Birth of Shri Ramakrishna

Sri Ramakrishna was born at Kāmārpukur, a village in the Hooghly District in rural Bengāl.

It was far from the railway, untouched by the city. It contained rice-fields, tall palms, royal banyans, a few lakes, and two cremation grounds.

South of the village, there was a stream. A mango orchard dedicated by a neighbouring zamindār to the public use was frequented by the boys for their noonday sports.

A highway passed through the village to the great temple of Jagannāth at Puri. Most of the villagers were farmers and craftsmen. They entertained many passing holy men and pilgrims.

The dullness of rural life was broken by:

• lively festivals
• the observance of sacred days
• religious singing, and
• other innocent pleasures.

Sri Ramakrishna’s Parents

Khudirām Chattopādhyāya and Chandra Devi were his parents. They were married in 1799. At that time Khudirām was living in his ancestral village of Derepore, not far from Kāmārpukur.

Their first son, Rāmkumār, was born in 1805, and their first daughter, Kātyāyani, in 1810.

In 1814, Khudirām was ordered by his landlord to bear false witness in court against a neighbour. When he refused to do so, the landlord brought a false case against him and deprived him of his ancestral property.

Thus dispossessed, he arrived, at the invitation of another landlord, in the quiet village of Kāmārpukur, where he was given a dwelling and 1 acre of fertile land.

The crops from this little property were enough to meet his family’s simple needs. Here he lived in simplicity, dignity, and contentment.

Ten years after his coming to Kāmārpukur, Khudirām made a pilgrimage on foot to Rāmeswar, at the southern extremity of India. Two years later was born his second son, whom he named Rāmeśwar.

Again in 1835, at 60, he made a pilgrimage to Gayā. Here, from ancient times, Hindus have come from the four corners of India to discharge their duties to their departed ancestors by offering them food and drink at the sacred footprint of the Lord Vishnu.

At this holy place Khudirām had a dream in which the Lord Vishnu promised to be born as his son. Chandrā Devi, too, in front of the Śiva temple at Kāmārpukur, had a vision indicating the birth of a divine child.

Upon his return the husband found that she had conceived.

Ramakrishna was born on February 18, 1836. In memory of the dream at Gayā, he was named Gadādhar, the “Bearer of the Mace”, an epithet of Vishnu.

Three years later a little sister was born.

Boyhood

Gadādhar grew up into a healthy and restless boy, full of fun and sweet mischief. He was intelligent and precocious and endowed with a prodigious memory. On his father’s lap he learnt by heart the names of his ancestors and the hymns to the gods and goddesses. At the village school, he was taught to read and write.

But his greatest delight was to listen to recitations of stories from Hindu mythology and the epics. These he would afterwards recount from memory, to the great joy of the villagers. He enjoyed painting. The art of moulding images of the gods and goddesses he learnt from the potters. But arithmetic was his great aversion.

At 6 years old, Gadādhar had his first experience of spiritual ecstasy. One day in June, when he was walking along a narrow path between paddy-fields, he looked up at a beautiful, dark thunder-cloud.

As it spread, rapidly enveloping the whole sky, a flight of snow-white cranes passed in front of it. The beauty of the contrast overwhelmed the boy. He fell to the ground, unconscious. Some villagers found him and carried him home. Gadādhar said later that in that state he had experienced an indescribable joy.

Gadādhar was 7 when his father died. This incident profoundly affected him.

For the first time the boy realized that life on earth was impermanent. Unobserved by others, he began to slip into the mango orchard or into one of the cremation grounds, and he spent hours absorbed in his own thoughts. He also became more helpful to his mother in the discharge of her household duties.

He gave more attention to reading and hearing the religious stories recorded in the Purānās. And he became interested in the wandering monks and pious pilgrims who would stop at Kāmārpukur on their way to Puri.

These holy men, the custodians of India’s spiritual heritage and the living witnesses of the ideal of renunciation of the world and all-absorbing love of God, entertained the little boy with stories from the Hindu epics, stories of saints and prophets, and also stories of their own adventures. He, on his part, fetched their water and fuel and served them in various ways.

Meanwhile, he was observing their meditation and worship.

At the age of nine, Gadādhar was invested with the Sacred Thread. This ceremony conferred upon him the privileges of his brāhmin lineage, including the worship of the Family Deity, Raghuvir, and imposed upon him the many strict disciplines of a brāhmin’s life.

During the ceremony of investiture he shocked his relatives by accepting a meal cooked by his nurse, a Śudrā woman. His father would never have dreamt of doing such a thing. But in a playful mood Gadādhar had once promised this woman that he would eat her food, and now he fulfilled his plighted word. The woman had piety and religious sincerity, and these were more important to the boy than the conventions of society.

Gadādhar was now permitted to worship Raghuvir. Thus began his first training in meditation. He so gave his heart and soul to the worship that the stone image very soon appeared to him as the living Lord of the Universe. His tendency to lose himself in contemplation was first noticed at this time. Behind his boyish light-heartedness was seen a deepening of his spiritual nature.

About this time, on the Śivarātri night, consecrated to the worship of Śiva, a dramatic performance was arranged. The principal actor, who was to play the part of Śiva, suddenly fell ill, and Gadādhar was persuaded to act in his place. While friends were dressing him for the role of Śiva - smearing his body with ashes, matting his locks, placing a trident in his hand and a string of rudrākaśa beads around his neck - the boy appeared to become absent-minded. He approached the stage with slow and measured step, supported by his friends. He looked the living image of Śiva.

The audience loudly applauded what it took to be his skill as an actor, but it was soon discovered that he was really lost in meditation. His countenance was radiant and tears flowed from his eyes. He was lost to the outer world. The effect of this scene on the audience was tremendous.

The people felt blessed as by a vision of Śiva Himself. The performance had to be stopped, and the boy’s mood lasted till the following morning.

Gadādhar himself now organized a dramatic company with his young friends. The stage was set in the mango orchard. The themes were selected from the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Gadādhar knew by heart almost all the roles, having heard them from professional actors.

His favourite theme was the Vrindāvan episode of Krishna’s life, depicting those exquisite love-stories of Krishna and the milkmaids and the cowherd boys. Gadādhar would play the parts of Rādhā or Krishna and would often lose himself in the character he was portraying. His natural feminine grace heightened the dramatic effect. The mango orchard would ring with the loud kirtan of the boys. Lost in song and merry-making, Gadādhar became indifferent to the routine of school.

In 1849 Rāmkumār, the eldest son, went to Calcutta to improve the financial condition of the family.

Gadādhar was on the threshold of youth. He had become the pet of the women of the village. They loved to hear him talk, sing, or recite from the holy books. They enjoyed his knack of imitating voices. Their woman’s instinct recognized the innate purity and guilelessness of this boy of clear skin, flowing hair, beaming eyes, smiling face, and inexhaustible fun. The pious elderly women looked upon him as Gopālā, the Baby Krishna, and the younger ones saw in him the youthful Krishna of Vrindāvan.

He himself so idealised the love of the gopis for Krishna that he sometimes yearned to be born as a woman, if he must be born again, in order to be able to love Sri Krishna with all his heart and soul.