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efited women was that different women could identify with different stages of Ma’s
life and be inspired. The lila of Ma’s life included both a short period of time where
she played the role of a young housewife and a much longer time when she played
the role of a renunciant. Clearly Ma’s life as a housewife provided radical challenges
to the ideal of the Hindu wife described in the sacred law-books and epics—her
marriage to Bholanath was never consummated, and rather than serve him as her
god she, in fact, became his guru, orchestrating his spiritual life until his death in
- Yet Ma’s message to most householder devotees was “Do as I say, not as I do.”
For example, although she instituted the chanting ofkirtans, or devotional songs,
for women, she made sure that happened at a time that did not interfere with
women’s household duties. She seemed to recommend a kind of piety for married
women that Caroline Walker Bynum calls (reconsidering Weber) an “innerworldly
asceticism,” a piety that unites action and contemplation in such a way as to provide
continuity in women’s lives as they become more spiritualized.^2 At the core, how-
ever, was the idea that most women should pursue their dharmaas wives who serve
their husbands as their Lord. We can conclude, then, that, while Ma was an advo-
cate of women’s spiritual equality, in many ways she reinforced the classical ideal
for women that her life contradicts.
Yet when I asked Ma’s women devotees whether or not Ma was a model for them
of how to live their lives, I was met with a look of disorientation that took me to the
heart of the paradox of Ma’s gender. It brought me back to the response that Bithika
Mukerji had given me when I told her that I was interested in Ma as a woman saint.
It became clear to me that within the Hindu tradition, Ultimate Reality is conceived
of as beyond form and beyond gender, and as such, Ma could not be seen as a woman
at all. While the difference in the Hindu tradition between male and female among
ordinary people is highly marked, it seems that in the realm of extraordinary
people, as in the realm of the divine, there is almost a third gender. Male and female
holy people are more like each other than they are like other men and women. In
fact, the goal of the spiritual path is a kind of transcendence of gender, a shedding
of the limitations of one ’s sexual identity, an identity that simply reflects the limited,
dualistic world. That which is aspired to, Ultimate Reality, on the other hand, is
often conceived of as formless, genderless consciousness. Anandamayi Ma herself
said, “You are the Self of All, you are He. He is neither masculine nor feminine.
Therefore here, too, there is no question of man or woman. In all men and women
is He alone. The Self in everybody is genderless.”^3
Taking into account the Hindu understanding of the gender of God, as well as
its emphasis on disidentification with the body, it is not difficult to understand why