In 1933, Abhay Charanaravinda formally received initiation from Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura and took the name Abhay Charanaravinda Dāsa. His spiritual master’s instruction was unambiguous: go to the English-speaking world and preach the message of Lord Caitanya. This instruction became the defining mission of Prabhupāda’s life.

For the next three decades, Prabhupāda remained in India — managing a family, running a pharmaceutical business, and all the while writing, translating, and contemplating how he might fulfil his guru’s instruction. In 1950, he took vānaprastha (retired life) and devoted himself increasingly to study and writing. In 1959 he received sannyāsa, the renounced order, taking the name A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.

In August 1965, carrying forty rupees, a small supply of dry cereal, and a trunk of his translated scriptures, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami boarded the cargo ship Jaladuta in Calcutta, bound for New York. During the voyage, he suffered two heart attacks. Yet he continued writing in his diary, resolved to carry out his mission.

He arrived in New York City on September 17, 1965. For almost a year he struggled, living on the charity of sympathetic Indians and sleeping on the floor of friends’ apartments. Then, in the summer of 1966, something extraordinary happened.

In Tompkins Square Park in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Prabhupāda began holding outdoor kirtanas — chanting the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra with a small group of young Americans. The counterculture youth of New York were electrified. Within months he had established the International Society for Krishna Consciousness — ISKCON — on July 11, 1966.

From that single storefront on Second Avenue in New York, Prabhupāda’s movement spread with astonishing speed. Within just twelve years — between 1966 and 1977 — he established over 108 temples on every inhabited continent, initiated over 10,000 disciples, and oversaw a farm community program, a restaurant chain (Govinda’s), and the world’s largest vegetarian food distribution program (Food for Life).

Prabhupāda presented Kṛṣṇa consciousness not as a sectarian religious doctrine but as a precise, systematic science of the self — applicable to all people, of all backgrounds, in any walk of life. His core teaching was simple: the living being is not the body but the eternal soul (ātmā), and the supreme purpose of human life is to re-awaken the soul’s original loving relationship with God, Kṛṣṇa.

The method he emphasised above all was sankīrtana — the congregational chanting of the holy names. “Simply by chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa,” he would say, “one’s consciousness is purified and one gradually comes to understand one’s spiritual identity.” This deceptively simple instruction carried the weight of the entire Vedic tradition behind it.

Despite travelling constantly and managing a global institution, Prabhupāda produced a remarkable body of literature — translations and purports of the Vaiṣṇava canon that remain the foundational texts of the Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement worldwide. He often wrote early in the morning, before 4:00 AM, dictating into a tape recorder while his disciples transcribed and typeset the manuscripts.