anandamayi ma. 175
claimed a full incarnation of Krishna. Since then, it has become more common for
disciples of a master to claim that he is an avatara. The nineteenth-century Bengali
master, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, was declared an avatara when he was in his
twenties and went on to attract thousands of devotees, among them Swami
Vivekananda, who established the worldwide Ramakrishna Mission. In all cases, the
avatara is considered to have been fully conscious of his divinity at every moment,
so that everything he does is seen as simply playacting, or lila.
For the last four centuries Hindus have referred to certain male historical figures
as avataras. The subject of this essay, however, is a female religious figure of this
century who has been and still is worshipped by hundreds of thousands of devotees
as an incarnation of the divine.
Anandamayi Ma was born as Nirmala Sundari to a poor Brahmin family in Ben-
gal in 1896. She was married at the age of twelve but lived with her husband until
his death in 1938 not as his “wife,” as Hindu dharma(sacred law or duty) would de-
fine it, but as his guru. As her sacred biographies recount, early in their marriage
Nirmala withdrew more and more from everyday activities and spent a large part of
her day in states of spiritual ecstasy. She began to attract devotees who saw her as
an extraordinary spiritual being. Her husband, while bewildered at first, soon be-
came convinced that his wife was a manifestation of the Goddess. He received spir-
itual initiation from her and spent the rest of his life following her spiritual instruc-
tion, mediating between her and her growing number of devotees and caring for her
physical well-being, as she seemed completely disinterested in her body. (See figure
K at the Web site http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/vasu/loh.))
In 1926 Ma—or “Mother,” as Nirmala had come to be called—completely
stopped feeding herself and for the rest of her life was fed by the hands of her close
devotees. That same year Ma completely abandoned her dharmaas a Hindu wife and
began her endless travels around India, accompanied by her husband and attracting
devotees wherever she went. Thousands came to receive her blessings and bathe in
her ecstatic spiritual state. Many reported that one glance from Ma awakened in
them a spiritual energy so powerful as to redirect their entire life.
After her husband ’s death, Anandamayi Ma continued to grow in stature and in-
fluence. Referring to Ma in his book, Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahamsa Yo-
gananda reports, “Never before had I met such an exalted woman saint.” Many
heads of state, intellectuals, and prominent businesspeople considered Ma their guru
and, in some cases, their deity. In the last decade of her life, Anandamayi Ma’s devo-
tees numbered in the hundreds of thousands; and ashrams, schools, and hospitals
were established in her name all over India. By the time of her death in 1982, this il-