Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (Gadadhar Chattopadhyay, 18 February 1836 – 16 August 1886) was a Bengali Brahmin priest of the Dakshineswar Kali temple north of Calcutta whose intense practice of multiple religious paths produced the doctrine that all sincere paths lead to one realisation. Born at Kamarpukur in Hooghly district, he served as priest at Dakshineswar from 1855, took Sarada Devi as his married consort in 1859, and trained the disciples who became the founders of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. He died of throat cancer at Cossipore in north Calcutta. His recorded conversations, edited by Mahendranath Gupta as the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, run to five Bengali volumes.
Early life and the Kali vision
Gadadhar was the fourth child of Khudiram Chattopadhyay and Chandramani Devi, born after his father’s pilgrimage to Gaya during which Khudiram reported a dream of Vishnu promising a son. The family was poor. His father died when Gadadhar was seven; his elder brother Ramkumar moved to Calcutta and opened a small Sanskrit school. In 1852 Gadadhar joined him. In 1855, when the wealthy widow Rani Rasmani consecrated her new Kali temple at Dakshineswar, Ramkumar was appointed head priest. Gadadhar joined as assistant. After Ramkumar’s death the following year, Gadadhar became the chief priest of the Bhavatarini Kali shrine.
For roughly twelve years from 1856 onward, Ramakrishna’s worship of Kali at Dakshineswar passed beyond ritual into a state of continuous spiritual intensity. The vision of the Mother as a living presence in the temple, described in his own words in the Kathamrita, came after months of weeping and refusal to eat. The account he later gave was that, in desperation, he reached for the sacrificial sword to end his life, and at that moment the stone image dissolved into a sea of consciousness.
The disciplines: Tantra, Vaishnava, Vedanta, Islam, Christianity
From 1861 onward a sequence of teachers arrived at Dakshineswar and guided him through specific disciplines, each completed in a compressed period:
- 1861–63, Bhairavi Brahmani: a wandering Tantric initiated him into the 64 sadhanas of the Bhairavi-yamala. He claimed to have completed in months what was traditionally given decades.
- 1864, Jatadhari: a Vaishnava who installed an image of the child Krishna and taught vatsalya-bhava (devotion as parent to a child).
- 1864–66, Totapuri: a wandering Advaita Vedantin who initiated him into sannyasa and trained him in nirvikalpa samadhi over eleven months.
- 1866, Govinda Rai: a Sufi who taught him Islamic practice. Ramakrishna lived for several days outside the temple, performing namaz.
- 1874, Sambhu Charan Mallik: a devotee who read him the Bible. He reported a vision of Christ entering his body.
Marriage and the disciples
In May 1859, when Ramakrishna was 23, his mother arranged his marriage to five-year-old Sarada Devi of Jayrambati. The marriage was conventional in form and never consummated. Sarada joined Ramakrishna at Dakshineswar in 1872 at age 18; on 25 May 1872, the night of Phalaharini Kali Puja, Ramakrishna performed Shodashi Puja with Sarada in the seat of the goddess, formally treating her as the embodiment of Kali. She lived in the small Nahabat room adjoining the temple courtyard.
From 1879 onward, young Bengali men from Calcutta’s educated middle class began visiting Dakshineswar in growing numbers. The principal disciples who would later form the monastic order included Narendranath Datta (the future Swami Vivekananda), Rakhal Chandra Ghosh (Brahmananda), Gopal Chandra Ghosh (Advaitananda), Sashi Bhushan Chakraborty (Ramakrishnananda), and Latu Maharaj (Adbhutananda). They visited intermittently, taking instruction without formal initiation in his lifetime.
Illness, Cossipore, death
Ramakrishna developed a throat lesion in early 1885, diagnosed by Mahendralal Sarkar as cancer. He was moved from Dakshineswar to a rented house at Shyampukur in Calcutta in September 1885, and then to a larger garden house at Cossipore in December. The disciples gathered around him in continuous attendance through the spring of 1886. On New Year’s Day 1886, in the garden at Cossipore, he is recorded as having touched the assembled disciples and given them spiritual experience, an event commemorated as Kalpataru Day. He died on the night of 15-16 August 1886, aged 50. He was cremated at Cossipore ghat the following morning; the urn is enshrined at Belur Math.
The Kathamrita and the Mission
Mahendranath Gupta, a schoolteacher who visited Dakshineswar between 1882 and 1886, kept a diary of Ramakrishna’s conversations. The first volume of his Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita appeared in 1902, the fifth in 1932. The English condensation by Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, was published in 1942 and remains the principal English source. The Ramakrishna Math, founded by Vivekananda at Baranagar in 1886 and shifted to Belur Math in 1898, and the Ramakrishna Mission, registered on 1 May 1897, carry the institutional legacy.
For what it’s worth, the Kathamrita is a peculiar document by Western biographical standards. It is not a chronological diary but a thematic edit by Mahendranath of his original notes, with sequences rearranged and dialogues compressed. The principal Bengali edition is closer to the original than the English condensation, which softens some of the rougher edges of Ramakrishna’s village idiom.
Common questions
Was Ramakrishna a Tantrika, a Vaishnava, or a Vedantin?
He passed through all three disciplines under different teachers and held that each was a complete path to the same realisation. His settled identity at Dakshineswar was as a worshipper of Kali in the Shakta-Tantric mode, but he refused to absolutise any single approach. His most quoted teaching, jata mat tata path (as many faiths, so many paths), summarises the conclusion he drew from his own experiments.
What is the relation between Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi?
They were legally married and lived together at Dakshineswar from 1872 onward; the marriage was unconsummated. He treated her as the living embodiment of the Mother and performed formal Shodashi Puja with her in the seat of the goddess. After his death, Sarada Devi became the spiritual head of the developing order until her own death in 1920. The Ramakrishna tradition treats them as a coordinated pair, not as guru and disciple.
Where are the principal sites of Ramakrishna pilgrimage?
Dakshineswar Kali temple on the eastern bank of the Hooghly, twenty minutes north of central Kolkata, remains a functioning temple. The Panchavati grove and the Nahabat room at Dakshineswar are preserved. Belur Math, on the western bank opposite Dakshineswar, is the headquarters of the Ramakrishna order and the location of the principal Ramakrishna temple. Kamarpukur (his birthplace) and Jayrambati (Sarada’s birthplace) in Hooghly and Bankura districts are reached by a short train journey from Howrah.
One limitation worth noting
Academic scholarship on Ramakrishna, including Jeffrey Kripal’s Kali’s Child (1995), has reopened questions about the editing of the Kathamrita and the framing of Ramakrishna’s mystical states in subsequent literature. The Ramakrishna Mission has contested some of this analysis. A reader interested in the historical Ramakrishna should compare the Bengali Kathamrita with both the Mission’s standard biography and the academic critique. The biographical summary is at the Ramakrishna entry on Wikipedia; the official organisational record is at Belur Math.
