Ekachakra is not the kind of place from which movements are expected to start. It lies in the district of Birbhum, in the tract of western Bengal that the old texts call Radhadesha, literally the country where the Ganges is not visible. Nabadwip, some sixty miles to the east, was the most celebrated seat of Sanskrit learning in the province, a town of logicians and grammarians where a young scholar could make a national reputation. Ekachakra was farmland: a long straggling settlement of hamlets, a small river called the Maudesvara which local people treated as their Yamuna, a shrine of Siva, a tamarind tree, and a village schoolmaster. It was in that schoolmaster's house, in about 1474, that Sri Nityananda Prabhu was born.
His father was Hadai Ojha, known also as Hadai Pandita; the second name simply records that he was a learned brahmana who taught. The genealogies make him the son of Sundaramalla Nakadi Baduri, a brahmana of the Radha clan. He kept a primary school close to his own house, and he maintained the worship of a Siva deity called Bhandisvara on the northern side of the village. His wife was Padmavati Devi. The Vaishnava biographies say almost nothing about the couple's circumstances beyond the fact that they were poor, respectable and devout, and that they loved this son past all reason, a detail that matters, because it is what makes the next chapter of his life so painful.
The date given by the tradition is the thirteenth day of the bright fortnight of the month of Magha in the Saka year 1395, which corresponds to the early part of 1474 by the Western calendar; some authorities give 1473. The day is kept across the Gaudiya world as Nityananda Trayodasi, and it falls, appropriately, a few weeks before Gaura Purnima. He was thus about twelve years older than Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who was born at Nabadwip in February 1486. The household called him Nitai, and the name has stuck so firmly that in Bengal the two of them are still spoken of together as Nitai-Gaura, with the servant's name placed first.
Vrindavana Dasa Thakura, whose Chaitanya-bhagavata is the source for almost everything we know of these years, records that auspicious signs attended the birth and that hardship in the surrounding country lifted. He also relates that on the day Mahaprabhu appeared at Nabadwip, twelve years later, the boy at Ekachakra shouted aloud in joy with a sound that carried an extraordinary distance, so that people said a thunderbolt had struck, and that nobody understood what had actually happened. These are things known only from devotional literature, and the tradition reports them as such. What it insists on without qualification is the identity: that the child born in Hadai Pandita's house was Balarama, the elder brother of Krishna, come down first.
That word first carries the theological weight of the whole episode, and it is worth setting out plainly, because a reader coming to this fresh will reasonably ask why the deputy should arrive before the principal. Krishnadasa Kaviraja's answer, in the fifth chapter of the Adi-lila, is that Balarama is not a deputy at all in the ordinary sense. Krishna is the fountainhead of all incarnations; Balarama is His second body, the same identity in a different form, the first expansion, who exists in order to assist Krishna's pastimes and who tastes, in every one of His forms, the bliss of serving Him. When that original Krishna appeared at Nabadwip as Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Balarama appeared with Him as Nityananda. The relation is not one of rank but of function.
And the function is prior. In Gaudiya theology Balarama is the sandhini potency, the energy of existence: He supplies the ground on which anything at all can happen. Krishnadasa Kaviraja works this out through a long chain of expansions, from Balarama as the original Sankarshana, to Maha-sankarshana in the spiritual sky, to the three Vishnu forms who lie on the Causal Ocean, the Garbha Ocean and the ocean of milk, to Ananta Sesa who bears the worlds. The universes rest on Him. So do the living beings, of whom Sankarshana is called the shelter. If the Lord is to appear anywhere, the setting, the associates and the paraphernalia of that appearance are all extensions of Balarama, which is why the first move in any descent is His. It is the order Vraja itself observed: in the Bhagavatam the son of Rohini is born before the son of Devaki, and when Garga Muni performs the secret name-giving ceremony he names Him Rama for the joy He gives, Bala for His strength, and Sankarshana because He joins two families together.
There is a further reason the tradition gives, and it belongs specifically to Nityananda rather than to Balarama in general. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu came to distribute love of God without conditions. A gift of that kind needs someone to carry it to the door, and the office of carrying it, of introducing a soul to the Lord and making it fit to be introduced, is the office of the spiritual master. Gaudiya Vaishnavism holds that this office belongs originally to Balarama, that he is the adi-guru, and that Nityananda Prabhu is guru-tattva embodied. Seen that way, the twelve years between Ekachakra and Nabadwip are not an accident of the calendar. The teacher is in place before the lesson begins. That doctrine is taken up more fully on the page on the mercy of Nitai.
The birthplace itself is still there, and is one of the principal pilgrimage sites of the Gaudiya world. The spot where the birth took place is called Garbhavasa, and land was settled on it long ago to maintain the worship, the Maharaja of Dinajpur adding a substantial donation. Half a mile away stands the temple whose central Deity is Banka Raya, also called Bankima Raya, a form of Krishna which, according to the priests of Ekachakra, Nityananda Prabhu Himself recovered from the water at the Kadamba-khandi ghat on the little river and installed. A deity of Srimati Radharani found under a nima tree at Bhaddapura, in the neighbouring village of Viracandrapura, was placed at His side, and is still known locally as the mistress of Bhaddapura. Jahnava Mata now stands on Banka Raya's right. The temple was struck by lightning in 1924 and rebuilt; the surrounding villages of Viracandrapura and Virabhadrapura carry the name of Nityananda's son. Srila Prabhupada set the whole topography down in his purport to the verse of the Chaitanya-charitamrita which does no more than note that Nityananda Prabhu took birth in Radhadesha, one of the longest geographical purports in the book, and a sign of how much the place matters to the tradition.
For Gaudiya Vaishnavas the significance of the advent is finally a matter of direction. The movement's own story does not begin in the university town. It begins in a village on the wrong side of the river, in the house of a man who taught children their letters, with a boy whose whole later career consisted of going to people no one else would go to. Everything Nityananda Prabhu is remembered for, the door-to-door preaching in Nabadwip, the decades spent in the Bengali countryside rather than in Puri with the Lord, the readiness to be struck on the head by a drunkard rather than walk past him, is already implicit in where he chose to be born.
