Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita

Methodology and history

Mahendranath Gupta (famously known simply as "M.") was a professor at Ripon College and taught at a number of schools in Kolkata. He had an academic career at Hare School and Presidency College in Kolkata. M had the habit of maintaining a personal diary since the age of thirteen. M met Ramakrishna in 1882. Attracted by Ramakrishna's teachings, M would maintain a stenographic record of Ramakrishna's conversations and actions in his diary, which finally took the form of a book Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita. Initially, when M began writing the diaries, he had no plans of publication. Regarding his methodology, M wrote, "I wrote everything from memory after I returned home. Sometimes I had to keep awake the whole night... Sometimes I would keep on writing the events of one sitting for seven days, recollect the songs that were sung, and the order in which they were sung, and the samadhi and so on." In each of his Kathamrita entries, M records the date, time and place of the conversation. The title Kathamrita, literally "nectar words" was inspired by verse 10.31.9 from the Vaishnava text, the Bhagavata Purana.

The pre-history of the Kathamrita has been discussed in R.K.Dasputa's essay (Dasgupta 1986). The first volume (1902) was preceded by a small booklet in English called A Leaf from the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1897). After the death of Ramakrishna, the growing public recognition of him encouraged Gupta to make his diary public. M thought that his was an important medium for public dissemination of Ramakrishna's ideas. M also sought Sarada Devi's appraisal before the publication of the diary. Between 1898 and 1902, transliterated excerpts from his diary were published in leading Bengali journals like Bangadarshan, Udbodhan, Hindu Patrika, Shaitya Patrika and Janmabhumi. The first four volumes were published in 1902, 1904, 1908 and 1910 respectively and the fifth volume in 1932; the final volume was delayed because of M's health problems. At the time of M's death in 1932, he was contemplating at least six to seven volumes, after which he hoped to rearrange the entire material chronologically.

According to Sumit Sarkar, "The Kathamrita was published 15-50 years after the sessions with Ramakrishna, and covers a total of only 186 days spread over the last four and a half years of the saint's life. The full text of the original diary has never been made publicly available. Considered as a constructed 'text' rather than simply as a more-or-less authentic 'source', the Kathamrita reveals the presence of certain fairly self-conscious authorial strategies... The high degree of 'truth effect' undeniably conveyed by the Kathamrita to 20th century readers is related to its display of testimonies to authenticity, careful listing of 'types of evidence', and meticulous references to exact dates and times." Tyagananda and Vrajaprana write, "...at the time of M' death, he had enough diary material for another five or six volumes. Poignantly and frustratingly, M's diary notations were as sparse as they were cryptic. As a result, M's Kathamrita project ended with the fifth volume. And, lest there be any misunderstanding, it needs to be said that the sketchy notations which constitute the remainder of M's diary belong solely to M's descendants, not to the Ramakrishna Order. It also needs to be pointed out that, according to Dipak Gupta, M's great-grandson, scholars can, and have, seen these diaries."