BVT 13 :: The Authenticity of the Autobiography
I have been through this subject a couple of times on this blog.
(1) Narayan Maharaj's comments on Sva-likhita-jivani
(2) Lalita Prasad Thakur and Bhaktivinoda's meat-eating.
This version is a little shorter, since I have here been able to rely on the testimony of Shukavak Das and the photos from the MS.
This file also includes some comments on the new translation and acknowledgements and appreciation at the end.
Though it seems barely worth mentioning, there are unfortunately some who doubt the authenticity of the Jīvanī. These persons have put forth various speculations on why it may be a forgery or have been tampered with in some way. This seems to have arisen out of a misunderstanding of the genre and mentality of Bhaktivinoda Thakur in writing his autobiography.
Perhaps these suspicions -- always coming from those who have little or no expertise in Bengali or Bengali history -- arise out of a fear that anything that disagrees with the image of the Thakur as someone who descended from the Spiritual World, unblemished in any respect by matter, as the incarnation of Gadadhar or his shakti, even Radha herself, in order to teach bhakti to the conditioned souls and bring them back to Godhead, could not possibly be genuine. Their idealized image would be contradicted by any representation of him as a genuine human being living life with real human challenges, and the fact that for Kedarnath Datt Bhaktivinoda, the main story of his life is his conversion to Vaishnavism. He is telling his "how I came to Krishna consciousness" story -- and the good thing is that there is more to it than just coming -- he stayed and was victorious, so to speak, by inspiring others to follow him.
Anyway, there is no fear. The Jīvanī was written as a letter to Lalita Prasad Thakur when he was just a teenager but was showing the attitude of veneration for his father that made him a genuine and honest disciple. It was written as a long letter. Lalita Prasad Prabhu kept it as a treasured gift from his father to the last day of his life and it is still preserved at the Dwadash Mandir ashram in Birnagar. Shukavak Das himself writes:
"I wanted to compare the handwriting of the Jīvanī with handwriting from other known sources to see if it was actually penned by the hand of Bhaktivinoda. There had been allegations that Lalita Prasad had written the letter himself or had tampered with it, which would mean that the book held in the India Office had been changed from the original handwritten manuscript. That being said, in Birnagar at Dwadash Mandir I found the original manuscript along with its marginalia, and when I compared the handwriting against other proven handwriting sources of Bhaktivinoda there was no doubt that they matched. There were no major differences between the handwritten manuscript and the published book. The marginalia on the handwritten manuscript matched the handwriting of the actual text and most of the marginalia had been incorporated into the published text." [Journal of Vaishnava Studies, 23.1, 2014, p.14.]
Anyone serious who wants to see the manuscript personally is welcome to come and look at it. The Bhaktivedanta Research Institute in Calcutta has done a good job of preserving and photocopying both the manuscript and the published edition and can make it available for viewing and comparison. Several images are given here where one can see for oneself:
(1) His English signature
(2) The signed picture of Bhaktivinoda Thakur dated to the same time as the manuscript
(3) Bhaktivinoda’s birth chart
(4) Some of Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s English handwriting.
(5) Lalita Prasad Thakur’s handwriting as a teenager
(6) Lalita Prasad Thakur’s handwriting as an adult
(1) Bhaktivinoda's English signature on the day he started the project.
(2) The signed picture of Bhaktivinoda Thakur dated to the day the manuscript was completed. There are weevil holes in the paper.
(3) Bhaktivinoda’s birth chart, drawn in his own hand. The ink has seeped into the pages, making the impressions from one side appear on the other.
(4) Some of Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s Bengali handwriting.
(5) Lalita Prasad Thakur’s handwriting as a teenager. Appended to the last pages of the manuscript.
(6) Lalita Prasad Thakur’s handwriting as an adult
One looks at the distinctive handwriting of Bhaktivinoda Thakur – that of an experienced individual who writes a lot and so writes quickly. Nowadays we can type and record our thoughts rapidly, even still finding it difficult to keep up with the speed of the mind, but think of a man whose thoughts are rapid but can only write by hand. By way of contrast one can see the inexperienced hand of the young adolescent Lalita Prasad in the last portions of the manuscript. There is a world of difference between the two. Even if the young Lalita Prasad had been interested in distorting his father’s memoir in some way (which in itself is unthinkable) he did not have the skills to do so. The printed edition that was published not long afterwards is for all intents and purposes exactly as in the manuscript.
The Current Translation
The current English translation has gone through a couple of incarnations, as I always believe on building on the work of others. I started with a translation that has been circulating on the internet, sometimes attributed to Shukavak N. Das. This edition had numerous omissions and inaccuracies that were in need of correction.
A later editor, who signs himself KDA, made a number of criticisms of this edition, and made some attempts to improve it, even while admitting that he does not know Bengali! Nevertheless, he did point out many places where more clarity was needed. In his introduction, he writes a lengthy critique of the earlier translation saying that the translator has taken a too objective, too clinical look at Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s life, without giving it the theological slant to the work that would be appropriate from the devotional perspective. His judgment is that Shukavak’s translation is “potentially calamitous.”
KDA does however inquire into the kinds of questions that I had been trying to deal with by accepting it as true, and trying to find a theological response to doubts about Bhaktivinoda Thakur himself. In this connection, KDA quotes Srila Prabhupada, who had given the appropriate explanation in response to one of his doubting disciple’s queries.
Since I believe many of the readers interested in this edition might also be interested to see how Srila Prabhupada dealt with the problem of flaws in a devotee venerated as a saint and as a guru. His answer in relation to Bhaktivinoda is: "The purport is, sometimes even a liberated person like Arjuna plays the part of a conditioned soul in order to play some important part. Similarly, Bhaktivinoda Thakura for sometimes was associating with the impersonalists. And then he exhibited himself in his true color as a pure devotee, exactly in the same way as Arjuna exhibited in the beginning as a conditioned soul, and then as a liberated soul. So there is nothing to be misunderstood in this connection. Krishna and his devotees sometimes play like that, as much as Lord Buddha, although an incarnation of Krishna, preached the philosophy of voidism. These things are conducted in terms of place, audience, time etc. In the Chaitanya Charitamrita it is said that the activities of a Vaishnava cannot be understood by the greatest scholar... So there is no doubt about it that Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura is an eternal energy of Lord Sri Krishna Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. And whatever he did was just to suit the time, place, circumstances, and etc. There is no contradiction in his activities."
At any rate, seeing both the original printed edition alongside Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s handwritten manuscript has made the whole project very evocative in many ways. Translation has been more of a challenge than I expected. There are many words that seem to have fallen out of usage and are not found in the dictionaries, even the good ones, place-names I can’t find on any map, people who may or may not be well known and need to be researched, proper spellings of Bengali place and person names, etc., have all been hurdles.
I spent a lot of the time I was working on this translation and commentary while staying at Bhaktivinoda Thakur's birthplace at Dwadash Mandir in Ula-Birnagar. Having lived there for a time both in the 70's and 80's as well as the present day, I was able to feel a kind of organic connection to the Thakur’s recounting of his childhood in that village.
Appreciations
I would like to offer again my appreciation for Shukavak Das and others whose enlightening work has enriched my understanding of Bhaktivinoda Thakur.
Let me take care to thank two Ukrainian devotees, Hanna Chaikovska and Muraliswara Das, who had been continuously pressuring me into doing this, exacted my promises. And without their insistence and strong desire, I would probably still be giving my attention elsewhere.
Murali had translated the current available edition of the Jīvanī into Russian, but had had some misgivings about, some very justified misgivings that are also marked in KDA’s edit with question marks and parenthetical insertions, which mostly came as a result of Shukavak’s mistranslations and awkward syntax. [I am sure Shukavak, whom I knew in Toronto days, or his PhD advisor, Joseph O’Connell, would not take too much exception to this critique. Our early work is our early work.] And, not knowing Bengali, there was no way that KDA could really do anything more than note some of the confusing portions and occasionally guess at the intent.
Its is also necessary to give special thanks to Angelo Pugliese. Angelo (Achyutananda) made all the materials from the Bhaktivinoda Thakur Janmsthan available to me from the Bhaktivedanta Research Institute. I am very glad now of the diligence with which Achyutanandaji has built the Bhaktivedanta Research Center, and especially the care that Achyuta and his staff took to catalog, photograph and preserve these documents.
I would like to thank Krishnadas Bag, who helped me extensively with the translation and various aspects of the editing. I am particularly thankful to Mahanta Maharaj Satyanarayana Dasaji of the Jiva Institute for recognizing the importance of the information being given here and publishing this text for the benefit of the progressive devotional community.
And I should not forget to give a final thanks to Dr. Satyanarayana Dasa Babaji Maharaj, who is publishing this book from the Jiva Institute in the interest of furthering better knowledge of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition and history. As was stated at the beginning of this introduction, there is no doubt that Bhaktivinoda Thakur was a significant and influential figure in Vaishnava history who should be known and understood.
And, of course, to all my spiritual masters.
Other articles in the introduction
BVT 1-2 : Invocation and Introduction to the Autobiography
BVT 3 :: Modern Scholarship on Bhaktivinoda Thakur
BVT 4 :: Bhaktivinoda Thaku and his thirst for knowledge.
BVT 5 :: Bhaktivinoda Thakur and Christianity
BVT 6 :: Bhaktivinoda Thakur in Jagannath Puri
BVT 7 :: Bhaktivinoda and the Meat-eating issue
BVT 8 :: Initiation from Bipin Bihari Goswami
BVT 9 :: Bipin Bihari Goswami in the Thakur's Writings
BVT 10 :: Lalita Prasad Thakur
BVT 11 :: Bhaktivinoda Thakur and Sampradaya
BVT 12 :: Bhaktivinoda Thakur and Legitimacy
BVT 13 :: The Authenticity of the Autobiography
Other articles inspired by the Autobiography:
A Bengali Zamindar's education in the 1840's
Bipin Bihari's testimonial to his best disciple Kedarnath Datta
Longfellow and Bhaktivinoda Thakur's poems
And also,
Hari-nama-cintamani related posts
Siddhi-lalasa
(1) Narayan Maharaj's comments on Sva-likhita-jivani
(2) Lalita Prasad Thakur and Bhaktivinoda's meat-eating.
This version is a little shorter, since I have here been able to rely on the testimony of Shukavak Das and the photos from the MS.
This file also includes some comments on the new translation and acknowledgements and appreciation at the end.
Though it seems barely worth mentioning, there are unfortunately some who doubt the authenticity of the Jīvanī. These persons have put forth various speculations on why it may be a forgery or have been tampered with in some way. This seems to have arisen out of a misunderstanding of the genre and mentality of Bhaktivinoda Thakur in writing his autobiography.
Perhaps these suspicions -- always coming from those who have little or no expertise in Bengali or Bengali history -- arise out of a fear that anything that disagrees with the image of the Thakur as someone who descended from the Spiritual World, unblemished in any respect by matter, as the incarnation of Gadadhar or his shakti, even Radha herself, in order to teach bhakti to the conditioned souls and bring them back to Godhead, could not possibly be genuine. Their idealized image would be contradicted by any representation of him as a genuine human being living life with real human challenges, and the fact that for Kedarnath Datt Bhaktivinoda, the main story of his life is his conversion to Vaishnavism. He is telling his "how I came to Krishna consciousness" story -- and the good thing is that there is more to it than just coming -- he stayed and was victorious, so to speak, by inspiring others to follow him.
Anyway, there is no fear. The Jīvanī was written as a letter to Lalita Prasad Thakur when he was just a teenager but was showing the attitude of veneration for his father that made him a genuine and honest disciple. It was written as a long letter. Lalita Prasad Prabhu kept it as a treasured gift from his father to the last day of his life and it is still preserved at the Dwadash Mandir ashram in Birnagar. Shukavak Das himself writes:
"I wanted to compare the handwriting of the Jīvanī with handwriting from other known sources to see if it was actually penned by the hand of Bhaktivinoda. There had been allegations that Lalita Prasad had written the letter himself or had tampered with it, which would mean that the book held in the India Office had been changed from the original handwritten manuscript. That being said, in Birnagar at Dwadash Mandir I found the original manuscript along with its marginalia, and when I compared the handwriting against other proven handwriting sources of Bhaktivinoda there was no doubt that they matched. There were no major differences between the handwritten manuscript and the published book. The marginalia on the handwritten manuscript matched the handwriting of the actual text and most of the marginalia had been incorporated into the published text." [Journal of Vaishnava Studies, 23.1, 2014, p.14.]
Anyone serious who wants to see the manuscript personally is welcome to come and look at it. The Bhaktivedanta Research Institute in Calcutta has done a good job of preserving and photocopying both the manuscript and the published edition and can make it available for viewing and comparison. Several images are given here where one can see for oneself:
(1) His English signature
(2) The signed picture of Bhaktivinoda Thakur dated to the same time as the manuscript
(3) Bhaktivinoda’s birth chart
(4) Some of Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s English handwriting.
(5) Lalita Prasad Thakur’s handwriting as a teenager
(6) Lalita Prasad Thakur’s handwriting as an adult
(1) Bhaktivinoda's English signature on the day he started the project.
(2) The signed picture of Bhaktivinoda Thakur dated to the day the manuscript was completed. There are weevil holes in the paper.
(3) Bhaktivinoda’s birth chart, drawn in his own hand. The ink has seeped into the pages, making the impressions from one side appear on the other.
(4) Some of Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s Bengali handwriting.
(5) Lalita Prasad Thakur’s handwriting as a teenager. Appended to the last pages of the manuscript.
(6) Lalita Prasad Thakur’s handwriting as an adult
One looks at the distinctive handwriting of Bhaktivinoda Thakur – that of an experienced individual who writes a lot and so writes quickly. Nowadays we can type and record our thoughts rapidly, even still finding it difficult to keep up with the speed of the mind, but think of a man whose thoughts are rapid but can only write by hand. By way of contrast one can see the inexperienced hand of the young adolescent Lalita Prasad in the last portions of the manuscript. There is a world of difference between the two. Even if the young Lalita Prasad had been interested in distorting his father’s memoir in some way (which in itself is unthinkable) he did not have the skills to do so. The printed edition that was published not long afterwards is for all intents and purposes exactly as in the manuscript.
The Current Translation
The current English translation has gone through a couple of incarnations, as I always believe on building on the work of others. I started with a translation that has been circulating on the internet, sometimes attributed to Shukavak N. Das. This edition had numerous omissions and inaccuracies that were in need of correction.
A later editor, who signs himself KDA, made a number of criticisms of this edition, and made some attempts to improve it, even while admitting that he does not know Bengali! Nevertheless, he did point out many places where more clarity was needed. In his introduction, he writes a lengthy critique of the earlier translation saying that the translator has taken a too objective, too clinical look at Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s life, without giving it the theological slant to the work that would be appropriate from the devotional perspective. His judgment is that Shukavak’s translation is “potentially calamitous.”
KDA does however inquire into the kinds of questions that I had been trying to deal with by accepting it as true, and trying to find a theological response to doubts about Bhaktivinoda Thakur himself. In this connection, KDA quotes Srila Prabhupada, who had given the appropriate explanation in response to one of his doubting disciple’s queries.
Since I believe many of the readers interested in this edition might also be interested to see how Srila Prabhupada dealt with the problem of flaws in a devotee venerated as a saint and as a guru. His answer in relation to Bhaktivinoda is: "The purport is, sometimes even a liberated person like Arjuna plays the part of a conditioned soul in order to play some important part. Similarly, Bhaktivinoda Thakura for sometimes was associating with the impersonalists. And then he exhibited himself in his true color as a pure devotee, exactly in the same way as Arjuna exhibited in the beginning as a conditioned soul, and then as a liberated soul. So there is nothing to be misunderstood in this connection. Krishna and his devotees sometimes play like that, as much as Lord Buddha, although an incarnation of Krishna, preached the philosophy of voidism. These things are conducted in terms of place, audience, time etc. In the Chaitanya Charitamrita it is said that the activities of a Vaishnava cannot be understood by the greatest scholar... So there is no doubt about it that Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura is an eternal energy of Lord Sri Krishna Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. And whatever he did was just to suit the time, place, circumstances, and etc. There is no contradiction in his activities."
At any rate, seeing both the original printed edition alongside Bhaktivinoda Thakur’s handwritten manuscript has made the whole project very evocative in many ways. Translation has been more of a challenge than I expected. There are many words that seem to have fallen out of usage and are not found in the dictionaries, even the good ones, place-names I can’t find on any map, people who may or may not be well known and need to be researched, proper spellings of Bengali place and person names, etc., have all been hurdles.
I spent a lot of the time I was working on this translation and commentary while staying at Bhaktivinoda Thakur's birthplace at Dwadash Mandir in Ula-Birnagar. Having lived there for a time both in the 70's and 80's as well as the present day, I was able to feel a kind of organic connection to the Thakur’s recounting of his childhood in that village.
Appreciations
I would like to offer again my appreciation for Shukavak Das and others whose enlightening work has enriched my understanding of Bhaktivinoda Thakur.
Let me take care to thank two Ukrainian devotees, Hanna Chaikovska and Muraliswara Das, who had been continuously pressuring me into doing this, exacted my promises. And without their insistence and strong desire, I would probably still be giving my attention elsewhere.
Murali had translated the current available edition of the Jīvanī into Russian, but had had some misgivings about, some very justified misgivings that are also marked in KDA’s edit with question marks and parenthetical insertions, which mostly came as a result of Shukavak’s mistranslations and awkward syntax. [I am sure Shukavak, whom I knew in Toronto days, or his PhD advisor, Joseph O’Connell, would not take too much exception to this critique. Our early work is our early work.] And, not knowing Bengali, there was no way that KDA could really do anything more than note some of the confusing portions and occasionally guess at the intent.
Its is also necessary to give special thanks to Angelo Pugliese. Angelo (Achyutananda) made all the materials from the Bhaktivinoda Thakur Janmsthan available to me from the Bhaktivedanta Research Institute. I am very glad now of the diligence with which Achyutanandaji has built the Bhaktivedanta Research Center, and especially the care that Achyuta and his staff took to catalog, photograph and preserve these documents.
I would like to thank Krishnadas Bag, who helped me extensively with the translation and various aspects of the editing. I am particularly thankful to Mahanta Maharaj Satyanarayana Dasaji of the Jiva Institute for recognizing the importance of the information being given here and publishing this text for the benefit of the progressive devotional community.
And I should not forget to give a final thanks to Dr. Satyanarayana Dasa Babaji Maharaj, who is publishing this book from the Jiva Institute in the interest of furthering better knowledge of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition and history. As was stated at the beginning of this introduction, there is no doubt that Bhaktivinoda Thakur was a significant and influential figure in Vaishnava history who should be known and understood.
And, of course, to all my spiritual masters.
Other articles in the introduction
BVT 1-2 : Invocation and Introduction to the Autobiography
BVT 3 :: Modern Scholarship on Bhaktivinoda Thakur
BVT 4 :: Bhaktivinoda Thaku and his thirst for knowledge.
BVT 5 :: Bhaktivinoda Thakur and Christianity
BVT 6 :: Bhaktivinoda Thakur in Jagannath Puri
BVT 7 :: Bhaktivinoda and the Meat-eating issue
BVT 8 :: Initiation from Bipin Bihari Goswami
BVT 9 :: Bipin Bihari Goswami in the Thakur's Writings
BVT 10 :: Lalita Prasad Thakur
BVT 11 :: Bhaktivinoda Thakur and Sampradaya
BVT 12 :: Bhaktivinoda Thakur and Legitimacy
BVT 13 :: The Authenticity of the Autobiography
Other articles inspired by the Autobiography:
A Bengali Zamindar's education in the 1840's
Bipin Bihari's testimonial to his best disciple Kedarnath Datta
Longfellow and Bhaktivinoda Thakur's poems
And also,
Hari-nama-cintamani related posts
Siddhi-lalasa
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