Sri Anandamoyi Ma was a spiritual teacher, Guru, saint and a mystic from Bengal, and hailed as one of prominent mystics of the 20th century. During her times, she was considered the embodiment of spiritual bliss and her name literally means Joy Permeated Mother.
Early Life
She was born as Nirmala Sundari on 30 April 1896 to Bipinbihari Bhattacharya and Mokshada Sundari Devie in Kheora, Brahmanbaria District, British India, in what is now Bangladesh.
At the age of thirteen, in 1908, she was married. She spent 5 years after her marriage at her brother-in-law's home, where she was in a trancelike state much of the time.
When she was about 17, she went to live with her husband in Ashtagram. It was here that a devout neighbor, Harakumar, developed a habit of addressing her as "Ma", and prostrated before her morning and evening.
In 1918, they went on to live in Bajitpur, where she became famous for her beauty. Here they stayed till 1924, while she went deeper into her trances. On his return from the office at the end of the working day, her husband often found her lying on the kitchen floor, the food half cooked or burnt.
On the full moon night of August 1922, at midnight, 26-year old Ma went through the actions of spiritual initiation - all by herself.
Members of her husband's family did not respond to his wife’s strange behavior as calmly as he did. While his relatives suggested he remarry, he became her first disciple in 1922.
The Dhaka Period
In 1924 she moved to Shahbag with her husband where he had been appointed caretaker of the gardens of the Nawab of Dhaka.
During this period she used to manifest the ecstasy that resembled Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.
In 1926 she set up a Kali temple in the Siddheshwari area and devoted herself to spirituality.
She underwent a mystic experience while praying in the temple one day. Henceforth, she became known as Anandamoyi Ma, meaning the Joy Permeated Mother. She set up an ashram at Ramna within the precinct of the Ramna Kali Mandir. Though her parents were Vaishnavas, she followed the Tantric creed.
Scholars and followers were attracted to Anandamoyi Ma's spiritualism, though she called herself "a little unlettered child".
The Dehradun Period
In 1932, Anandamoyi Ma went to Dehradun with her husband and started working there. She traveled across the subcontinent to enlighten others. Several ashrams, and seats of learning hospitals were established in her name at Ramna (near Shahbag) and Kheora in Bangladesh, and Benares, Kankhal and other areas in India. Twenty-five ashrams are named after her.
She also renovated many dilapidated holy places, including the Naimisharanya, where she set up a temple there and arranged for the recitation of holy names and the performance of kirtan and other religious rites.
At this times people like Arnaud Desjardins, the French producer of sprititual films, Melita Maschmann, the German novelist, and Dr. Collin Turnbull, the English author, became her disciples.
Kamala Nehru, wife of the future prime Minster, Jawaharlal Nehru, became a devotee in 1933. Anandamoyi was then staying at a small temple in Dehradun, while Pandit Nehru was incarcerated by the British in Dehradun jail. Later she took Kamala to the Ambika temple in Kajpur to perform a three-day yajna. She gave to her daughter Indira the rosary which Mataji had given her.
Mahatma Gandhi came to hear of Anandamayi through Kamala and sent his aid, Jamnalal Bajaj, to see her. He in turn became a devotee. After the unexpected death of Bajaj, she went to Wardha to console Mahatma Gandhi.
She visited Ramana Maharshi at his ashram and also met J Krishnamurti.
Although she is mentioned in many books about Indian spiritual teachers, she is notably written about in Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. His meeting with her is recounted in the chapter titled The Bengali "Joy-Permeated Mother", where he wrote:
Father, there is little to tell." She spread her graceful hands in a deprecatory gesture. "My consciousness has never associated itself with this temporary body. Before I came on this earth, Father, I was the same. As a little girl, I was the same. I grew into womanhood, but still I was the same. When the family in which I had been born made arrangements to have this body married, 'I was the same... And, Father, in front of you now, I am the same. Ever afterward, though the dance of creation change[s] around me in the hall of eternity, I shall be the same.
She died on 27 August 1982 and was buried on the banks of the Ganges near the Kankhal Ashram in Haridwar in North India.
