Srila Prabhupada Room

Information – On the second floor of the Lotus building are two rooms that were used by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the Founder-Ācārya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) as his personal quarters in 1976-77. These rooms have been maintained as when His Divine Grace was present. The first room was Srila Prabhupada’s darsana room and in the next room, Srila Prabhupada’s personal Deity of Sri Mayapur Chandra and the imprint of Srila Prabhupada’s lotus feet are there.

Bhavānanda: Śrīla Prabhupāda introduced us to many of the details of Indian culture at Māyāpur. He had us put down mattresses covered with sheets in his room. In 1970, in Los Angeles, he had asked me to sew sheets together to make a covering for the rug in his room. And then he had gotten down on his hands and knees right next to me, and we had smoothed out the wrinkles in the sheet.

So he had us do that same thing in Māyāpur, where we put mattresses from one end of the room to the other with bolster pillows against the wall. “Now you have white sheet covers,” he said, “and you change these every day.” When Bengali gentlemen visited Śrīla Prabhupāda in his room, they would sit on these mattresses around the edge of the room, their backs against the bolster pillows.

It was very aristocratic. The whole mood was that he was the mahant, the master of the house, the ācārya, but also the aristocratic Bengali gentlemen saw that he was reestablishing the old aristocratic mood from the early 1900’s or 1920’s. It was from Prabhupāda’s old days with the Mullik family and it was rapidly dwindling. At that time you couldn’t find a semblance of the old culture anywhere, because all those families had become degraded, and their wealth gone.

(Śrīla Prabhupāda-līlāmṛta, Volume Two, Chapter 42 – “Developing Māyāpur”)