Chaitanya was a Sanskrit scholar of Nabadwip in Bengal, known for a sharp intellect and a talent for defeating other scholars in debate, when at about twenty two he went to Gaya to perform the rites for his dead father and came back a different person. Those who had known him described someone unable to complete a sentence about anything else, weeping, fainting, and no longer interested in the grammar school he ran.
What he began doing was public. Congregational singing of the divine names, with drums and cymbals, processing through the streets at night, was not itself new, but the scale and the openness were: anybody could join, the singing crossed caste lines in a town where those lines were policed, and it drew crowds. The local Muslim magistrate, the Kazi, banned it after complaints. Chaitanya's response was to lead a mass procession, said to number in the tens of thousands, to the Kazi's house, and the ban was lifted after an exchange the tradition preserves as a conversation rather than a confrontation.
He took formal renunciation at twenty four, moved to Puri in Orissa, and spent the rest of his life there and on pilgrimage in the south, in states of devotional absorption that his companions describe as physically extreme. He died in 1534, in circumstances the sources do not agree about.