Anandamayi Ma: She Initiated Herself

What was happening before it

From around 1918, while doing ordinary household worship, her body began doing things she had not learned.

Asanas she had never seen. Mudras she could not have known. Mantras in Sanskrit, a language she did not have. Long absorptions during which she did not respond and did not move.

Bholanath watched this for years. So did neighbours. The household reaction was the ordinary one: they wondered whether she was possessed, whether she was ill, and whether something should be done about it, and an exorcist was brought at one point and left saying there was nothing there of that kind.

And she herself described it consistently in the same way for the rest of her life: that it was khela, play, that it happened through this body, and that she had not decided to do any of it.

August 1922, Bajitpur

On a full moon night she performed her own initiation.

Which is not a thing that can be done.

Diksha requires a guru. The guru gives the mantra, the guru is in a lineage, the lineage authorises, and a person cannot occupy both ends of the transaction. This is not a minor procedural rule but the structural centre of how the entire system transmits itself.

She did it anyway. The accounts describe her performing the rite in both roles, as the one giving and the one receiving, and afterwards she had a mantra and a practice and had never had a teacher.

Later she also gave Bholanath his initiation, and by then her husband was her disciple.

What that means, structurally

And this is why she belongs in this series next to Chokhamela and Salabega and the rest.

Every single qualification the system requires, she lacked.

• No guru, and therefore no lineage, and therefore no authority anybody could check
• No Sanskrit, and no capacity to read the texts she was later asked to explain
• No education beyond two village years
• No renunciation: she was a married woman, and remained legally and socially a wife
• And a woman, in a system that had spent two thousand years arranging not to have this happen

And it did not matter.

Who came

Gopinath Kaviraj, one of the most learned Sanskritists of the twentieth century, Principal of the Government Sanskrit College at Varanasi, became her devotee and wrote about her.

Kamala Nehru was a devotee. Indira Gandhi visited. Presidents and ministers came. Paramahansa Yogananda met her and put her in his book. Arnaud Desjardins filmed her and took her to a European audience.

And the ordinary people came in far larger numbers, and the pattern of her life for sixty years was that she moved constantly and crowds formed wherever she stopped.

The name

Anandamayi Ma, the joy permeated mother, was given to her by devotees at Dhaka in the 1920s, and Bhaiji, Jyotish Chandra Roy, is generally credited with fixing it.

She did not choose it and did not use it of herself.

How she referred to herself

This body.

Not I. For decades, in thousands of recorded conversations, she said e sharir, this body, and it was consistent and deliberate and not a mannerism she adopted for effect.

What it does

It removes the owner from the sentence.

A person who says this body ate, this body travelled, this body was ill is describing events without the assumption that somebody is having them, and doing it in ordinary speech, thousands of times, in front of people, for sixty years.

Which is a practice rather than a doctrine, and it is available to anybody, and it is uncomfortable in a way that reading about non duality is not.

Almost nothing systematic, and that was deliberate.

She had no doctrine

She did not produce a philosophical position, did not write, did not found a school of thought, and did not resolve any of the classical disputes when asked to.

When scholars pressed her on whether reality is one or two, whether the world is real, whether the path is knowledge or devotion, her answers were of a type: that both are true from where each is spoken, that the question dissolves when you get there, and that she was not going to choose because there was nothing to choose between.

Which frustrated some of them and satisfied others, and Gopinath Kaviraj, who knew the disputes better than almost anybody alive, was in the second group.

What she actually told people to do

Different things.

This is the most reported feature of her instruction: she gave one person a mantra and another person a completely different practice and a third person nothing at all, and she gave contradictory instructions to different people about the same question.

And her stated reason was that the instruction is for the person and not for the subject.

Which is either evasive or is the entire point, and the tradition holds the second, and the practical version of it is that the correct practice for you is not necessarily the correct practice, and asking what the best practice is may be the wrong question.

The consistent instructions

There are a few, and they repeat across sixty years of records.

One. Keep the name going. Whatever name, in whatever form, continuously, underneath the day. She was insistent about this and it is the closest thing she had to a universal instruction.

Two. Do it now. She had no patience for postponement, for the plan to take up practice after the children are settled, after retirement, after the situation resolves. The situation does not resolve.

Three. Fix a time and keep it. A short period daily, at a set hour, held even when there is no inclination and nothing is happening, was her ordinary practical advice to householders.

Four. Everything is His. Not as consolation but as a working assumption about causation, applied to the day as it arrives.

What she built

• Around twenty five ashrams across India, at Kankhal, Varanasi, Dehradun, Kishenpur, Vindhyachal, Almora, Puri and elsewhere, though she never stayed long in any of them
• Samyam Saptah, a week of collective observance, silence, restricted diet and continuous practice, held annually and still held
• Kanyapeeth, a residential school for girls at Varanasi, teaching Sanskrit, scripture and ritual

And the Kanyapeeth deserves its own line.

Girls were not taught this material. The exclusion of women from Vedic study is old, was still substantially in force, and she set up a school in Varanasi to teach girls the texts and the rites, which is a concrete act rather than a statement.

Her constant travelling

She almost never stayed anywhere.

For decades she moved continuously, arriving without notice, leaving without notice, sometimes within hours, and the ashrams were built by devotees who wanted her to stop and largely did not succeed.

She gave the same explanation each time: that this body goes where it is taken and does not decide.

Which had the effect, whether or not it was the intention, of preventing the thing that happens to every other successful teacher: she never became the resident head of an institution, and there was no seat, no throne, no daily darshan queue at a fixed address, and no machinery that could be inherited.

Three, and this entry is not going to leave them out.

One. The body states, and not imitating them

For long periods she did not feed herself.

The accounts describe her hands not going to her mouth, and devotees feeding her by hand for years at a time, and periods of very little food, and physical conditions that alarmed the people around her.

And this needs a flat statement.

Do not imitate this, and do not let anybody in your household frame it as a practice.

Not eating is not a spiritual attainment in anybody who is not Anandamayi Ma, and it is a medical emergency in a great many people who present it as one.

Eating disorders in India are underdiagnosed, are increasingly common in adolescents, and are routinely misread as fasting, discipline or piety by families who would take a fever seriously. Anorexia nervosa has among the highest mortality of any psychiatric condition.

The signs a family should not explain away: sustained restriction, secrecy about meals, rapid weight loss, fainting, cold intolerance, stopped periods, and a spiritual or moral framing offered for all of it.

Tele MANAS 14416, free, all hours. A doctor first, and the practice afterwards.

Two. Caste and access

Her ashrams maintained traditional restrictions during her lifetime.

Some spaces and some ritual functions were governed by birth, there were restrictions affecting non Hindus and non brahmanas in certain contexts, and Western devotees in particular found this hard and wrote about it.

This is documented, it is not hidden by the tradition, and this entry states it rather than working around it.

And it sits next to the Kanyapeeth, in which she taught girls the scripture that girls were not taught, which broke a different exclusion decisively.

Both are true. She broke the barrier around sex and maintained the one around birth, and a reader looking for consistency will not find it, and the series has recorded the same split in Ramana two entries ago.

The honest observation is that reformers are usually reformers about one thing, that the one thing is generally the barrier they personally ran into, and that people who dismantle every barrier at once are rarer than devotional writing implies.

Three. What happens to a movement with no doctrine

She left no system, no book, no appointed successor and no single seat.

Which prevented the succession war that this batch has now recorded three times. Nobody could inherit what she had because she had not built anything that could be inherited.

And the cost is the other side of it. There is no compact statement of what she taught, the material is anecdote and recorded conversation and photographs, the ashrams operate independently, and a person who wants to follow her has to assemble it themselves.

Which is either a defect or is exactly what she wanted, given that her whole instructional method was that the practice is for the person and not for the subject.

Where to go

• Kankhal, near Haridwar, where her samadhi is, and where the main ashram stands
• Bhadaini, Varanasi, the ashram and the Kanyapeeth
• Kishenpur and Dehradun, where she died
• Vindhyachal, Almora, Puri, Naimisharanya
• Kheora, Bangladesh, her birthplace, which requires a visa and planning

When

• Her birth anniversary, in April or May, on the tithi rather than the date
• Samyam Saptah, held annually and announced by the ashrams, which is open and is the closest thing to participating in what she set up

A daily practice from this entry

• Any name, kept going underneath the day, which is the one thing she told everybody
• A fixed short period, at a fixed hour, held on the days it is not working
• And her speech habit, tried once: describe your day for five minutes using this body instead of I, and notice what it does

Who: Anandamayi Ma, born Nirmala Sundari Devi on 30 April 1896 at Kheora in eastern Bengal, now Bangladesh, to poor brahmanas, her father a devotional singer with no money. She had about two years of village school, could read a little Bengali, and had no Sanskrit, no training, no texts and no philosophical vocabulary at any point in her life. She died at Dehradun on 27 August 1982 and her samadhi is at Kankhal near Haridwar.

Marriage: she was married at twelve, in 1909, to Ramani Mohan Chakrabarti, later called Bholanath. Child marriage was ordinary then and is a crime now: the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 sets the minimum age at eighteen for a woman and twenty one for a man, a marriage below that is voidable, arranging one is punishable, and it applies regardless of community or custom. Childline 1098, police 112, the District Child Protection Unit. The marriage was never consummated, the accounts describing him approaching her and being unable to continue and then accepting it, and eventually Bholanath became her disciple and she initiated him. What he did was remarkable and is usually skipped, since a man in Bengal in 1915 had complete social permission to insist, remarry or make her life unendurable. And a woman today does not need a miracle to decline: the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 explicitly includes sexual abuse, coercion by a husband is actionable, women's helpline 181, police 112, free legal aid 15100.

Before 1922: from around 1918, during ordinary household worship, her body began performing asanas she had never seen, mudras she could not have known and mantras in a language she did not have, with long absorptions. Neighbours wondered whether she was possessed or ill, and an exorcist was brought and left saying there was nothing of that kind. She described it consistently as khela, play, happening through this body without her deciding.

August 1922, Bajitpur: on a full moon night she performed her own initiation, acting as both the one giving and the one receiving, which is not a thing that can be done, since diksha requires a guru in a lineage and a person cannot occupy both ends. She did it anyway, and afterwards had a mantra and a practice and had never had a teacher. Later she initiated Bholanath. Every qualification the system requires she lacked: no guru and therefore no lineage or checkable authority, no Sanskrit, no education, no renunciation since she remained a wife, and a woman in a system that had spent two thousand years arranging not to have this happen. It did not matter. Gopinath Kaviraj, one of the most learned Sanskritists of the century and Principal of the Government Sanskrit College at Varanasi, became her devotee. Kamala Nehru was a devotee, Indira Gandhi visited, Paramahansa Yogananda put her in his book, and Arnaud Desjardins filmed her.

This body: for decades, in thousands of recorded conversations, she said e sharir, this body, rather than I. It removes the owner from the sentence, describing events without the assumption that somebody is having them, in ordinary speech, thousands of times, for sixty years. It is a practice rather than a doctrine and is available to anybody.

What she taught: nothing systematic, deliberately. She produced no philosophical position, wrote nothing, and refused to resolve the classical disputes, saying both sides are true from where each is spoken. She gave different people completely different practices and contradictory instructions on the same question, her stated reason being that the instruction is for the person and not for the subject. Her consistent instructions were four: keep the name going underneath the day, do it now rather than after the children are settled since the situation does not resolve, fix a short time daily and keep it even when nothing is happening, and treat everything as His. She founded around twenty five ashrams, the annual Samyam Saptah week of collective observance, and the Kanyapeeth at Varanasi, a residential school teaching girls the Sanskrit, scripture and ritual that girls were not taught. She travelled constantly for decades, arriving and leaving without notice, which meant she never became the resident head of an institution and left nothing that could be inherited.

The hard parts: for long periods she did not feed herself and devotees fed her by hand, and this must not be imitated. Not eating is not a spiritual attainment in anybody who is not Anandamayi Ma, eating disorders in India are underdiagnosed and increasingly common in adolescents and are routinely misread as piety, and anorexia nervosa has among the highest mortality of any psychiatric condition. Sustained restriction, secrecy about meals, rapid weight loss, fainting, cold intolerance and stopped periods, with a spiritual framing offered for all of it, are signs a family must not explain away. Tele MANAS 14416, and a doctor first. Her ashrams also maintained traditional caste restrictions during her lifetime, which is documented and not hidden, and it sits next to the Kanyapeeth: she broke the barrier around sex and maintained the one around birth, which is the same split this series recorded in Ramana. And she left no system, book, successor or seat, which prevented a succession war and also means there is no compact statement of what she taught.