Anandamayi Ma literally means ‘Bliss-permeated Mother’. It was as early as 1920s that people close to her began to realize the essence of Mother Divine in her, and started calling her ‘Mataji’ or often, just ‘Ma’. It was one of her early disciples, called Bhaiji, who gave her the title of ‘Ma Anandamayi’, meaning, ‘Mother, full of Bliss’. Soon, people all over the country and from different quarters of the world who flocked to her for spiritual illumination started calling her Anandamayi Ma, or ‘Bliss-permeated Mother’.
Birth and Early Life
On April 30, 1896, in a remote rural village of Kheora in East Bengal, a girl child was born to a poor but devout Vaishnava Brahmin couple. They named her ‘Nirmala Sundari’, meaning ‘immaculate beauty’, or ‘Taintless Beauty’.
According to Prof. Bithika Mukherjee, the principal biographer of Anandamayi Ma, she was a very detached child right from early years, showing little interest in her surrounding environment. People often thought she was intellectually challenged (Aymard 11).
But this detachment did not mean any withdrawal from life. Nirmala Sundari was indeed a very happy child. She communed with animals and trees, like St Francis of Assissi, and often fell into spiritual trances.
At the age of 13, Nirmala Sundari was married to a much older person, Ramani Mohan Chakravarty. He later became her disciple, and she called him ‘Bholanath’, one of the names for Lord Shiva.
Ma went through her marriage life with complete commitment, treating her husband like a devoted wife. But she never consummated her marriage with sexual union or procreation. It is said that whenever the thoughts of physical attraction and lust occurred to her husband, Ma’s body would assume the terrible and awe-inspiring form of the Goddess Kali, and the poor husband would retreat in submission and guilt.
Bholanath was troubled and frustrated at first, but was gradually convinced that his wife was in fact a manifestation of the Divine Mother. He later took spiritual initiation from his wife and began to relate to her as his guru. In a remarkable reversal from the perspective of dharmasastra, or the Hindu code, he spent the rest of his life as his wife's disciple, caring for her physical well-being, as she seemed completely uninterested in her body, and mediating between her and her growing number of devotees
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Voiceover: Surjit Singh
Script: Shaiju Koottucheradil Chacko
Editor: Medo
Score: Epidemic Music
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References:
Aymard, Orianne. When A Goddess Dies: Worshipping Ma Anandamayi After Her Death. Oxford UP, 2014.
Hallstrom, Lisa Lassell. Mother of Bliss: Anandamayi Ma (1896-1982). Oxford UP, 1999.
Lipski, Alexander. The Essential Anandamayi Ma: Life and Teachings of a Twentieth Century Indian Saint. World Wisdom, 2007.
Maschmann, Melita. Encountering Bliss: My Journey Through India With Anandamayi Ma. Translated by Sridhar B. Shrotri. Motilal Banarsidass, 2002.
Pechilis, Karen. “The Female Guru: Guru, Gender, and the Path of Personal Experience,” in The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Jacob Copeman and Aya Ikegame. Routledge, 2012.
Yogananda, Paramahamsa. Autobiography of a Yogi. Self-realization Fellowship, 1946.
