Acknowledgements

Words of Anandamayi: Short Conversations

CHAPTER 1 Impressions of Anandamayi

CHAPTER 2 Tile Early Years of Anandamayi

CHAPTER 3 Perfection of the Beginning

CHAPTER 4 Bhava and Samadhi

CHAPTER 5 The Fullness of Her Powers

CHAPTER 6 Discourse and Dialogue of Anandamayi

Afterword

I would like to express my deep thanks to the Sri Sri Anandamayi Sangha, Varanasi, for kindly granting me permission to publish extracts from their publications, and for their generous help extended to me over the years.

Many people have helped in a variety of ways to ensure that this book would reach the high standards they longed for, and I alone am responsible for the manifest shortcomings in the text, the photographs and the layout design.

I am deeply grateful to Gitanjali Dhingra for rescuing the whole project from oblivion and whose faith has been unwayering. I would also like particularly to thank Markell Brooks for taking such a bold leap of imagination and thereby making it all possible. Through their magnanimity we have all had our wishes to celebrate the birth centenary of Mataji fulfilled.

I would also like to pay special tribute to one who is no longer with us, but without whom this book would never have come into existence - Atmananda. Indeed, without Atmananda I would never have met Anandamayi. Her loyalty and devotion to Mataji for 40 years has its best memorial in the superbly luminous and faithfully accurate translations of Mataji's words included in this book. I have fond memories of sitting with her and Pandit Gopinath Kaviraj, puzzling together over the choice of exactly the right English word in the early stages of translation. Thus, I also wish to honour the memory of a great scholar, Mahamahopadhyaya Pandit Sri Gopinath Kaviraj, for wise counsel and for his indefatigable efforts to serve Anandamayi over a very long span of years.

I wish to honour the names of great devotees who helped me in all manner of ways during my many periods of residence in various ashrams between 1954 and 1958: Gurupriya Devi, known to all as Didi; Sri Hari Ram Joshi; Dr N K Das Gupta; B Sanjiva Kao; Dr Pannalal; Brabmachari Kamal Bhattacharjee; Swann Paramananda.

In Britain a number of friends have been enormously helpful and supportive during the years when the prospect of completing a project I conceived 35 years ago was no more than a secret gleam in my eye - and gave warm encouragement when work was once more under way: Liza Mackintosh, Chloe Goodchild, Roger Housden, Christopher Pegler Pauline Baines. Thanks also to Claude Portal for his kind patience at the other end of the phone, to Bithika Mukeijee, and to Ram Alexander for a rare archive photograph.

A special word of thanks goes to the distinguished scholar, John Irwin, former Keeper of the Indian Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for his most generous assistance with the ancient Indian symbolism of the cosmogony, on which he is a leading authority.

Simon Ferguson proved to be a tireless collaborator, working long hours with particularly difficult negatives. His sensitivity for the subject and his determination to overcome formidable technical hazards are greatly appreciated.

Be like a child who never grows up: the only reason why the child-like state does not last is "desire".

I am a little child and do not know how to lecture or give discourses. Just as a child, when it finds something sweet and good, takes it to his mother and father, so do I place before you what is sweet and good. You take whatever pleases you. Mine is only a child's prattle. In fact, it is you alone that questions and you alone that answers. You beat the drum, and you hear the sound.

The household itself can be an ashram.

To do pranam obeisance means to put one's head where it should be - at the feet of God. His feet are everywhere and therefore one may do namaskar, salutation, everywhere, remembering the feet of God.

To do pranam means to open oneself to the Divine Power, which is always streaming down on everyone. One usually shuts oneself away from it. To do pranam means to give one's mind, one's I to Him, to surrender oneself to the One, so that there should be only He and not you.

You attempt to appease want by hence want does not disappear and neither does the sense of want. When man awakens to the acute consciousness of this sense of want, then only does spiritual inquiry become genuine. You must bear in mind that only when the sense of want becomes the sense of the want of Self-knowledge does the real Quest begin.

There are two kinds of pilgrims on life's journey: the one like a tourist is keen on sight-seeing, wandering from place to place, flitting from one experience to another for the fun of it. The other traveller treads the path that is consistent with man’s true being and which leads to his real home, to Self-knowledge. Sorrow will certainly be encountered on the journey undertaken for the sake of sight-seeing and enjoyment.

So long as one’s real home has not been found, suffering is inevitable. The sense of separateness is the root-cause of misery, because it is founded on error, on the conception of duality. This is why the world is called du-niya - based on duality.

What is wanted is genuine Awakening, an awakening after which nothing remains to be attained. . .

To become fully conscious is not enough, you will have to rise beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. That which Is has to shine forth.

The various activities that aid the spiritual life have to be knit together closely with ever renewed effect - as the thread is not seen in a garland, without a gap. No sooner does the mind get an opening than it will direct all its actions downwards, towards the perishable.

Relentless one-pointed perseverance brings about the change in perspective which will establish you in Peace.

Our mind is the swiftest thing in creation. Let the mind move at its own speed constantly towards the One Aim, which is God.

If you endeavour to fulfil yourself by entering the current of your true being, this current will eventually lead you to the perfect poise of your own true being.

The Beloved is comparable to ice, which is nothing but water, and consequently He is without form, without quality and the question of manifestation does not arise. This is the state of Self-Realisation. For to find the Beloved is to find one's Self to discover that God is one's Self, wholly identical with Oneself, one's innermost Self the Self of one's Self.

When one sees a stone, it cannot be called a vigraha, an image of the deity; and seeing a vigraha, it cannot be called a stone. Where it is regarded as a focus for the presence of God, there He actually is.

Just as t s said that everything is Cod's own vigraha it is only fitting that one should strive after the direct perception of this fact.

Stone-mindedness is foolishness - the fact of God's immanence has not yet been grasped. The delight in the things of this world, in sense objects, is fleeting indeed. It does not last; it is impermanent. But where God and God alone stands revealed, there is no such thing as impermanence. Your attention is directed towards the world, not towards the Eternal; you are identified with that which is transient in constant flux.

What is revealed thereby? The perishable. In the perishable there is no Self-revelation. How can Reality, true Being, be in that?

For the destruction of destruction has not yet come about.

The perishable must perish.

The light of the world comes and goes, it is unstable. The Light which is eternal can never be extinguished. By that Light you behold the outer light and everything in the universe; only because It always shines within you, can you perceive the outer light.

Whatever appears to you in the universe is due only to that great Light within you, and solely because the Supreme Knowledge of the essence of things lies hidden in the depths of your being is it possible for you to acquire knowledge of anything.

Keep your thinking on a very high level; praise and blame, filth and sandal paste must become alike. Nothing in the world should be repulsive to you.

Look into our own heart and become repelled by the repulsion.

Divinity, is complete, whole, nothing whatsoever can be excluded from it. Thus, there are and must ever be new expressions according to the varying modes that are being manifested at different times and places.

Nothing without exception can be rejected or left out where.

Truth is revealed in it purity.

There is a time for everything. No one can come to me until the time is ripe.

Question: How can I know which is the true path?

Answer: If you sit with all doors and windows closed, how can you see the path? Open the door and step out; the path will become visible.

Visitor: I have no spiritual aspirations; I am happy as I am.

Answer: That is good; we also are talking of happiness. If you have found the secret of happiness why do you make this statement instead of being in this state for all to see? She smiles, the visitor laughs and acknowledges that it is so.

To be with God is true happiness.

The multifarious kinds of beasts, birds, men - what are they all? What are these varieties of shapes and modes of being, what is the essence within them? What really are these everchanging forms? Gradually, slowly, because you are rapt in the contemplation of your Beloved, He becomes revealed to you in every one of them; not even a grain of sand is excluded. You realise that water, earth, plants, animals, birds, human beings are nothing but forms of your Beloved.

Some experience it in this manner; realisation does not come to everyone in the same way. There are infinite possibilities and, consequently, which for any particular person is the specific path along which the Universal will reveal itself in its boundlessness, remains concealed from most individuals.

Question: Is it ever possible to bribe God?

Answer: By cheating, you yourself alone will be cheated.

God is everywhere, He pervades everything.

He, whom you think you have sought in vain for so many years, is not apart from you. Just as a man cannot be without bones, blood, flesh and skin, so the One is present everywhere, at all times, interwoven with everything that exists.

God is one's very own Self, the breath of one's breath, the life of one's life, the Atma. Not until his true Self has been revealed to him may a seeker ever relax his search. By seeking, one will find the Self is within one's own grasp. To feel fatigued, exhausted, because one has not found Him is a very good sign indeed.

It indicates that one is nearing the purification of one's heart and mind.

In dreams all kinds of things can be seen: things, which the mind has been busy with and, also, things which have not been thought about but which have occurred in the past or will come about in the future.

In any case every thing that happens belongs to the realm of dreams.

There are instances when one loses consciousness while sitting in meditation. Some people have found themselves swooning away, as it were, intoxicated with joy, remaining in that condition for quite a long time. On emerging they claim to have experienced some sort of divine bliss. But this is certainly not Realisation. A stage exists in meditation where intense joy is felt, one is as if submerged in it.

But who is it that gets submerged? The mind, of course. At a certain level and under certain circumstances, this experience may prove an obstacle. If repeated time and again one may stagnate at its particular level, and thereby be prevented from getting a taste of the Essence of Things.

If after coming down from the state of contemplation you are capable of behaving as before, you have not been transformed.

When one has become established in a state of tranquillity, one has become still.

Only then, the activity of one’s nature, which is continues at every moment in sleep and in waking from birth to death, this as part of thinking mind become caught in the Stream of Self eternally remain floating in it.

Ever to keep the mind poised in the Self wide-awake in the current of Reality, where the Unfathomable, the One-without-end is ever revealed in His infinity - this must, with the intensity of a possession, be your one and constant endeavour.

Question: Is it necessary to renounce the world

Answer: No, why Where is the place where God is not? The natural way of life itself could he transformed into the spiritual way of life. In fact, there is nothing which can be "other" to God; so properly speaking, to live in the world is to be on the way to Self-realisation.

If one does not arrive at a state of stillness, the agitation of one's whole system will manifest through every nerve and fibre of the body and render one inefficient. If one's energy is not retained, the harmonious functioning of this energy in perfect tranquillity is not possible. Interest in the Supreme Quest and practices performed in search of Truth naturally have a calming effect. The preservation of energy is essential.

A person who expects this body to be always super-normal in its dealings with the world, will be disappointed.

One must not allow oneself to be caught by the lure of supernormal faculties. Suppose one has acquired the power that whatever one utters becomes true or whatever one desires is fulfilled. What of it? This is only a stage. By using such powers to destroy or improve people one may become arrested on that level instead of progressing towards the ultimate. To get entangled on the level of these powers is a waste of energy, Having acquired them one must not lose sight of the supreme Goal of human existence, but strive unceasingly after Self-realisation.

Failing to do so will create obstacles and may result in a fall.

Everyone has his own path.

In God's creation the possible becomes impossible and the impossible possible at all times.

Question: If Mataji has found peace why does she keep wandering about?

Answer: If I stayed in one place the same question could arise, could it not? Pitaji, don't yon know I am a very restless little girl. I cannot stay in one place. This is one answer. From another point of view; I might say it is you who see me travelling. In reality I do not move at all. When you are in your own house, do you sit in one corner of it? Similarly, I also walk around in my own house - I don't go anywhere - I am always at rest in my own home.

I am not going anywhere: I am always here. There is no going or coming - all is Atma.

Question: What do you think of all these new people coming to see you almost daily?

Answer: Nobody is new. They are all familiar to me.

You and I are two persons and yet you and I are one; and the gap between the two of us this also is myself: there can be no question at all of duality. Attachment and hate arise out of the sense of duality.

Everybody’s satisfaction is my satisfaction.

Everybody’s happiness is my happiness.

Everybody's misery is my misery.

Become drinkers of nectar - all of you - drinkers of the wine of immortality.

Tread the path of immortality, where no death exists and no disease.

When you feel power within yourself, when new light dawns on you from within, the more you can keep it concealed in utter calm and stillness, the more it will grow in intensity. If the slightest opening appears, there is always the fear it will escape.

Sustained effort ends in effortless being - in other words, what has been attained by constant practice is finally transcended, and then spontaneity comes.

One afternoon, after taking their midday meal, a small group of companions set out by car for Lucknow. After they had passed Unnao, a lady sitting bundled up in the back of the car in gauzy white robes exclaimed: "Look, Didi, what a lovely little village!"and the woman addressed as Didi looked indifferently at the passing view. In all directions stretched the same unchanging expanse of farmland, dotted here and there with clusters of trees and the mud huts of villages. It was a typical scene in the monotonously vast Gangetic valley. The car swept on, raising a cloud of dust in its wake; with the sun high in the sky the scene was shadowless and almost devoid of colour. "Weren't those trees beautiful," the lady in the back persisted as the car sped on. "Come on then," replied Didi patiently, "let's go back and look at them." "But the car has already taken us some distance away," responded the other with some hesitation. "Never mind," Didi put in, "let's go back, driver, please!"

When the car had returned most of the way, it turned off the road and bumped down a track between fields. Silhouetted against the vast horizon, a distant peasant went about his work. The car came to a halt at the edge of the village. The lady who had spotted the trees got out of the car and set off at speed in their direction. Without turning towards the other members of the party, she commanded them: "Bring the basket of fruit and all the garlands that are in the car." Didi did as she was bidden, carrying them all in her arms as she ran to catch up. There was a pond beside a large house with tiled roof and smoothly moulded mud walls. Beside the pond stood two young trees, one a banyan, the other a margosa, growing side by side.

By this time villagers began to collect, curious to know what brought so unusual a vehicle as a motorcar to their rustic dwellings. The woman in the cotton robes of dazzling whiteness cut a striking figure amidst the dun-coloured surroundings, the dun-coloured garments of the villagers and several dun-coloured dogs. Her fine jet-black hair fanned out over her shoulders and her pale skin was as faintly lined as the delicate grasses silhouetted against a whitewashed wall nearby. She looked about her with keenly alert eyes; a smile came to her lips as she gazed intently at the two trees. Around her a hush fell, the gathering crowd of villagers astonished by the commanding presence of the stranger. She approached the two trees and started caressing their branches and trunks with great affection. Pressing her forehead repeatedly to their trunks she said in soft but clearly audible tones: "Well, well, so you have brought this body here to see you." Everyone looked at the trees with blank incomprehension, there being nothing to distinguish them from countless others dotting the plain. The woman nevertheless seemed to hold everyone in silent thrall.

"What is the name of your village?" she enquired.

"Bhawanipur," was the reply.

"Who planted these two trees?"

"Dwarka," someone offered.

"Is the owner of this land at home?"

"No, but his wife is over there."

The group of visitors, who were now being watched with intense curiosity by a cluster of children, turned and saw the owner's wife approaching. Addressing the woman with sweetness of tone and expression, the visitor in white told her: "take great care of these two trees and worship them. It will be for your good."

Then she took the garlands from Didi and decorated the trees with them and distributed all the fruit from the basket to the incredulous villagers. Without the faintest notion who she was, they all assumed postures of deferential respect towards her, as if they perceived her to be of exalted station. Yet they could instantly recognise her as one of themselves, a simple woman simply dressed and accustomed to village ways. She moved easily among them, but paid tender attention to the numerous children while at the same time encompassing one and all within her friendly and attentive gaze.

She turned back whence she came, closely followed by the crowd, who were now smiling with awkward pleasure, yet still dismayed by the inexplicable attention conferred on them and on a couple of trees by a bunch of total strangers.

"Margosa and banyan - Hari and Hara!" exclaimed the lady.

"Now you’ve given these trees the names of gods," Didi declared in wonder.

When they reached the car, the crowd were enjoined to plaster the place round the trees with a mud platform.

Then the lady in white asked them: "Do you repeat God’s name-. Even though you may not be able to do so daily, at any rate now and again perform puja worship and sing kirtana, or religious songs, under the boughs of those trees." Then she turned to her companions. "How extraordinary!" she observed, "those trees were pulling this body towards them as people might. The car was carrying us away from them, but it was just as if they caught hold of the shoulders of this body and dragged it back in their direction. This kind of thing has never happened before."

As the visitors got back into the car, one of the villagers diffidently enquired of the driver who was the great lady who had referred to herself as "this body".

"Anandamayi Ma of Bengal. Remember this visit well, for she is a holy person and she never does anything without meaning."

This incident, which I have reconstructed from the diary account of Didi Gurupriya Devi, Anandamayi's lifelong chief assistant, typifies the paradoxical status of a figure such as Anandamayi in modern Indian society. She is so unusual that there is no woman, not even an example known to us from the past, with whom she can be compared except in the vaguest of terms. We are baffled, as were the inhabitants of Bhawanipur, by her unplaceability. A strange event was visited upon the good peasants of that nondescript village - an eruption of the sacred which they would puzzle over for many years. In her speech, mode of dress and features, the lady with the airs of a holy person seemed to belong nowhere or everywhere.

Nowadays, we indiscriminately call such a charismatic figure a Guru, without being any too clear what that term means other than, perhaps, somebody with pretentious claims to spiritual wisdom. We relegate all Gurus to a dubious category of exotic, perhaps dangerous, cults. Gurus have been seriously discredited by recent scandal and tend to be treated with a degree of caustic suspicion. We recall Bhagavan Rajneesh - he of the 87 Rolls Royces - or various cult leaders whose followers committed mass suicide. We look on them as sinister and mendacious personalities who take backhanders from politicians or seduce the daughters of our friends.

Traditionalists point out that people like Sri Aurohindo, Krishnamurti, Swami Ramdas and Swami Shivananda, Mother Meera, Sai Baba and Meher Baba are not Gurus at all but a hybrid phenomenon catering to foreigners.

Certainly, the glamorised deluxe ashrams which have sprung up in recent decades are a far cry from the modest pattern of the age-old guru-shishta relation-ship of master-disciple tutelage; yet this ancient system survives, for example, in the teaching of classical music and dance.

Throughout Indian history, this pattern of instruction ensured the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. In the case of Anandamayi who did not herself have a Guru, but was self-initiated, the traditional model of the teacher and the taught has, in certain respects, taken on new life, but in other equally important respects she radically departed from tradition.

Her role as a revered Brahmin divine was by no means orthodox since this was a departure from the traditional status parameters of the married woman; further, for some 50 years as a widow and thus a member of the lowliest rank of Indian society, she was at the same time one of the most sought after of all spiritual teachers.

Yet again, she revived the old custom of the gunikul, an ancient style of schooling for both girls and boys at her ashrams. Until almost the very end of her life she could not be classed as a Guru in a technical sense; for a Guru is one who gives diksha to disciples, or initiation by mantra.

Nevertheless, in the more general and metaphorical sense of spiritual teacher she was certainly a Guru, one of the greatest and the most respected of her time. In addition, she was indeed the Guru to many advanced sadhikas spiritual practitioners.

For them she was everything that the Guru traditionally should be a perfect vehicle of Divine Grace. There is a section in the excerpts from the discourses of Anandamayi included here where she comments at length on the spiritual meaning of the Guru. The true Guru is never to be regarded by the disciple as merely human but as a divine being to whom he or she surrenders in total obedience.

The disciple places himself in the hands of the Guru and the Guru can do no wrong.

Moreover, from the point of view of the Guru's disciples, the Guru is the object of worship. Obviously so serious a commitment is hedged about with all manner of safeguards, for the Indian is as aware of the perils inherent in such a position of absolute authority as is any sceptical outsider - rather more so, in fact, for much experience about the dynamics of the guru-shishya bond has been amassed over the millennia of its existence.

How could such adulation, such assumption of control over another's destiny, fail to turn the heads of all upon whom this mantle of omniscience falls? Everything depends on the closely observed fact that there are a few rare individuals at any one point in time who are so devoid of ego that no such temptation could possibly be felt. Egolessness is the sine qua non of the Guru.

For an Indian, submission to tutelage by a Guru is but one among many possible routes to salvation, or Self-Realisation. In the case of Anandamayi, it has become obvious, indeed widely known, that we are dealing with a level of spiritual genius of very great rant, Her manifestation is extraordinarily rich and diverse.

She lived for 86 years, had an enormous following, founded 30 ashrams, and travelled incessantly the length and breadth of the land. People of all classes, castes, creeds and nationalities flocked to her; the great and the good sought her counsel; the doctrine which she expounded came as near to being completely universal as is attainable by a single individual.

Though she lived for the good of all, she had no motive of self-sacrifice in the Christian sense: "there are no others," she would say, "there is only the One". She came of extremely humble rural origins, though from a family respected over generations for its spiritual attainments.

In the course of time she would converse with the highest in the land, but draw no distinction between the status of rich and poor, or the caste and sectarian affiliations of all who visited her. She personified the warmth and the wide toleration of the Indian spiritual sensibility at its freshest and most accessible.

The fact that she was a woman certainly accentuates the distinctive features of her manifestation. Female sages as distinct from saints capable of holding sustained discourse with the learned are almost unheard of in India. Her femininity certainly imparts to the heritage of Indian and global spirituality certain qualities of flexibility and common sense, lyricism and humour not often associated with its loftiest heights.

Her quicksilver temperament and abundant lila sacred play are in stark contrast with the serenity of that peerless exemplar of Advaita Vedanta, Sri Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai, the quintessence of austere stillness. That a woman of such distinction and wide-ranging activity should emerge in India in the 20th century the century of world-wide feminism and reappraisal of feminine phenomenology hardly seems a coincidence. The Guru, by definition, reflects the profoundest and most urgent needs of all followers. While the Guru incarnates the wish-fulfilments of a myriad devotees, he or she also extends, expands and elevates to new and unfamiliar sensitivity those who take heed.

I believe Anandamayi has added a whole new spiritual dimension to the re-awakening awareness of women to their own inheritance. As an exemplary figure, she emanates a feeling of complete ease, warmth and secure confidence in her feminine.

Anne Bancroft, in her line study of modern women mystics, Weavers of Wisdom, quotes this moving statement by an Englishwoman: "I felt she loved me so utterly that I could never be the same again. Although I only saw her a few times, I have never lost that feeling and her presence is always with me. She was a person who had a vision of life and reality which she could transmit in such a way that, since seeing her, I have always known that there is harmony and purpose in the universe."

In the wisdom and profundity of Anandamayi's discourse we recognise the true voice of the sage. But she was more than just a wise person, although when it comes to defining exactly what this special extra dimension to wisdom and spiritual goodness was, adequate words are hard to find. She was, I believe, just about as near perfect a human simulacrum of the divine as we are ever likely to encounter on this planet. I chose the word 'simulacrum" with care for the simple reason that I do not know what a divine human being really is. I am agnostic to this degree, whereas the niajorits" of her followers are devotees, bhaktas, and for them she is, without qualification, truly a Divine Being. I have already tried to show that, in India, assertion of such an audacious claim for the Guru is nothing out of the ordinary.

Attribution of divine status to a living person is deeply entrenched in the Indian spiritual outlook.

However, it is important to point out that such an attribution is not made arbitrarily by credulous neophytes. The sacred, the divine and the holy are realities intricately bound up with, and elaborately developed within, the various metaphysical and mystical systems of high learning.

Attribution of divinity is also commonplace in Indian theology. What matters is the unique particularities of the person to whom this attribution is given.

In the present instance, Mahamahopadhyaya Pandit Sri Gopinath Kaviraj, who was before his retirement head of the Sanskrit College in Varanasi, devoted long study to this issue in an essay published in 1961. Arthur Koestler was aroused to particularly contemptuous scorn by this essay, pointing out that this kind of scholasticism went out of fashion in Europe in the 16th century. Perhaps, but what I find particularly appealing is Gopinath Kaviraj's scrupulous modesty. At all times he admits the powerlessness of his intellect to fathom a phenomenon that is intrinsically paradoxical and resistant to rational deduction.

I had felt years ago that it was beyond my powers to delineate through words a faithful picture of Anandamayi, showing her not merely as she was in herself, but even as she appeared to me. I feel the same difficulty and hesitancy even now; perhaps all the more strongly with the deepening of my sense of mystery about her . . . the best thing for us would be to try to love her deeply and sincerely and by loving her to bring ourselves into closer union with her true Self.

I am convinced that as a result of this process she will surely reveal herself to us more fully according to the degree of our fitness and receptivity and that we shall then be in a fortunate position to know immediately, and not through our intellect, which sees through a veil and perverts what it sees, what she truly is.

And in so knowing her we shall be able to know our own selves also.

The person herself, divine or not, offers concrete evidence, at a time when our world-view is dominated by scientific rationalism, that spiritual perfection, or at least spiritual perfectibility, remains as much within our reach as it ever did in the past. In the face of what this woman visibly manifests I can only play with words.

Although both words and photographs can lie, the photograph does have a certain workaday veracity. I only hope that my combination of words and pictures honours the reality of this remarkable woman.

I first met Anandamayi in 1954, on my first visit to Varanasi. I was a freelance photographer specialising in magazine reportage. I was always on the lookout for fresh feature material.

I was 26 travelling rough, and hard pressed to locate marketable themes in a notoriously competitive field. I heard of Anandamayi through a remarkable Austrian pianist and schoolteacher, Blanca Schlamm, who had been a follower of Krishnamurti for 30 years. On the staff of a school inspired by the ideas of Krishnamurti, she was then in the process of readjusting her whole life to the new perspective opened up for her by Anandamayi. She already had considerable experience of Mataji's teaching and devoted scrupulous care to the translation of her words into English for the ashram magazine, under the name Atmananda. Moreover, due to her linguistic abilities Atmananda was frequently called upon to act as interpreter, not only for foreigners in private talks with Mataji, but also for many Indians who understood neither Bengali nor Hindi, the two languages in which Mataji conversed.

My first glimpse of Anandamayi was inadvertently preceded by a solecism. Standing by the roadside awaiting her car as she drove into Varanasi, I was nervously holding a small bunch of roses with which to greet the great lady. Time passed and, as I fretted, I took a deep sniff at the flowers in my hand.

"Now you have polluted them with your sniff! You can't offer polluted flowers!"

I must have looked mortified as I glanced at the innocent blooms, aghast at my occidental crudity.

"Oh well, because you didn't know you mustn't sniff an offering, it won't matter!"

The car eventually came into sight, heading towards the beautiful Varanasi riverfront, and pulled up. An impressive party of women scrutinised me as I singled out Anandamayi and offered my roses. I found myself peering in at this handsome woman bundled into the back seat, smiling encouragingly at me. The car swept on into the city.

My professional curiosity had been aroused; no photographer had yet covered her for the Western media. If Henri Cartier-Bresson had recently photographed Sri Aurobindo and Sri Ramana Maharshi, then Anandamayi - their successor in stature, as I was given to understand - might provide me with a scoop. I therefore set out to visit her riverside ashram the next day. My glib cameraman's nose for a story might pollute a rose with a sniff but I resolved to improve my manners and get down to some serious work.

This humdrum beginning to my acquaintance with Anandamayi would lead me into an entirely fresh phase of apprenticeship. Until then, I had sought to record, among many other themes, the spiritual life of India as and when I found it, consistently from an outsider's point of view. Indeed, I went to much effort to maintain this outsider's view as a positive factor in my work. At that time, reportage photographers consciously accepted a role as detached-yet-sympathetic observers, using a kind of built-in secularism as a means to achieve candid, anonymous, non-judgemental records of things-as-they-are. Now out of courtesy for the feelings of a cloistered group of people under the scrutiny of my lens, I would have to learn an altogether different approach. There was, besides, my ignorance of my subject. First impressions of Anandamayi as I sat in the ashram hall watching her were of a woman truly impressive in stature and intelligence, and of great psychological complexity Here was a woman of high prestige, of most striking appearance, displaying a diversity of eloquent facial expression, moving about with superb grace and surrounded by a congenial multitude of staunchly individual, highly evolved followers.

However, this was no more than a minimal starting-point. It was not long before I discovered a very striking visual effect: those around her all seemed to converge upon her figure in spontaneous often fast-changing, unconsciously felicitous compositions.

The graceful plasticity with which they took up their places in a single configuration at once recalled to me visual art traditions that I assumed belonged irretrievably to the past. No sooner had I noticed this than I was struck by something I was naive enough to believe impossible: events and experiences essentially inner in nature could best be portrayed in action.

I had assumed that it would be impossible to take high-speed action photographs of movement expressing inner, spiritual love of one person for another - until, that is, I saw someone prostrate at Anandamayi's feet. In that instant, Rembrandt's great painting of his old age, of the Prodigal Son falling at his father's feet, which I had hitherto regarded as a parable, became a living reality. Similarly, when I saw the retinue of women disposed around Anandamayi, I recalled a similar disposition of figures in Poussin's great series of paintings of the Seven Sacraments. Here was a throwback to the past occurring in the here and now with a certain gritty actuality that was unmistakably 20th century in character. I suppose I fancied myself as an ultra-modern photographer extending the possibilities of visual instantaneity.

The last thing I wanted to do, however - and on this I was adamant -was to imitate the old masters. Equipped with a lightweight camera and fast film, engaging with a peaceable community where stillness and timelessness were of the essence, I would focus upon the fugitive and fleeting instant.

But I had a feeling that I was looked on as if I was doing something tantamount to blasphemy, whereas from my point of view my approach would result in the revelation of a hidden mystery.

The freezing action of the fast shutter does have the power to uncover events which the human eye can scarcely register, but which intuition knows to exist, as it were, in a state of latency. What Anandamayi's retinue feared might reduce pure moments of true spiritual feeling to pictorial crudity, could, I was sure, enhance them.

It was considered indelicate to portray a revered figure as subject to ageing without recourse to retouching. Preferably, the face of the holy, even in a photograph, should be depicted like an icon, transubstantiated. Whereas, as in the Zen precedent of the famous Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, which represent sequent steps on the path to enlightenment, I would portray the highest attainable state of grace not as a quasi-divine being but as someone who is nothing special.

Here, in fact, was my solution: I would adapt the methods of contemporary photojournalism for purposes of visual anti-hagiography. I would proceed with as much tact and patience as I could muster, seeking the revelatory moment when that quality of nothing special was revealed in the split second of my open shutter.

Pure paradox! This would be a project made possible by a combination of Anandamayi's quicksilver grace and the cheeky efficiency of a good camera. From the start I noticed how fast was the tempo of her movements, how rapid her changes in facial expression, how swift her gestures, how quick her powers of observation. The camera seemed to me a thoroughly sympathetic instrument for registering the subtle interplay between the fleeting and that, which never changes.

The sacred art of the past employs stillness, permanence, immobility, hieratic gesture, and stylised and abstracted features in the depiction of exalted spiritual beings. To achieve transcendence of mundane appearances, sacred art of all epochs and all cultures also depended upon the artist's ability to depart as far as possible from any factual resemblance to natural appearances. For instance, the sublime beings carved from the living rock of India's ancient cave sanctuaries do not counterfeit the look of mere mortals - they are divine by reason of their distance from the facts of material reality.

Was I, by freezing action with fast shutter speeds, committing sacrilege in a holy place, or was I pushing the limits of the optical to evoke that which lies beyond time? Anandamayi did not curb my immoderate zeal; one of her most persistent leitmotifs was the need for skill in action. She tolerated my close attendance with intrusive apparatus for days at a time spanning a period of four years. So, with equal generosity, did many of her followers, who no doubt had better things to do than fuss over my needs.

What was I trying to do? First, I was trying to be truthful to experience. A friend of mine, the veteran educator Sanjiva Kao, compared Anandamayi's mind to an extraordinarily sensitive photographic plate. "She contacts the world around her without the mediation or interpretation of a busy mind. This mind carries on absence of independent activity of its own, but generate a clear mirror for the reflection of Truth. Her photographic plate records without distortion the physical and psychic events occurring around it. Anandamayi possesses an extraordinary gift of remembering people she has met despite the ceaseless and numberless parade of faces which passes daily in front of her eyes." Here was my model in a dual sense: on the one hand, a paragon of that "I am a camera" truthfulness I sought to emulate; on the other, a photographer's "model" whom I could record from every angle. By a series of decisive moments, recorded by ultra-efficient lens and film, at the very quick of life, I would move in close to this hypersensitive person as she in turn moved out to meet me. In that conjunction of reciprocal awareness, a third reality would come into being, an image escaped from the trammels of time recording an occurrence powerful enough to eclipse my own intrusive ego.

As things turned out, this proved to be a hard apprenticeship: sessions involved intense visual concentration and, often as not, ended with no picture being taken, due either to the press of devotees or insufficient light. Almost all the best moments with Anandamayi occurred at night or in deep shade, when it was not possible to use a camera. Besides, her attention was so acute that she seemed at times to anticipate my every move, however discreet, permitting me to use my camera only briefly - no verbal refusal was ever given, just ingenious evasion - and at her own moment of choice! There was, often, no mistaking those occasions when photography was deemed unacceptable. At other times, compliance was tacit and the work proceeded without mishap. My most important requisite, I soon discovered, was my own heart. Nothing worked if I was not focused heart and soul upon my task - there would simply be no way through and I would be blocked. Only when my emotional temperature was sufficiently high, or sufficiently cool, so it seemed, did she pick up the correct signal and make way for me. Here was a lesson in a new kind of concentration. Photography became my sadhana spiritual exercise, as meditation and yoga were the sadhana of my fellow ashram inmates. It was my path to Truth.

The ashram garden was like the wings of a theatre; people made their entrances and exits through its screen of foliage to the hand some terrace over the Ganges. Here I watched many scenes of breathtaking beauty. It was indeed a kind of stage, but for the performance of sacred drama; it never had even the slightest touch of theatricality about it though, nor were the players given to strutting the boards", as my figure of speech might suggest.

The marvellous thing about this terrace stage was the fact that every action, which took place there, sprang from the inner motivation of all who walked upon it. The performances were not according to a script in an assumed and predetermined role, but a spontaneous participation in divine lila.

Like iron filings attracted by a magnet, everyone was drawn into the ineluctable patterns of a current whose force was holistically greater than the sum of its parts. The location high above the sacred waters, the magical light which is so distinctive a charm of this ancient city, the pulsations of the kirtan singers circling close to Anandamayi - all contributed to the enchantment. The retinue of women who seemed to accompany her wherever she went looked exactly as one would imagine the Greek Chorus looked -and no doubt had a kindred function.

Here on the terrace people would gather for Mataji's darshan blessing by presence during her promenades. Very early in the morning, when the mist created the effect of a lace veil in the still air between parapet and river, she might stroll for a while, heavily wrapped in a shawl. Nobody could tell when she would come out of her room; when at last she did so, all eyes would be upon her, following her every movement in a contemplative vigil. It was lovely to watch the people come and go, some prostrating themselves at Mataji's feet; sometimes she gave an exquisite response, her hands folded delicately in ever-changing mudras, at other times she would become absorbed with a supplicant in brief counselling.

I soon noticed the complete absence of regimentation - no serried ranks or rows of obedient congregation, no processions no massed lines of followers performing synchronised rituals at the command of intoning priests. The only activity organised in patterns was the chanting of hymns, particularly a fine arati hymn, evensong verses composed for Anandamayi's people. There were many occasions, especially during festivals, when the music provided an insistent and compelling rhythmical pulse to quicken the spirit and carry people to the border of rapture. More usually; nama kirtan was an opportunity to generate ardour. I can still, 40 years on, feel a tingle in my spine when I recall the haunting voice of Pushpa, a gifted young woman, as she repeatedly called out the name of a deity - a wonderfully archaic sound, like a maenad shrilling in the sacred wood. Now and then Anandamayi would sing - inimitably - in a sweet, youthful, transparent way. The mood was relaxed, but also poignant.

In those days, in the l950s, hardly any people from the West turned up. It was considered a "difficult" ashram, with orthodox pollution rules scrupulously observed, Bengali and Hindi the only languages spoken, and the routine a distinctively paradoxical mixture of genial informality and stern discipline. This was a place of absolutely strict asceticism, no two ways about it. And, interestingly, there was never any question of it being anything other than just that. It was an irreducibly chaste regime and this simplicity gave the institution freshness and lightness of tone. At that time, there were only two non-Indians resident in all Anandamayi's ash rams. A year before I arrived, the celebrated anthropologist of the Ituri pygmies, Cohn Tumbull, had spent a while imbibing Mataji's compelling ways.

She had tilled exactly that emptiness I had felt in the western world, and through her I learned how to lead a whole life how to carry the spirit into the every-dav world, how to lead all every-day life that is at the same time a dedicated life, and intensely spiritual.

In her ashram I felt the bond of brotherhood which will eventually unite the world, and in the mutual love and consideration which pervaded all those gathered around Mataji I found a way of life which is yet hut a dream among the majority of the people of the western world. There was no question of rich and poor, good or bad, high or low there was perfect brotherhood among all.

I think that perhaps the greatest things I learned were a love for Truth and a love for all my fellow beings. Truth can be a hard master, hut there are none better, for Truth is one of the ways in which the spirit is revealed. Those around Mataji could not help but be impregnated with this wonderful ideal, and at the same time feel all the petty differences and distinctions which normally surround us disappearing. Here was life as it should he led, life for the One Self not for the little individual self, a life in which all of us could join equally no matter how feeble and weak we were.

Foliage and flowers in the Varanasi ashram were monastic - nature here was barely more than hinted at in the immediate field of vision; beyond stretched a hazy waste of water and distant fields.

Soon after I first met Anandamayi that sounds so social, it was more a silent encounter! I spent a number of days in close proximity to her at her ashram in Vindhyachal. Here I was able to see her in the depths of the Indian countryside and to gauge how deep was her relation to all living things. Vindhyachal, at some distance from Varanasi, huddles at the foot of a sacred hill on the edge of a rocky wilderness clad with jungle overlooking the Gangetic plain. It is a hallowed spot sacred to Tantrics, with remains of great antiquity." On the slopes of the hill are plunging, forested gullies, sequestered temples and primeval shrines. It was winter when I arrived and the leaf-strewn ground beneath gnarled trees and rocks was littered with beautiful sculptures that had fallen from ruined temples. The little ashram, strangely reminiscent of Tuscan farmhouses, commanded a magnificent view from atop the hill. The majestically wide Ganges meandered across a vast sandy bed into the far distance. The main ashram building was a rectangular two-storey tower surrounded by verandas on all sides. From the upper balcony one could view" clusters of dwellings at the foot of the hill and a square temple tank, with a single pillar at its centre rising from the water like the Axis Mundi, the still point of the turning world. Everything at Vindhyachal was steeped in the bright winter hush. During the day, the air was very clear and every speck of detail stood out sharply; as in a medieval miniature. Only the distant sound of a dog barking or a temple bell rang through the echoing air. At night, it became misty and extremely cold, the temperature dropping almost to freezing point.

There were only about a dozen of us there. Anandamayi often retreated from the crowds to this ashram. It was a perfect, unhurried setting in which to imbibe the nature of her being and savour the atmosphere of this enchanted spot. It was a remarkably non-culture-specific scene. On that hilltop one might have been almost anywhere in the world, so muted was the detailing. At the ashram, people wore plain, anonymous garments, mostly unadorned lengths of wrap-around cotton with woollen shawls.

These clothes were white and indeed the whole scene was very muted in colour. In this basic environment I had the sensation of being located at the outer reaches of what had once been a single, vast hegemony which stretched from the eastern extremity of India to the furthest western fringe of Ultima Thule.

Upon this domain, as one can often feel in the Gangetic plain, there remain faint traces of an ancient uniting force, that of Greece, which spread across immensities of time and space to leave their gentle impress - no more than ghostly traces now, but palpable none the less - upon dwellings and people.

In this antique land, Anandamayi had something about her of the sibyl and walked abroad like a Homeric prophetess or Hebraic psalmist. She also brought to mind archetypes from the basilicas of Byzantium and Constantine's home, and from Zeud Avesta and Mahabharata.

The upper storey of the ashram contained Anandamayi's very simple quarters, with surrounding balconies. She would sit here on the southern balcony every morning in light shade, perhaps dictating letters while having her long and fine hair combed by an attendant. One morning it became wordlessly clear that I could approach with my camera. The light was perfect; all was quite still. I stood directly and silently in front of her, paused to collect my thoughts, made some camera adjustments, pre-focused my lens to its closest range and moved forward until her features came into focus on the ground-glass viewfinder of my reflex camera. Holding the camera below my own eye-level, I slowly looked up from it. My eyes were now level with hers and she was precisely 68 centimetres 27 inches away. For what seemed like an eternity I steadied my breathing and we very gently gazed into each other's eyes. Or at least I did, but she cast her cleansing glance right through me into the far distance. For a moment I felt myself to be completely transparent, without substance. Then I pressed the shutter once and moved away. I never needed, nor wished, to do that again.

I used to go for walks in the sacred groves and wander around the temples, quite alone. I peered into dark, sinister niches in the rock where stood terrifying images of deities. Only in close-up could the truly Indian character of Vindhyachal be appreciated, particularly in the juxtaposition of these deities of the local folk culture with the refined sweetness of the classical sculpture that tumbled from some great, lost monument nearby. Then I would pick my way among rocks and pebbles beneath intricate networks of bare winter branches, or clear the autumn leaves from the sculptures strewn around. Everywhere there were streaks, veins, marks, striations, dapplings, twigs, bark, lichen, moss, ferns, and thickets.

I would return to the ashram and take my place with the others at the foot of Anandamayi's bed. She was only a pace or two away; sometimes there was talk and laughter, animated discussion and tales recounted of her early life. There was no exaggerated emotionalism about her; her voice flowed, mellifluous and clear, like the water in a stream, tumbling without hesitation over sparkling pebbles. At other times she was silent, swaying a little from side to side, her head tilted as if listening to something far away Her face was tender and her whole personality radiated a secure warmth. In a swift mood-change her sense of humour shone. She was at home, among her people, perfectly natural, charged with life.

Now and then I would disengage myself from this deep immersion and look into the room from outside, along with a few bystanders from Vindhyachal. The scene, especially by lamplight, reminded me of Flaubert's famous remark on catching sight of cottagers in their lighted hovels: "Ils sont dans le vrai" - literally; "they are in the truth". But the analogy I will use for these scenes is that of a conductor with an orchestra, each musician playing a different instrument. Here, Mataji was conducting a symphony of quietness, not by commands or even by a unifying beat, but by a kind of focused persuasion, suggestion, inspiration. Each person present would be pursuing his own inner tune and perhaps occasionally giving voice to a solo or joining a duet discussion.

When Mataji fell silent, as she often did for minutes on end, she would tilt her head upwards in a variety of ways, but always accompanied by a flick of her locks and a shift in her gaze - intent, alert, hearkening. It seemed to me that, with these little pauses, she was whisking all present through the portals of an open door into a larger, more magical domain of invisible intimations. Even as I write, I can recall these little adjustments of her posture exactly: they had a "creature" quality, like a bird ruffling its feathers before it settles to roost.

These were moments of pure enchantment when I could watch everyone respond as if to fresh inspiration. Like ears of ripening wheat in a light breeze, they would sway a little before they too would settle and glow.

I could look over her shoulder, through door and balcony, and see the branches of trees, pebbles, rocks, leaves and twigs which I had recently examined closely. My eyes would return indoors and scan this sibylline figure as she sat relaxed and bemused. I marvelled at the soft texture of her skin, at the way the shadows round her eyes seemed to have the density of velvet. She retained a youthfulness, which belied her age: 58. I was fascinated by her incessantly mobile features, especially the multiplicity of extremely delicate lines that wove a mobile network across her skin, notably on her forehead and on her lips.

I felt I was looking again at all the intricacies of line I had been tracing in the woods - as if she were a part of the vegetation and the markings of her face and the markings on the trees were all part of a long intricate inscription written in one single script. I had stored in my memory a beautiful observation of Paracelsus on this theme.

It went something like this: 'there are many kinds of chiromancy, not only the chiromancy of man's hands, from which it is possible to infer and discover his inclinations and his fate; there are yet other kinds of chiromancy - for example, that of tree leaves, of herbs, of wood, of shells, of rocks and mines, the chiromancy of landscapes, countries, their roads and rivers."

Written horizontally across Anandamayi's brow were five lines like those of a music score; crossing these were a myriad fine-spun vertical lines in constant movement, knitting and fanning out, narrowing and widening like the action of a loom when the warp and weft open and close. At the mid-point, her brow was momentous, with a suggestion about it of a membrane for receiving and transmitting signals. The brow arched high, expansive and flat, to meet the hairline abruptly. This arching forehead and an energetic jaw like the prow of a ship sailing out of harbour were her most distinctive features. The nose and brows were rounded, gentle, and unassertive. The mouth was very wide, with a multitude of little dips and puckerings, a trenchant line dipping at the centre; so changeable was her mouth that to find any definitive shape in it was impossible.

The eyes of a sage are, of course, the focus of intense interest. Anandamayi's eyes were, as might be expected, most unusual and strange. It was actually quite difficult to settle your gaze on them, regardless of whether or not she happened to be looking at you. At times they were serene and still, but more often they flickered and fluttered like hovering moths, with neither self-consciousness nor agitation certainly not in any way flirtatious or hypnotic. No, their flickering seemed to indicate intense receptivity, mental agility, as if she was listening to a myriad inaudible and different signals on a radio receiver.

I have never watched such an eveutful face. It was not exactly focused on any one spot however, but this acute attention seemed diffused in order to encompass both the very near and the very far. Then, like a light being switched off- without the least drama - all animation, all expression, all the fine sensitivity that held you in thrall, would abruptly vanish. Just for a little while, the face would become, like that in the last of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, nothing special.

Once or twice on these occasions our eyes would meet. But even then, it was hard to say whether they did or didn't meet, for the radar power of her eyes seemed to cover a wide range. It is difficult to tell what their colour was either, but I guess it was a mixture of black, brown and russet. The irises were irregularly flecked, crumbly with golden glints. I could focus on one eye quite easily, being as near as I was; I could settle on it comfortably even when she seemed to be looking straight at me. But if I made a concentrated effort to look into the other eye, it was not only extremely difficult to hold my gaze but the eye became strangely perturbed and to blink within an otherwise impassive face. My description of this scrutiny no doubt reads as detached, clinical, controlled. In fact, it was much more feeling-saturated and communicative than I can put into words. It was a truly extraordinary experience, inspirational, uplifting, consolidating. Yet it is natural that I should describe this particular face in such impersonal terms, considering who she was. In her silence she was, it seemed, aside, detached, apart. She did not give an impression of coldness in the very least, but her sheer presence was paradoxical.

One had to take a long searching look before one found this ultimate redoubt of Selfhood.

No sooner has one made any kind of assertion as to her true nature than one has to qualify it! I could say she had the simplicity of a rose, but I could equally say she had all the complexity of a rose. Her nothing special quality did not, however, conceal her distinction of manner and movement, especially in a crowd.

Her walk was unusual and this alone marked her out, even when viewed from a long distance away. It had a sort of comfortably springy elasticity: she seemed to relish the sensation of walking. The English poet, Lewis Thompson, who, from long experience, had developed a discerning eye for people of very high spiritual quality, met and had long private talks with her in 1945, and said he could tell at once she was a realised being from the way she walked - completely without ego.

She had a marvellous way with words and a marvellously musical voice, as anyone who has heard her in person or has listened to tapes of her singing, will testify. Bengali is a sweet-sounding and sibilant tongue. To my ear, her mode of speaking seemed to be quintessentially feminine, but more than merely in its vocal pitch and its emotional colouring, for she used words in special and remarkable ways. She was a virtuoso in the use of dazzling verbal cadenzas that bounded away from every scriptural score - pure spontaneous extemporisations, not only with the sounds and the puns inherent in word-play or word-lila, but, more importantly; in the import of the thought behind the words. Here was the other half of spirituality - the often-unheard feminine half-reunited and completed in non-dual gender.

There was an essentially poetic organisation in everything she said, but then all sacred utterance, all sacred text is traditionally poetic in the Eastern cultures. Her words bounded out of her without the least hesitation, rich in vocabulary, endlessly allusive within the heritage of quotation and conceptual paradoxes, which comprise the corpus of India's spiritual traditions.

She had a curiously Tele-grammatical way of constructing her sentences, leaving out any words which her care over clarity of meaning could dispense with, as if there was no time for lingering; so swift was her mind, so direct its route. A Bengali poet told me: 'she talks the way modern Bengali poets write."

And she never wrote anything down, never prepared her discourse, never revised what she had said; somehow; it came out perfectly shaped. In her irresistible way; her woman’s way, she could ignore the rules of the game in order to play it all, more exultantly; copiously, freshly.

Sadly, the problems involved in noting down exactly what Anandamayi said in her discourses have been so great that very little has been safely and accurately preserved. What we have, even so, is impressive, although the musicality and alliterative word-play somehow die on the printed page. Only one man, I gather, Brahmachari Kamal Bhattacharjee, had the ability to transcribe her discourse with scrupulous fidelity. Only a few of these transcriptions have been translated into English. Through her patient labours and insight into Mataji's teaching, Atmananda managed to convey the transparency of the words, although their musical enchantment could not survive. Here are two examples of dazzling word-play in the service of thought of the highest subtlety - though, alas, there must be recourse to explanation:

You should understand that one who loves God is but out to destroy identification with the body. When this has come about, there is destruction, nasa, of delusion, of honge, in other words, of desire, vasana, of "not-Self", na Sva.

Your dwelling place, vasa, at present is where the Self manifests as "not-Self", na Sva; when that is destroyed, it is only destruction that is destroyed.

Sva and sa are pronounced alike in Bengali; thus nasa destruction sounds like na Sva "not-Self". Vasana, desire is where the Self dwells as "not-Self": nasa to dwell, na, no, not. In translation, a beautiful thought which had come tripping from Mataji's tongue, and which could be easily understood by an attentive ear, becomes laboured.

What goes and what comes? Behold, it is movement as that of the ocean, samudra, He expressing Himself, Sva mudra. The waves are but the rising and the falling, the undulation of the water, and it is water that forms into waves, tarauga, limbs of His own body, Tar auga - water in essence. What is it that makes the same substance appear in different forms, as water, ice, waves? What actually have you realised? Find out!

With marvellous plasticity, with "concrete" poetry she makes a murti image of a deity out of words - samudra means sea; sva mudra, "His own expression; taranga, a wave; tar, His; anga, limb, intrinsic part. In spite of these difficulties with the translation of some passages, Atmananda succeeded in rendering the meaning of Mataji's subtle teaching with clarity and precision.

She had the longest association of any European - 4 years almost to the day - and played a significant role as the principal interpreter of Anandamayi to the non-Indian world. Her journals, a remarkable account of a 2th-century woman's spiritual pilgrimage towards her final goal as a disciple of Anandamayi, are currently being prepared for publication. When, as Blanca Schlamm, she became a permanent resident saduka, her name was changed to Atmananda, and Mataji allowed her to adopt the ochre robe of a sanyasini in 1962. She was given jal-samadhi, immersion in the waters of the Ganges, a privilege reserved for renunciates, on her death in 1985 at the age of 81.

The Sanskritic roots of most modern Indian regional languages run even deeper than those of Latin in some modern European languages, and the Sanskrit vocabulary for spiritual matters, being the richest and most precisely differentiated of all ancient languages, figures prominently even now in daily religious usage. Around 2 of the Sanskrit terms used by Anandamayi are included in the English glossary used in her ashrams, compiled by Atmananda with assistance from Gopinath Kaviraj. The precision and tensile strength of Sanskrit were well suited to Anandamayi's purposes; unlike Sanskrit scholars, she would pick up words and play with them like toys or trinkets - yet remain mindful of their philosophical implications and semantic resonance. Like the Buddha's Four Noble Truths and Eight-fold Path - a formulation indelibly stamped with Gautama's style despite millennia of elaboration - Anandamayi's compressed formulation of God's essence - like ice and water, waves and limbs - will also enter the mainstream of mystical thought and probably survive for just as long.

By the time I met her, Anandamayi's "genius" went into her public and private discourses as well as her on-going tutelage of innumerable sadukas. Her large following included many distinguished and impressive people. Because they had known her, and each other, for a great many years and had witnessed many extraordinary scenes associated with Mataji, there was a vast repository of oral history at the disposal of anyone like myself who was interested in the anecdotal level of so lively a scene. I learnt more about India's living spiritual culture in this way than by any other means. My own anecdotes are few; I include some here to amplify what I think my photographs express more vividly;

During the 59th-birthday celebration in Almora, a very large number of people gathered daily for satsang; the hall would be absolutely packed. In the mornings, distinguished speakers gave talks while Anandamayi sat to one side listening. There was always a pile of recently offered flowers beside her on the dais, and I watched her one-day playing with these flowers abstractedly while someone sang bhajans.

She selected one particularly handsome bloom, a big dark red dahlia, so dark that it was almost black. She started to smooth down its petals and sway from side to side, shaking out her hair, which had been coiled on top of her head.

Now she went into a wild bhava, she herself darkened and the structure of her head became noticeably different. The bhava was somehow secretive, in-drawn, particularly when she began, with accelerating speed, to pull off each petal, one by one. When, finally; she had pulled off the last petal she held the dahlia by its stalk, fingered the golden centre, and then for a long time gazed at this with the most rapt and delicate attention. Had she, I wondered, made the connection between what she had just done, and an incident recorded by her beloved disciple, Bhaiji? The Almora ashram, after all, was built beside Bhaiji's last resting place, his samadhi, in 1937:

One day at the ashram, Sri Ma took a flower and plucking away all its petals, said to me: "Many of your samskaras, psychic traces, have dropped away and many more will fall off like the petals of this flower, till I shall remain as your main prop, just like the one stalk of this flower. Do you understand?", saying this, she began to laugh. I enquired: "Ma, how can I reach that state."

She replied: "Every day remember this once: you need not do anything else."

One of the morning speakers that season in Almora was an eminent and powerful monk who headed the Shankaracharya Math in Bombay; A very tall and imposing figure with bald head, bull neck and ash-smeared brow, he was an intimidating presence on his dais in the centre of the hall, while Anandamayi was seated well to one side, taking no part at all in the proceedings. She was in a restive mood, looking about her, apparently not listening to what the monk was saying. He was lecturing on Vedanta, larding his words with formidable Sanskrit terminology in a somewhat hectoring tone.

Playing with the string of a flower garland, very casually, almost in an absent-minded aside, Mataji interjected a one-sentence remark, addressing the Swami respectfully as Pitaji father, but in the lightest of tones. The Swami stopped in mid-sentence, paused, looked down and suddenly burst into tears.

To everyone’s astonishment the giant monk just crumpled before our very eyes. With a word to an attendant, Mataji swept the girls of the ashram school into bhajans and everyone joined in. The mood relaxed, the Swami regained his composure and was soon rattling on. What had touched him to the quick nobody could tell.

During satsang in Varanasi about 50 of us were gathered while Mataji listened to someone talking. In the background, down below in the courtyard, two men were talking, their voices rising in a crescendo until they were bellowing angrily at each other. Hitherto, no row had ever erupted during any of my stays in the ashram.

The noise now beginning to wreck the peaceful atmosphere in the hall. Mataji looked at me, beckoned an attendant to her side and sent him over to speak to me. Would I, he whispered please go and stop the argument. I had no alternative but to do as I was bidden. I went down to the yard and found that the row was between the senior Swami and Mataji's brother. It suddenly dawned on me why I in particular had been selected to remonstrate with the culprits.

The plain fact was, I realised, I could not speak their language, nor could they mine! Thus are the winning ways of Anandamayi! She knew I would not become ensnared in the karmic net of other men’s disputes and that everyone's self-esteem would remain intact. It ended with both protagonists reduced to helpless laughter by my futile remonstrations.

One drowsy afternoon at Vindhyachal there were very few people about; nothing stirred. Up on her balcony; Anandamayi was having her hair carefully combed by an attendant who had just washed it. A young doctor from Allahabad came to take his leave. "What train do you intend taking?" Mataji enquired.

The doctor indicated which one. "And where will you change trains to get the Allahabad connection?" Mataji persisted. The young man gave a seemingly reasoned reply; but this did not satisfy" Mataji and she questioned him further concerning his connection, suggesting with some emphasis that he not take the train he had first proposed, but the alternative which she was now proposing.

She was most meticulous about this, yet the doctor just could not see any logic in her suggestion. Mataji was not looking at him, her head bent to the comb as it was passed through her hair. Selecting a long strand, she tautened it as she talked.

The eyes of all three of us were now fixed on the strand of hair. Holding it in her right hand she began, very slowly; with the most attentive care, to wind it round the first joint of her left index finger. She wound it with such precision that it made no more than a fine millimetre-thick circuit of her finger. She wound it thrice in overlapping coils without looking up, and again addressed the acutely discomfited young man.

"Everv thing I say . . .", and at this she made a further turn of hair tightly round her finger, ". . . and every thing I do has ’ - one more turn, ’. . . meaning." She looked up; the man raised his hands in namaskar, bowed, and departed without saying another word.

If I had to find one word with which to describe the most outstanding characteristic of Anandamayi's teaching it would have to be "inclusiveness". But to account for why I find this word the nearest approximation possible, I would have to make my reply inclusive too. I will attempt no more than a rough sketch.

In the simple terms of her life story, she had passed, level by level, through the entire gamut of spiritual development by the age of 30 - from childhood piety to humble religious ardour, to worship of gods, recitation of God's name and service to others in the name of God, to visionary experience, to meditation, to initiation, to glossolalia and prophetic utterance, to the practice of advanced yoga at the highest levels of perfection, to ecstatic rapture, kirtan and the dance of the bhakta, to samadhi.

In addition, she had emerged as an exponent of contemplative esoteric, or mystical, religion through direct experience and personal awareness, where the inward sense of the self is one with the feeling of the external world.

At this latter end of the process, her teaching became like the delta of a great river system, an infinity of tributaries, each one flowing towards the unanimity of the human spirit. In short, she encompassed the particularistic states and stages within a unitive whole. She carried with her, as she raised awareness from one level to the next, all those who retained their divergent beliefs, but she then reached beyond these surface differences to the transcendental unity of all religions.

It was not just a matter of mouthing platitudes about "the oneness of all religions"; she gave detailed instructions to people of different faiths and at different stages of development which were precisely in tune with their own particular situation.

Her teaching certainly did point to the unity hidden beneath all the outer symbols, affording a glimpse into a universalistic stratosphere without departing from down-to-earth detail.

She was always precise, never vague.

She was the unassuming country girl from a dirt-poor village home who became the cynosure for all eyes.

Yet still she would say: "I am always the same."!

Anne Bancroft puts it beautifully: "All of us sense a timelessness dwelling in our heart, an essential core of being which does not change. Thus Mataji, who seems to have known herself to be total timelessness, always responded from this essence to the same essence in the situation."

While she knows exactly who and where she is - "I am always the same - we don't know that we also are where she is!

There is no need for us to "become" liberated; we are already free.

Most graphically, she shows us how to find this out for ourselves. The clarity of the way she does this is revelatory: "I do nothing of my own volition." Nothing? Surely; this is a trite remark - or mediumistic? It is nothing of the sort. If we could only realise it, she is saying, she can do nothing by her own volition and nor can we. All action is His action.

Bhaiji puts it this way: "Her life is an eye-opener to us all. She shows by her everyday activities how we can link every minute detail of life to the Infinite and how we can cultivate a new outlook in our relations with men and make this world a place of new joy and hope and peace. . . . She has devoted herself wholly and completely to the good of the world. All living beings are her own kith and kin. "If you think that there is something peculiarly my own, I must tell you that the whole world is my own.

Here is a strangeness, an indefinable rarity, an uncanny, ineffable quality which comes so near the limits of the recognisably human as to call for a revision of what we mean by that very word "human". Some would undoubtedly find her behaviour very strange, and her freedom to behave strangely both audacious and disturbing.

She was, throughout her life, in every domain, the acme of effortless perfection. Were it not for her lifelong exertion for the good of all, this perfection would be insufferable.

And 60 years of total accessibility must surely have been unendurable had not Anandamayi her-self sustained a marvellous balance between effort and effortlessness.

"There are no others. All others are like the limbs of this body."

Douglas Harding, who met Anandamayi, told Anne Bancroft that the essence of her life and doctrine was "to care and not to care."

She was totally detached from what was going on and paradoxically totally united with it. And these two are both necessary, for if you have one without the other - look out! She was free of the world in the sense that her essence was the Source of the world and she was not limited by its products or involved in them. Intrinsically she was freedom itself -that was one extremely important half of the truth. The other half was that she was so involved in everything. You see, to be totally separate from everything, to be space for it, capacity for it, is to be it. Paradoxically if one is free of a thing one is free to be it. She exhibited this paradox - to be free of the world is to be the world. To be free of grief is to be grief. A woman came to her who had lost her son and they sat together weeping for hours and then the woman went away comforted. At the same time her teaching was totally uncompromising when it came to the essence of things, very tough; but absolutely gentle and generous with people's efforts.

In a letter she sent to a group of sadhikas, Anandamayi reveals her own high-energy inclination:

.."Those who are pilgrims on the path must develop great inner strength, energy, mobility and swiftness, so that their lives may become beautiful, to fill their new life with a new current. It will not do to sit down and ride in a rickety, jolting bullock-cart. At all times, the mind must be intensely vigorous, energetic, and alert - then only can you forge ahead with great speed. Remember that every person has to mould his or her own life. Accept cheerfully whatever He may bestow on you or take away from you."

Anandamayi was born on 30 April 1896, of a poor but prestigious Brahmin family in a small village called Kheora, in the district of Tripura. The area is now in Bangladesh but was then part of the province of Bengal, on the eastern edge of India. Her given name was Nirmala Sundari Devi, which means Immaculate Beauty; she was a blithe and happy child. Details of her childhood are sparse, but then the daily life of her toilsome family was also sparse. While there is no pretext for romanticising the life of India's rural poor, it would he equally unrealistic to assume that Nirmala Sundari's childhood domain of imagination and play was in any way impoverished; on the contrary, it was full of 'thick-coming fancies". Though deeply rural, the Bengali environment was burgeoning with new cultural vitality, producing great spiritual figures too, such as Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. While only the faintest ripples of this would have reached Tripura district, the local folk culture nourished the imagination of village Bengalis. There is an indwelling lyricism in this rural culture which comes through in the writings of modern Bengal's great poet, Rabindranath Tagore. When I try to imagine the kind of childhood Anandamayi may have had I think of the haunting beauty and pathos of the children in the masterpiece of film-director, Satyajit Ray, Path or Paucjali.

I imagine, too, the woodland glades, the rice fields and the ponds in that film would not be so very dissimilar to those she knew.

In his Glimpses of Bengal, Tagore writes: "the flow of life in the village is not swift, but neither is it entirely inactive or inert. Work and leisure keep the same pace, as if walking together hand in hand. They seem harmonised into a music that is tranquil, dreamy and infused with pathos - something immense, but also restrained."

In an essay on the modern neglect of India's villages, "The Robbery of the Soil", Tagore likens the village to the figure of the neglected woman: "In their keeping is the cradle of the race. They are nearer to nature than the towns and are therefore in closer touch with the fountain of life. They have the atmosphere, which possesses a natural power of healing. Like women they provide people with their elemental needs, with food and joy, with the simple poetry of life and with those ceremonies of beauty which the village spontaneously produces and in which she finds delight."

I would add one further detail to this evocation of village Bengal, which I remember most vividly from a few marvellous days I spent in Bhirbhum district at the home of a remarkable minstrel who had known Tagore, the Baul mystic, Nabani Das.

He lived in a typical mud and thatch hut in the middle of the fields away from any village and we spent the day on the tamped earth outside his simple home. What I remember most is the earth itself: we sat right on the sun-baked earth with the peasant’s low-angle perspective of ploughed earth clods stretching to infinity under an enormous sky. This bare-minimum view opened upon a void cleansed of everything save the omnipresence of God.

Nirmala Sundari's father, Bipin Bihari Bhattacharya, was a devout Vaishnava with a typical Bengali love of devotional music, which he shared with his daughter, teaching her many songs. Bengalis are very musical; song, more than any other art form, is the main vehicle for the expression of their emotional nature, the development of their exquisite language and the primary conduit through which the spiritual culture of the region so richly flows.

Dadamahasaya as Nirmala's father came to be known in his daughter's ashrams, in his later years a stately and bearded old gentleman, loved to regale the company with hymns he and his daughter had composed. Nirmala's mother, Mokshada Sundari Devi, familiarly known as Didima, was a gentle, pious woman who lived to an advanced age; she took saniyas became an ochre-robed renunciate with the name of Swami Muktananda Giri, and accompanied her daughter on her incessant peregrinations.

To form a mental picture of Kheora it is necessary to appreciate how very remote it was, just one among many villages of the deltaic region. Not long ago a Frenchwoman, on a pilgrimage to visit Anandamayi's birthplace, searched the area for a whole week without any success. Stranded in the middle of nowhere and in tears, she was finally rescued by a helpful Bangladeshi on a motorcycle who took her to her destination. Kheora is near the eastern border of Bangladesh; the Indian state of Assam is only miles away. But a visit to see the actual birthplace itself is a frustrating experience as Nirmala Sundari's family home was bought by Muslims soon after she left and drastically altered.

The French devotee, Claude Portal himself among the last of the few to receive Mataji's diksha described Kheora for me after a recent visit: "It is a very peaceful and welcoming village in beautiful countryside quite flat, with many small fields surrounding each little village. The soil is sand very soft and gentle to bare feet - and that is nice!

There are several ponds round Kheora and plenty of little woodland glades full of atmosphere and a strong sense of place. The village is too small to have a mosque, but a very simple Hindu shrine still stands - just four walls. Altogether, a village of most delightful aspect. Almost indistinguishable from many others - how small it is!

There is, indubitably, a fabled quality to all the tales of Nirmala Sundari's childhood in this upright high-caste family, but this is not solely accountable to pious imagining. At Nirmala's birth, Gurupriya Devi tells us, her mother did not suffer much, the delivery occurring after ten minutes of moderate pain. Didima put Nirmala under a tulashi basil plant for a while on the morning after she was born and, for 18 months, she would put the baby under the plant every day. The tulashi is sacred to Krishna and is usually garlanded on festival days, with incense waved before it. Signs of Nirmala's unusual nature were barely visible, even to the most attentive eye. However, it was noted that she was scarcely ever heard to cry. This and other signs suggest that she was perceived as a little unusual, but because nobody understood what these signs might portend, the general view was that she was an unexceptional little girl. She became curiously entranced whenever she heard kirtan music or Muslim chanting of the Namaz.

And one night, undetected by anyone, she sat outside the tent of some visiting Christian missionaries and listened to their hymn singing in a state of solitary rapture. As she got older, the child's ecstatic states became more noticeable, and many people came to look upon her as retarded, while Didima herself often said she was a simpleton.

Ancestors on both sides of the family had attained spiritual distinction: her father came from the well-known Kashyap clan of Vidyakut. Before Nirmala was born, he took off one day and disappeared - in the way that Brahmins of his kind tended to do - becoming a kind of wandering pilgrim with no very clear goal. He turned up again three years later as if nothing had happened. To outward appearances, Nirmala Sundari was fair and beautiful, of bright and sunny disposition. Apparently, everyone was very fond of her. The population of the village was predominantly Muslim and relations between themselves and the few Hindu families were entirely amicable. Muslims often carried the child around in their arms and this affection has endured through the years.

Even now, the Muslim population of Kheora still refer to her as "our own Ma".

Nirmala was conspicuously docile, obedient to a degree, with a lively sense of humour, although she was sometimes "absent-minded". The extreme guilelessness of her nature and her habit of carrying out orders to the letter sometimes led to amusing consequences, but not always. When still a child she was taken to a fair by a relative, who put her down before a Shiva temple and told her to sit there quietly while she went away with her companions. But the relative then forgot all about the child. Remembering her at last after a long time, she hurried back and was amazed to find little Nirmala Sundari sitting in exactly the same position - she had not moved at all.

While giving Nirmala lessons in reading, her mother had once pointed out that she was to pause only when she reached a full stop. Subsequently, if she came across a long sentence she would twist and contort her body in an effort to reach the full stop in one breath. If she was forced to take a fresh breath in the middle of a sentence, she would start all over again. Such extreme obedience naturally irritated her mother, but the child's palpable innocence and obvious good intentions deflected all rebuke.

A moribund lower primary patliasala was the only educational institution available to Nirmala - and this she attended only ir regularly for one or two years. Despite her patchy attendance she did quite well at school. She once said laughingly, 'somehow or other I invariably happened to look up the very lesson the teacher would ask and consequently he always found me well prepared." But her parents had misgivings about her future. It happened at times that she didn't know where she was, or could not remember what she had done or said a few minutes before. Sometimes she was so bemused that while reading aloud she would even get lost in the middle of a word, as if the interval betsveen one syllable and the next had lasted an eternity.

In 1909, when barely 13, and as was the custom in those davs, Nirmala Sundari was married to Ramani Mohan Chakravarti, who later became known as Bholanath, or Pitaji. He was much older than her and at the time of their marriage worked in the Police Department, although he lost his job soon after.

He was then in and out of work in what became a pattern - picking up a post as a station master or working as a gardener. A personable and decent man, he was subsequently to make a great success of his marriage and contribute to the care of Nirmala Sundari with ungrudging kind-ness. Meanwhile, the child bride was received into the family of Bholanath's eldest brother, where she remained until she was 18.

In the manner of the day she had to endure the ordeal of moving from a carefree childhood into the role of the inexperienced, deeply shy young daughter-in-law - a familiar pattern of domestic drudgery, unremitting hardship and severe discipline. She cooked, cleaned, fetched water from the pond, took care of the children and served her sister-in-law with exemplary patience and modesty.

In the words of a long-time devotee, Bithika Mukerji: Hard work is the lot of village women not only in India but all over the world. What sets Sri Ma apart from all such girls placed in similar situations is the fact of her total adequacy and a little extra, as it were. She remained uniformly cheerful, good-humoured and more than willing to shoulder other people's burdens. Nothing was a chore to her.

Her serene and equable temper was never disrupted by thoughtlessness or unfair treatment at the hands of elders. It took time for discerning people to understand that Sri Ma was obedient but not biddable or suggestible.

Her boundless compassion overflowed in concern for whoever came within the orbit of her ministrations: family, neighbours, servants as well as animals and plants felt the magnetic touch of this innate interest in their welfare. She also had a very" ready and impish sense of humour. .

She always had the aura of perfectibility all around her but somehow it never overwhelmed her companions. On the contrary; by her gentle ways and ready smile she endeared herself to everyone who came in touch with her.

Anandamayi personally described this period of her life:

This body has lived with father, mother, husband and all. This body has served the husband, so you may call it a wife. It has prepared dishes for all, so you may call it a cook. It has done all sorts of scrubbing and menial work, so you may call it a servant. But if you look at the thing from another standpoint you will realise that this body has served none but God.

For when I served my father, mother, husband, and others. I simply considered them as different manifestations of the Almighty, and served them as such. When I sat down to prepare food I did so as if it was a ritual, for the food cooked was after all meant for God. Whatever I did, I did in a spirit of Divine service. Hence I was not quite worldly; though always engaged in household affairs. I had but one ideal - to serve all as God, to do everything for the sake of God.

When she was about 17, Nirmala went to live with her husband in Ashtagram.

It was here that a devout neighbour, Harakumar, developed a habit of addressing her as "Ma", and prostrated before her morning and evening. "Ma" is a respectful, affectionate name for an older woman, not necessarily one’s mother; but it is also used as a way of addressing a certain kind of saintly woman in Bengal, where worship of the Goddess is widely prevalent. One day, Harakumar declared: "Daughter, you will see, now I am calling you Ma, but one day the entire world will call you Ma."

During her stay in Ashtagram, strange states of her body during the singing of kirtan were first noticed and these bhavas, or ecstatic trances, were to become the most striking aspect of her behaviour for about eight years. At times she would become mute and motionless after chanting the names of the deities. During kirtan her body became stiff and benumbed.

Although Nirmala Sundari was as gentle and obliging as the most exacting person could wish, the extraordinary nature of her character and of her skill in the performance of all tasks was never seriously in dispute.

But she was very shy and heavily veiled at all times - more so than was customary.

At that time also, she began to go into states of samadhi a state of total withdrawal inward, but people could not understand what this was. "Somenmes such states would occur while she was cooking," Gurupriya Devi relates, "and people thought that this daughter-in-law was a rather sleepy one. Sometimes the rice and dal would fall to the ground. Then her brother-in-law's wife would scold her. Ma would get up shamefacedly, tidy up everything and cook again."

These incidents did not change her general behaviour very great and simple people, unaware of their deeper portent, were glad to gloss over this aspect of her life.

In 1918 Uholanath was transferred from Ashtagram to Dajitpur and thereafter was only intermittently employed. This patient, good natured and handsome man was now brought face to face with an unexpectedly grave challenge to his loyalty as husband to this extraordinary young woman.

He found her surrounded by an aura of such awe-inspiring sanctity that this precluded any physical relationship. In retrospect, it does not seem appropriate to describe the married life of this couple as one of purity and celibacy because such questions never even arose. As Anandamayi herself put it many years later:

At the time of my marriage, they told me that I should respect and obey Bholanath. Consequently, I gave him the respect and obedience due to my father. Bholanath himself also behaved just like a father to me. From the very beginning, he seemed to have absolute faith in me. He appeared to be convinced that whatever I might do could not be anything but right.

And on another occasion she said:

There was a time when this body tried to carry out to the very letter anything Bholanath asked for. But when he saw that this body became rigid, that it was incapable of performing certain types of worldly actions, unable to bear them, he himself most gladly took back his request.

This is how, not withstanding that some tasks could not be attended to, strict obedience was being observed in one sense. However, one day the husband of Bholanath's sister came on a visit. When he saw this body obeyed Bholanath in all matters he felt annoyed and exclaimed: "Have you no opinion of your own? Have you to consult your husband about every little detail? What a state of affairs. Suppose he asked you to do something wrong, would you obey then also?"

He got the reply: Let such an occasion arise and, on setting out to put the order into practice, just see what would happen: This answer left him dumbfounded.

Nirmala Sundari was famous in Bajitpur for her beauty. A neighbour, the wife of Bholanath's boss, said: She was so beautiful that whenever she went to the bathing hat steps down to pond, river or tank, the ghat lit up with her radiance. Others began asking her outright: "Who are you?" - meaning by this "What kind of spiritual being are you?"

When really pressed to answer this question she appeared to experience, at least in her younger days, a considerable degree of agitation. Her usual light response to this increasingly common enquiry was: "I am whatever you take me to be."

Members of Bholanath's family did not respond to his wife’s strange behaviour as calmly as he did. In the course of time, when they got the measure of Nirmala Sundari's personality, it became clear to them that it would never be possible for Bholanath to lead a conventional home life, settle down and have children. They thought it their duty to urge Bholanath to marry again. This Bholanath absolutely refused to consider, declaring with remarkable forbearance that he was quite satisfied with the existing state of affairs.

In spite of heavy household responsibilities, Nirmala found time to develop her skills at various arts and crafts. During her hard-earned spare time, she would visit the houses of neighbours, and there learnt needlework, cane-work, the spinning of fine thread and other handicrafts. She could thread o finely that she could put the entire length of a brahmin's sacred thread inside the empty shell of a cardamom. She used to present these sacred threads, packed in this manner, to various male relatives. A few specimens of her handiwork were preserved by Didi in the Varanasi ashram. There was one beautiful piece of embroidery, a depiction of Krishna, which Didi had innocently framed and hung on the wall. The day Anandamayi noticed it, she took it down and before anyone realised what she was doing, she threw it in the Ganges. She did not like hoarding of any kind and threatened Didi that on the day of her kheyala, spontaneous upsurge of Will, she would get rid of all the souvenirs. Consequently, Didi kept everything well hidden.

During the seven years from 1918 to 1924 when the couple remained in the township of Bajitpur, Nirmala Sundari went through the experiences, processes and techniques of intensive sadhana, or spiritual practice, that were performed for the purpose of preparing oneself for Self-Realisation.

She uses two words here, which are crucial to our understanding of not only what happened next but also her whole life. Kheyala, in common usage means "a spontaneous thought" as distinct from an act of will or a wish for some desired end.

Gopinath Kaviraj writes of the word kheyala: "Ordinarily it means a sudden and unexpected psychic emergence, be it desire, will, attention, memory or even knowledge without any adequate causal antecedent behind to account for its origin.

There is an element of spontaneity in the act. It might thus seem to be analogous to the playful vagaries and caprices of an eccentric and non-purposive mentality. Mataji has borrowed it and used it in her own sense, enriching it with her own associations." In her case and in daily terms, her kheyala appears to have taken shape from the needs of her companions. Once expressed, it was seen that a concatenation of events led to its fulfilment. The term lila most commonly associated with the lively frolics of kheyala lila means "sportive play", particularly sacred play, or the endlessly variegated play, the manifestation, of the Supreme Being.

With the benefit of hindsight we are now in a position to view Anandamayi's phase of spontaneous sadhana - entirely self-taught -as lila. She was to draw on this extensive experience in countless ways for the rest of her life and it is an outstanding example of her practicality, a stunning demonstration of the 'skill in action", as she called it, which she enjoined on others.

When she gave instruction she did so with great exactitude and expert knowledge. For this reason the phase of her sadhana lila is crucial. At the time that it occurred, for Bholanath - the one person privy to the process - it must have looked, at the very least, bizarre, occasionally perilous, frequently awesome.

It might seem to us, initially, almost on the verge of mania, particularly if one has no notion where it is leading; viewed within the span of a whole lifetime it all falls into place as if it were inevitable.

The very first point to emphasise is that the entire process occurred spontaneously, without any teaching whatsoever.

There was nobody around to help her even had she wanted it. Nor had she any prior knowledge, no manuals, no reading in a library; instruction in such matters is not normally available in rural India - adepts congregate in centres, and Anandamayi would not have been acquainted with these until after the whole process had been completed. In itself, the fact that she was entirely self-taught marks her out as extraordinary.

On his return from the office at the end of the working day, Bholanath often found Nirmala lying on the kitchen floor, the food half cooked or burnt. She would be oblivious to the world and he could do nothing with her, until of her own accord she would come back to normal. He naturally did not understand what was happening and, courageously, left her alone. Gradually, she started practising sadhana in a more systematic manner. Her knowledge, of course, was meagre. All she knew was how to repeat the names of the Lord - Hari in her case - learnt from her father. She did this whenever free, but Bholanath was perplexed.

"Why do you repeat the names of Hari? We are not Vaishnavas, we are Shaktas worshippers of the Goddess."

"Then what do you want me to do? Shall I repeat the names of Shiva?"

"Yes, you may do that," Bholanath replied.

It was all the same to her.

When she had finished her day's work in the house she would thoroughly clean not only her room but the area surrounding the room, and when Bholanath settled down to his rest with a hookah, she would sit in one corner of the room in a relaxed posture. Bholanath then watched with fascination as she assumed various yogic asanas and mudras postures and hand gestures. Some he recognized, but the sheer variety of these processes and the speed with which she went through them were quite beyond his comprehension. He was amazed, enthralled and awed, but never frightened. It was apparent to him that these yogic movements occurred involuntarily. Referring to the spontaneity of these kriyas creative actions, she later said, "If I tried to help my limbs while performing the asana, the sequence of movements would be automatically upset., She would also make it clear that she was merely a witness to all these activities.

.. "All these asanas and so forth were not done of my own volition. Indeed, I was unable to do anything with my own hands. I saw that this body was bending and performing various asanas. Every day a variety of asanas was performed. One day, a particular asana occurred, but another time when the same asana began again, I thought I would watch what happened. I supplied extra support with my hand and readjusted slightly. This caused a severe pull to my leg and I was hurt. Even now it feels sensitive at that spot. At that time I didn't know what were, but various kinds formed of themselves. Till then I had not been informed externally as to how many kinds of asanas existed nor what their names were.

After that, I began to hear and understand clearly from within what was going on. The body was being twisted and turned to perform asanas in such a way that it was entirely boneless and only thus was it possible for it to contort in that way. It was turned topsy-turvy in all kinds of positions. The head would bend backwards and remain touching the middle of the back. The hands were bent so sharply that it was stunning to watch.

This body has not followed one particular line of sadhana only, but has covered all known lines. It passed through all the different varieties of practice referred to by the sages of ancient times. This body success-fully went through nama sadhana, hatha yoga with its numerous asanas and through the diversity of yogas, one after another.

In order to attain to a particular stage along only one of those lines an ordinary individual may have to be born again and again, but in this body it was a matter of seconds. Moreover, the different forms of sadhana that this body has been seen to practise were not meant for this body, they were meant for you all.

This body has no desire, no intention or set purpose - everything occurs spontaneously.

Whether this body talks to you or laughs or lies down to sleep, or whether it sinks to the ground and rolls about, as sometimes happened during kirtan, no matter how many different states and conditions this body may appear to be in, it nevertheless remains always in the one state.

Indeed everything arises out of one Being.

The theme of the Witnessing Consciousness is central to classical Indian yoga. This is a state of unitary awareness, an even, undifferentiated continium of choiceless witnessing which remains constant and unchanging throughout all levels of consciousness, all levels of mental and emotional intensity, in waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep, in bhava, in samadhi, during yoga, meditation and ecstatic musical expression.

The Witnessing Consciousness is both the fruit of yoga and prior to it, for it exists in the Eternal Present. By extension, we can say that the lila of Nirmala's sadhana is not ordinary human play-acting, or role-playing, but play of a sacred nature in which the "player" is witness to the play, simultaneously "actor" and "audience".

But this is only a commentary from an ordinary mental level and lacks the brevity and the clarity of Anandamayi's own account of her yogic experiences.

During these periods of intensive sadhana lila she was oblivious to everything. Even acute physical pain did not affect her. Sometimes when engaged in complicated yogic postures her long black tresses would get entangled with her limbs and her hair would be torn out by the roots.

Sadhana mostly took place at night, but her person was changed during the day also. She seemed very remote and her constant companions, puzzled and apprehensive, avoided her.

They regretted that so charming and loveable a girl had, in their eyes, become possessed by evil spirits. This opinion gained ground and Bholanath was variously advised to consult doctors and ojhas, men who drive out evil spirits.

Feeling helpless in the face of adverse criticism, Bholanath finally agreed, but they could not "cure" Nirmala Sundari. A doctor with some experience of religious hysteria was of the opinion that there was nothing pathological in her behaviour.

He advised her husband to protect her from public curiosity as she was clearly in an exalted spiritual state.