Not every devotee at Puri received a personal assignment from Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Satyaraja Khan's family did. Chaitanya-charitamrita records that Ramananda Vasu and Satyaraja Khan were present from Kulina-grama, and that "Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, with great respect, gave them the following orders" — to become the worshipers of the ropes used to pull Lord Jagannatha's chariot, and to bring silken rope from their own village every single year for the festival. It was not a ceremonial gesture. Silk-rope manufacture was apparently a real trade of Kulina-grama's residents, and Mahaprabhu turned that ordinary village craft into an annual act of Deity service, tying His two Bengali householder-devotees permanently to Nandighosa, the great chariot that carries Lord Jagannatha through the streets of Puri every year at Ratha-yatra, and to the largest festival held there.
Sold To The Descendants Of Gunaraja Khan #
The depth of Mahaprabhu's feeling for this family surfaces in the same conversation. He first told the Kulina-grama devotees that Gunaraja Khan's Sri Krishna-vijaya — a Bengali retelling of Krishna's pastimes from the Tenth and Eleventh Cantos of Srimad-Bhagavatam, written so plainly that even ordinary readers with little education could follow it — contained a line revealing its author's own ecstatic love for Krishna. Then, in one of the most quoted single lines connected with this family, He recited a verse about His own attachment to Krishna, the son of Nanda Maharaja, and added, of Himself: "By this statement I am sold into the hands of the descendants of Gunaraja Khan." It is an extraordinary thing for the Lord to say about anyone, let alone a family remembered mainly for its silk-rope service — and Mahaprabhu did not stop there. He told them directly, "even a dog living in your village is very dear to Me. What, then, to speak of others?" Coming one after another in the same conversation, the praise of the father's book and this declaration about the son's household read as two parts of a single, connected regard. Kulina-grama's devotion, however quietly it was expressed through poetry, rope-making and yearly journeys, had reached Mahaprabhu completely.
An Ordinary Service, Repeated Every Year #
What makes this episode worth telling on its own, apart from the drama of Mahaprabhu's words, is how undramatic the actual service was. Rope for a chariot is not a scripture, a poem or a philosophical argument — it is rope, made by hand in a Bengali village and carried several hundred miles to Orissa, year after year, so that a wooden Deity's cart could be pulled through the streets of Puri. Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own attention to this detail is a small but concrete illustration of a theme this whole family's history keeps returning to: that in Gaudiya Vaishnavism a very plain, physical act of service, taken up without complaint and repeated faithfully, can carry exactly the same weight as any more visibly spiritual achievement. Satyaraja Khan seems to have taken this lesson personally rather than only receiving it as an instruction — how he then asked Mahaprabhu, in his own words, what a householder like himself should actually do with his life, is told at how to recognize a Vaishnava.