Prabhupada's Claimed Lineage

Prabhupada, born Abhay Charan De in Calcutta in 1896, was initiated by Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakur, the reformist Gaudiya Vaishnava teacher who had organized the Gaudiya Math as a missionary revival of Chaitanya's teaching earlier in the twentieth century, and Prabhupada presented himself as carrying that specific guru's instruction forward when he arrived in New York in 1965 to found what became ISKCON the following year. The disciplic succession he claimed, tracing back through Gaudiya Vaishnava teachers to Chaitanya and, in traditional reckoning, further back still to Madhva's Dvaita lineage, was the source of authority he cited both for his own right to initiate disciples and for the specific interpretation of Gaudiya theology, including the centrality of the four regulative principles and public sankirtana, that ISKCON institutionalized worldwide.

Scholars of the movement, including sociological studies of ISKCON's development, have noted that Prabhupada was one among several disciples of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati who claimed to carry his teaching forward, and that the Gaudiya Math itself fragmented into competing branches after its founder's death in 1937, a precedent that mattered a great deal for what followed Prabhupada's own death four decades later.