The Kheturi festival grew out of a discovery Narottama Dasa Thakura made following the guidance of his own dream: an abandoned granary belonging to a local brahmana, said to be infested with poisonous snakes that had kept everyone else away. Narottama Dasa Thakura went in anyway and found, guarded by those same snakes, six self-manifest Deities - Sri Gauranga-deva, Sri Vallabhi-kanta, Sri Vraja-mohana, Sri Radha-kanta, Sri Radha-ramana and Sri Krishna. Jahnava-mata, by then the senior-most figure among the Gaudiya Vaishnavas, ruled that since the Deities were self-manifest no formal installation ceremony was required, only a mahabhisheka - and she named Shrinivasa Acharya to perform it, with Shyamananda Prabhu, Ramachandra Kaviraja and Narottama Dasa Thakura himself leading the kirtana. Devotees converged from across Gauda-mandala, Kshetra-mandala and Vraja-mandala for what later tradition remembers as the largest single gathering of Gaudiya Vaishnavas in the generation after Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu himself - a festival, it is said, that has never since been equaled in scale.
A Brother Brought to Krishna Consciousness #
Kheturi was not the only family matter Ramachandra was involved in during these years. His younger brother, Govinda, raised alongside him in their grandfather's Shakta tradition, had by then been formally initiated by Shrinivasa Acharya - but when Govinda fell seriously ill and appeared to be near death, Ramachandra grew anxious that his brother's final thoughts should be fixed on Krishna, in the spirit of the well-known Srimad-Bhagavatam verse that the highest fruit of any path is simply "to remember the Personality of Godhead" at life's end (Bhagavatam 2.1.6). He asked Narottama Dasa Thakura to arrange for the Bhagavatam to be recited to Govinda; Narottama, characteristically unwilling to present himself as anyone's spiritual authority, instead wrote to Shrinivasa Acharya and asked him to do it. Hearing the Bhagavatam recited at his bedside transformed Govinda completely - by tradition, it was in this state that the well-known kirtana "bhaja re mana, sri-nanda-nandana" first came from his lips, a song still counted among the classics of Vaishnava padavali literature.
A Second Journey to Vrindavana #
After Kheturi, Shrinivasa Acharya returned to Vrindavana, and Ramachandra Kaviraja went with him - this time for good. Later in life, on the joint instruction of Shrinivasa Acharya and Narottama Dasa Thakura, he made one more journey back to Vraja, but arrived to find that the direct disciples of the Six Goswamis he had met and been blessed by on his first pilgrimage - the men described on pilgrimage-to-vrindavana-and-the-kaviraja-title - had by then all departed this world. Unable to bear the weight of that separation, tradition says, he did not long survive it himself.
Disappearance and Samadhi #
Sources do not agree on the precise date of Ramachandra Kaviraja's disappearance: one account places it on the third day of the dark fortnight of the month of Pausha, another on Krishna-trayodashi of Magha. What is agreed is that he passed away in Vrindavana after his own guru's disappearance, and that his samadhi stands in the Dhira Samira grove, directly beside Shrinivasa Acharya's own - guru and disciple, in death as in life, kept within sight of one another. His chief disciple was Harirama Acharya, and the Deities he and Govinda had worshiped together were later moved from Teliya Budhari to Bhagavangola, where they continue to be worshiped today by the followers of Rama Dasa Babaji.
Narottama Dasa Thakura's own grief at Ramachandra's passing is said to have shaped two of his most enduring works, *Prema-bhakti-chandrika* and *Prarthana* - the second of which preserves the line by which their friendship is still remembered: "daya kara sri-acarya prabhu srinivasa, ramacandra sanga mage narottama dasa," "Be merciful, O Prabhu Shrinivasa Acharya - Narottama Dasa begs for the association of Ramachandra." Narottama is also remembered to have said, more simply, that if he were ever to take human birth again he would still want an associate like Ramachandra Kaviraja at his side. Five centuries later, that longing remains the clearest window into who Ramachandra Kaviraja actually was: not primarily a theologian or an institution-builder, but a friend whose company another great Vaishnava thought worth begging for.