Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura’s Nāma Haṭṭa System: Community Development and the Modern Missionary Roots of a Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Community: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura stands as a significant figure at the helm of modern, institutionalized Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism. The largest organized
Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava institutions in India and internationally—the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and the Gauḍīya Mission1—draw much of their institutional structure and practices from his repackaging of the Gauḍīya tradition.2 Jason Fuller (in a previous issue of JVS) has shown Bhaktivinoda’s role in institutionalizing Gauḍīya community through print media. In tandem with those print media efforts, Bhaktivinoda also institutionalized Gauḍīya community on the ground. This was carried out through a mixture of delimiting the “orthodox” Gauḍīya community and expanding that community through missionary outreach. That expansion was largely affected through Bhaktivinoda’s Nāma Haṭṭa program, which began to carry out missionizing programs in rural Bengal and Orissa while also training preachers in that mission. It thereby created an expanding Gauḍīya authority structure alongside expanding congregations.