Sri Sulochana

Sulochana is one of the devotees Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami names in the long roll call of associates who gathered around Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in Bengal. The name has no connection to the Ramayana's Sulochana, wife of Indrajit, or to any other unrelated Sulochana outside Gaudiya Vaishnavism -- this page is about the Bengali devotee Krishnadasa Kaviraja places among Mahaprabhu's own associates in Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita.

Named Among the Branches of the Chaitanya Tree #

Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami describes Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's following as a single all-merciful tree with many branches, and in this listing Sulochana holds a precise, numbered place: the forty-second branch, named in the very same breath as his close friend Chiranjiva, the forty-first. The same two verses name three devotees just before them -- Khandavasi Mukunda dasa and his son Raghunandana Thakura as the thirty-ninth branch, and Narahari Sarkar Thakura as the fortieth -- and Krishnadasa Kaviraja's own summary line for the whole group states plainly what they did with their lives: "They were all big branches of the all-merciful tree of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. They distributed the fruits and flowers of love of Godhead anywhere and everywhere." Beyond this one line, the text gives Sulochana no separate sentence of his own -- his recorded life is inseparable from this small circle of five men.

Srila Prabhupada's own purport to this verse fills in a good deal about Chiranjiva's family without adding anything further about Sulochana personally. Chiranjiva's elder son, Ramachandra Kaviraja, was a disciple of Shrinivasa Acharya and a close associate of Narottama Dasa Thakura, while his younger son, Govinda Dasa Kaviraja, became one of Bengal's best-loved Vaishnava poets. Both sons are recorded on this site in their own right: see Ramachandra Kaviraja and Govinda Dasa Kaviraja. No equivalent family record survives for Sulochana himself -- the purport names his companion's wife, father-in-law and two sons, but says nothing more about Sulochana's own household. The one scene in which this Srikhanda circle steps onto the page together, rather than simply being named in a list, comes years later at the Ratha-yatra festival in Jagannatha Puri -- see The Srikhanda Singers at Ratha-yatra.

Srikhanda or Shrihatta: Two Sources Disagree #

Sources disagree, even, on where Sulochana lived. Prabhupada's purport to Adi 10.78-79 states directly: "Cirañjiva and Sulocana were both residents of Śrikhaṇḍa, where their descendants are still living" -- the same village, four miles west of Katwa, already home to Raghunandana Thakura and Narahari Sarkar Thakura's families. But Kavi Karnapura's own Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika, in the very passage that gives Sulochana's identity in Krishna-lila (see below), states instead that Chiranjiva and Sulochana "lived in the village of Shrihatta." These are two different places in Bengal, and nothing in the sources checked for this page explains the discrepancy. Rather than silently picking one, this page reports both: the fuller documentary trail -- descendants, neighboring families, land records Prabhupada cites -- points to Srikhanda, but Kavi Karnapura's own text says Shrihatta.

His Identity in Krishna-lila #

Kavi Karnapura's Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika holds that many of Mahaprabhu's male associates were, in their eternal identity, gopis of Vraja who took male form to serve Him in Gaura-lila. In the same stretch of verses that names Chiranjiva as the former gopi Chandrika, the text closes its list with Sulochana as the former gopi Chandrashekhara, one of the many maidservants of Shrimati Radharani. Prabhupada's own purport confirms the Chiranjiva-Chandrika identification by verse number (Gaura-ganoddesha-dipika, verse 207) but does not spell out Sulochana's own verse number; the pairing given here rests on Kavi Karnapura's text placing the two names last, in matching order, in both of its parallel lists. This Chandrashekhara is unrelated to the historical Chandrashekhara Acharya of Varanasi, a different person the same tradition remembers separately.

A Second Devotee of the Same Name #

Chaitanya-charitamrita is not finished with the name Sulochana after Adi-lila 10. One chapter later, in the list of Lord Nityananda Prabhu's own personal associates, a devotee named Sulochana appears again -- the fifty-seventh in that separate roll call, following Vasanta, Navani Hoda, Gopala, Sanatana, Vishnai and Krishnananda (Adi-lila 11.50). Krishnadasa Kaviraja gives no further word about this second Sulochana, and Prabhupada's purport to the verse says nothing to link or distinguish him from the Srikhanda devotee described above. Whether this is one man remembered twice, in two different groupings, or two different devotees who happened to share a name, none of the sources checked for this page say. It is reported here as an open question rather than resolved either way.