Anandamayi Ma

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In a mud-walled house in the village of Kheora, in the Tipperah district of what was then East Bengal and is now Bangladesh, a daughter was born to a Brahmin family on the thirtieth of April 1896 and named Nirmala Sundari, a name that carries the sense of spotless beauty. The child was, by every account that reached the village, unremarkable in the ways that village watching measures children: quiet, undemanding, given to long stillnesses that her mother took for absent-mindedness and her neighbors for slowness. She was barely schooled. She was married at twelve. Nothing in the visible record of those years anticipates that the woman this girl became would be carried by automobile through crowds of thousands, that prime ministers and renunciates and Bengali grandmothers would press toward her for a glance, or that she would describe her entire life as the unfolding of a single state she had never once left. The honorific that fastened to her name was Anandamayi Ma — the Bliss-permeated Mother, the Mother saturated with joy. She is among the most documented and least classifiable figures of twentieth-century Indian religion: a saint without a guru, a teacher without a doctrine she would call her own, a Mother who insisted she was, and had always been, exactly what she was.

Anandamayi Ma (1896-1982), the Bengali saint revered as the Bliss-permeated Mother — anonymous photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain, PD-India)

Nirmala Sundari

The outward facts are firm where the inner life is not. In February 1909, not yet thirteen, Nirmala was married to Ramani Mohan Chakravarti, a pious and poorly schooled Brahmin from Atpara in the Vikrampur region of Dhaka district, roughly a decade her senior. By the custom of the time she remained for some years in her natal household before joining his; the conjugal life, when it came, never became conjugal in the ordinary sense. The marriage stayed celibate from its inception — a fact she did not present as renunciation, since by her account no appetite required renouncing. Ramani Mohan, whom she came in time to call Bholanath, found himself married to someone whose nature he slowly understood he could not domesticate. He became, in the end, less her husband than her first devotee.

Through her late teens and twenties, living at Ashtagram, Bajitpur, and Dhaka, she passed through states that had no name in the household vocabulary available to describe them. Her body would grow rigid or fold into postures it had never been taught; she would lose, for long stretches, the ordinary commerce of speech and recognition; sounds rose from her of a kind that frightened those who loved her, and a luminous immobility settled over her that they did not have the categories to read. Doctors were called and found nothing; an exorcist was called and, in the traditional telling, found himself overmatched. What was happening, in her own later description, was not affliction and not transformation. It was the visible surfacing of a condition that had been continuous in her since before there was a Nirmala to host it.

A saint without a guru

Here the figure of Anandamayi Ma diverges sharply from almost every model of Indian sanctity around her. The transmission of realization in India runs characteristically through the guru — the teacher who carries the lineage, confers the mantra, and stands as the disciple’s living door. The path of devotion, bhakti, and the disciplines of yoga alike presuppose this chain of hand to hand. Anandamayi Ma stood outside it. She took no human teacher, was initiated by no living master, and inherited no sampradaya. What she did instead, in the tradition’s reading and her own, was perform her own initiation.

On the full-moon night of the third of August 1922, at Bajitpur, the act that her devotees mark as the hinge of her outward life took place. In the architecture of Hindu initiation, three terms ordinarily stand apart: the guru who gives, the disciple who receives, and the deity or sacred sound that is given. On that night, by the account preserved in the community, all three collapsed into one person. She was, simultaneously, the one initiating, the one initiated, and that into which she was initiated — guru, disciple, and mantra at once. No outside hand touched her. The rite that elsewhere binds a seeker into a lineage she enacted alone, as a closed circle, and the singularity of it — a self-conferred diksha, and conferred by a young, barely-lettered married woman — is part of why her case has resisted easy filing ever since. She did not climb toward a state. She staged, for those who needed to see a beginning, the beginning of something she said had no beginning.

The years that followed she herself called a lila of sadhana — a play, an enactment, of spiritual discipline. The framing matters and is precise. The austerities, the postures, the long submersions in samadhi that observers took for the hard-won fruits of practice were, in her telling, not labors by which she attained anything. They were a kind of demonstration, performed as if from the outside, of disciplines she had no need to undergo. She was not becoming realized. She was showing what realization looks like when it wears a body.

Kheyala

The single concept that organizes her life and her speech is kheyala. The Bengali word resists clean translation; in her usage it names a spontaneous arising — a movement of thought, impulse, or action that surfaces of itself, neither willed toward a chosen end nor desired for an advantage. It is not whim, which is appetite, and not decision, which is deliberation. It is the welling-up of something prior to both. When she was asked why she did a thing — why she fell silent for years, why she stopped feeding herself, why she traveled here and not there, why she laughed — the answer, again and again, was that the kheyala had come.

Read from within her frame, kheyala is the operative form taken by the divine will when it moves through a being in whom the personal will has gone transparent. The ordinary person acts from wanting; the action is an arrow aimed at a target the self has set. In Anandamayi Ma there was, by her account, no archer and no target — only the arising and its expression, the way a wave is not a decision the sea makes. This is why she could be at once utterly responsive and utterly without project. She fed thousands and organized nothing; she let ashrams rise around her and disclaimed having founded them; she traveled ceaselessly across the subcontinent for sixty years and said she went where the body was taken. Kheyala is the hinge on which her doctrine of non-agency turns, and it is the closest she came to a teaching about herself: that what looked like a life of extraordinary spiritual achievement was, from the inside, no achievement at all, but the unobstructed passage of a will that was never hers.

The unchanging one

If kheyala describes how she acted, her account of who acted is stranger still and more central. Anandamayi Ma denied, consistently and across decades, that she had ever changed. She had not been an ordinary girl who became a saint. She had not practiced her way from bondage to freedom. The states that erupted in her twenties added nothing and revealed everything. Before this body was born, she would say, I was the same; as a small girl, the same; grown to womanhood and given in marriage, the same; and so I shall remain. She spoke of herself characteristically in the third person — as this body, or as the little girl — not as affectation but as exact report: the awareness that called itself by those names had never, she insisted, been identical with them.

This is not the language of one who attained brahman and reports back from the far shore. It is the language of one for whom there was no shore, no crossing, and no far. Where a path of yoga or the disciplines of the philosophers describe an ascent from ignorance to realization, her self-disclosure cancels the ascent: there was nothing to attain because nothing was ever lost. To enter her presence, in the testimony of those who did, was to feel the pressure of a being for whom time and change were a kind of courtesy extended to visitors — a story she would tell, in a body she would wear, for as long as the kheyala kept her in it.

A following across India

From the late 1920s the gravitational field around her widened past anything a village could hold. In Dhaka she reopened worship at the long-derelict Siddheshwari Kali temple in 1926, and in 1929 the first ashram raised in her name went up at Ramna, within the precinct of the Ramna Kali Mandir — the work, chiefly, of Jyotish Chandra Roy, the devotee she addressed and the community remembers as Bhaiji. It was Bhaiji who fixed upon her the name by which the world would know her, Anandamayi, and Bhaiji who wrote the first sustained account of her, the book the tradition treasures as Mother as Revealed to Me. Around the same nucleus of puja, kirtan, and her own unpredictable presence, the circle thickened into a movement.

Through the 1930s and after, the field of her devotion spread up the Gangetic plain and into the Himalayan foothills. Ashrams rose at Varanasi — the Kashi ashram became the institutional heart — and across the Kankhal–Haridwar–Dehradun corridor along the upper Ganga, with further houses at Vrindavan, Kolkata, and a score of other sites, until the network ran to some two dozen establishments. By around 1950 these were gathered under an organizing body, the Shree Shree Anandamayee Sangha, headquartered at Varanasi, which would publish her words and run her schools and hospitals; its quarterly carried her sayings in Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, and English. Yet the institution sat oddly atop a figure who claimed to have founded nothing. The buildings, the trusts, the printed teachings — all of it accreted around her the way iron filings gather on a field they do not generate, drawn by a presence that, on her own account, was simply being itself in their midst.

The Anandamayi Ma ashram at Kankhal, near Haridwar, one of some two dozen houses in the network gathered under the Shree Shree Anandamayee Sangha — Naresh Balakrishnan, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Her devotees crossed every line that ordinarily sorts Indian religious life. Among them were Kamala Nehru, the wife of Jawaharlal Nehru, who came to Ma in the last years of her life; Nehru himself; and the young Indira Gandhi. Scholars and renunciates, Bengali householders and Himalayan ascetics, Western seekers and skeptical journalists found their way to her darshan. She gave no systematic philosophy and demanded no conversion, answering questions in parables and turns of phrase that pointed, always, away from doctrine and back toward the questioner’s own seeing.

Among the moderns

Anandamayi Ma belongs to a particular density of twentieth-century Indian spiritual life, and the encounter that fixed her in the Western imagination came through one of its great chroniclers. Paramahansa Yogananda, returning to India in the mid-1930s, met her and devoted to her a chapter of his Autobiography of a Yogi — the forty-fifth, which he titled “The Bengali ‘Joy-Permeated Mother.’” His account became, for a global readership, the door to her: he records her greeting him as one she had always known, and her reply when he asked her to speak of her life. She told him, in the passage he preserved, that her consciousness had never identified itself with the temporary body — that before she came to earth she was the same, as a little girl the same, grown the same, and after this body fell she would be the same; that whatever had a beginning and an end was not what she was.

She arose within the same Bengal that had produced Ramakrishna a generation before, and the resonance is exact at one point and instructive at another. Ramakrishna’s life was a torrent of bhava, of ecstatic absorption in the Mother Kali; Anandamayi Ma passed through states the Bengali tradition would recognize as the same family of divine madness. But where Ramakrishna was the worshipper swept into the Goddess, his devotees — and increasingly hers — came to read Anandamayi Ma as the Mother herself, present in a body: not the bhakta before the divine feminine but its living face. With Sri Aurobindo, whose evolutionary metaphysics ran along wholly other lines, she shares only the era and the soil; she wrote no system to set beside his. And among the modern teachers of the Self — the wordless self-abidance taught at Arunachala by Ramana Maharshi, the relentless inquiry into the sense of being, the I-am, pressed by Nisargadatta Maharaj in Bombay — she stands as a third and distinct thing: not a method offered to seekers but a presence offered to them, her teaching less a path to walk than a person to sit near. Even Rabindranath Tagore, no devotee of saints, is reported to have honored her. She fit none of their molds, and that refusal to fit is itself the most consistent fact about her.

Scholarship and the textual record

The study of Anandamayi Ma has had to reckon from the start with a figure who left no treatise and disowned the very category of attainment, so the record is built from the speech of others and the witness of devotees. The standard critical study in English is Lisa Lassell Hallstrom’s Mother of Bliss: Anandamayi Ma (1896–1982) (Oxford University Press, 1999), a Harvard doctoral project built on extensive fieldwork and interviews that treats with unusual care the paradox at her center — the worship of the divine feminine in a body, and what that worship meant for and about Hindu women. Alongside it stands the earlier, briefer Life and Teaching of Sri Anandamayi Ma by Alexander Lipski (Motilal Banarsidass, 1977), which first set her before a scholarly Western readership.

From within the community, the indispensable witness is Bithika Mukerji, whose multivolume From the Life of Sri Anandamayi Ma (Calcutta, 1980–81) and A Bird on the Wing give the fullest devotional biography, and Bhaiji’s foundational Mother as Revealed to Me. Her own words survive as gathered sayings rather than authored books: the early Sad Vani, first published in Bengali with an English rendering in 1935, and the Matri Vani volumes translated by her close disciple Atmananda. The wider scholarly placement of her ecstatic states belongs to the study of Bengali religious ecstasy, treated most searchingly in June McDaniel’s The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (University of Chicago Press, 1989). A careful, sourced overview of her life and reception is maintained by the World Religions and Spirituality Project. The Shaktic and Vedantic vocabularies her devotees reached for in describing her — the Mother as ultimate reality, the unchanging witness behind the play of forms — are themselves accessible in the public-domain primary corpus, among them Woodroffe’s Hymns to the Goddess and the Complete Works of Vivekananda.

Kankhal

In her last years the body she called this little girl weakened, and the kheyala that had carried it across the subcontinent for six decades turned toward stillness. On the twenty-seventh of August 1982, at the Kishenpur ashram in Dehradun, the breath left it. Two days later her form was given samadhi in the courtyard of the Kankhal ashram, on the bank of the Ganga near Haridwar, where the shrine raised over it remains the principal place to which her devotees come.

The Samadhi Mandir at the Kankhal ashram, the shrine raised over the place where Anandamayi Ma’s body was given samadhi in 1982 — Ekabhishek, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

For those who hold her, nothing decisive happened there. The death of the body was, in the logic she had spoken all her life, one more arising of the kheyala — the play withdrawing its actor, the wave subsiding into the water it had never been other than. She had said it plainly enough: what begins and ends was never what she was. The samadhi at Kankhal marks where a body was set down. It does not mark, in the only account she ever gave of herself, the going of anyone, for the one her devotees came to see had, on her own word, never arrived and could not leave — the same before the body, the same within it, and the same now that the courtyard holds only its trace.

→ In the library: Woodroffe — Hymns to the Goddess (1913) · Vivekananda — The Complete Works

→ Related: Ramakrishna · Paramahansa Yogananda · Sri Aurobindo · Kali · Shiva · Hinduism · Bhakti Movement · Mysticism · Guru · Yoga · Puja · Brahman · Rabindranath Tagore · Ramana Maharshi · Nisargadatta Maharaj