page_title: Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati
section_title: Birth and childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati / Early period (1874–1900): Student / Birth and childhood
caption_attribution_description: English: Bhaktivinoda Thakura with his family. Bimal Prasad is first from the left, top row
context_page_description: Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, born Bimla Prasad Datt, was a Gaudīya Vaisnava Hindu guru, ācārya, and revivalist in early 20th century eastern India. To his followers, he was known as Prabhupāda.
  Bimla Prasad was born in 1874 in Puri in a Bengali Hindu Kayastha family as a son of Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda Thakur, a recognised Bengali Gaudiya Vaishnava philosopher and teacher. Bimla Prasad received both Western and traditional Indian education and gradually established himself as a leading intellectual among the bhadralok, earning the title Siddhānta Sarasvatī. In 1900, Bimla Prasad took bhagawath initiation instead of Pancaratrika into Gaudiya Vaishnavism from the Vaishnava ascetic Gaurkishor Dās Bābājī, Although this remains controversial. This involved the sprinkling of holy dust on his head and a simple blessing instead of a fire yajna and other formalities. No one before nor since has received such an initiation.
  After the passing away of his father and his guru to spiritual world, in 1918 Bimla Prasad accepted the Hindu formal order of asceticism in the most controversial way, via a photograph of his Bhagawath guru and renamed himself Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Goswami.
context_section_description: Srimad Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Goswami Prabhupāda was born Bimala Prasad at 3:30 pm on 6 February 1874 in Puri – a town in the Indian state of Orissa famous for its ancient temple of Jagannath. The place of his birth was a house his parents rented from a Calcutta businessman Ramacandra Arhya, situated a few hundred meters away from the Jagannath temple on Puri's Grand Road, the traditional venue for the renowned Hindu Ratha-yatra festival.
  Bimala Prasad was the seventh of fourteen children of his father Kedarnath Datta and mother Bhagavati Devi, devout Vaishnavas of the Bengali kayastha community. At that time Kedarnath Datta worked as a deputy magistrate and deputy collector, and spent most of his off-hours studying Sanskrit and the theistic Bhagavata Purana text (also known as the Shrimad Bhagavatam) under the guidance of local pandits. He researched, translated, and published Gaudiya Vaishnava literature as well as wrote his own works on Vaishnava theology and practice in Bengali, Sanskrit, and English.
  The birth of Bimala Prasad concurred with the rising influence of the bhadralok community, literally "gentle or respectable people", a privileged class of Bengalis, largely Hindus, who served the British administration in occupations requiring Western education, and proficiency in English and other languages. Exposed to and influenced by the Western values of the British, including their condescending attitude towards cultural and religious traditions of India, the bhadralok themselves started questioning and reassessing the tenets of their own religion and customs. Their attempts to rationalise and modernise Hinduism to reconcile it with the Western outlook eventually gave rise to a historical period called the Bengali Renaissance, championed by such prominent reformists as Rammohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda. This trend gradually led to a widespread perception, both in India and in the West, of modern Hinduism as being equivalent to Advaita Vedanta, a conception of the divine as devoid of form and individuality that was hailed by its proponents as the "perennial philosophy" and "the mother of religions". As a result, the other schools of Hinduism, including bhakti, were gradually relegated in the minds of the Bengali Hindu middle-class to obscurity, and were often seen as a "reactionary and fossilized jumble of empty rituals and idolatrous practices."
  At the same time, nationalistic ferments in Calcutta, the then capital of the British Empire in South Asia, social instability in Bengal, coupled with British influence through Christian and Victorian sensibilities contributed to a portrayal of the hitherto popular worship of Radha-Krishna and Caitanya Mahaprabhu as irrelevant and deeply immoral. The growing public disapproval of Gaudiya Vaishnavism was aggravated by the prevalently lower social status of local Gaudiya Vaishnavas, as well as by erotic practices of tantrics such as the sahajiyas, who claimed close affiliation with the mainstream Gaudiya school. These negative perceptions led to the slow decline of Vaishnava culture and pilgrimage sites in Bengal such as Nabadwip, the birthplace of Caitanya.
  To avert the decay of Vaishnavism in Bengal and the spread of nondualism among the bhadralok, Vaishnava intellectuals of the time formed a new religious current led by Sisir Kumar Ghosh (1840–1911) and his brothers. In 1868 the Ghosh brothers launched the pro-Vaishnava Amrita Bazar Patrika that pioneered as one of the most popular patriotic English-medium newspapers in India and "kept Vaishnavism alive among the middle class".
  The father of Bimala Prasad, Kedarnath Datta, was also a prominent member of this circle among Gaudiya Vaishnava intelligentsia and played a significant role in their attempts to revive Vaishnavism. (His literary and spiritual achievements later earned him the honorific title Bhaktivinoda).
  After being posted in 1869 to Puri as a deputy magistrate, Kedarnatha Datta felt he needed assistance in his attempts to promote the cause Gaudiya Vaisnavism in India and abroad. A hagiographic account has i
caption: Kedarnath Datta's family ca.1900[15] From left to right:Back row: Bimala Prasad, Barada Prasad, Kedarnath Datta, Krishna Vinodini, Kadambini, and Bhagavati Devi (seated).
  Second row: Kamala Prasad, Shailaja Prasad, unknown grandchild, and Hari Pramodini.
  Front row: two unknown grandchildren.
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