Swami Ramakrishnananda

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

He was Shashi Bhushan Chakravarti, born in 1863 in the Hooghly district of Bengal, and a brilliant mathematics student — the kind of mind that could have had a university career in a colonial system that had very few places to offer. He spent it on a shrine. Through the last illness at Shyampukur and Cossipore he nursed; after 1886, at the Baranagore monastery, he took charge of the worship of his teacher's relics and did it every single day for twelve years without one break, with the exactness of a temple priest — the offerings on time, the lamp, the food, in a house where there was often no food for the monks themselves. He did not treat it as symbolism. He treated it as attendance on someone present. In 1897 he was sent to Madras, and from there, largely alone, he opened the Order's work across the whole of southern India — Bangalore, Mysore, Trivandrum, and as far as Burma. He wrote a life of Rāmānuja in Bengali, and books in English on the soul and the universe. He died in 1911 at the Baghbazar monastery in Calcutta, at forty-seven, worn out. He is the answer to a question people often ask about non-duality: what happens to devotion once you have concluded that there are not two? In him, nothing happened to it. It got more exact.

The turn it rests on

He treated the shrine as a living presence and never once treated the duty as routine.

What was taught

Carried the Order into South India almost single-handed, with extraordinary personal discipline.