The one part of Shrinatha Pandita's life that did not disappear from the historical record is the temple he built. Credited by the commentary tradition attached to Krishnadasa Kaviraja Goswami's Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita with founding a Deity called Sri Krishna Raya, he left behind a physical site that can still be visited in Bengal today, its walls carrying a tablet inscribed with his name and the names of his father and grandfather.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Deity | Sri Krishna Raya (Radha-Krishna) |
| Original site | Kanchadapada, about one and a half miles from Kumarahatta / Kamarhatta, Bengal |
| Present-day location | Rathtala area, Kanchrapara, North 24 Parganas, West Bengal |
| Present structure built | Shakabda 1708 (1785-86 CE), by the brothers Nimai Charan and Gour Charan Mallick of Pathuriaghata, Calcutta |
| Sister Deities (tradition) | Radha-vallabha of Vallabhapura; Shyamasundara of Khadadaha |
| Stone's traditional origin | Said to have been brought from Murshidabad by Virabhadra Prabhu, son of Nityananda Prabhu |
A Temple at Kanchadapada #
According to Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura's Anubhasya commentary on Chaitanya-charitamrita, Adi 10.107, the village of Kanchadapada lay about one and a half miles from Kumarahatta, itself a few miles from Calcutta. Shivananda Sena, the householder devotee who organized Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own household affairs, lived in the same area and built his own temple there to Sri Gaura-Gopala. Shrinatha Pandita's own foundation, a short distance away, housed Radha-Krishna Deities under the name Sri Krishna Raya -- a separate temple, to a separate pair of Deities, in the same small corner of Bengal that also raised Kavi-karnapura Goswami, the disciple Shrinatha Pandita would go on to initiate.
Two More Deities from the Same Stone #
The Anubhasya adds a striking detail, though it reports the story only as hearsay rather than settled history: Virabhadra Prabhu, the son of Nityananda Prabhu, is said to have brought a single large stone from Murshidabad, and three separate Deities were carved from it -- the Radha-vallabha Deity of Vallabhapura, the Shyamasundara Deity of Khadadaha, and the Sri Krishna Raya Deity that came to Kanchadapada. If the tradition is accurate, it ties Shrinatha Pandita's own Deity to two other well-known Bengali temples through a single block of stone, and to Nityananda Prabhu's family through the hand that is said to have carved it. Whether or not every detail of the story can be verified independently, it reflects how the temple was remembered by the generations that came after Shrinatha Pandita.
Rebuilt by the Mallick Brothers #
The original structure, standing on the bank of the Ganges, eventually fell into disrepair. The Anubhasya records that a prominent Calcutta zamindar named Nimai Mullik saw the ruined temple of Krishna Raya while traveling to Benares and afterward built the large temple that stands on the site today, completed in Shakabda 1708, corresponding to 1785-86 CE. Wikimedia Commons photographs of the temple, taken at the Rathtala area of present-day Kanchrapara in West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district, describe an atchala -- eight-roofed -- structure with a porch set on a triple archway, credited there to two brothers, Nimai Charan and Gour Charan Mallick. The Anubhasya's account of a single builder and the photographed temple's own record of two brothers are not necessarily in conflict -- large family temple projects of this kind were often credited to more than one family member -- but this page reports both versions rather than picking one. Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati's commentary further describes a large courtyard in front of the temple, residential quarters for visitors, and arrangements for cooking prasadam, with the whole compound enclosed by high boundary walls -- and notes that a tablet inside names Shrinatha Pandita together with his father and grandfather, alongside the date the temple was built.
Worship Continues Today #
The temple that stands today at Kanchrapara is by no means small: nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts describe it as almost as large as the well-known Mahesh temple elsewhere in Bengal, and photographs confirm a substantial, still-maintained structure. Gaudiyahistory.iskcondesiretree.com's own biography page for Shrinatha Pandita reports that "his Deity of Sri Krishna Raya is still residing there" -- a small but real sign that the worship he established has outlasted him by more than two centuries, even though almost nothing about his own personal life survived alongside it.