Jahnava traveled between Bengal and Vraja more than once in her life. On an earlier visit, Rupa Goswami himself explained scripture to her directly — a mark of standing that few Vaishnavas of any generation received from him. It was a later journey, made after the Kheturi festival described on Presiding at the Kheturi Festival, that the Bhakti-ratnakara records in the most detail.
The Road to Vraja #
Leaving Kheturi, Jahnava's party traveled toward Vraja along a route that passed through a prosperous village where, the tradition records, she delivered a number of confirmed atheists and criminals and gave them Krishna-prema — the same mercy the sources elsewhere describe her extending to devotees of every station. Arriving in Vrindavana, she visited the samadhi of her own uncle, Gauridasa Pandita, discussed on Birth and Family, and is said to have wept at the sight of it. The senior Goswamis of Vrindavana were already there to receive her: Jiva Goswami, Gopala Bhatta Goswami, Lokanatha Goswami and Bhugarbha Goswami among them, along with Madhu Pandita, the priest of the Gopinatha Deity whose own temple would later carry Jahnava's name. Taking these leaders of the Vrindavana community with her, she visited the principal temples of Vraja in turn — Madana-mohana, Govinda, and Gopinatha — before going on to Radha-kunda.
Radha-Kunda with Raghunatha Dasa Goswami #
At Radha-kunda she met Raghunatha Dasa Goswami, by then living in constant chanting of the holy names, his body emaciated by decades of austerity, and notoriously the most severe and reclusive of the Six Goswamis toward ordinary visitors. He nonetheless spent a great deal of time personally showing her the ground at Radha-kunda. She remained there three days doing bhajana, and while sitting on the bank of the kunda she heard the sound of Krishna's flute and had a vision of Krishna Himself that overwhelmed her in waves of divine love; the ghat where this happened is still known today as Shri Jahnava Ghat. Afterward she joined a parikrama of the whole of Vraja-mandala with the Vaishnavas gathered around her, during which she heard Jiva Goswami himself discourse on his own Brihad-Bhagavatamrita.
The Return Through Bengal #
Rather than returning directly to Khardaha, Jahnava's route home retraced much of Gaudiya Bengal's own devotional geography: three or four days again at Kheturi, then Budhuri in Murshidabad district — the home of Ramachandra Kaviraja — then Ekachakra, Nityananda Prabhu's own birthplace, then Katwa, where Mahaprabhu had taken sannyasa and where she met Yadunandana Acharya, then Jajigrama, Shrinivasa Acharya's home village, then Shrikhanda, home of Raghunandana Thakura, then Navadwip, Ambika, and Saptagram, where she visited the house of Uddharana Datta Thakura, before finally returning to Khardaha. It was on this same journey that Jahnava, moved by what her stepson Virabhadra's close associate Parameshvara Dasa reported after his own vision of Radha and Gopinatha united in Vrindavana, instructed him to install the Deities of Radha-Gopinatha at Atapura, in Hooghly district — an episode also recorded, from a slightly different angle, on Leading the Movement After 1534.
The Deity of Jahnava Radhika #
The best-known result of her time at the Gopinatha temple concerns the Deity of Radharani installed there. Jahnava came to feel, seeing the small Deity of Radhika beside Gopinatha, that the couple would look still more complete with a larger one, and that same night, in a dream, Gopinatha is said to have asked her directly to arrange for a taller Radhika to stand beside him. She had a new Deity made in Bengal and brought it to Vrindavana; the Deity that has stood at Gopinatha's left ever since is still called Jahnava Radhika, while the original, smaller Deity was later taken to Jaipur. Some accounts of the temple's later history add a further layer to this story, tied to the account of her own disappearance, which is told on Legacy and Worship Today: more than any single episode in her life, this Deity is the reason her name is spoken today by pilgrims who may never have heard of Kheturi or Khardaha at all.