Anandmayi Ma

Nirmala Sundari known as  Anandmayi Ma was a great Indian saint of the nineteenth century. The name Anandmayi was given to her by her followers to describe the perpetual state of divine joy she used to be in. Paramhansa Yogananda translates Anandamayi as ‘Joy Permeated’.

Anandmayi’s parents were Bipinbihari Bhattacharya and Mokshada Sundari Devi. They were Orthodox devout Vaishnavite Brahmins, although very poor. They lived in village Kheora, Brahmanbaria dist, Bangladesh. Bipinbihari was a renowned Vaishnavite singer originally from Tripura. Even though they were poor both the parents were from well-known ancestry.

Anandmayi attended a few months of school and her teachers were impressed with her learning ability. Her mother was however worried about her mental capacity because Anandmayi always seemed to be smiling and in a perpetual state of joy. When her mother once fell seriously ill, all the neighbors and relatives noticed Anandmayi’s unusual indifferent and joyful behavior.

At the age of 12 years, as was the custom at that time Anandmayi was married off to Ramani Mohan Chakravorty of Bikrampur.

For five years after her marriage, she lived in the house of her brother-in-law and carried out her household duties in a detached meditative frame of mind. When she was seventeen years old she went to live with her husband at Ashtagram. It was here that a devout neighbor named Haratkumar and who was generally considered insane started calling her Ma. he recognized 

Her spiritual superiority and prostrated before her in reverence every morning and evening.

The couple later moved to Bajitpur, but it was a celibate marriage. Whenever Ramani had any lustful thoughts and touched Anandmayi, she would become stiff like in death. 

Finally, on the full moon night of August 1922, when Anandmayi was 26 years old, she initiated her own spiritual ascension. 

All the spiritual ceremonies and rites associated with this event were revealed to her by divine power. The complex mantras and rituals were not known to the uneducated Anandmayi, but they were performed by her according to the ancient Hindu and Vedic rituals. As people started wondering how an uneducated woman could know about all these religious practices; Anandmayi explained that she was conducting rituals as they were being spontaneously revealed to her. She conducted the offering of flowers, yantra, and yagna, all in their proper sequence and in the correct form. Anandmayi, herself was the guru teaching and she herself was the disciple devoutly accepting the offerings.

After staying at Bajitpur the couple moved to Shahbag, where Anandmayi Ma’s husband got a job as the manager of the gardens of the Nawab of Dhaka. It is during this period that Nirmala attained her full spiritual form. She would go into ecstasies at religious kirtans. Slowly people began to be drawn to her divinity and in 1929 her first disciple Jyotish Chandra Ray built the first ashram in her honor in the precincts of the Ramna Kali Mandir.  In Shahbag, more and more people began to be drawn to her as they perceived her to be the living embodiment of the divine.

1. As you love your own body, so regard everyone as equal to your own body. When the Supreme Experience supervenes, everyone’s service is revealed as one’s own service. Call it a bird, an insect, an animal, or a man, call it by any name you please. One serves one’s own Self in every one of them.

2. Who is it that loves and who that suffers? He alone stages a play with himself, who exists to save him? The individual suffers because he perceives duality. It is a duality that causes all sorrow and grief. Find the One everywhere and in everything and there will be an end to all pain and suffering.

3. The supreme calling of every human being is to aspire to self-realization. All other obligations are secondary.

4. Only actions that kindle man’s divine nature are worthy of being called actions.

5. Everyone is right from his own standpoint. 

6. She did not perform formal initiations and did not like to be called a guru. “All paths are my paths and I have no particular path”.

Anandmayi Ma never prepared or wrote down her speeches, she had informal talks where she spoke swiftly. Her followers later transcribed her speeches.

She did not advise anyone to give up the material world and she did not take part in religious arguments because she believed all paths were the right path.

She did not formulate any religious rituals, regarding religion her approach was very democratic. 

She welcomed and conversed with devotees and reputed scholars from all the different religious streams be they Shaivite, Vaishnavite, Christian, Tantric, Jews, Zoroastrians, or Muslims. Even now Muslims from her native village of Kheora refer to her as their very own “Ma”.

Anandmayi Ma taught the world to live a God-centered life and conducted her life as a living example of this lofty ideal to act as an inspiration for thousands of her followers. She was one of the earliest champions for women’s equality as she opened the sacred thread ritual for women. This practice had been traditionally performed by men for millennia. However, her stipulation was that those women should have a high moral and personal standard.

Mata Anandmayi or Mother of Joy is the most shining diamond in the luminous crown of contemporary Indian spiritual life.

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