When Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura set out to establish, once and for all, the true site of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's birth, he did not do so alone. He asked Jagannatha Dasa Babaji — by then a very old man, respected across the Gaudiya Vaishnava world as its foremost living authority — to accompany him, and it is Jagannatha Dasa Babaji's part in that search that Vaishnava tradition remembers as one of the great pastimes of his long life.
A Shifted River and a Vanished Town #
The problem Bhaktivinoda faced was genuinely difficult. Over three centuries the Ganges had repeatedly changed course through the nine islands of Nabadwip, submerging some places and exposing others, so that the town called Nabadwip in Bhaktivinoda's own day turned out, on inspection, to be barely a hundred years old — plainly not the Nabadwip in which Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had been born. Opinion among local Vaishnavas was divided: some held the birthplace now lay beneath the river itself, others that it stood somewhere within the modern town. Dissatisfied with rumour, Bhaktivinoda turned to antiquarian maps, government land records and Vaishnava texts written in Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own era, all of which agreed that the true site of Mayapur-Nabadwip lay on the east bank of the Ganges — and there he found several large mounds, thickly overgrown with sacred tulasi plants, on land then owned by Muslim landholders who avoided the site themselves, believing it haunted by strange lights and sounds.
Carried to the Spot in a Basket #
Many of the old babajis of the area already believed this overgrown, avoided ground to be the actual birthplace of Mahaprabhu, and it was Jagannatha Dasa Babaji — by this point so old and infirm that he could not open his own eyes without forcing them apart with his fingers, and could not walk at all — whose confirmation Bhaktivinoda most wanted. Bihari Dasa carried him there in the same basket in which he carried him everywhere in those last years.
Upon arriving at the site, Jagannatha Dasa Babaji leapt out of the basket unassisted and danced in ecstasy, shouting "Haribol!" and "Gauranga!" — establishing, to everyone present, that this was indeed the place.
Traditional accounts date this decisive visit to 1893, when Jagannatha Dasa Babaji went from Koladwipa to Surabhi-kunja in Godrumadwipa; it was on this same expedition that he is said to have identified not only the birth-site itself but other lost holy places nearby, including the Yogapitha and Srivasa Angana, the courtyard where the sankirtana movement had begun. A verse of homage still recited in the Gaudiya Vaishnava community credits him directly with the discovery:
gaura-virbhava-bhumes tvam nirdesta sajjana-priyah
vaisnava-sarvabhaumah sri-jagannathaya te namah
"I offer my respectful obeisances unto Sri Jagannatha Dasa Babaji Maharaja, dear to the devotees, who is honoured by the entire Vaishnava community as Vaishnava Sarvabhauma, and who pointed out the place of Lord Gaura's appearance."
Settling at Nabadwip #
After this, Jagannatha Dasa Babaji remained in the Nadia area, performing bhajan on the bank of the Ganges; his bhajan kutir and samadhi shrine stand there to this day. On his instruction, Bhaktivinoda Thakura built a hut nearby so that visiting devotees would have somewhere to stay close to him — the seed of what would grow into a settled devotee community at the very site his old age and Bhaktivinoda's persistence had together recovered. The unusual, often very funny character he displayed in these final years at Nabadwip, as witnessed by his servant Bihari Dasa, is described here, and his part in guiding both Bhaktivinoda Thakura and the young Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati is told here.