Every account of Nityananda Prabhu's boyhood at Ekachakra agrees on one striking fact: he did not play games. He staged plays. From the time he could organise other children, the whole of his day was given to acting out the pastimes of Krishna and of the other descents of Vishnu, with the boys of the village taking the parts, and the parents and neighbours watching. Vrindavana Dasa Thakura devotes the ninth chapter of the Adi-khanda of his Chaitanya-bhagavata to these performances, and the detail he preserves is unusually specific — which is why the episode has kept its hold on the Bengali Vaishnava imagination for five hundred years. Almost nothing of it appears in the Chaitanya-charitamrita, which was written later and about a different subject; if we know these stories at all, it is because Vrindavana Dasa thought them worth recording.
The performances had a fixed method. Nityananda would set the scene, assign the roles and coach the lines; the other children knew what to say because he had taught them. One of the earliest and most often repeated is the assembly of the demigods. A boy would be dressed as the Earth, oppressed by the burden of wicked kings; the others took the parts of the gods; and the whole company would walk down to the riverbank to petition Kshirodakasayi Vishnu, who lies on the ocean of milk. A boy hidden out of sight would then answer in a deep voice that he would shortly be born in the cowherd country of Mathura. From there the cycle ran through the whole of Krishna's life in order: the marriage of Vasudeva and Devaki; the family's playhouse converted into Kamsa's prison; the midnight birth; Vasudeva carrying the child across the Yamuna to Nanda's village and bringing Yogamaya back in his place.
Then the Vraja pastimes. A boy dressed as Putana while another climbed up to take her breast. A cart built of reeds, made in order to be broken. Serpents made from the leaves of trees, and a boy who went into the village pond and floated there motionless until Nityananda revived him. A grove of palms, where the demon Dhenuka was killed and the fruit tasted. Toy figures named Baka, Agha and Vatsa, made to be destroyed. Raids on the house of the village milkman for curd and butter, in exact imitation of Krishna, which the milkman's family seem to have borne with remarkable patience. The cows taken out to pasture and brought home in the late afternoon with the boys blowing buffalo horns. The lifting of Govardhana Hill. A replica of Vrindavana built somewhere in the fields, and later a replica of Mathura, complete with garland-makers, with one boy dressed as Kubja, and with a bow that Nityananda broke with a great noise before disposing of the elephant Kuvalayapida, the wrestlers Chanura and Mustika, and finally Kamsa, dragged off by the hair.
One of these performances is remembered for a different reason. When the boy playing Akrura arrived to take Krishna and Balarama away from Vrindavana to Mathura, Nityananda did not act the part of the departing brother. He wept as the gopis wept, in the mood of those left behind, and the biographies say that the tears ran down in streams in full view of the other children, who did not understand what they were looking at. This is the detail that separates the Ekachakra plays from children's imitation. The boy who organised the drama was, at intervals, not performing at all.
The Rama cycle was staged as thoroughly as the Krishna cycle. Verandah plants were chopped down and thrown into the water as boulders while the children, playing monkeys, built the bridge to Lanka and shouted the victory of Raghunatha. Nityananda's own favourite role, by every account, was Lakshmana — which the tradition finds entirely natural, since Krishnadasa Kaviraja states that Nityananda Svarupa had formerly appeared as Lakshmana and served Ramachandra as His younger brother, silently bearing what He could not prevent. As Lakshmana he stormed into Sugriva's palace, bow in hand, to reproach him for making merry while Rama grieved on the mountain; as Lakshmana he chastised Parashurama; as Lakshmana he received the frightened monkeys, embraced them, and led them to his master.
The most famous of all the Ekachakra incidents came out of that cycle and very nearly ended badly. In the scene of Lakshmana's fall, a boy playing Ravana threw a lotus flower at him in place of the fatal weapon. Nityananda dropped where he stood and did not move. He had briefed the children beforehand: when I fall, gather round and weep, and then send Hanuman for the medicine, and I will revive when it is applied. But when it actually happened the children lost their heads entirely and forgot the instruction. They wept, called out to him to get up, and could find no sign of life anywhere in his body. Hadai Pandita and Padmavati came running, found their son apparently dead, and fainted on the spot. The village gathered. Someone in the crowd — the biographies are careful to say it was a bystander, not one of the players — remembered that an actor playing Dasaratha had once died in earnest on stage, and someone else said that the boy was only acting his part and would recover as soon as Hanuman brought the medicine. That remark reminded the children of their own script.
What followed was a piece of theatre that has been retold in Bengal ever since. The boy playing Hanuman set off; another, dressed as a sage, delayed him with an offer of fruits and roots and was politely refused; at a lake a third boy caught his ankles under the water as a crocodile and was dragged out and beaten; a fourth, dressed as a demon, threatened to eat him, and the two fought until Hanuman won. At last he reached the mountain, defeated a party of Gandharvas, and carried it back on his head. Another child, playing the physician, applied the medicine to Nityananda's nose, and he sat up. The village laughed with relief, Hadai Pandita took his son into his arms, and everybody asked the question they had been asking for years: where did you learn all this. The answer he gave, and which nobody took seriously, was that these were his own pastimes, and that he was only repeating what he had said in earlier lives.
That question is, in fact, the point of the whole chapter. These were village children in Radhadesha in the fifteenth century. They had not read the Bhagavatam and their parents mostly could not have read it to them. Nobody had taught Nityananda the sequence of Krishna's pastimes, the names of the demons, or the speeches. The neighbours said openly that they had never seen anything like it and could not account for it, and the biographies state that by the influence of the Lord's own illusory energy nobody at Ekachakra recognised who was living among them. Gaudiya Vaishnavas read the twelve years as a concealed rehearsal — a form of preaching conducted before the mission had begun, and an early exercise of the one talent that would define Nityananda's whole life, which was the ability to draw ordinary people into Krishna's pastimes without asking them for any qualification first. The children left their homes and their parents to be with him, and the parents did not object; Vrindavana Dasa breaks off at one point to offer his obeisances to those boys, whose names nobody knows.
The places are still shown. A short walk from the Banka Raya temple is a spot called Visramatala, where the tradition says he enacted the rasa-lila and the other Vrindavana pastimes with his friends. Near Garbhavasa is Bakulatala, named for a bakula tree under which the boys played a rough game called jhala-jhapeta; the tree is very old, and its branches and sub-branches are said to resemble the hoods of serpents, which local devotees take to be Ananta appearing in that form at Nityananda's wish. The story attached to it is that the tree once had two trunks, and that when his playmates found it awkward to jump from the branches of one to the branches of the other, he merged the two into one. A little further off is Hantugada, where he is said to have distributed chipped rice and yogurt to the village, kneeling down to take it himself — the same dish, and the same posture of a servant, that he would make famous forty years later at Panihati. Fairs are still held there on his appearance day and at Goshthashtami.
Read against what came afterwards, the childhood is not a charming prelude but a statement of method. Nityananda Prabhu never at any point in his life taught by argument. He set something up in which other people could take part, and let the taking part do the work. It began with a schoolmaster's son casting the boys of an obscure Birbhum village as the cowherds of Vraja, and it ended with a whole province of Bengal singing in the streets.
