Anandamayi Ma

Anandamayi Ma was born Nirmala Sundari in 1896 in the village of Kheora, in Bengal (now Bangladesh). From childhood she slipped into states of absorption whenever she heard kirtan, and as a young woman in Bajitpur and then Dhaka those states deepened into the full ecstatic trances that drew her first devotees. She took no guru, joined no order, and wrote no books; asked who she was, she answered simply that she was whatever the questioner believed her to be. Her actions, she said, arose from kheyala — a spontaneous divine will rather than personal intention.

For six decades she moved ceaselessly across India, and some two dozen ashrams grew up in her wake, from Dhaka to Haridwar, where her samadhi shrine at Kankhal now stands. Paramahansa Yogananda visited her in 1936 and devoted a chapter of Autobiography of a Yogi to "the Joy-Permeated Mother"; Kamala Nehru was a devotee, and seekers from every tradition — including many early Western travelers on the yoga trail — took her darshan. Around her, devotion stayed simple: the sung name of God, hours of kirtan, and a joy that witnesses said was itself the teaching.