By the time Pundarika Vidyanidhi settled for periods at Nabadwip, he had every external mark of a well-off, worldly householder, and he did nothing to soften that impression. He dressed well, kept servants, and lived exactly as comfortably in Nabadwip as he did at home in Chittagong. Only one person among the Vaishnavas of the town was not fooled: Mukunda Datta, who had known him since they were both boys in Chittagong and understood perfectly well what lay beneath the appearance. Everyone else, including for a time Gadadhara Pandit himself, took him for what he seemed to be — a comfortable man of the world with no particular interest in Krishna.
The Ganges He Would Not Touch #
One detail preserved in Sri Chaitanya-bhagavata cuts against the surface impression entirely. Pundarika Vidyanidhi, by this account, never bathed in the Ganges, because he considered it disrespectful to touch her sacred waters with his own feet; he would go to see her only at night, from a distance, precisely so as not to have to witness others washing their teeth, bathing their hair, or rinsing clothes in her during the day, which he could not bear to see. Before performing any act of worship, he would first drink a little Ganges water. None of this looked like the behavior of a man absorbed in worldly comfort, but because it happened privately, it went unnoticed by nearly everyone around him.
Why He Kept the Disguise #
Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura, commenting on this period in his Gaudiya-bhashya to the Chaitanya-bhagavata, makes the general point directly: Krishna's own devotees are sometimes reluctant to reveal themselves to people who are not ready to recognize them, and so they let themselves be taken for ordinary people. Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Himself is sometimes described in the tradition as a pracchanna-avatara, a hidden incarnation, for exactly this reason. Pundarika Vidyanidhi's opulence, on this reading, was not a contradiction of his devotion but a kind of shelter for it — a way of remaining unnoticed by those who would only have judged him by what they saw.
Sitting Among the Devotees at Srivasa's House #
In the meantime, Pundarika Vidyanidhi was not a stranger to Nabadwip's devotional life; he simply blended into it unnoticed. He is remembered as having taken part in the nightly kirtan gatherings at Srivasa Thakura's house, where Mahaprabhu and His associates would chant long into the night. It was there, tradition says, that he witnessed one of the most celebrated deliverances of the entire Nabadwip period: the transformation of the drunkards Jagai and Madhai, whom Nityananda Prabhu and Haridasa Thakura had gone door to door to reclaim on Mahaprabhu's order. When the two former sinners sat among the devotees before Mahaprabhu displaying the same ecstatic symptoms of prema as everyone else, Pundarika Vidyanidhi is said to have been completely overcome with joy at their good fortune — a wealthy outsider from Chittagong, moved to tears by the change in two men the town had given up on.
A Test No One Expected #
The disguise held until the day Mukunda Datta decided it should not. What happened when he finally brought Gadadhara Pandit to meet Pundarika Vidyanidhi, and what it cost Gadadhara to have misjudged him, is told in full on Initiating Gadadhara Pandit. The lesson the tradition draws from that single afternoon — that a Vaishnava's external circumstances are simply not the instrument by which his devotion can be measured — is one Gadadhara Pandit is said to have carried with him for the rest of his life, long after he had settled at Puri to serve the Deity of Tota Gopinatha.