Jeevanmukta Das: Navadwip was a centre of learning. A university campus of sorts, where scholars came from far and wide to learn philosophy and religion. Everybody you met on the streets was a scholar or a scholar’s family member or support staff of this varsity. If one were to ask the family history of just about any resident of Navadwip, he or she would invariably have the same story to tell. Which is, I or my husband or father or grandfather or even great grandfather originally came from x, y or z village here to Navadwip to study… and later…we settled here.

Mahaprabhu too was in fact the progeny of such an immigrant scholar, and so were most of his friends. In short, let it be pictured and understood that Navadwip was an oasis for scholars, a magnet if you will, that had gained for itself the enviable title of being the topmost centre for learning Vaishnavism in India. Navadwip was the Stanford of the East, though far superior, for it dealt in real knowledge, and not in what passes off today as knowledge or learning.

Like all Ivy League institutions of learning, this varsity too had to its credit, various firsts. And amongst its foremost achievements was a startup that we now intimately know as Krishna Consciousness. That is right. Krishna Consciousness was the brainchild of this Stanford of the East. Mahaprabhu did not start Krishna Consciousness. That credit wholly belongs to this varsity, and to clutch of scholars whom I will briefly introduce forthwith. But yes, he certainly was this ideology’s foremost champion.

Who were these scholars? Well, the resident scholars were, Advaita Acharya, Srivasa, his three brothers, Srirama Pandit, Sripati Pandit and Srinidhi Pandit, Gadadhara Pandita, Gopinath Acharya, Chandrashakera, Murari Gupta, Sanjaya, Sridhara, Pundirika, and many others, including the women of their respective households. Isvara Puri was a visiting professor and so was Nityananda who was considered an avidhuta. An avidhuta is a mystic who has risen above worldly concerns and acts without consideration for standard social etiquette. Isvara Puri, Nitanyanda and Advaita were disciples of Madhavendra Puri, who was a prominent itinerant guru of Madhava Sampradhaya.

Mahaprabhu grew up in this scholar community. Unfortunately, while he was very young, his father passed away. To complicate matters, his elder brother soon left home and took sannyas. It is thus that we see Mahaprabhu or Nimai as he was known then, running a small grammar school for children, to support himself and his widowed mother Sachi.

Young Nimai was what one would call a ‘scholar scrapper’ whose eyes eagerly scanned the streets of Navadwip in search for verbal duets. Murari Gupta was his favorite punching doll. “Murari, Murari, stop, STOP… I say,” he would call out, “where are you running off?” Having captured Murari, he would then proceed to trap him in a verbal duel. Murari, who was a brilliant scholar, would reluctantly oblige with an accurate answer, yet invariably he would find himself publicly declared ‘wrong’ and berated for his incompetent answer. Nimai Pandit would then proceed to provide an answer that was subtly superior, one that betrayed a genius mind. Thoroughly fed up by this constant badgering, Nimai’s friends got into the habit of running away in the opposite direction whenever they saw him approaching!

At times one would see Nimai strutting about in fineries, accompanied by a group of his students. Now, this trait really was a Krishna hangover that His Lordship appeared to have quietly smuggled into this avatar as well. Sri Krishna was a flamboyant dresser, one who wore shocking colors and loved to decorate his person with peacock feather and flowers! We generally assume that this indeed was the way the people dressed in those days. Not so. It was, even then, considered odd, somewhat gypsy like, and did in fact draw the occasional amused remarks. Dear Nimai too, it seems dressed in a similar flamboyant style, and although sometimes people laughed, it nonetheless endeared him to the tightly-knit community of this varsity. I personally find it quiet enchanting and therefore mention it.

That the de facto nawab of Navadwip was actually penniless is what further endeared him to the varsity. This fatherless youngster was bravely eking out a living and supporting his widowed mother was a zealously guarded secret they enshrined in their collective hearts. Indeed, merchants and their like, often filled his youth’s hands with whatever he needed, without extracting a price.

Such being his circumstances, Nimai it seems, had also picked up a bit of guile, not to mention the muscle that invariably to go with such an art, and would get Sridhar, who himself scraped a living selling banana leafs, to give him choice plantain cores and other ingredients free of charge! Sridhar of course could well see through the youngster’s guile, and it was not love either that allow him to let Nimai take what little he had. It was fear! Sridhar was more than a little afraid that Nimai will beat him up if he tried to stop him and had merely learned to live with this bit of ‘hafta’ collection!

In short, let it sink in deep into our subconscious levels that the Supreme Lord of the universe, the husband of the Goddess of Fortune, made his living in his youth rather precariously, not unlike how a hard-pressed street-smart youth from any part of the world. But of course, it has to be borne in mind that this was a Brahminal community and the boy in question was a Brahmin youth. Poverty was something they wore proudly, as we, the truly impoverished people of the world, wear jaded ornaments. Learning, scholarship, devotion and so on, was what mattered most to them, and a bit of precariously living, which meant dependent fully on the Lord, was something they embraced without breaking into a cold sweat we do now. Once again, I am specifically highlighting the poverty bit here just so that devotees may take heart, and relearn to live… dangerously, without that is, the aid of a bank balance and assets to cushion themselves, their children and children’s children.

Secret eyes closely monitored Nimai’s every move, overheard and his every mid-street verbal duels and watched him increasingly take charge of the streets of Navadwip. They belonged to the senior scholars of the varsity and they gleamed with dark design. They could see that the young scrapper was precociously brilliant and appeared to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the scriptures. If only they could convince him to take up the Krishna Consciousness ideology they had so preciously incubated, they would have the champion they have been wanting and waiting for…one who could take their product to the world market. Thus they tailed him in turn, took their campaign into the streets of Navadwip and lost no opportunity to buttonhole young Nimai in almost the same manner as he himself operated! They blessed him, berated him, begged him and tried every other trick they had up their Brahminical sleeves to derail him from the impersonalist path that he was currently treading and turn his proud head towards Krishna the Lord of their very own hearts. The precocious scholar scrapper, the uncrowned Nawab of Navadwip thus became the centre of attention of this varsity called Navadwip.

But where exactly was varsity, this Stanford of the East? Where indeed was Navadwip?

It is clear that after the disappearance of Srimati Visnupriyadevi, the house of Mahaprabhu in Mayapur was not preserved as a place of worship. The Deity of Mahaprabhu that she worshipped was kept in the houses of her family members after she departed, but even this site was eventually lost. (My research is incomplete here).

The first temple on marking Mahaprabhu’s birthplace was built by Bir Hambir of Vishnupur, who ruled from approximately 1586 -1621. This small shrine was claimed by the Ganges. Later, Gaur Govinda Singh, the Diwan of the East India Company, built a second temple on the same site in 1780-5. This sixty foot high building with nine pinnacles in red sandstone too was washed away in floods in 1876.

In 1891, Srila Bhakti Vinod Thakur, after much research, identified a fresh site at Sridham Mayapur on Anterdwip (the one we know), and established it as the real birthplace of Mahaprabhu. Now, the original Gaur Govinda Singh Temple is said to have been around till the 1876 flood and Srila Jagannath Das Babaji, who was born a little before this event, is sure to have known of its rough whereabouts. Even so, Jagannath das Babaji, the leader of the Gaudiya Vaishnava community, fully endorsed Srila Bhakti Vinod Thakur new site. We may therefore assume that neither he nor Srila Bhakti Vinod Thakur thought that the old site was correct or that the whole issue warranted a fresh research from scratch. And, as we all know, he was eventually aided by a vision by which he was able to eventually identify the current site.

In 1897, Sashibhushan Bandyopadhyaya published an article that claimed the real Gaur Govinda temple site was indeed the correct one and that it was located in Ramchandrapur. Following this report, at about 1916, one Premananda Bharati engaged a government engineer, surveyed maps, dug about 700 odd holes and managed to locate a large piece of red sandstone, presumably of the old temple. A third temple was built at this site and the area named Prachin Mayapur in 1928. The temple which presumably still stands, was eventually turned over to Ramdas babaji in 1953.

The fact that Srila Bhakti Vinod Thakur does not mention the Gaur Govinda site in his writings need not be misconstrued as a case of suppressing of facts. The Thakur did not endorse it and certainly had no obligation in enshrining what had become a raging controversy in his writings. Also, very likely it probably did not strike him that a 100 odd years down the road, this omission may appear to some prudes as a glaring case of omission.

So now we have two birth place sites. The change from the old to the new, by the way, was bitterly disputed and may be said to have split the Gaudiya Vaishnava community into two fractious halves. The Brahminical Vaishnava community, presumably under the leadership Bipin Bihari Goswami and others, supported the Prachin site and the new site was supported by the non-brahminincal Vaishnava community under the leadership of Srila Bhakti Vinod Thakur and endorsed by Srila Jagannath Das Babaji. Needless to add, this contributed to the rift between Bipin Bihari Goswami and Takur Bhakti Vinod who until that point in time, the later considered the former his guru and had shared a strong bond between them.

Such being the case, you would wonder, why on earth would we need a third now?

We do not. It is just this. I am an amateur landscape archaeologist of sorts, who has recently published a book identifying the real temple of Jerusalem, the one that Solomon built in the mountains of Modern-day Syria (read my book, The Bible Betrayed. http://www.thebiblebetrayed.com). One day, I was playing around with Google Earth and happened to zoom in very close to Sridham Mayapur and noted a clear island formation west of the Ganges opposite the current birth-place site. Zooming out a bit I was shocked to find that the whole area was terribly scarred by the virulently oscillating river. Trapped bit of river loops or ox-bow lakes were everywhere. I could indentify about a dozen or so of such lakes. (See Google Earth map)

Let me explain. At times, when the soil is very sandy or loose, rivers tend to undulate into tight loops. Invariably, some of these loops break off and form what is known as an ox-bow lake. These are essentially landlocked bit of the loop that eventually gets hemmed in, when the river migrates away.

Now, there is however a stage that may be said to be one step away from the ox-bow lake formation. That is the stage when the river short-circuits the loop. The formation that distinctly stands out at this stage is of the island trapped between the loop and where the river short-circuited the loop.

Incidentally, the short-circuiting can happen overnight so to speak. I mean, you can actually wake one morning to the cries of “dada, the river has broken though; we are now living on an island!” Such being the case, it is quite conceivable that the newly formed island would be dubbed ‘new island’ for want of an immediately available consensus name. In Bengali that would of course be… ‘Navadwip.’ ‘Nava’ means ‘new’ and ‘dwip’ means ‘island.’

Now I know very well the ‘nava’ means ‘nine’ and the nine processes of bhakti yoga represented by each of the island theology that goes with it. This ideology was first proposed by Narahari and the same was later adopted by Bhakti Vinod Thakur. Unfortunately, a cluster of nine islands, while not improbable, would be difficult to accommodate in this tight region. Besides, somehow the landscape with its innumerable ox-bow lake formations, with the necessary intermediate stage of a ‘new island’ formation, the more accurate rendering of the term ‘Navadwip’ would be ‘new island’ rather than the theologically inspired ‘nine island’ name tag. Incidentally, the ‘new island’ interpretation (although not the formation dynamics that I have elaborated here) is also held by Muslim scholars of nearby Bangladesh.

I am not of the ‘crow mindset,’ wherein an error such as this would bring into sharp and immediate focus the integrity of the person who propounded it. I am not uncomfortable at all if my theology veers slightly to the right and my archaeology slightly to the left. I could happily take in a ‘nine island’ spiritual interpretation during my Bhagavatam class, and switch over to a ‘one island’ interpretation during my geography class, without losing any sleep over it.

Not that I am actually proposing a new and third site. All I am saying is, given the viability of the new interpretation, the nature of the scarred terrain, and not to mention the new technology being used to crack this mystery, finding the real Navadwip or a new island in this region that presumably came into formation a little before 1486 AD should be quite easy. All one has to do is date the existing islands as well as the 10 odd trapped bits of ox-bow lakes in the Mayapur area. It could well be the loop that arcs in the current Antardwip site of Bhakti Vinod Takur.

Getting back to our scholar scrapper, whom we left mid-fight to resolve this minor geographical reconstruction discrepancy, we find him now in a determined mood. The constant buttonholing by seniors and running away of so-called friends upon seeing him, took its sweet toll upon the scholar’s mind, and give birth to a steely resolve. He promised to himself, ‘I will show these people, I will become such a great Krishna devotee that even Lord Brahma, Shiva will come to my doorsteps and roll on the ground!’

That promise he kept and how!

May that destitute Nawab of Navadwip—the bane of Murari—live forever in my heart.

HK

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