178. gurus
In the course of my interviews, I asked twenty-six of Ma’s closest devotees,
“Who is Ma?” Not surprisingly, the answers were as diverse as the devotees them-
selves. Narendranath Bose said, “You see, for everybody, Ma was a very different
person because she responded to individual vibrations. You will have to draw your
own conclusions.” But the most common reply to the question was, “Ma was God.”
Nearly all devotees were interviewed in English, and although some went on to give
equivalent Sanskrit terms such as Parabrahman or Devi, the first word that came to
them to describe Ma was God.
One celibate female renunciant, or brahmacharini, Malini, spoke poignantly about
knowing Ma since birth, having been born into a devotee family:
When I was in school (I was about seven or eight years old), the Christian nuns
over there, they said that God never comes on earth. And so, I was very upset. I
said, “No, I have spoken to God!” And they said, “You can’t speak to God. There
is no such thing. God never comes to earth. Only Jesus Christ can, and no one
else!” They said unless you believe in Jesus Christ, you can never reach God. So I
was very perturbed. All these things I was told. And when I came back home, I
cried and cried. So my mother asked, “What is the matter?” So I told her. “They
have been telling me that unless I become a Christian, I won’t reach God. And I
told them, ‘No, I have met God. I have talked to Her. I have seen Her. For on our
holidays, we go to God!’ How can they say those thmgs?” So my mother said,
“Don’t worry, they won’t understand this. But, yes, your God talks to you.”When I asked Malini, “Did your family have a chosen deity?” she replied, “No,
we believe in Krishna and Ram and things like that, but as children we were taught
that Ma was everything. For us Ma was Krishna, Ma was Ram, Ma was Shiva, Ma
was everything. To us the name of God was Ma.”
Sita Gupta, a housewife, reiterated this theme when she said, “My children and
grandchildren know of no other God except Mother. You say Ram or Krishna or
Shiva or Devi, they think Ma. They don’t know these others, just Ma.”
Naren Bose, a sophisticated young Calcutta businessman, trained at Boston Uni-
versity and Harvard, who also grew up in a family devoted to Ma, put it this way:
“For me, Ma is God. I have no deep knowledge of the Hindu scriptures or any scrip-
tures. So my conviction in any one established religion is not there. All my convic-
tions are what I have seen through Ma. All my belief is only Ma. And God for me is
Ma. Ma is my life. Very simple. Everything.”
For some devotees, recognition of Ma’s divinity took time. Uma Chatterji said,
“After I met Ma, I could not immediately associate Ma with God. But after some