The episode of Jagai and Madhai is usually told as a story about Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and told that way it is a story about anger and forgiveness: the Lord raises His disc against two criminals and then puts it down. Told from Nityananda Prabhu's side it is a different story altogether, and a harder one, because from his side the interesting question is not why the Lord relented but why Nityananda went near the brothers in the first place, and then, having been chased off once, why he went back.
The sequence begins with an order that has no obvious precedent in the religious life of the period. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu instructed Nityananda Prabhu and Haridasa Thakura to go through Nabadwip door to door and beg. What they were to beg for was not food: at every house they were to ask the householder to worship Krishna, chant Krishna's names and follow Krishna's instructions, and then move on; and at the end of the day they were to report the results. The devotees who heard the instruction laughed at the idea of begging alms of that kind. The two of them took it literally and went out.
The reception was mixed in a way that would be recognisable to anyone who has done this work since. Pious householders were delighted, invited them in and promised to do as they were asked. Others thought they were madmen and said so about the Lord who had sent them. A number of people who had been shut out of the nightly kirtana at Srivasa Pandit's house and resented it went further than words: the Chaitanya-bhagavata records that the two preachers were physically set upon and threatened with prosecution by the local authority. Vrindavana Dasa's comment is that, being empowered by Chaitanya, they paid no attention and carried on. What is being described here, in plain terms, is the first systematic door-to-door preaching campaign in the history of the movement, and Nityananda Prabhu was one of the two men conducting it. Everything he did for the next thirty years grew out of this assignment.
At some point in that campaign the two of them came upon Jagai and Madhai in the street. The brothers were brahmanas of Nabadwip by birth and had abandoned every part of it. They were drunk more or less permanently, ate meat, robbed people, set fires, and were feared to the point where the town simply arranged itself around them. Vrindavana Dasa's description of what Nityananda and Haridasa felt on seeing them is not pity in the ordinary sense; he says their hearts wept. They took counsel and decided that these two were the clearest possible illustration of what Mahaprabhu had come to do, and that they would deliver the Lord's message to them despite what was likely to follow. So they called out to them across the street to worship Krishna.
The brothers took this as an interference with their afternoon and came after them, and the two preachers ran. That is the first attempt, and the biographies do not dress it up: they were chased off. They went to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, described what they had seen, and asked Him to make good the name Patita-pavana, the deliverer of the fallen, by delivering these two. There is a wry footnote from Advaita Acharya at this stage of the story. When Haridasa Thakura, still shaken, described Nityananda's restlessness and what it had nearly cost them both, Advaita Acharya replied that it was hardly astonishing, since drunkards belong in the company of drunkards and it was quite fitting that three of them should be found together; Nityananda being intoxicated with love of Krishna and the brothers with wine. Haridasa, being a man of vows, had no business there at all. In the etiquette of the Nabadwip devotees this counted as praise.
Vrindavana Dasa adds one observation that carries a great deal of the doctrinal weight of the episode. For all their sins, Jagai and Madhai had never in their lives committed an offence against a Vaishnava; they had simply never had the opportunity. In Gaudiya theology that is the difference between a debt that the holy name can clear and one that it cannot, and the biographer flags it precisely because of what is about to happen.
Some time afterwards the brothers camped on the bank of the Ganges at the ghat where Mahaprabhu bathed, which frightened the neighbourhood considerably. At night they heard the sound of the kirtana, assumed in their condition that it was being performed for the goddess Mangalachandi, and danced to it. And it was then that Nityananda Prabhu went to them again, at night, alone.
This is the decision that the tradition regards as the definitive statement of his character, and it is worth pausing on it. He had already been chased through the streets by these men. He had no new order compelling this particular visit; the door-to-door assignment did not require a second attempt on a household that had thrown him out. There was no audience. He was, by every account, entirely aware of what he was walking into. He went anyway, because in his view the fact that they were the worst men in Nabadwip was the reason to go rather than the reason to stay away.
Madhai picked up a broken earthen pot and threw it. It struck Nityananda on the head and the blood ran down. What he is recorded as saying in reply is the sentence for which Bengal has remembered him ever since: that Madhai might strike him again if he liked, so long as he would chant the name of Krishna. Jagai, drunk as he was, took hold of his brother and stopped him, and rebuked him for what he had done to a man who had come to them with nothing but good.
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu arrived with the devotees, saw the blood on Nityananda's body, and called for the Sudarshana disc; and the Chaitanya-bhagavata says that the two brothers saw it with their own eyes. What Nityananda did at that moment is the second half of his contribution to the episode, and it is not simply a plea for mercy. He told the Lord that Jagai had protected him. That is a piece of advocacy: with his own head still bleeding, he directed the Lord's attention to the one decent act performed by either brother in years, and made it the ground of the case. Mahaprabhu accepted it and gave love of God to Jagai on the spot.
Madhai, watching his brother receive what he had just disqualified himself from, broke and threw himself at Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's feet. The Lord refused him. The refusal is doctrinally exact rather than vindictive: the offence had not been committed against Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and He would not presume to remit a debt owed to somebody else. He sent Madhai to the feet of Nityananda Prabhu, and then turned to Nityananda and said that since the man had fallen at his feet it was proper for him to be merciful. Nityananda's answer, as the text has it, was to offer whatever spiritual credit he himself possessed in exchange for Madhai's forgiveness. Then, on the Lord's order, he took hold of the man who had opened his head a few minutes earlier and embraced him, and the Chaitanya-bhagavata says that he entered into Madhai's body and filled him with his own energies.
The rest followed quickly. Mahaprabhu forbade the brothers to sin again, accepted the burden of their past, brought them into the house, and, when love of God had reduced them both to rolling on the ground, declared them maha-bhagavatas and instructed the devotees to treat them as such, with a warning about the consequences of doing otherwise. The Vaishnavas blessed them, and their sinful reactions, the text says with some grimness, were transferred to those who blaspheme Vaishnavas. Local tradition at Nabadwip still identifies a ghat on the Ganges as the place where Madhai performed his atonement by serving pilgrims.
Krishnadasa Kaviraja gives the whole affair a single line in the Chaitanya-charitamrita, because Vrindavana Dasa had told it fully and there was no need to repeat him. But the episode surfaces again in his book at a revealing moment. Years later, at Ramakeli, two ministers of the Sultan of Bengal fell before Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and told Him that delivering Jagai and Madhai had cost Him nothing, since the brothers were brahmanas of a holy town whose only fault was addiction to sin, whereas they themselves were servants of meat-eaters and fallen millions of times further. Those two men became Rupa and Sanatana Goswami. The point for our purposes is what their prayer takes for granted: by the 1510s, the deliverance of Jagai and Madhai had already become the fixed public measure of how far the Lord's mercy would reach. It was the benchmark against which everyone else measured their own hopelessness. And it existed as a benchmark because one man had walked back down a dark street towards two drunks who had already chased him once.
That is why Gaudiya Vaishnavas read this episode as the definitive statement of Nityananda Prabhu's character rather than as an incident in it. The title Patita-pavana is not a compliment; it is a claim that requires evidence, and evidence of that kind can only be produced by somebody who is prepared to be injured. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had the disc; Nityananda had the wound. And the structure of the resolution, in which the Lord Himself will not forgive an offence committed against His servant and refers the offender back to the servant, is the reason the tradition insists that the way to Chaitanya Mahaprabhu runs through Nityananda Prabhu and not around him. That doctrine is set out on the page on the mercy of Nitai, but its evidence is here, in a broken pot and a man who did not put his hand to his head.
