belonged to: "Isana was the personal servant of Srimati Sacidevi, who showered her great mercy upon him. He was also very dear to Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu."
Left Behind With the Two Women Who Loved Him Most #
Everything changed again when Mahaprabhu accepted the sannyasa order and departed Nabadwip for Puri, never to return. He left behind His mother and His young wife, Vishnupriya Devi, and Ishan Thakur - together with another household attendant, Vamsivadana Thakura - stayed on to care for both of them for the rest of their lives. The Chaitanya-bhagavata calls him, in this role, "most fortunate in the fourteen worlds" for having served the Lord's mother constantly, and a commentary on that same passage by Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura pictures the actual, unglamorous shape of that service: sweeping and cleaning the house, gathering up rice that had been scattered through it during one of Nityananda Prabhu's own ecstatic outbursts, keeping a household running that grief could easily have let fall apart. There was no limit, the commentary concludes, to Ishan's good fortune - he was able to render service to the Lord's mother throughout his entire life.
The Only One Left Who Remembered #
Ishan Thakur outlived nearly everyone. By the time Vishnupriya Devi herself had passed on, and with her most of the generation that had personally known Mahaprabhu in Nabadwip, Ishan Thakur - by every account an old man decades past the events he was describing - was still there. When three younger Vaishnavas central to the next generation of the movement, Shrinivasa Acharya, Narottama Dasa Thakura and Ramachandra Kaviraja, made their own pilgrimage to Nabadwip, the devotional history Bhakti-ratnakara records that he alone could still show them where Mahaprabhu's pastimes had actually taken place, the sites themselves already old and in disrepair: nearly everyone had disappeared from Navadwip, the verse says - no one but the Lord's servant Ishan remained.
A Death Learned of on the Road #
Ishan Thakur blessed and embraced the three pilgrims before they continued on from Nabadwip to Shrikhanda, to meet Raghunandana Thakura. It was there, according to Bhakti-ratnakara, that they received the news of his passing, reported to them by others they met along the way. No date, no age, and no further detail about his final days survive anywhere in the sources consulted for this page - only that a servant who had held the infant Lord on his lap lived long enough to become, for a little while, the last living link to that infancy, and then quietly was not there anymore.