The Name, the Street, and the Twentieth Century Missions

The practice appointed for the present age is the chanting of the names of God, and the tradition means this literally rather than as one option among several. Sankirtana, congregational chanting with drum and cymbals, was performed in public processions in Chaitanya lifetime and drew people who would not have been admitted to a temple, which is part of why the movement spread across Bengal and Odisha as fast as it did. The sixteen word maha-mantra of Hare, Krishna and Rama is its standard form.

The tradition passed through a difficult period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a number of groups claiming Gaudiya descent were regarded within the tradition as having departed from it. The reform that produced the modern movement came from Bhaktivinoda Thakur, a Bengali magistrate who wrote extensively and worked to establish which lineages and texts were authoritative, and from his son Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, who founded the Gaudiya Math in the early twentieth century, took sannyasa outside the usual channels, and built a preaching organisation with printing presses.

One of his disciples, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, went to New York in 1965 and founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness the following year. That is how a sixteenth century Bengali devotional tradition became visible on Western streets, and ISKCON is now one branch among several, alongside the Gaudiya Math lines and the older communities of Bengal, Odisha and Vrindavan.