mind. She did not, however, join Sri Aurobindo at
that time, but went with her husband to Japan.
After leaving Japan and spending some time
in Europe, Mirra Richard abandoned married life
and joined Sri Aurobindo as his spiritual partner
in 1916. At first there were questions about her
status at his ASHRAM from people close to Sri
Aurobindo, but he quelled them by declaring
that his consciousness and the Mother’s con-
sciousness were one; it was he who gave her the
important spiritual title, Mother. In his book On
the Mother he explained her spiritual role in the
new world.
The yoga that she and Sri Aurobindo practiced
was worldly. Rather than the isolated transcen-
dence of the renunciant in a cave, it was a trans-
formative yoga aimed at changing all of reality in
its wake. They wanted to bring to earth the divine
superconsciousness, termed the supramental, by
Aurobindo, which would, they thought, alter
the nature of reality itself. The Integral Yoga, or
complete yoga, of Sri Aurobindo and Mother was
designed to orient its devotees yogically toward a
life in the world that would progressively become
divine.
In 1926 Sri Aurobindo went into seclusion in
the ashram and left Mother in charge of day-to-
day affairs. He declared that he had reached the
Overmind in his yogic work and needed seclu-
sion to work with the powerful forces in order
to expand this into a supramental manifestation.
Mother from then on managed all ashram affairs,
designed the movement’s educational programs,
and provided inspiration to the burgeoning
group of followers who began to attend more
regularly.
Sri Aurobindo died in 1950 without complet-
ing his spiritual project. He declared that it was
the Mother herself who would succeed in bringing
about the supramental manifestation that would
begin the transformation of all life, all matter, and
all the cosmos toward perfect consciousness and
bliss. In 1956 Mother announced that she had
succeeded in bringing down the supramental and
proceeded from that day to prepare the world for
the power of a new consciousness that she felt
would now inevitably manifest.
Mother had already, in the early 1950s, envi-
sioned a utopian ground where all nations could
join to manifest the unity on Earth that she felt
would accompany the new consciousness. This
early vision of an international center for edu-
cation gradually changed into the idea of a city
to be built in South India under her auspices.
In 1968 she broke ground for this city—AURO-
VILLE—which was to be a guide for the new
earthly transformation. People from around the
world flocked to the city to begin the new spiri-
tual experiment.
Mother died in 1973 at the age of 95 and was
buried in a tomb beside her beloved spiritual
partner, Sri Aurobindo. She left a legacy of prac-
tice and commitment that few women spiritual
teachers in the 20th century could match. Her
writings were not vast as her mentor’s were, but
her words and wisdom were dutifully recorded by
her student Satprem, who transformed them into
a many-volume series, The Mother’s Agenda.Further reading: Kireet Joshi, Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother: Glimpses of Their Experiments, Experiences, and
Realisations (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi,
1989); Satprem, Mother’s Agenda, 12 vols. (Paris: Institut
de recherches évolutives, 1991); George Van Vrekhem,
The Mother: The Story of Her Life (New Delhi: Harper-
Collins Publishers India, 2000).Mother India (1927)
Mother India was a controversial book, written in
1927 by Katherine Mayo, an American medical
missionary and journalist, that condemned Hin-
duism as a cause of India’s suffering.
The book was inspired by Mayo’s encounters
with Indian women and customs during her
travels to the country in 1925 and 1926. It raised
consciousness of important gender and caste
issues that needed to be addressed; however, itMother India 293 J