Mahendranath Gupta (“M.”)

Mahendranath Gupta was born in Calcutta in 1854 and educated in the city’s English-language schools and colleges. He spent his working life as a teacher and headmaster in Calcutta schools, and was a householder, married with children, throughout his life.

In 1882, in a time of personal crisis, he was taken to the Kali temple at Dakshineswar, north of Calcutta, and met Ramakrishna. He returned again and again over the next four years, until Ramakrishna’s death in 1886, and each time wrote up in his diary what he had seen and heard: the conversations, the songs, the visitors, the time of day and the setting. Ramakrishna is said to have recognized him as one called to spread his teaching among householders.

From these diaries he published, under the pen name “M.”, a few English pamphlets in the 1890s, which Vivekananda warmly encouraged, and then the Bengali Śrī Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Kathāmṛta, in five volumes from 1902 to 1932. Swami Nikhilananda’s English translation, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), made the work known throughout the world. In his later years M. was himself sought out as a teacher. He died in Calcutta in 1932.