Since the publication of Sri Ramakrishna's first biography, readers have been familiar with the awesome figure of a spiritual personality who established a direct liason with the divine and preached the most enlightened religious eclecticism in simple vernacular. All subsequent studies on the paramahamsa have been predicated on the monastic Vedantic interpretation of his career and character.This study is a pioneering attempt to uncover the human face behind the mask of the Paramahamsa. Using rare Bengali sources, it is an entirely new look at the saint. In his search for the historical and human figure, the author reexamines the saint's life and thought, and delves into his childhood experiences presenting him as a simple, gregarious, semiliterate rustic with a complex sexual dilemma and spiritual hunger who sought a solution to his troubled psyche in an eclectic piety of faith and fun.