From Bengal's Streets to ISKCON's

The doctrine's insistence that sankirtana is congregational, sung aloud with others rather than repeated silently, carried a social force alongside its theological one, since a public chant in a marketplace or a village square could include people the temple ritual of the period effectively excluded on grounds of caste or gender.

Gaudiya hagiography remembers this inclusiveness as one of Chaitanya's deliberate points, and later Gaudiya institutions, from the Vrindavan Goswamis' writings through the nineteenth century Gaudiya Math founded by Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakur to A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's International Society for Krishna Consciousness, treated public chanting as the doctrine's natural expression rather than an optional accompaniment to private practice. ISKCON's street chanting, robed devotees singing and dancing with drums and cymbals in public spaces worldwide from the late 1960s onward, is a direct institutional continuation of the sankirtana doctrine rather than an innovation, carrying Chaitanya's claim that the age itself calls for a public, participatory practice into settings the sixteenth century could not have anticipated. The doctrine is why Gaudiya Vaishnavism, alone among most Hindu devotional movements, treats a public performance as a completed act of worship in its own right rather than as preparation for a more private or restricted rite.