Mirra Alfassa - The Mother

The book Mirra Alfassa —The Mother: Her Life and Her Work is an excellent introduction to the Mother for people who haven’t yet come into contact with her work and also for those who are not fully aware of her numerous accomplishments and her vast field of experience. The author, Sunayana Panda, has done a remarkable job of capturing in a little pocket book of less than 150 pages the essence of who the Mother was and what she represented.

 The book traces parts of the Mother’s physical, psychological and spiritual journey and helps the reader understand and appreciate the full scope of her being. It explores many of the experiences she underwent and reveals their significance in her growth. It also offers a keen insight into the Mother’s life before she came to the Ashram, something not many have taken the time or made the effort to know more about.

 After briefly introducing the Mother and the groundbreaking work she did in the Ashram, the book plunges into her early beginnings, looking first at her rich cultural heritage, then her time growing up in Paris, her artistic training and finally her journey of self-discovery in Japan. Sunayana has added a nice personal touch to these chapters by including her own observations of the places where the Mother had stayed. Though much has changed with time, one can still see why the Mother chose the circumstances, places and experiences she did in order to propel her own inner development.

 Once the initial journey is covered, the book goes into the Mother’s deeper spiritual quest and looks at many different aspects of her being. It explores her contributions to the world as a writer, an artist and a playwright and marvels at how beautifully her work expresses the deeper truths she was born to reveal.

 The final part of the book covers the significance of the Mother’s arrival in Pondicherry, her collaboration with Sri Aurobindo, her pioneering work in the field of education and the creation of Auroville, a drive towards human unity. In the last few pages especially the author shows how the Mother’s work to manifest Sri Aurobindo’s thought in the material world took form in the Ashram and Auroville.

 Here’s a passage from the book that clearly conveys what the Mother worked for, explained simply and beautifully by Sunayana:

In the Integral Yoga, all aspects of the world and the self have to be included; nothing must be left out. It is not a turning away from the world—it is taking the world and making it more perfect. The physical world, the most material aspect of our lives, had to be transformed. The Mother made it clear that in the physical plane it was through beauty that the Divine manifests Himself. This clearly means that beauty is one of the faces of the Divine and that looking for beauty is another way of looking for the Divine. Whether it was the Dining Room or the School or the Library, the places were immaculately maintained and beautifully kept.

   I would also like to add that this book contains a number of photographs, some familiar and others perhaps less so, that depict various stages of the Mother’s life and work. There’s one of the Mother with her fellow students at the Académie Julian, and there are others including those of a painting by Henri Morisset showing the Mother in their flat in Paris, the Mother with Rabindranath Tagore in Japan, the Mother with Jawaharlal Nehru, K. Kamaraj, Indira Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri at the Playground in 1955, and the Mother attending a rehearsal at the Ashram Theatre.

Anurag Prasad

Anurag graduated from SAICE in 2010. He works in the field of online learning and development. Reading and writing are his hobbies and he has self-published a book, Above Hatred, brought out in 2013.

Reviewed in December 2019