By Madhava Ghosh dasa

Samba, Hayagriva’s eldest son, has found previously unpublished letters from Srila Prabhupada in his father’s effects that Hayagriva had stored at his mother’s house before leaving his body. As his grandmother approached the end of her life, Samba retrieved the boxes and has had them for five years.

He is currently cataloging the contents of the boxes. The collection of letters that Hayagriva had are from Srila Prabhupada to himself, his wife Shama, as well as some to Kirtanananda and a few others. Most of them are already in the Vedabase but many weren’t.

The BBT archives are going to officially process them, but Samba was kind enough to let me get copies of all those that aren’t found in the VedaBase. My unoffical count is that there are 76 of them. Of those, Srila Prabhupada mentions New Vrindaban in
48 of them, which clearly demonstrates his interest in the project.

There isn’t anything earthshaking in them, and there is no single letter that is any kind of a magic bullet, but the body of them clearly demonstrate his commitment to having a farm project and to publishing and distributing books.

I have started scanning them and getting them converted to digital form and have permission from Samba to post them on brijabasispirit. com so they are now being posted once a week categorized as Prabhupada’s Letters.

In addition to the New Vrindaban discussion, a lot of them are about the editing work that Hayagriva was doing for Srila Prabhupada. There are even form letters where Srila Prabhupada is having to personally dun the temples for nonpayment of bills owed to the BBT for books. He has the letter typed then hand writes the name of the recipient in the salutation.

I will quote from one of them:

“So the best thing will be to keep daily count of your stock and how many magazines and books sold. Then, regularly, on Sunday of each week the sales proceeds may be totaled for issuing a check to the amount owed to my book fund and to the BTG accounts. Then on each Monday the check may be sent to Los Angeles. So you do this regularly and it will be very nice. ”

No one can say that Srila Prabhupada wasn’t taking care of business. :-)

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