Rain swept the courtyard of the High Court of Judicature at Fort William in Calcutta, and the monsoon sky of 1937 hung grey over Esplanade Row. In the lofty chamber of Chief Justice Sir Leonard Wilford James Costello, lawyers in black gowns argued over title deeds, bank ledgers, and sacred properties. Outside, trams rattled along their rails and street vendors called out under dripping cotton awnings. Inside the hall, the spiritual movement that had stirred all Bengal had become Testamentary Suit Number 2 of 1938. A mission meant to flood the world with devotion had come down to a bitter legal battle before a British judge.
The legal machinery had begun to turn in early June, when the court summoned the principal parties. On one side stood Kuñjavihārī, the former general secretary, who that spring had left the Baghbazar headquarters at 16/A Kali Prasad Chakrabarty Street to set up a rival center on Lansdowne Road in South Calcutta. Through the firm of N. C. Mandal and Company he produced a handwritten testament that Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī had executed on May 23, 1923, just before a dangerous hernia operation. It named three executors, Kuñjavihārī, Paramānanda Brahmacārī, and Ananta Vāsudeva, to manage all ancestral and acquired assets. Kuñjavihārī’s advocates argued under the Dāyabhāga of Jīmūtavāhana, the twelfth-century Bengal school of Hindu law, that Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta was in law a kāyastha householder who had owned all the institution’s properties outright. On that basis they claimed probate, seeking to set aside the newly formed Governing Body and gain legal control of assets worth nearly three hundred thousand rupees.
Ananta Vāsudeva, represented by G. C. Chunder and Company, answered with affidavits. Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta, he argued, had renounced caste as a Vaiṣṇava sannyāsī nineteen years before and owned no temples personally. The properties were public religious trusts, created from public donations for the spreading of bhakti, and were now governed by the thirteen-member board elected at Māyāpur during Gaura Pūrṇimā. He testified that a later will naming five executors had been drafted in October 1931 by Annada Prasad Datta under Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta’s direct guidance, and he charged that Kuñjavihārī was concealing it. The conflict soon drew in the family. Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta’s three brothers, Lalita Prasad Datta, Radhika Prasad Datta, and Viraja Prasad Datta, filed a caveat to protect their interests, then withdrew it to avoid further scandal.
Śrīla Prabhupāda: Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura, at the time of his departure, requested all his disciples to form a governing body and conduct missionary activities cooperatively. He did not instruct a particular man to become the next ācārya. But just after his passing away, his leading secretaries made plans, without authority, to occupy the post of ācārya, and they split in two factions over who the next ācārya would be. Consequently, both factions were asāra, or useless, because they had no authority, having disobeyed the order of the spiritual master.
Through the hot months the case dragged on, and the spiritual life of the mission was widely neglected. In August, Lakshmi Moni Dutt and Kshirode Sundari Dutt, widows of the philanthropist Jagabandhu Dutt, sent a desperate petition to the High Court. Their husband had spent three hundred and fifty thousand rupees building the marble temple at Baghbazar, and they had added fifty thousand more to complete it. Now, appalled to see the daily worship