Nityananda Prabhu spent the first half of his life as an avadhuta. The word describes a renunciant who has passed beyond the observance of rules altogether, and it fitted him exactly: he had left home at twelve, wandered India for twenty years, kept no fixed residence and no fixed practice, and behaved in ways that scandalised orthodox Bengal on a regular basis. That he ended his life as a married householder at Khardaha with two wives, a son and a daughter is one of the more surprising turns in Gaudiya history, and the tradition is quite clear about whose idea it was.
The later Bengali biographies record that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu took him aside and put it to him directly. If Nityananda also confined himself to the austerities of a renunciant, who would deliver the people sunk in material life, and how would the work continue? He should go back to Gauda, accept household life, and preach from inside it, so that ordinary people had an example they could actually copy. This is not recorded in the Chaitanya-charitamrita, and a reader should know that; it comes from the Bhakti-ratnakara, the Premavilasa and the body of Bengali hagiography that grew up around the Nityananda line. But the logic of it is entirely consistent with everything else about the mission in Bengal, which was aimed at householders from beginning to end. An avadhuta cannot be imitated. A married man running a congregation can.
The family he married into was already inside the movement. Suryadasa Sarakhela lived at Saligrama; the title Sarakhela records that he kept accounts for the ruler of Gauda. He had several brothers, one of whom was Gauridasa Pandita, one of the twelve gopalas and among the most fervent of all Nityananda's followers, and another of whom, Krishnadasa Sarakhela, is named alongside him in the Chaitanya-charitamrita's list of Nityananda's devotees as a reservoir of love of God. Suryadasa had two daughters, Vasudha the elder and Jahnava the younger.
The traditional account of the marriage is dramatic, and since it comes from the later biographies rather than from the two great ones it should be read as what the tradition preserves rather than as documented history. In that account Nityananda came to Suryadasa's house, accompanied by Uddharana Datta Thakura, and asked for Vasudha's hand, and was refused: Suryadasa could not reconcile himself to giving his daughter to a man who had abandoned his caste position. Nityananda left. Vasudha, who had understood who had come for her, collapsed, and by the time Gauridasa Pandita had come and fallen at his elder brother's feet to beg him to change his mind, she had been carried to the Ganges for her last rites. Nityananda came to the riverside; Suryadasa fell at his feet and asked for his daughter's life; Nityananda answered that he would restore her on condition that the marriage take place, and Suryadasa agreed. The accounts describe her waking and looking at him. He then asked Suryadasa to perform the customary purificatory rites and invest him with the sacred thread, and consented without argument, remarking that in this matter he was not the one in charge and that the only master was Chaitanya. Some days later, while Jahnava was serving him his meal, her veil slipped; and he understood that she too was his own energy, and asked for her as well. Suryadasa answered that he had nothing left that he could refuse.
They were married, spent a few days at Saligrama, and then went on the round of visits that any Bengali bridegroom makes: to Sachi Devi at Nabadwip, who received the two brides with great affection, and to Advaita Acharya's house at Shantipur, where Sita Thakurani took them into her lap and blessed them. Afterwards Nityananda settled at Khardaha, on the Ganges north of present-day Calcutta, and Khardaha became the headquarters of the Bengal mission.
Vasudha bore eight sons and one daughter. Seven of the sons died in infancy. The two children who survived were the daughter Ganga Devi and the youngest son, Virabhadra, also called Virachandra. Vasudha herself died soon after their birth, and Jahnava, who had no children of her own, raised them. The accounts say that Virabhadra was her particular favourite, and it was Jahnava who eventually gave him initiation.
Virabhadra Gosani's standing in the tradition is stated in the strongest possible terms at the head of the eleventh chapter of the Adi-lila. Krishnadasa Kaviraja calls him the greatest branch after Nityananda Prabhu himself, describes him as the main pillar of the hall of devotional service erected by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, says that it is by his mercy that people all over the world have the chance to chant the names of Chaitanya and Nityananda, and takes shelter of his feet before beginning to write the Chaitanya-charitamrita. A tradition preserved by the Nedadi sampradaya holds that he brought twelve hundred Nedas, former Buddhist monastics, into the Vaishnava fold and set them to dig the great tank called Svetaganga at Ekachakra. He built the temple at Ekachakra which his father had never troubled to build, and the villages of Viracandrapura and Virabhadrapura beside the birthplace carry his name.
But it is Jahnava Devi, remembered throughout Bengal simply as Jahnava Mata, whose later career is the reason this page matters as much as it does. When Chaitanya Mahaprabhu disappeared in 1534, and Nityananda Prabhu, Advaita Acharya and Srivasa Pandit followed within a few years, the movement was left without any of the figures around whom it had been organised. The person who filled that gap was Nityananda Prabhu's widow.
She did it without any of the ordinary supports. She had no formal office, no lineage of her own, and no scriptural precedent to appeal to; sixteenth-century Bengal was not a society in which a widow was expected to lead anything. What she had was recognition, and the record contains no sign of a dispute about it. She gave initiation to her stepson Virabhadra and to a large number of other people, which is to say that she functioned as a diksha-guru. Narottama Dasa Thakura, Srinivasa Acharya and Shyamananda Prabhu, the three men who carried the second generation of the movement, accepted her as the foremost Vaishnava in Bengal.
The clearest demonstration came at the festival at Kheturi, which Narottama Dasa Thakura convened and which is generally regarded as the moment when the second generation of Gaudiya Vaishnavism consolidated itself; it included the first recorded observance of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's appearance day after His disappearance, and six Deities were installed. Jahnava Mata was invited, given the highest honour, and asked on the opening day to take charge of the whole event. She did: she directed the kirtana, oversaw the Deity worship, told Srinivasa Acharya to distribute garlands and sandalwood paste and accepted them herself, and when the assembled devotees experienced what they took to be Mahaprabhu's presence in the kirtana, it was she who told them what had happened, that Mahaprabhu appears wherever the holy name is sung together, and then instructed them to begin the colours. The next morning she cooked the offering herself, distributed it, and ate only after everybody else had been fed.
Afterwards she travelled to Vraja, as she had done at least once before; the accounts say that on an earlier visit Rupa Goswami himself had explained the literature to her, and that Raghunatha Dasa Goswami, notoriously the most severe and reclusive of the Six, spent a great deal of time showing her the area of Radha-kunda. She is credited, more than any other single person, with binding the Bengali wing of the movement and the Vrindavana wing into one body, at a period when the two might easily have drifted apart. In a vision she was told that the small Radha deity beside Gopinatha at Vrindavana should be replaced by a larger one; she had it made in Bengal and brought it, and the deity installed at Gopinatha's left is still called Jahnava Radhika, the original having gone to Jaipur.
Gaudiya Vaishnavas do not usually present her as a reformer, and she did not present herself that way. But it is worth naming what happened, because the tradition has never disowned it. In the middle of the sixteenth century a woman held the acknowledged spiritual leadership of a movement full of brahmana men, initiated disciples, presided over its central assembly, and negotiated its most important institutional relationship, and the sources treat this as unremarkable. That was possible because the movement's own logic had already made it possible: the qualification for teaching, in Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's stated position, is knowledge of Krishna and nothing else, neither birth nor status. Jahnava Mata is what that principle looks like when it is applied without flinching. She is worshipped today beside Nityananda Prabhu in temples throughout Bengal, and at Ekachakra she stands on the right-hand side of the Deity of Banka Raya.
The two marriages had one further consequence. Through Virabhadra and Ganga, Nityananda Prabhu's line became a family, and the hereditary Goswami households of the Nityananda-vamsa have carried the worship in Bengal ever since. Hereditary succession later became a contested question in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, and Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura's reforms in the twentieth century were directed in large part against its abuses. But in the decades immediately after 1534, when every founder of the movement had gone within a few years of each other, it was the family at Khardaha, and above all the woman at its head, that kept the thing standing.
