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. According to the Chaitanya-bhagavata, one of the most specific pictures of Ishan Thakur's service comes from these years. 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. It was an ordinary household task, but it was done for the two whom Gaudiya Vaishnavas worship as the very center of the Panca-tattva.
A Branch on the Chaitanya Tree #
Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami later formally recorded Ishan Thakur for exactly this closeness. In Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita's Adi-lila, he pictures Mahaprabhu's associates as a huge tree with a trunk, branches and sub-branches spreading in every direction. He goes carefully through the list, naming devotee after devotee by their place on the tree. Ishan Thakur is counted as the fifty-eighth branch. He is listed in a single line alongside Srinatha Mishra, Subhananda, Sriram, Srinidhi, Sri Gopikanta and Misra Bhagavan. The verse gives only a bare mention of his name. This kind of passing reference is exactly what makes Srila Prabhupada's purport to the verse so valuable. The purport settles, as plainly as any available source, 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. 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. A commentary on that same passage by Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura shows what that humble service was really like. It shows him sweeping and cleaning the house, and gathering up rice that had been scattered through it during one of Nityananda Prabhu's own moments of ecstasy. It shows him keeping the household running when grief could easily have made it 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.
Gaudiya Vaishnava philosophy sees this as the highest position. Real perfection is humble, selfless service to the Lord's dear devotees, not any post or title. The ideal is summed up in the words gopi-bhartuh pada-kamalayor dasa-dasanudasah: "the servant of the servant of the servant of the lotus feet of Lord Sri Krishna, the maintainer of the gopis" (Chaitanya-charitamrita, Madhya-lila 13.80, quoted from Padyavali 74). Ishan Thakur, whose whole life was spent with a broom and a water pot, was a living example of this ideal.
The Only One Left Who Remembered #
Ishan Thakur outlived nearly everyone. By the time Vishnupriya Devi herself had passed on, most of the generation that had personally known Mahaprabhu in Nabadwip had gone with her. But Ishan Thakur was still there. All accounts agree that he was by then an old man, decades past the events he was describing. Three younger Vaishnavas who were central to the next generation of the movement made their own pilgrimage to Nabadwip. They were Shrinivasa Acharya, Narottama Dasa Thakura and Ramachandra Kaviraja. The devotional history Bhakti-ratnakara records that when they came, he alone could still show them where Mahaprabhu's pastimes had actually taken place. The sites themselves were already old and in poor condition. 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. According to Bhakti-ratnakara, they received the news of his passing there. Others they met along the way reported it to them. No known source records his date, his age, or any further detail about his final days. The sources tell 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. Then, quietly, he was gone.
