At the heart of a spiritual sojourn

The Mother is part of a series of biographies titled Indian Lives, though neither this subject nor the author of this book is Indian.

- Charumathi Supraja

THE MOTHER

While the subject, the 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 is global in essence.

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 Alfassa who, as The Mother, eventually founded a place called Auroville that (in her words) “belongs to humanity as a whole’, when she was 90 years old.

She would die five years later, but what 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.