By the time of his final years, Vamsi Dasa Babaji had spent almost four decades as one of Navadvipa's fixed points - a figure Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura's own disciples were taught to revere from a careful distance, and whose eccentric daily life had become, to the Vaishnavas around him, a kind of open teaching in itself.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Final departure from Navadvipa | Returned to birthplace, Majidpur, near the end of his life |
| Disappearance | Shukla Chaturthi, Shravana, 1944 (one source: 23 July 1944) |
| Age at disappearance | Approximately 85 |
| Present-day site | A kutira/mandir near Baral Ghata, Koladvipa, Navadvipa, still visited by pilgrims |
Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura's Blessing #
The relationship between Vamsi Dasa Babaji and Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura is one of the better-documented threads of his life, precisely because it was recorded by Bhaktisiddhanta's own disciples. Bhaktisiddhanta arranged regular supplies of rice and grain for the old babaji through brahmacharis sent from the Yoga-pitha, and would bow to him personally whenever their paths crossed, once remarking that Vamsi Dasa Babaji was "not within this world, but is moving in the transcendental realm." Vamsi Dasa Babaji, in turn, is remembered greeting Bhaktisiddhanta warmly on sight - "Someone very close to my Gaura has come to me" - and, on another occasion, seeing Bhaktisiddhanta approach and exclaiming, "Oh, a manjari has come, so won't Radha come also? She will come! She will come!" At the same time, Bhaktisiddhanta was careful never to let ordinary disciples treat this closeness as an invitation. After the incident in which Babaji Maharaj threw his own deities into the Ganges over a moment's attraction to fish, Bhaktisiddhanta forbade all visits outright, telling his disciples plainly that they lacked the spiritual maturity to witness such behavior without misunderstanding it - and when, sometime later, one brahmachari visited anyway, Babaji Maharaj threw a stone at him and said, "If you want to please me, then never return here again!"
The Final Return to Majidpur #
Toward the end of his life, Vamsi Dasa Babaji made his way back to Majidpur, the village where he had been born and where he had left his family behind decades earlier - carrying his deities with him the whole way, and, by one account, neither eating, sleeping, nor stopping along the road. Renunciate tradition generally holds that a sadhu should not return to his former household, and true to that, he did not formally re-enter the town; he is said to have stayed instead in a dilapidated temple nearby. It was there, on Chaturthi - 23 July 1944, according to the one source that gives a precise date, though the wider tradition simply marks his disappearance day as Shukla Chaturthi of the month of Shravana - that Vamsi Dasa Babaji left his body, at roughly eighty-five years of age.
The Kutira Today #
His bhajana kutira on the western side of Navadvipa, in the area known as Koladvipa, still stands and is still maintained as a small mandir, marked today by a signboard reading "Sri Sri 108 Siddha Vamshidasa Babaji Maharaj's Mandir" at Baral Ghata on the Aranghat Road. Modern pilgrimage accounts note that Koladvipa itself carries an older significance in Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition - remembered as the place where Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu once excused the offense committed against Srivasa Thakura by Capala Gopala and Devananda Pandita - and that Vamsi Dasa Babaji's own kutira sits within the same general stretch of Navadvipa as the later years of Jagannatha Dasa Babaji, another renunciate revered by Bhaktivinoda Thakura's generation, whose own bhajana kutira and samadhi are counted among the area's pilgrimage stops today. There is no record that the two babajis knew each other personally; the connection is only that present-day visitors to Navadvipa can walk from one man's memorial to the other's within the same afternoon - two very different lives of renunciation, remembered a short distance apart on the same stretch of the Ganges.
