According to the genealogy preserved in Narahari Chakravarti's Bhakti-ratnakara, Srila Sanatana Gosvami's family traced its origin to a Karnataka-brahmana family that migrated to eastern India generations before his birth. Various branches of the family are said to have passed through Paulastya-desa, and then through Navahatta (present-day Naihati in West Bengal). Later one ancestor named Kumara, troubled by family difficulties, moved to the village of Bakla-Chandradvipa in East Bengal and built a house at Fateyabad in Jessore. Sanatana, Rupa and Vallabha were born and raised as Kumara's sons. The Bhakti-ratnakara says that the three brothers' learning and early devotion made them "the life of the Vaishnava community." It is not settled which of these ancestral villages was Sanatana's own birthplace. Bhaktivinoda Thakura and the historian Satishchandra Mitra place his birth in Jessore. Other biographers argue for Naihati or Bakla-Chandradvipa. Still others argue for Ramakeli itself, where the family later settled and rose to prominence at the Bengal court. No single account is accepted by all, so an 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. Because of the family's position, all three sons received a serious classical education from childhood. Another part of the family's genealogy names their mother as Revatidevi. It records six children in all, one daughter and five sons, though only Sanatana, Rupa and Vallabha are remembered by name as devotees. This detail does not fully settle the birthplace question above. 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 later become the father of a fourth great 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 keep returning 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 Vrindavana games. They gave the forests where they spent their childhood hours the names of Vraja's own twelve forests, among them Talavana, Madhuvana, Kamyavana and Mahavana. They called their favorite bathing ponds Radha-kunda and Shyama-kunda. These are the very names of the two sacred lakes at Govardhana. Sanatana would walk to them and around them almost daily as an old man, decades later. Biographers see this detail as an early, unconscious sign of the bhava that would later flower fully under Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's direct instruction. It is not proof of anything that can be checked historically. But the tradition has remembered it about him so consistently that it is worth recording as part of that memory.
A Dream and a Waking Vision #
One more story attached to Sanatana's youth also comes from within the devotional tradition, not from any record that can be checked historically. It describes a dream in which a very beautiful brahmana boy appeared to him and placed a Srimad-Bhagavatam in his hands. Sanatana woke overjoyed, but was then upset to find neither the boy nor the book anywhere near him. According to the same account, he sat down for his morning worship that same day. Then a boy who looked exactly like the boy in his dream appeared before him in person and offered him a Bhagavatam. The boy told him to study it always, and promised 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," and these words are striking enough that later Gaudiya writers have connected them back to this early episode. But the connection itself belongs to devotional legend. It does not come from anything Sanatana wrote directly about his own childhood.
Scholars Under Vidyavacaspati #
As the brothers grew older, their formal education deepened. Sanatana and Rupa both studied Nyaya and Vedanta. Nyaya is the classical Indian system of logic and rhetoric. Their teacher was 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. They also studied 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 the brothers held government office. Later Gaudiya writers honored them as among the greatest scholars of their generation in Bengal. The brothers had built this reputation well before either of them met Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. That is part of what made their later public renunciation so startling to the people of their time. Their learning could have earned them almost any position, but in the end they chose to walk away from all of it. This choice is told in Service as Minister to Hussain Shah.
