Religions of India in Practice

Archanāpurī Mā is the spiritual leader of a large ashram in Calcutta, with almost one hundred members. She grew up in rural West Bengal, in the Birbhum district, an area with a wide variety of spiritual practitioners and temples. The area is especially known for its Śaktas who worship the goddess Kālī, Śaivas who worship the god Śiva, and Bāuls, itinerant singers who worship a deity who lives within the physical body. She is a respected guru, a Holy Mother and teacher, and as such has much power in her ashram and among other devotees. She gained her social role in a traditional manner, by being part of the respected spiritual lineage of Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa, and being chosen to succeed her guru after his death.

It is traditional for a male disciple to inherit the guru’s role as leader of the ashram when the guru dies; it is quite unusual for holy women in West Bengal to do so. Most holy women have never been part of a traditional lineage, and thus are outsiders who have had to fight for acceptance in a culture that tends to believe that women belong in the home, surrounded by children. Often holy women are not respected when they speak of religious experience, and are considered to be possessed by an evil spirit. They must then undergo painful and protracted exorcisms, medical treatment with Āyurvedic medicine, or various forms of testing to see if their experiences are false, or a result of insanity (there is a long tradition of religious madness in Bengal, in which abnormal behavior is accepted and even expected from spiritual figures). Because religious experience is a major claim to spiritual leadership, it is always questioned and tested in some way. Archanāpurī Mā had this testing occur in a mild way (during the testing of her trance states), but in her case she was supported by a respected religious figure, and there was no physical torture.

The holy women who seem to have the most difficult time are the gṛhi sādhikās, the married women who decide that they have a religious vocation. This is often preceded by a “call” (the god or goddess comes to the woman while she is cooking or involved in other domestic chores, and tells her that she must become a devotee). When the call is reported to the husband and members of the joint household, it is vigorously denied by the others. Such holy women have a very difficult time defending their religious interests and experiences.

In India, the religious life is traditionally a hard life. Holy people of both genders eat little, sleep for only a few hours a night, have only one or two sets of clothes and few other possessions, and must spend their days in spiritual disciplines. These may involve long fasts, enduring extremes of heat and cold, physical pain and discomfort, and following arduous work schedules. The goal is to make the person strong, relatively unaffected by temperature and the presence or absence of food, and capable of extended meditation. They may wander, sleeping in the woods, praying and meditating, or settle down in one locale. This is generally an ashram (literally, a refuge or shelter for people following a religious life).

Because of the difficulties involved, fewer women than men tend to become religious renunciants. Whereas the adolescent boy may see the religious quest as a great challenge to his masculinity, the girl is being prepared for her marriage (which is usually arranged by her parents and family in non-Westernized areas of Bengal). Once married, it is difficult to leave husband, home, and children (and frequently a houseful of relatives) to go off on a religious quest. Men leave the family setting for the religious life more frequently than do women, and it is more socially acceptable for them to do so. It is much easier for a woman to decide to be a holy woman if her husband dies and she is childless, or her children are grown. Also, women have a harder time gaining credibility and respect in India, as the ascetic tradition there tends to portray women as distractions to the spiritual path (as in the expression “women and gold,” showing what spiritual people must avoid), rather than as seekers themselves.

Although Archanāpurī Mā is part of the Śakta Universalist tradition made famous by Rāmakṛṣṇa, her own path may be characterized as guru bhakti or devotion to the guru. The guru or gurudeva is not an individual, but rather a person whose mind has been joined with that of a god, or with Brahman, the universal consciousness. Devotion to the guru is thus the equivalent of devotion to a god. For those who find transcendent gods too distant and abstract, here is a god in the flesh.

A person begins to follow a guru through initiation, or dīkṣā. Different religious traditions in India have different types of initiation. For instance, the Kulārṇava Tantra (XIV, 40-60) describes initiation by look (the guru looks deeply into the disciple’s eyes), by touch, by thought, by speech, and by sprinkling with water. Unlike the mainstream dharmic tradition in India, the tantric tradition holds that initiation by a woman is very powerful, and eight times more powerful still is initiation by one’s mother. Some gurus initiate by writing a mantra on the tongue of the disciple, or on some other part of the body. Initiation is believed to give instantaneous knowledge and insight.

In Archanāpuri Mā’s tradition, there are three levels of initiation (as will be seen in her biography). The first, mantra dikṣa, gives mantra and lineage (acceptance into a line of gurus). The second, or brahmācārya, enters the person into an austere and celibate life, and the final renunciation, or sannyāsa, is the declaration of death to the physical world, and total devotion to the spiritual world. Often, renunciation is accompanied by austerities. There is a long tradition in India of testing the person’s endurance and dedication by means of extreme actions: enduring heat, cold, hunger, and so on. This is also understood to increase the person’s tapas, a spiritual heat or energy which may then be used for meditation or miraculous abilities which many people believe that renunciants and gurus possess.

Archanāpurī Mā belongs to a universalist order, whose most important guru, Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa, had at one time worshiped his wife Śāradā Devī as a goddess. Her ashram emphasizes creativity: her guru Satyānanda was said (by different sources) to have written between seven and eight thousand songs, and Archanāpurī Mā has written forty-eight plays and three thousand songs, as well as a thousand poems, epics, essays, and several books. She speaks of her mood of separation (from her guru) in “A Memorable Midday” (“Ekti Snarnīya Dupur”):

On this side it is still very silent, absolutely lonely and desolate

You cannot tell whether or not the Gaṅgā waves are rolling.

Far away, one or two boats are floating like disjointed talk

All this I see is a broken part of a complete poem

That must be rhymed.

The ashram is also a teaching institution, with courses on Hindu religion, morality, music and dance, drama, and spoken and written Sanskrit. There is also an eye clinic and a general clinic, as well as a homeopathic dispensary, to help the poor.

The following text is drawn from Archanāpurī Ma’s oral description of her life, during which disciples added various statements with which she agreed. For ease of reading, the statements of some disciples have been incorporated into the text. The poem is from a Bengali photocopied manuscript, recently mailed to me by her chief disciple. He has also sent me some additional background material, which is included.

For further information on Bengali holy women see June McDaniel, The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For information on Sri Lankan holy women, see Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

I was born in Dinajpur in Bengal, in 1928. I lived in the great house of my maternal grandfather, who was a zamīndār or landowner, and he had the title of Mahārāja of Dinajpur in the days before partition and independence. I loved my grandfather very much, and when I was a child, he would call me Brahmavādinī, a girl who follows the wisdom of Brahman.

I come from a religious family. My father took religious vows of renunciation and became a svāmī, Svāmī Nirvedānanda (his earlier name was Nalinish Chandra Mitra), and my mother became Sannyāsinī Renuka Purī Mā (her name had been Renuka Mitra). During my childhood, we lived in a joint family in Suri, in Birbhum, West Bengal. It was a very large household of about fifty people, including my father’s seven brothers and two sisters. My father worked as a lawyer, a stage actor, and a writer, and then was involved in India’s fight for independence. In later life he was the chief disciple of Śrī Ṭhākur Satyānanda and president of his ashram in Suri, the Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Ashram. Education was important in the family, and the boys went out to school, but the girls had a private tutor instead, because the family was conservative and followed the old traditions. I lived in a large family setting, but I did not feel close to any of my relatives or friends during childhood.

I began to sing almost from the time I started to talk. I could pick up songs that I heard quickly, and entertain relatives and family members by singing to them. I used to dance alone on the roof of the top floor of the house beneath the open sky. I felt like a bird spreading her hands as wings. I remember that I tried to reach heaven by placing piles of rice bags one upon the other, forming steps up toward the heavens. Just a few years later my guru Ṭhākur mentioned that one cannot reach heaven by placing rice bags one over the other as steps toward the sky. Instead, one must come down from the heights of such idealism to the ground of renunciation.

When I was twelve years old, I met Ṭhākur Satyānanda and my life was changed; when I saw him, I never wanted to leave him, and everything else became unimportant. I recognized him as my Jīvandevatā, the god of my soul. He asked me if I did pūjā, and I told him that I had worshiped the god Śiva from the age of six years, and he was pleased. He also asked if I could meditate, and when I told him that I could, he showed me a portrait of Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa and asked me to meditate on him as Lord Śiva by putting an imaginary trident by his side.

Ṭhākur Satyānanda had both a god and a goddess to which he prayed. One was Gopāla Kṛṣṇa (Kṛṣṇa as a cowherd), and the other was Kāli Bhāvatāriṇī (Kālī as savioress). He was constantly in communion with these deities, and sometimes he took on their forms. People saw him and worshiped him as Gopāl, as Mother Kālī, and as Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa. He would appear in visions to people, and in their dreams at night. Ṭhākur was in a state of continuous union with the divine, which was not an obvious trance, but rather a state which was subtle and arose in him spontaneously.

Śrī Ṭhākur Satyānanda was born in 1902, after his mother Kaśīśwari Devī had performed religious rituals to have a spiritual child, and his birth name was Satyavrata. He loved silence and meditation. He had been initiated by Svāmī Abhedānanda, a disciple of Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa of Dakṣiṇeśwar, for his first initiation, but later was initiated into renunciation by Mā Bhāvatāriṇī, and she gave him the name Satyānanda. He immersed himself deeply in spiritual practice (sādhana) and performed many penances. He attained his spiritual goal in 1939, and began to initiate disciples into the Rāmakṛṣṇa order with traditional Hindu rites. His own paternal house at Suri was transformed into the Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Ashram, and separate sections of male renunciants and female renunciants were created.

I began to visit Śrī Ṭhākur Satyānanda at his ashram in Suri. I spent a lot of time there and began living there, rarely returning to my parents’ house. I used to play games with Ṭhākur, but his games were always special. Ṭhākur gave me initiation in that year, but he surprised me; while we were playing a game, he grasped my hand and whispered a mantra to me. In his playing with us, he taught us much about religion.

I remember that one day I was sick and lying asleep in my room, and Ṭhākur was leaving Suri for Calcutta on that day. My mother and the other disciples and devotees went to the Suri railway station to see him off, and I woke up alone in the house. I did not eat, but wept at being alone and then fell deeply asleep. I dreamt that Ṭhākur came to me and caressed me, and tore off a nail from one of his fingers and gave it to me. I felt full of ecstatic joy, and awoke just as my mother entered the room. I was angry at her for leaving me there, but she said, “Look at what Ṭhākur has sent for you.” I opened my eyes, and was overwhelmed with joy to see that it was a piece of fresh fingernail which he had torn off and sent affectionately as a gift.

Life at the ashram involved worship of the ashram’s deities, and singing the morning and evening worship inside the temple. Ṭhākur had also established a school, and he taught us about great men and women, such as Rabindranāth Tagore, Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa and Śāradā Devī. There were also other teachers, including a Christian woman. Learning the language of Sanskrit was very important. My parents became part of the ashram, and my father took religious vows and became a svāmī. When I grew older, I told Ṭhākur that I did not want to marry, and I took vows of celibacy at the age of fourteen years. I was initiated by Ṭhākur. I concentrated on my studies, and learned about philosophy, and Sanskrit and Bengali literature.

When Ṭhākur would give people initiation, a light used to flash from his eyes. I remember that, around the time of the holiday of Kālī Pūjā, Ṭhākur initiated a disciple. I was watching through a window, and I remember a curtain was blowing. I could see Ṭhākur looking at the disciple in a strange way, and then I could see rays of light coming out of his eyes, like the beams coming out of a powerful flashlight. My eyes were open, I could see this right before me. The rays of light seemed to enter into the disciple’s soul. I don’t know how he felt at the time, but I felt as if somehow those rays had entered me, and I was terrified. I started to shake and I couldn’t stop myself, so I ran home. My whole body felt as if it were burning, though the weather was cold, and I did not know what to do. I lay on the cold cement floor at home, but my relatives did not pay much attention to me; they were thinking of the ashram and of spiritual things, so they didn’t ask if anything was wrong. But late that evening a message came from Ṭhākur, to attend the Kālī Pūjā ceremony which took place at midnight.

Without even thinking that I would be out alone very late at night, I started running toward the ashram. It was all lit up with candles, as people were there rehearsing for a stage play. The ceremonies of Kālī Pūjā would start just at midnight, and they would be performed by Ṭhākur himself.

I was still frightened, and in my mind I could see those powerful eyes with their beams of light. When I quietly moved toward the well, Ṭhākur called me over, and I went straight to him and fell on my face before him. He patted me on the back and asked, “Have you become afraid of me? Is something wrong?” At his touch I felt wonderfully cool, and the painful burning in my body disappeared. He had me sit close to him, and he spoke to me about the process of initiation. I could not understand him fully, but he spoke of transferring his spiritual power into his disciples by a certain type of look. Perhaps that day the transmission of power was tolerable to the disciple, but it certainly was not so for me. Without realizing it, Ṭhākur had given him the same “Śakti mantra” which he had repeated to me earlier.

Ṭhākur would have many spiritual experiences and visions, and there were times when he would spend the whole day in a state of ecstatic trance (bhāva). This is a deep experience of religious bliss, and he would enter this state through meditation. When I was initiated by him into celibate life, my soul began to fuse with the soul of Ṭhākur, and I would fall unconscious. I became lost in Ṭhākur, he was all that I could see or hear, I became one with him, and I too began to fall into trance states like his. This lasted for several years, and these were not fainting fits. I was fully aware in my soul, but I could not move my body; it was like a wooden statue, or a rock. I was sharing Ṭhākur’s thoughts and emotions, I was becoming one with him.

When I fell into these trance states, Ṭhākur would leave his own meditation to care for me. Some of the other devotees at the ashram would complain about this, saying that I was disturbing him in his spiritual practice. But Ṭhākur became angry with them, and said, “I have taken her as my adopted daughter (mānasakanyā or spiritual daughter), so you should not question her. I forbid the devotees to criticize her.” Some of them thought that I might have some disease, but Ṭhākur said, “She does not have a disease, it is a state of religious ecstasy. For the sake of you who are questioning her, I will do an experiment.”

When I was in one of these trance states, Ṭhākur brought a group of doctors and devotees into the house. He had one group sit in the room where I lay on the bed, and the other group was nearby on the veranda. I have heard about this from both Ṭhākur and from the devotees. While I was unconscious, with my eyes closed and my hands in fists, Ṭhākur started striking his own body in different places. Wherever he struck his body, I felt the pain in my own body, and I winced and put my hands on my own body. My eyes were still closed, though Ṭhākur was not within the range of my sight even if they had been open. The devotees could walk from the bedroom to the veranda and see the similarity of the gestures. For another experiment, he had groups of people synchronize their watches and write down notes on what I did during trance. Ṭhākur would make deliberate gestures, and the gestures that I made would echo them. I was upstairs in bed, while Ṭhākur was downstairs. The gestures and times again corresponded.

This was because my soul was fused with the soul of my guru. It is a state called ekātmika bhāva, which means that we share one soul. I shared his emotions and dreams, thoughts and desires, and we could sense each other’s feelings at a distance. We were no longer two separate people, but in some mysterious way we were united, and we could see each other in dreams and visions. In such a state, the whole body is made of love (prema), and the mental images of the other person stay bright and clear in the memory.

In my spiritual life, I believe in both bhakti and yoga. If one has firm devotion to the divine, one can have many have kinds of visions, with eyes open or closed. Visions are like dreams, except that they are conscious and stay in the memory, and they make you feel an intense state of love. You see the god or the guru with the eyes of love, which are different from the physical eyes. Sometimes a god shows pictures in your mind, and then your mind becomes like a screen, and god is like a film projector. You feel so much love that your whole body becomes a body of love, and you can hardly stand to feel so much joy and love. This is how I would feel when I saw Ṭhākur, inwardly or outwardly.

This fusion of souls remained over time, though the uncontrolled trance states stopped after a year or two. After that I took vows of full renunciation into the state of sannyāsa, and I spent my time in meditation and prayer. As Ṭhākur was fond of penance, all of his disciples performed austerities, like sitting in the scorching sun on summer days and being drenched in ice water on winter nights for hours together, as well as performing extended fasts. But these were just part of life, and because we loved him so, they gave us enormous pleasure instead of pain. His love was greater than that of a worldly mother and father, sister and brother, friend and relation. His love was a thousand times greater than the love of all of these combined. I never felt any lack of worldly love.

Ṭhākur used to feed poor people at the Suri ashram, and often holy people came to eat with us. I remember once helping him feed a wandering renunciant with wild eyes and uncombed hair. He said to Ṭhākur, “You take everything from the lion cub, and lion cub, you take everything from the lion.” He meant that Ṭhākur and I should learn from each other. Ṭhākur would stand there, looking closely at the people, looking into their eyes. The ashram would distribute food, clothing and medicine to poor people, and he initiated low-caste people and called them Ṭhākurdās. They could come into the temple and worship with us, and some took vows and became part of the ashram.

We lived with him for about thirty years, and it was a very happy time. Though sad events happened from time to time, they did not touch us, for we floated on a current of joy. We had a series of festivals with music, song, drama and dance which kept us all joyful over the years.

But then Ṭhākur left us, and I felt as if I fallen from some ideal heaven world onto stony ground. I felt as helpless as a child of six months old, and I wanted to leave the earth with Ṭhākur and not stay here alone. I wanted intensely to go with him. But he had wanted me to stay on earth to help the ashram, and I obeyed his wishes.

The fusion of souls between guru and disciple does not end with death. I still fight with Ṭhākur for leaving me alone here on earth, and I can still talk to his subtle presence, although his physical body is not here. His invisible grace is showered upon all of us at every moment, and in every act. I could not stand alone without him. I depended on him so much, I was one with him to such an extent that I did not have a mind separate from his. Now I suffer from this separation, as Rādhā suffered when Kṛṣṇa was (away from her) in Mathura. It has been many years, but I still cannot bear his physical absence. Sometimes I feel so helpless. I was so full in his presence, and now I am empty in his absence.

But I stayed to support the ashram, and began to initiate the seeking devotees. In 1976, we established the ashram dedicated to Ṭhākur in Calcutta. From being the spiritual daughter of my guru, I have become the Holy Mother of the ashram, giving spiritual shelter to its children. The ashram has grown up around us. I stayed there, and other women and men came. Early on, there were twelve unmarried holy women (sannyāsinīs), and a few married ones, as well as renunciant men (svāmīs). This has increased to about thirty female and about fifty male renunciants.

At the ashram, I offer ritual worship to the temple deities, write books, compose songs and poems, teach courses, direct music and evening worship. During the last five or six years I have increased my prayers and recitation of mantras for the well-being of all humanity. I spend more time in ritual worship, because the environment is deteriorating, and the greed for money and power is wiping away the respect for religion in India. The serenity and calmness of spiritual bliss is no longer a goal for people who are diving down and breaking all of the barriers of morality and conscience. My own health is not good, but I try to do what I can.

The relationship between a guru and his disciple is an eternal one; it does not stop even if one of the persons dies. When I first saw Ṭhākur, I was only a child and had no understanding of the spiritual world or of God. But I loved him from the very first moment that I saw him. I entered the ashram by play, but gradually I found that Ṭhākur had become my friend and spiritual guide. He has been an eternal source of love.