Raising Nimai Pandita

Nearly two decades passed between the childhood pastimes told on their own page and the night Nimai finally left home for sannyasa. In those years Sachi Devi bore one grief after another. So far as the record shows, she never turned any of it against her son. This page follows those years from her side of the household. The scholarship and the debates belong to Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own pages. Here we look at what a mother watched happen to her family while that scholarship was being built.

Vishvarupa Leaves Without Warning #

The first of these griefs came from her elder son. Vishvarupa had grown into a young man of unusual detachment. Instead of accepting the marriage his parents were arranging for him, he left home and accepted sannyasa, taking the name Shankararanya. The Chaitanya-bhagavata does not pass quickly over the household's wailing at this departure. It gives it real attention. It also records that young Nimai afterwards comforted His mother with a promise that He would not do the same to her. Vaishnava readers have never been able to read this promise without also remembering what He would do at twenty-four. Some while later, Nimai fell unconscious one day. When He came back to His senses, He said that Vishvarupa had taken Him away and then sent Him back home with a message, asking that "hundreds and thousands of obeisances" be offered to his mother. Krishnadasa Kaviraja preserved this small detail. It suggests that the son who left never stopped thinking of the mother he left behind.

Widowed, With A Household To Keep #

The second grief was the death of Jagannatha Mishra while Nimai was still a boy. The family had never been wealthy, and now it was left in real difficulty. Sachi Devi, now a widow, had to keep the household running with little money. Meanwhile her surviving son continued His education, by this point largely on His own, from His father's books. Some years later Sachi Devi herself, not any male relative, arranged Nimai's first marriage. The bride was Lakshmipriya, daughter of Vallabhacharya of Navadwip. Sachi Devi arranged it after she saw her son and the girl meeting near the Ganges. By every account, the wedding was simple and entirely traditional. It was exactly what a widowed brahmani of limited means could manage for her only remaining son.

A Second Bereavement, A Second Marriage #

That marriage did not last. While Nimai was away teaching in East Bengal, Lakshmipriya died of a snakebite at home in Navadwip. Krishnadasa Kaviraja leaves the meaning of this death open, on purpose. Gaudiya commentators, for example, have long read it as the "serpent of separation," meaning she could not survive being parted from Him. Sachi Devi's own grief at this loss is recorded in the Chaitanya-mangala without softening. Once again it was Sachi Devi who insisted on a second marriage, this time to Vishnupriya, daughter of the raja-pandita Sanatana Mishra. This match was far above the widow's own circumstances. The tradition says that Nimai agreed to it out of respect for His mother, not from any wish of His own. Vishnupriya Devi's own life, from this marriage to the far longer story of what followed it, is told on her own pages.

Fear, Then Recognition #

The turning point in these years came when Nimai travelled to Gaya to perform His late father's memorial rites. He returned home a transformed man, after receiving initiation from the wandering sannyasi Ishvara Puri. He was weeping, fainting and dancing, constantly absorbed in the names of Krishna. Most people in Navadwip reacted in the obvious way. They thought a brilliant young scholar had suffered some kind of breakdown, whether from grief or from something worse. According to the account preserved at Gaudiya History, Sachi Devi's own first reaction was exactly this fear. She thought her son might be suffering a mental disorder and arranged for medical treatment. This should be recorded honestly, not smoothed over, because it is the most human moment in her entire story. Even Sachi Devi, so often described in the tradition as unshakeable, needed time to recognise what her son had become.

A Vision That Removed The Fear #

When that recognition finally came, it came through her own eyes, not because anyone persuaded her. Sachi Devi dreamt that the household Deities of Krishna and Balarama had taken the forms of her son and Nityananda Prabhu, wrestling playfully over an offering as children do. The next day she invited Nityananda to take prasadam at her house and watched the two of them eat side by side. In that ordinary scene she recognised exactly what her dream had shown her, and she fainted on the spot. The Chaitanya-charitamrita records this immediately before the story of Jagai and Madhai, the two drunken brothers Mahaprabhu delivered soon afterward. It is as though the household's own mother had to see the truth first, before the wider work of deliverance could begin. In a gentler moment, Nimai is also remembered telling His mother directly about a dream-vision of Krishna He had had. This is one of the few moments in the record where a private religious experience is shared by the son with the mother, not the other way round.

What These Years Established #

By the time Nimai stood at the head of Navadwip's sankirtana movement, His mother had already buried a husband and a daughter-in-law. She had said goodbye to one son for sannyasa and arranged two marriages for the other. She had feared for His sanity. And she had been shown exactly who He was, in a vision no one gave her but her own dreaming mind. None of it, the tradition insists, weakened her devotion or turned her against the path her sons had chosen. Instead, it built in her a particular kind of strength, which let her survive the much larger grief still to come. It was not the strength of someone who has simply given up. She was a mother who had already learned, little by little through smaller losses, how to keep loving what she could not keep.