Every year, Shivananda Sena organized and paid for the long walk that carried Bengal's devotees to Jagannatha Puri to see Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu — a journey described in full on this site at Shivananda Sena's own account of leading it. Raghava Pandit's household sent something with that same party each year that no one else's did: bags upon bags of food his sister Damayanti had spent the year preparing, packed and sealed for the journey south.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Prepared by | Damayanti, Raghava Pandit's sister, on his instruction |
| Carried by | Three bearers, under the pilgrim party organized by Shivananda Sena |
| Superintendent of the bags | Makaradhvaja Kara, Raghava Pandit's own disciple |
| Known collectively as | Raghavera jhali ("the bags of Raghava") |
| How long the food lasted | The entire year, until the next pilgrimage arrived |
| Source | Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita, Antya-lila 10.13–42, 124–131 |
What Went Into The Bags #
Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita gives an unusually long, detailed inventory of what Damayanti packed. She dried and powdered Ganges clay, strained it and rolled it into scented balls; made a hundred varieties of pickles and condiments, including koli-shunthi, koli-churna and koli-khanda; rolled sweetmeats from coriander and anise cooked in sugar, and others from dried ginger meant to settle the digestion; prepared long-lasting cheese, cream sweets and amrita-karpura; and made several kinds of flattened and puffed rice fried in ghee and cooked in sugar syrup, along with a preparation of powdered fused peas rolled into balls. "I could not mention the names of all these wonderful eatables, even in a lifetime," Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami writes. "Damayanti made hundreds and thousands of varieties." One preparation gets a special note of its own: sukuta, a bitter dried-vegetable dish Damayanti made because, thinking of Mahaprabhu as an ordinary person who might fall sick from overeating, she worried about His digestion and wanted something that would settle it. "Do not neglect sukuta because it is a bitter preparation," the text says. "Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu derived more happiness from eating this sukuta than from drinking panchamrita." Small cloth bags were sewn into larger ones, wrapped and sealed, and the whole collection — famous ever after as raghavera jhali — was entrusted to three bearers and put under the personal charge of Makaradhvaja Kara, described in the text as guarding them "with great attention like his very life."
"Only The Bags Of Raghava" #
What happened once the party reached Puri shows exactly how Mahaprabhu regarded this gift. Each year, devotees brought food for Him, and His servant Govinda would announce each one by name as he set it before the Lord — from Advaita Acharya, from Srivasa Thakura, from Vasudeva Datta and Murari Gupta, from the communities of Kulina-grama and Khanda. Mahaprabhu ate all of it that same day, enough, the text says, for a hundred people, and then asked Govinda if anything remained. "Now there are only the bags of Raghava," Govinda replied. Mahaprabhu's answer was to set them aside: "Let them remain today. I shall see them later." The next day, eating alone in a secluded place, He opened Raghava Pandit's bags Himself, tasted a little from each one, and praised its flavor and aroma — and then had the remainder kept back, to be served to Him little by little, sometimes at lunch and sometimes at night, across the entire year that followed, until the next year's bags arrived. No other devotee's offering was treated this way. Everyone else's gifts were consumed at once, in company, and named aloud; Raghava's alone were reserved, savored privately, and made to last.
A Gift That Outlasted The Season #
The effect was that a piece of Raghava Pandit's and Damayanti's devotion was present on Mahaprabhu's plate at Puri on most days of the year, long after the pilgrims who carried it had returned to Bengal — a quiet, continuous thread running underneath the more visible, more public devotion of festivals and kirtan. What is known of Raghava Pandit's own later life, and how Panihati remembers him today, is told at disappearance and legacy.
