A Day in the Life of Sri Ramakrishna

This is a re-presentation of one of Sri Ramakrishna’s visits to Kolkata, which is found in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna in the chapter ‘Visit to Nanda Bose’s House’. In this time of social distancing when social visits are unwelcome, let us swing back in time and accompany Sri Ramakrishna and his disciples on this visit.

- SWAMI CHIDEKANANDA

It was 28 July 1885. The time was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. It is very hot and humid. Sri Ramakrishna was sitting in Balaram’s drawing room with some devotees.1 Narayan, a close devotee, mentioned to the Master that Nanda Bose, an aristocrat of Baghbazar, had many pictures of gods and goddesses in his house. So, Sri Ramakrishna decided to visit Nanda Bose’s house (hereafter called Basu Bati). Putting on a pair of black varnished slippers and a red-bordered cloth and repeating the name of God, he got into a palanquin which had been brought for him. M., or Mahendranath Gupta, the author of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, walked alongside the palanquin.2

The owners

According to the family records, Nanda Lal Basu and Pasupati Basu (later called Nanda Lal Bose and Pasupati Bose), sons of the renowned Basu family of Kantapukur in Shyambazar, North Kolkata, were the owners of Basu Bati. In about 1876, they acquired a large plot of land in Baghbazar and constructed the large mansion known as Basu Bati.3

In the nineteenth century, Kolkata was divided into two towns. There was the ‘White Town,’ where British officers and other Europeans lived, and the ‘Black Town’, where the natives lived. To avoid being counted as residents of the ‘inferior’ Black Town, many zamindar families in the Black Town had designed or remodeled their homes according to the European style of architecture prevalent at that time.4 Many of these buildings combined a Western exterior and an Eastern interior, with a large, open-spaced inner court-yard that had a Thakur dalan. Thakur dalan is a verandah or raised platform with a roof along the outside wall of a house. Large religious festivals or pujas were usually held there.5