Anandamayi Ma

Nirmalā Sundarī was born to a Brāhmaṇa family at Kheora in what is now Bangladesh and married young, in the custom of her time, to Ramani Mohan Chakrabarti. From the late 1910s and 1920s she manifested intense spontaneous states of devotional absorption and was given the name Anandamayi ('permeated with bliss'). A community of devotees — including prominent figures of 20th-century Indian public life — gathered around her, and she traveled widely across India, with ashrams established in her name from Bengal and Bangladesh to Varanasi, Kankhal, and beyond. She taught informally, by presence and brief counsel, within a broadly Vedāntic and devotional idiom rather than any single school. She died near Dehradun in 1982, and her samādhi shrine stands at her Kankhal ashram near Haridwar. Her life is documented, though much of what circulates about her is the devotional record of her followers.