In January 1510 Chaitanya Mahaprabhu accepted sannyasa at Katwa. Three men went with Him to make the arrangements, and Nityananda Prabhu was one of them. He was also with Him on the road to Jagannatha Puri a few weeks later, and it was on that road that he did the thing which, more than any other single act, established what kind of associate he was.
At Kamalapura the Lord bathed in the Bhargi river and handed His sannyasa staff to Nityananda to hold. While He went on to the Siva temple at Kapotesvara, Nityananda broke the staff into three pieces and threw it into the water. A sannyasi's danda is not a walking stick; it is the visible sign of the order, and destroying it was, on the face of it, an act of open insubordination by a man who had been given it to look after. When the Lord came back and asked for it, Nityananda said that He had fallen in ecstasy and that the two of them had come down on it together. Mahaprabhu was angry; and Krishnadasa Kaviraja then records, with unusual candour, that the devotees could not understand any of it, neither why Nityananda broke the staff, nor why the Lord permitted it, nor why, having permitted it, He was angry. Nobody, he says, could grasp the real purpose of the two Lords. Gaudiya commentators have offered explanations since, but the point for a biography of Nityananda is simpler: he was the one person in the movement who would do such a thing, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu kept him anyway.
Not long afterwards the arrangement that would define the rest of both their lives was put in place. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu settled at Jagannatha Puri and, for the last eighteen years of His manifest life, essentially did not leave it. Bengal, which was the movement's home and its whole population, He handed to Nityananda. Krishnadasa Kaviraja mentions the appointment in a single clause, in the middle of a list of devotees, as a fact everybody already knew: when Nityananda Prabhu was ordered to go to Bengal to preach, two of Mahaprabhu's own men were told to go with Him. The Chaitanya-bhagavata gives the charge in fuller and blunter terms, as an instruction to deliver everyone and to take no account of who deserved it. For roughly thirty years, that is what he did.
The geography of the mission is worth setting out, because it is not the geography of a pilgrimage but of a province being worked. Nabadwip, where it had begun. Khardaha on the Ganges north of what is now Calcutta, where he eventually settled with his family. Panihati, a few miles further up the river. Saptagram on the Sarasvati in Hooghly, then a major inland port. Ambika Kalna, Barahanagar, Naihati, Jhamatpura, and back to the Birbhum country of his birth. He travelled with a large party of kirtana singers, servants and companions; Krishnadasa Kaviraja, describing a scene at Panihati, notes the crowd of devotees seated on the ground around Him and the sheer influence of the man, which astonished a visitor seeing it for the first time.
The most telling evidence of what he actually built is a list. The eleventh chapter of the Adi-lila is given over to enumerating the branches of Nityananda Prabhu's line, and it names more than seventy-five individuals, beginning with his son Virabhadra Gosani and running through Ramadasa, Gadadhara Dasa, Madhava Ghosh and Vasudeva Ghosh, Uddharana Datta, Gauridasa Pandita, Sundarananda, Kamalakara Pippalai, Mahesa Pandita, Dhananjaya Pandita, Parameshvara Dasa, Jagadisa Pandita, physicians, singers, dancers and a good many men about whom nothing survives except the name and the fact that they belonged to him. Twelve of them are identified as the twelve gopalas, the cowherd boys of Vraja returned. Krishnadasa Kaviraja ends the list by saying that these branches were loaded with ripe fruit and distributed it to everyone they met, and that each of them had the independent power to give Krishna to anybody. What is being described, in the language of a devotional biography, is a functioning organisation with a large layer of capable regional leadership. No other associate of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu has a chapter like it.
The most consequential thing Nityananda did in Bengal, though, was not organisational but social, and it can be seen in the career of a single follower. Uddharana Datta Thakura of Saptagram was a suvarna-vanik, a member of the gold-merchant and banking community. That community had been formally excluded from respectable Hindu society in Bengal for centuries. The traditional explanation is a quarrel between the ruler Ballal Sena and the great banker Gauri Sena, whom the king had been borrowing from extravagantly and who eventually stopped the supply; the king's revenge was to organise the ostracism of the whole caste. Nityananda Prabhu came to Saptagram, stayed in Uddharana Datta's house, ate there, and made him one of the twelve gopalas. The Chaitanya-bhagavata states flatly that the entire suvarna-vanik community was purified through him. Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura recorded the history in his commentary, and Srila Prabhupada, who came from that same community and whose family had visited Uddharana Datta's temple in his childhood, set it out in his purport. This is how the caste barrier was actually broken in sixteenth-century Bengal. Not by an argument, but by a man of unimpeachable brahmana birth who was also a recognised avadhuta sitting down to eat in a house where such a man was not supposed to eat, and then doing it again in the next town.
The best-documented single event of the Bengal years is the festival at Panihati, and it shows the method in miniature. Raghunatha Dasa was the son of a fabulously wealthy landholding family at Saptagram, and he had been trying for years to run away and join Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. His father kept having him fetched back; eventually guards were posted. One day he went instead to Nityananda Prabhu, who was at Panihati sitting under a tree on a rock by the Ganges with his party around him. Raghunatha offered his obeisances from a distance and would not come near; Nityananda called him, and when he still would not come, caught hold of him and put his feet on his head. Then, laughing, he passed sentence. Raghunatha, he said, was a thief who tried to slip away without giving himself up, and he must be punished: he was to hold a festival and feed all the assembled devotees chipped rice and yogurt.
Raghunatha sent his men into the village to buy every eatable they could find. The crowd grew so fast that he had to send to other villages; he bought four hundred large earthen pots, and then five or seven very large ones in which a brahmana soaked chipped rice in hot milk. Everyone present was given two pots, one of chipped rice with condensed milk and one with yogurt, sugar and bananas. Brahmanas who could not find a place on the platform went down to the bank of the Ganges, and those who could not find a place on the bank stood in the water and ate there. Shopkeepers from surrounding villages arrived to sell chipped rice, yogurt and bananas; Raghunatha bought their entire stock, paid them, and then fed them the food they had brought. Anyone who came to see what was going on was fed as well. Then, Krishnadasa Kaviraja says, Nityananda in meditation brought Chaitanya Mahaprabhu to the spot, stood up to receive Him, and went from pot to pot pushing a morsel into His mouth as a joke, before sitting the Lord down and eating beside Him. The comment that follows is the biographer's own: who can understand the influence of Nityananda Prabhu, who is so powerful that He induced Chaitanya Mahaprabhu to come and eat chipped rice on the bank of the Ganges. At the end of it he had the whole assembly bless Raghunatha, and put his own feet on the young man's head; Raghunatha Dasa left home shortly afterwards, went to Puri, and became one of the Six Goswamis of Vrindavana. The festival is still kept every year at Panihati as the Danda Mahotsava, the Festival of the Punishment.
Notice what the punishment consisted of. It was a picnic. That is not incidental; it is the entire preaching method. Nityananda Prabhu never asked anyone for a qualification before letting them in. He set the threshold at food, singing and company, all of it in the open air and free, so that nobody could fail to step over it, and left the rest to what happens to people who have chanted and eaten together for a day. The householders of Bengal did not have to renounce anything, learn Sanskrit, or leave their trades. They had to turn up.
That is why the tradition regards this appointment as the reason Gaudiya Vaishnavism became a mass movement rather than a school. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own preaching after 1510 was concentrated in Puri and in two long journeys. The Six Goswamis in Vrindavana produced the theology, and produced it magnificently, but they were six celibate scholars living under trees in another province; they did not build congregations. The congregations were built in Bengal, by Nityananda Prabhu and the seventy-five men whose names Krishnadasa Kaviraja preserved, among ordinary householders in ordinary towns. When Chaitanya Mahaprabhu disappeared in 1534 and the first generation began to go with Him, what remained on the ground was that Bengali householder community. Every later Gaudiya lineage, including the ones that eventually carried the movement out of India, grew from it.