The Bengal Renaissance and Ramakrishna

On a new-moon night at the Dakshineswar temple on the Hooghly, a priest in his thirties sat his wife on the seat where the goddess is worshipped, performed nyasa on her body, the placing of mantras limb by limb, and worshipped her with the sixteen services due to a deity. He prayed, in the words his biographer records: “O Lady, O Mother Tripurasundari, who art the controller of all powers, open the door to perfection; purify her (the Holy Mother’s) body and mind, manifest Thyself in her and be beneficent.” Then he gave away at her feet the results of all his practice, his rosary, and himself.

She was eighteen or nineteen. They had been married since she was five.

The tradition’s own sources do not agree on which night it was.

Which night

Swami Saradananda, whose Sri Ramakrishna the Great Master is the fullest account of the life, gives the date in his narrative as the new moon of Jyaishtha, B.E. 1280, which he converts himself to 25 May 1873. The chronology appended to the same book says 1872. Swami Tapasyananda gives 25 May 1873 and notes 5 June 1872 as another account. Amiya Sen prefers 1872. Belur Math’s own page says 1872 without a day; one Ramakrishna Math chronology prints 5 June 1872 flatly.

Saradananda’s book is divided against itself. His narrative gives 25 May 1873. His retrospect in Part V says the Master “brought his Sadhana to a close by performing the worship of Shodasi, the divine Mother, in A.D. 1873.” That is the one-volume English text; the two-volume printing of the same translation reads “the worship of the Divine Mother as Shodasi”, which is the Mahavidya-epithet construction and not an apposition. His appended chronology lists it, with a query of his own, as “1872?”.

His internal time markers do not settle it either, and the argument from them that this chapter used to make does not hold. He has Sarada Devi arrive about the Dol festival of 1872 and return to Kamarpukur “probably some time in October 1873”, which is about nineteen months, and in the same sentence calls the stay “about a year and four months”; elsewhere he writes that the Master “lived together with her continually for eight months”. The sentence usually pressed into service, that she “stayed with the Master for about five months after the worship of Shodasi”, is about the sleeping arrangement rather than the length of her visit. Saradananda glosses it in the next line, and has a further period in the music tower before she leaves.

Both candidate dates fall on a Jyaishtha new moon, so the astronomy decides nothing. This chapter does not settle it, and none of the accounts read for it does.

The man was Gadadhar Chattopadhyay, born at Kamarpukur in Hooghly district on 18 February 1836, known to the world as Sri Ramakrishna. His wife was Saradamani Mukhopadhyay, born 22 December 1853, known as the Holy Mother.

A temple nobody respectable would serve

The building this happened in exists because of a caste problem, and Saradananda tells the story at length.

Rani Rashmoni, who built Dakshineswar and consecrated it in 1855, was not a Brahmin. Saradananda calls her a Kaivarta; Banglapedia and other modern accounts call her family Mahishya. She was rich, she was devout, and either way the problem was the same one. The question that stopped her was whether a goddess installed by a Shudra could receive cooked food that caste Hindus would then eat. She sent for written opinions from pandits in several places. In Saradananda’s words, “none of them was to her liking.”

The ruling that worked came from a Sanskrit school at Jhamapukur in north Calcutta, and from the man who ran it, Ramkumar Chattopadhyay, Ramakrishna’s own elder brother: let the Rani make a gift of the property to a Brahmin, let him install the goddess and arrange the food offering, and the scriptural principle is observed. Other pandits still disapproved. Saradananda is blunt about what followed: no Brahmin of good family and good conduct would take the priesthood of a Shudra woman’s temple. Ramkumar took it himself, “lest the installation of the universal Mother should have to be given up”, and stayed for the rest of his life.

Ramkumar officiated at the installation and stayed on. Saradananda has Mathur move him to the Vishnu temple before his death and put Ramakrishna in the Kali temple in his place, with Ramkumar standing beside his brother to teach him the service; the temple’s own account has Ramakrishna succeed him after his death in the middle of 1856. This chapter does not adjudicate between them.

So the scene the rest of this chapter depends on happens in a temple that most of the learned men consulted thought should not have been built, staffed by a family that took the job because nobody else would.

The woman who made him a Tantric

Rani Rashmoni died in February 1861, and shortly afterwards a woman arrived at Dakshineswar whom Saradananda calls, through all the sadhana chapters, only the Bhairavi Brahmani. He gives her name once, late and at second hand: reporting Hriday, he writes of “the Bhairavi Brahmani named Yogeswari” whom the Master met again at Kasi, living in the quarter called the Sixty-four Yoginis with a woman named Mokshada. Ramakrishna said she was then about forty. She wore ochre and her hair loose.

She put him through the Tantric disciplines, and what she put him through has been miscounted for a long time, including by the earlier version of this chapter. The figure of sixty-four belongs to the texts, not to the rites. Ramakrishna’s own words, as Saradananda has them: “The Brahmani made me undertake, one by one, all the disciplines prescribed in the sixty-four main Tantras, all difficult to accomplish”. Sixty-four is the conventional canonical enumeration, the catuhsasti-tantra, and the lists differ by authority: Lakshmidhara rejected the whole set as un-Vedic and Bhaskararaya argued against him. It is a canon, not a tally. The practice ran from 1861 to about 1863, and Ramakrishna is quoted saying it did not take him more than three days to succeed in any of them.

The one initiation he names is purnabhisheka, the full Kaula consecration. “Having initiated me thus in Purnabhisheka, the Brahmani made me perform daily Tantric rites too numerous to mention.”

She left in 1867, and she left over a plate. At Kamarpukur she cleared away the leavings of a man named Srinivas, and the Brahmin women who visited objected, because she was a Brahmin woman. Hriday told her she could not stay in the house if she did such things. She answered that she would sleep elsewhere. Saradananda says her pride was wounded, that she thought it over and found herself at fault, that she made garlands and dressed the Master as Sri Gauranga and asked his forgiveness, and that she took the road to Kasi. She had been with him six years.

Saradananda follows her a little further than the quarrel. She went to Kasi; the Master met her there on his pilgrimage, she went on with him to Vrindavan, he asked her to settle there, and Saradananda writes that she passed away at Vrindavan shortly after the Master returned, which puts her death soon after the middle of 1868. No day and no place of burial appear in the accounts read for this chapter.

The name on the chapter

The rite is commonly called the Shodashi Puja. It is worth knowing where that name comes from, because it does not come from the account of the rite.

In Saradananda the name is the Order’s word for the event from the first, and it is never the word used inside the account of the rite. There the worship is “the worship of the Phalaharini Kalika Devi” and “the mystery-worship of the Devi”; Shodasi carries the chapter title, the heading over the preparations, and the sentence that closes the chapter. Elsewhere in the book he uses it freely, and always inside the Mahavidya frame: a section heading calls Shodasi “the Mahavidya”, the glossary lists her third among the ten Mahavidyas, and a later chapter says the Master “worshipped her as the Mahavidya, the divine Shodasi”. The words Sri Vidya, Sri Chakra and navavarana appear nowhere in the book. Nikhilananda’s English Gospel does record the rite, though not in the diary material. It appears in his own introduction, where he writes that Ramakrishna “placed on the seat the living image, Sarada Devi herself” and calls the rite “the Shodasi Puja, the ‘Adoration of Woman’”; his appended chronology lists it under 1872. In the diary itself the worship is not reported, and Sri Vidya, Sri Chakra and navavarana do not occur anywhere in the book. Shorasi, his spelling of the name, occurs twice in the diary: once in Ramakrishna’s own reported words, “I worshipped the Shorasi as my mother”, which Nikhilananda footnotes as the worship of a maiden of sixteen, and once in a list of pictures of Dhumavati, Shorasi, Bhuvanesvari, Tara and Kali, which he calls the terrible aspects of the Divine Mother.

There is a second slip in the usual account. Saradananda says Ramakrishna worshipped her “with the sixteen articles, as the Devi Herself.” That is shodasopachara, the ordinary sixteen-service format used for any deity in any tradition. It is not the shodasi vidya, the sixteen-syllable Srividya mantra. The two have been run together, and no source read for this chapter says a sixteen-syllable mantra was used. The earlier version of this chapter made that mistake, and also credited him with a Maha Shodashi mantra initiation from the Bhairavi, for which this chapter could find no source in the texts and Math pages it read.

How early the name attached to the night, this chapter has not established. It is already the title Saradananda gives the chapter, in a book written between 1909 and 1919, and Nikhilananda uses it in 1942. What can be said is narrower. Inside the only full account of what was done, the name does not appear, and everywhere else in that book it belongs to a Mahavidya.

Is any of this Sri Vidya

This treatise owes its readers a straight answer, and the straight answer is that the connection is thinner than it is usually made to sound.

Take Douglas Brooks’s definition: Srividya is the worship of Lalita Tripurasundari through her mantra and the Sri Chakra, and its social base is Smarta Brahman and southern. Brooks separates it as Srikula from the Kalikula of Bengal, Assam, Mithila and Nepal, where the goddess is Kali and Tara and the Mahavidyas and her aspect is fierce.

Everything documented about Ramakrishna’s Tantric formation is Kalikula. Kali at Dakshineswar. The skull seat, under the Vilva tree and at the Panchavati. Purnabhisheka, the full Kaula consecration. And Shodasi herself: wherever Saradananda names her outside the one chapter, he names her as a Mahavidya. What is absent is the whole of the Srividya apparatus. No Sri Chakra worship. No navavarana puja. No Panchadashi or Shodashi mantra. No Srividya initiation and no Srividya lineage. The one luminous triangle in the corpus Ramakrishna himself identifies, and he calls it the Brahmayoni, not the Sri Chakra.

What is present is one prayer addressed to Tripurasundari, and one vision of “Sri Rajarajeswari, otherwise called Shodasi.”

The reading came afterwards

The Sri Vidya claim is real, but it is a claim about interpretation, and it should be attributed to the people who make it.

Swami Hiranmayananda, writing for the Ramakrishna Mission in Delhi, sets out the argument. Shankara installed the Sri Yantra at Sringeri and consecrated Kamakshi at Kanchi; Shodashi, also called Kamakshi and Tripurasundari and Sri Vidya, presides over the Puri Sampradaya; by taking sannyasa from Tota Puri, Ramakrishna entered the Sri Kula of that sampradaya, having begun in the Kali Kula; in the southern practice the Parasurama Kalpasutra makes Kali the chief attendant of the supreme goddess, so success in Kali worship opens the way to Sri Vidya; and therefore, after realising Kali, he “performed the Upasana of Sri Vidya.” The article adds, separately, that he “did not perform the worship of Sri Vidya in any clay image.” The article ends by saying that Sri Vidya found her incarnation in the body and mind of one woman, and that she guides the order through Sarada Devi’s human form.

That is a genuine theological reading made by the tradition about itself, and it is interesting precisely as that. The article as published on the Mission’s site carries no citations. It rests on ordination lineage and identification, not on a documented chain of initiation or any record of Srividya ritual. And it is not the Order’s uniform position: Belur Math’s own page on Sarada Devi uses neither Shodashi nor Sri Vidya, saying only that on the night of the Phalaharini Kali Puja he ritually worshipped her, Sri Sarada Math’s page on the Holy Mother does use the name, and glosses it in a way that helps this chapter’s reading rather than the other one: his worship of her “as Shodashi – a form of Mother Kali”.

A chapter that shows a tradition interpreting itself over a century is better history than one that backdates the interpretation into the event.

The Holy Mother

Which leaves the person the whole scene was arranged around, and who is usually written about as its object.

Sarada Devi began giving mantra diksha after Ramakrishna died in 1886, and went on for thirty-four years. A list compiled in 1953 by Brahmachari Akshaychaitanya records 1,176 people initiated by her. Jeffery Long, reviewing the evidence in 2024, argues she probably had more direct disciples in her lifetime than her husband did. Accounts of her later years say she gave the mantra to several of Ramakrishna’s own disciples, among them Mahendranath Gupta, the “M.” whose notebooks became the Kathamrita. Whether he is on the 1953 list this chapter has not been able to check. She held no office. The Order calls her sanghajanani, mother of the order of monks, and its direct disciples treated her wishes as commands.

She died shortly after midnight, which Belur Math and Jeffery Long record as 21 July 1920 and Wikipedia as 20 July; the hour is why both dates circulate. Wikipedia places the death at the Udbodhan house in Bagbazar; the Order’s own page gives no place. The earlier version of this chapter put it at Belur, which no source supports.

The institutional fact worth ending on is a live one. Only male monastics may give mantra diksha in the Ramakrishna Order today, and many of them trace their own initiatory lineage back to her. The reason Long reports being given, by swamis and pravrajikas he spoke to, is a felt obligation to adhere to Shankara’s strictures, which is seen as securing the Order’s standing in the wider and largely conservative world of Hindu monasticism.

A note on the sources

The documents this chapter rests on are not transparent.

Mahendranath Gupta’s notes date from the 1880s, but Amiya Sen has shown the literary work on the Kathamrita did not begin before 1902 and took nearly two decades, and M.’s original diary is missing. Nikhilananda’s English Gospel rearranges it again. In 1995 Jeffrey Kripal published Kali’s Child, which read a homoerotic strain into the “secret talk” passages; it won an American Academy of Religion prize and was fiercely contested. Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana published a book-length rebuttal in 2010, and Jeanne Openshaw, Gerald Larson, Narasingha Sil, Rajat Kanta Ray, Peter Heehs and Hugh Urban all objected on grounds of translation, documentation, method or context. Kripal later corrected translation errors and said he had overplayed the claim that the Order suppressed material. Two attempts to ban the book in India, in 1996 and 2001, failed. Sil, who rejected Kripal’s conclusion, was in turn accused by Openshaw of writing pathography.

This chapter takes no side in that quarrel. It records that the quarrel exists, because a chapter that leans on the Kathamrita while pretending it is a transparent record of 1882 is not being straight with anyone.

What the Bengal renaissance left

The next chapter goes north, to a valley where the recovery was textual and the ritual had already stopped. What Bengal left is different in kind.

It left an order: the Math at Baranagar in 1886, Belur from 1898, the Mission founded on 1 May 1897, the Vedanta Societies in New York from 1894 and San Francisco from 1900, the Sarada Math from December 1954. It left a publishing programme that put the Lalita Sahasranama into English with Swami Tapasyananda’s translation. It left Tarapith and Kalighat and Kamakhya still working, and the household Shakta practice of Bengal that no reform movement displaced, and the devotional repertoire that runs from Ramprasad Sen down to the five hundred Hindu songs that Kazi Nazrul Islam wrote, for which some Muslims called him an unbeliever and some Hindus objected that a Muslim had written them.

And it left a question the tradition answered slowly. The documented rite of 1872 or 1873 was Bengali Shakta worship performed on a particular new moon. What the Order found, afterwards, was that it needed the language of the supreme vidya to say what Sarada Devi had turned out to be.

The worship took one night. The interpretation took a century.