Bhakti Raksaka Sridhara and Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math

People · By the Bhakti Atlas editorial team · Published 2026-11-06

Bhakti Raksaka Sridhara was one of the senior disciples of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, admired within the Gaudiya Math for his Sanskrit learning. The math he founded in Navadvipa became, late in his life, an important point of reference for Western devotees.

Life

He was born Ramendra Sundar Bhattacharya on 10 October 1895 in Hapaniya, in the Burdwan district of Bengal, into a Brahmin family, and studied philosophy in Calcutta. He joined the Gaudiya Math in the 1920s and took the vows of sannyasa in 1930, receiving the name Bhakti Raksaka Sridhara. He preached in many parts of India for the mission.

After Bhaktisiddhanta's death, and the conflicts that followed, he withdrew and in 1941 established Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math at Koladvipa, on the western bank of the Ganges in Navadvipa. He lived there until his death on 12 August 1988, and named Bhakti Sundar Govinda (1929–2010) as his successor.

Works

His most important Sanskrit work is the Prapanna-jivanamritam, an anthology with his own verses on the theme of surrender (sharanagati), organised in six chapters. He also wrote devotional poems, including a hymn in praise of Chaitanya, the Prema-dhama-deva-stotram.

In his later years a number of Western followers recorded his talks in English, which were edited into books such as Sri Guru and His Grace, The Search for Sri Krishna: Reality the Beautiful, The Golden Volcano of Divine Love (on Chaitanya) and Loving Search for the Lost Servant. He also published an edition of the Bhagavad-gita with a short Sanskrit commentary and English translation under the title The Hidden Treasure of the Sweet Absolute, which reads the whole work through its devotional core (see our article on the Gita).

A short Bengali commentary of his on Narottama Dasa's song Shri Rupa-manjari-pada is discussed on a separate page.

Teaching

His writing emphasises a theology of descent: spiritual truth, in his presentation, cannot be grasped from below by reason or effort but must come down through grace, the teacher and the holy name. He developed at length the idea of "Reality the Beautiful", a reading of Krishna as the absolute in its most attractive aspect, and stressed the line of teachers in the mood of Rupa Gosvami, called the rupanuga tradition.

Western followers

From the late 1970s, after the death of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, a number of members of ISKCON visited him in Navadvipa, and some accepted him as a guide. This led to tensions with ISKCON's leadership in the early 1980s, a period documented by scholars of the movement such as E. Burke Rochford. Today Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math and related institutions maintain centres in several countries.

A Sanskrit poet in the twentieth century

Sridhara belonged to a generation of Gaudiya Math preachers trained in the classical languages. Within the mission he was known as a composer of Sanskrit verse, and he wrote poems in praise of his teacher and of Bhaktivinoda Thakura as well as the hymns mentioned above. The Prapanna-jivanamritam, completed in the 1940s, collects verses on surrender from scripture and from earlier teachers, with his own compositions, in six chapters corresponding to the six aspects of surrender listed in Gaudiya manuals: accepting what is favourable to devotion, rejecting what is unfavourable, faith in God's protection, accepting God as guardian, offering oneself and humility. The structure echoes Bhaktivinoda's song collection Sharanagati, which follows the same scheme in Bengali.

The math at Koladvipa

Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math stands on the western bank of the Ganges in the town of Navadvipa, in an area the tradition identifies as Koladvipa, one of the nine "islands" of the Navadvipa circuit. It began as a small thatched building and grew over decades into a temple complex with a tall shrine and residential buildings. Its annual events include the Navadvipa parikrama around the spring festival of Gaura Purnima, the anniversary of Chaitanya's birth, which draws pilgrims from Bengal and abroad.

Relations with other institutions

Sridhara maintained relations with several of his godbrothers who had founded their own missions. Biographies of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami record that the two knew each other from the 1930s and remained in contact; in the 1970s Bhaktivedanta sent some of his disciples to meet him. After 1977 these contacts became a source of controversy within ISKCON, whose leadership was divided over the role an outside teacher should play. The episode, documented in studies of ISKCON's succession crisis, contributed to the formation of new communities of Western devotees affiliated with the Navadvipa math.

Successors and branches

Bhakti Sundar Govinda led the math from 1988 until his death in 2010 and travelled widely, opening branches in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia. Several other disciples of Sridhara founded independent missions. As a result, Sridhara's books and his interpretation of the rupanuga tradition circulate today in many languages, through a network of institutions that remain distinct from ISKCON while sharing much of its history.

Reading his works

For readers outside the tradition, the English books edited from Sridhara's talks offer an accessible introduction to Gaudiya theology as taught in the Gaudiya Math line: conversational in tone, rich in Sanskrit quotations and focused on grace, surrender and the person of Chaitanya. His Sanskrit works are of interest to specialists as examples of devotional composition in a classical language in the twentieth century.

Sources and further reading

E. Burke Rochford Jr., Hare Krishna Transformed, New York University Press, 2007.
Ferdinando Sardella, Modern Hindu Personalism, Oxford University Press, 2013.
Edwin F. Bryant and Maria L. Ekstrand (eds.), The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant, Columbia University Press, 2004.
Wikipedia, "Bhakti Rakshak Sridhar" (orientation): en.wikipedia.org.