180. gurus
So soft, just like a newborn baby, so soft to massage, so smooth. The ladies under-
stood her better and felt closer to her than the men.”
Indeed, several male devotees bemoaned the distance they had to keep from Ma.
Swami Premananda, who met Ma as a twenty-five-year-old graduate student, said,
“When I came to stay with Ma, I could not accept that it was not possible to be near
the body of Mother. Her being a lady and I being a man, there were certain limita-
tions. I would follow her everywhere, and I would cry when she scolded me. She
was once being fed by someone, and I said, ‘I also want to feed you.’ And her hair—
she had very long black hair, and I just wanted to comb that. It took me a long time
to accept.”
Thus the primary way in which Anandamayi Ma’s being a woman particularly
benefited and inspired women was in granting women intimate access to her divine
presence. Their privileged position close to Ma offered them a rare opportunity to
have a personal relationship with God as Ma, caring for and being cared for by her.
The second way in which Ma’s being a woman benefited women was that as a re-
sult of their intimacy with her, Ma was better able to advocate for women’s spiritual
equality with men. Ma kept close track of “the girls,” as the celibate women who
lived around Ma were called, encouraging them in their spiritual practice and hold-
ing them to the highest standards. The fact that the families of these young women
were willing to allow them not to marry, but rather to stay with Ma as her caretak-
ers and her closest disciples, is credit to the power Ma held in Bengali society. In ex-
change, they could take pride in the fact that their daughter was “under Ma’s spiri-
tual wing.”
Swami Gitananda, one of “Ma’s girls,” said, “We who wanted to be closely re-
lated to Ma were treated differently. Ma would scold us for the smallest infractions.
Later Ma would say, ‘Now I scold you with all of my heart. I do not hide anything.’
We thought we were special. With us Ma felt every little behavior had to be as fra-
grant and fruitful as a rose in full bloom. You see, Ma wanted us to blossom into per-
fection.” Furthermore, Ma established a Sanskrit school for girls in Banaras, offer-
ing a spiritual education for girls that had been unavailable since early Vedic times,
an education that prepared them to choose the life of a brahmacharini if they wished.
Ma also arranged for the sacred thread of Brahmin initiation, formerly given only
to males, to be given to several of her close women devotees. Finally, Ma empow-
ered several of “the girls” to plan, fund-raise for, and build a yajnashala, to house
the sacrificial fire of Vedic ritual at her ashram in Kankhal. All of these things were
manifestations of Ma’s advocacy for women’s spiritual equality.
The third way in which Ma’s birth in a female body might have particularly ben-