Srila Sanatana Gosvami's family traced its origin, according to the genealogy preserved in Narahari Chakravarti's Bhakti-ratnakara, to Karnataka-brahmana stock that migrated to eastern India generations before his birth. Various branches of the family are said to have passed through Paulastya-desa, then Navahatta (present-day Naihati in West Bengal), before one ancestor named Kumara, disturbed by family difficulties, resettled in the village of Bakla-Chandradvipa in East Bengal and built a house at Fateyabad in Jessore. It was among Kumara's sons that Sanatana, Rupa and Vallabha were born and raised - three brothers whose academic gifts and early devotion, the Bhakti-ratnakara says, made them "the life of the Vaishnava community." Exactly which of these ancestral villages was Sanatana's own birthplace is not settled: Bhaktivinoda Thakura and the historian Satishchandra Mitra place his birth in Jessore, other biographers argue for Naihati or Bakla-Chandradvipa, and still others for Ramakeli itself, where the family eventually settled and rose to prominence at the Bengal court. No single account has become decisive, and honest retelling has to leave the question open.
What is agreed upon is the household these three brothers grew up in: their father, remembered variously as Kumaradeva or Mukunda, held office as a secretary under Jalaluddin Fateh Shah, the Sultan of Gauda who ruled in the 1480s, and the family's position gave all three sons access to serious classical education from childhood. Sanatana was the eldest, Rupa Gosvami came next, and Vallabha - later given the name Anupama by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu himself - was the youngest. Anupama would go on to father a fourth towering figure of the tradition, Jiva Gosvami, though he did not live to reach Vrindavana himself.
Forests Named for Vraja #
Devotional retellings of Sanatana's boyhood consistently return to one detail: long before any of the three brothers had reason to think of Krishna's Vrindavana as anything more than a place in scripture, they were already playing at it. The forests where they spent their childhood hours were given the names of Vraja's own twelve forests - Talavana, Madhuvana, Kamyavana, Mahavana among them - and their favorite bathing ponds were called Radha-kunda and Shyama-kunda, the very names of the two sacred lakes at Govardhana that Sanatana would, decades later, walk to and around almost daily as an old man. Biographers read this detail as an early, unconscious sign of the bhava that would later flower fully under Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's direct instruction - not proof of anything that can be checked historically, but a detail kept consistently enough across the tradition's own memory of him to be worth recording as such.
A Dream and a Waking Vision #
One further story attached to Sanatana's youth, again from within the devotional tradition rather than from any historically checkable record, describes a dream in which a very beautiful brahmana boy appeared to him and placed a Srimad-Bhagavatam in his hands. Sanatana woke overjoyed, then upset to find neither the boy nor the book anywhere near him. According to the same account, when he sat down for his morning worship that same day, a boy answering exactly to the description of his dream appeared before him in person, offered him a Bhagavatam, and told him to study it always, promising that it would bring him to perfection. The tradition identifies the boy as Krishna Himself. Later in life, in his own composition Krishna-lila-stava, Sanatana would address the Bhagavata directly as "my only company, my only friend, and my guru... my greatest treasure and my personal saviour" - language striking enough that later Gaudiya writers have connected it back to this early episode, though the connection itself belongs to devotional legend rather than to anything Sanatana wrote explicitly about his own childhood.
Scholars Under Vidyavacaspati #
As the brothers grew older, their formal education deepened. Sanatana and Rupa both studied Nyaya, the classical Indian system of logic and rhetoric, and Vedanta under the well-known logician Vasudeva Sarvabhauma Bhattacharya - the same Sarvabhauma who would later become one of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's most celebrated converts at Jagannatha Puri - and under Sarvabhauma's brother, Madhusudana Vidyavacaspati, from whom Sanatana received his childhood initiation. Their scholarship became so widely respected that pandits and brahmanas from across India are said to have traveled to study under the two brothers even while they held government office, and they came to be honored, in the language later Gaudiya writers used for them, as among the greatest scholars of their generation in Bengal. That reputation - built well before either brother had met Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu - is part of what made their eventual public renunciation so startling to their contemporaries: men who could have had almost any position their learning could have earned them chose, in the end, to walk away from all of it, a choice told in Service as Minister to Hussain Shah.