The Mother is part of a series of biographies called Indian Lives though neither the subject nor the author of this book is Indian. While the subject, Paris born and educated Mirra Alfassa chose India to pursue the call of her spiritual life, American author, Peter Heehs chose to settle in Pondicherry (as it was then called) in the 1970s. The book’s foreword establishes that “Indian Lives was never intended to be narrowly xenophobic.” And indeed, The Mother is a biography that’s global in essence.
Peter Heehs minutely tracks how Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa, a Jew of Turkish-Egyptian origin, born and raised in France, travelled to Japan and then India, staying back here to be with her spiritual mentor turned collaborator Aurobindo Ghose. The transformative experiences that led them to be known as Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, though intertwined in real life, have been presented here with a clear focus on Mirra who, as The Mother, eventually founded a place called Auroville that (in her words) “belongs to humanity as a whole.” She was 90 years old when Auroville, just one and “the youngest of her institutional offsprings” was born. She would die five years after but all she enabled (including the ashram, educational institutions, carpentry units, garages, gardens and more) in material and philosophical terms still offers possibilities to people of diverse origins.
The strength of this biography is its firm rooting in history rather than theology. Heehs maintains and reiterates this position very carefully through the book, making the story of a remarkable woman more accessible to readers who may or may not be invested in Sri Aurobindo and The Mother’s teachings, yet could be inspired by them. The author has stated in a media interview that the book attempts “to put together authentic material that could fill in the account of what The Mother did and present it in such a way that people could use it to build up their own conception of what she was.”
{{/usCountry}}The strength of this biography is its firm rooting in history rather than theology. Heehs maintains and reiterates this position very carefully through the book, making the story of a remarkable woman more accessible to readers who may or may not be invested in Sri Aurobindo and The Mother’s teachings, yet could be inspired by them. The author has stated in a media interview that the book attempts “to put together authentic material that could fill in the account of what The Mother did and present it in such a way that people could use it to build up their own conception of what she was.”
{{/usCountry}}Towards this, the author chooses what he terms an alpha rather than omega approach. He explains in the book’s prologue that “If omega biographies are structured like novels, alpha biographies are like diaries.” While the former approach pushes the greatness or biographical worthiness of the subject on every page, the latter simply “records events as they happen, day by day, without knowing what will happen the day after.” To quote Heehs from the prologue, “I write on the assumption that Mirra Alfassa was not born with a prevision that she would take to a spiritual life. Her sense of spiritual vocation emerged gradually over the course of five decades.”
Thus, in the beginning of the book, we meet “a serious little girl” who liked spending hours looking at ferns at the entrance of her uncle’s home, learnt to read within three days and didn’t mind muddying her boots when they had to walk to relatives’ homes, due to the family’s reduced financial circumstances. Since her education was not particularly prioritised by her family, she made her own arrangements, for instance, by reading all the 800 volumes in her father’s library. That took her a year to complete and left her “still unsatisfied.” She sat in on classes that a private tutor gave her brother Matteo when he was preparing for the entrance examination to study at the Ecole Polytechnic, often solving the problems first.
She went on seaside holidays, picnics and experienced the healing powers of hot springs with her brother, extended family and cousins. By 18, she became an artist, even choosing to marry one by the time she was 19. In her marriage and in the early stages of her career, we see her as a follower whose “life revolved around her husband’s.”
Though the author describes that Mirra had a rich “inner life”, had felt “a light and a force above her head” as a child, was “sensitive to music” and once survived a fall of over 10 feet from a forest cliff without a scratch, he reports them all as memories she shared later in her own voice. He chooses not to “speak with feigned authority” about his subject’s “inner states or make expansive generalizations about them.” This allows the reader to draw closer to Mirra’s voice in her transition to becoming The Mother.
The turning points are woven in unobtrusively – like when Mirra, going through an intense phase of wanting “to know,” came across the Bhagavad Gita, through a talk by Gyanendra Nath Chakravarti, a member of Theosophical Society. It happened at a time when she was almost envious of people who are “born into a religion and believe without questioning.” The talk by Chakravarti and a personal meeting with him left her with “the idea of an inner divinity, ever present in the innermost depths of our heart.” This need to viscerally know a god from the inside that stood alongside her blatant rejection of organized religion is at the heart of Mirra’s spiritual sojourn. That quest came into its own when she met Aurobindo in Pondicherry, an erstwhile French colony, while on a visit to India with her second husband, Paul Richard.
The second part of the book is entirely devoted to The Mother and Sri Aurobindo working together, though in their separate ways. We see how The Mother was responsible for “the organization of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the creation of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and the foundation of Auroville” in the 47 years of her life after she chose to stay back in Pondicherry. It is to the author’s credit that, through all of this, we hear a mother’s voice in The Mother’s when she tells a disciple, “It is very hard to pursue both at the same time: the transformation of the body and taking care of people.”
Charumathi Supraja is a writer, poet and journalist based inBengaluru