AMMA
the hugging saint

Mata Amritanandamayi escaped an assassination bid on Sunday. It was the second such incident and has shocked her followers the world over. As reports of strengthening her security come in, A.J. Philip recalls his recent visit to Amritapuri Ashram.

IT was about 15 years ago that the accountant at the SBI branch at Kayamkulam in Kerala sent word that he wanted to meet me. He had heard that I was a journalist in Delhi and he wanted to tell me about Mata Amritanandamayi. He gave me a book on Amma and her photograph, which I preserve to this day.

He said Amma had a small group of believers in Delhi, who wanted my help to have their Press notes published in the newspaper I worked for.

That was my first introduction to Amma. Her followers in Delhi used to approach me with "news" about their activities and I would oblige them. Soon, one of her believers, Mr O. Rajagopal, became a member of the Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh. He organised Amma’s visit to New Delhi under the patronage of Chief Minister Madanlal Khurana.

It was not a very large gathering on the lawns of Vithal Bhai Patel House that evening but the who’s who of the Capital was there. It was my first encounter with Amma, the hugging saint from Vallikavu.

From the reverence with which her believers queued up to be hugged by her, it was obvious that her popularity was in the ascendant. Since then, she has been attracting larger and larger crowds on her yearly visits to Delhi. I began watching her from the sidelines. Those days I wrote a "middle" on Amma and I got a call from a senior journalist, who is now editor of a leading Malayalam daily.

He wanted to know whether I was a "believer", to which I replied that "one need not be a believer to recognise virtue in a person". Amma has always fascinated me for a host of reasons. First and foremost, she is a woman. Her village is just a few kilometres from my own. She belongs to one of the "lowest" castes. And she studied only up to the fourth standard.

If a person with such deprivations could command the respect of millions of people the world over, there must be something mesmerising about her, I always thought.

Within seconds of tsunami waters entering Amritapuri Ashram, Amma was busy controlling the situation and moving the inmates to safety. — Photo by Swami Dhyanamrita

Once I happened to meet a person in charge of her "Ashram" in Australia. An engineer-turned-vegetarian cook, he told me during the long journey to Kerala how coming in contact with her transformed him.

Every time I went to Kerala, I planned to make a visit to Vallikavu but somehow it never materialised. Last May I had another reason to visit the place. It was one of the tsunami-hit villages of Kerala.

Before I and my son set out for Vallikavu, we inquired about the bank accountant, who introduced me to Amma. I heard that he took voluntary retirement from the bank, gave all the money to Amma and was now staying in her Ashram with his wife. But I had forgotten his face and name.

We took a circuitous route to reach Vallikavu, a conical island, 17.5 km in length and half a km in width at its broadest, that juts into the Arabian Sea from the bosom of the brackish backwaters. The shorter route would have entailed getting down from the car and taking a ferry to cross the backwaters, home to karimeen (black fish), whose very name salivates the fish-lover.

Surrounded by the sea on one side and the backwaters on the other, the narrow island had been devastated by tsunami. The land and air teem with wildlife and birds, and gray sand beaches edge the warm waters of the sea.

On the way to Amritapuri Ashram, we saw rows and rows of concrete houses all along the coast, washed away by the tidal waves that killed over two lakh people from Sumatra to Sumeri. Only skeletons of the houses remained as mute witnesses to the devastation that struck millions of people on December 26 last.

Those houses were given by Amma to her village brethren, many of whom still remember her as Sudhamani, one of 13 siblings of Sugunanan and Damayanthi, who would roam the village at odd hours singing soul-stirring bhajans in praise of Lord Krishna. They were worried that she was going bonkers.

As we got down from the car, we were struck by a group of Europeans carrying on their heads potted plants from a nursery just outside the Ashram’s gate. They were chanting a mantra as they did their chores. Manual work is compulsory for the inmates and that includes Amma herself.

A short walk and we were already inside the sprawling prayer-cum-conference hall where a meeting of the tsunami victims was on. A government official was explaining to them alternative vocations for those suffering from sea-phobia

We went to a kiosk selling Ashram memorabilia. The moustachioed stall-keeper was busy packing up. But to my pleasant surprise, he turned out to be the person I was looking for. K. Padmanabhan had better memory than me. What confused him was my business card. "Were you not in the Hindustan Times in New Delhi?", he asked. He even remembered the title of the book he presented to me.

He took me to Amma’s ancestral house and the small room where she used to give ‘darshan’. He prostrated before her portrait in the ‘darshan temple’ as the Ashram’s chartered accountant, a Christian, who was doing puja there, fought his speech impairment to tell me how Amma changed his life.

From there, Padmanabhan led me to the computer room. On the way, as he showed me the steps that led to Amma’s residence on the first floor, he once again prostrated. This time his object of reverence was the flight of steps that Amma uses. Prostration seemed to come naturally to him.

He introduced me to Swami Dhyanamrita, a tall, handsome young disciple who was in charge of publicity and all computer-related work. What attracted him to Amma was the element of defiance in her. "She comes from a conservative society where it is unthinkable for an unmarried girl to hug a man. And she does it to thousands and thousands of people".

The Swami had a shine in his eyes when he recalled his first meeting with her. "She looked at me and smiled and I fell in love with her. The love was so powerful, so divine, and so protective that I could feel its fragrance.

I could never get that experience from my biological mother", he went gaga over that moment that ultimately persuaded him to don the yellow robes.

What about the belief that Amma was just a figurehead and her worldwide centres, innumerable institutions that include a state-of-the-art hospital in Kochi and several engineering colleges were managed by her able swamis? "Wherever she is, Amma is in full command. Nothing moves here without her express wish".

Swami Dhyanamrita also dabbles in photography. He showed us awe-inspiring scenes of the surging sea and the tsunami waters entering the Ashram he shot with his camcorder.

Amma was in the Ashram on that fateful day. Clad in an apron-like dress and standing in knee-deep water, she took command of the situation right from the word go. "Go up, go up" she shouted as the water rushed in.

Within minutes, all of them were on the upper floors of the Ashram, safe from the deadly waters. All the food in the kitchen was washed away. "Start the kitchen immediately" was the order she gave next. As if instantly, the kitchen was in full swing. "We procured food material from far and wide and started feeding thousands of people for several days. Our volunteers would go to the tsunami-affected villages and serve cooked food", recalled Swami Dhyanamrita.

Amma’s decisiveness was apparent in the video he shot that day. "She asked us to procure 2,000 buckets, mugs, toothbrushes and toothpaste" for the victims who lost everything. "In this small village, how could we procure so many buckets and mugs so quickly? Even the manufacturers would not have so many in their factories".

That was when the resources of the Ashram were put to the test. Amma’s believers bought buckets and mugs from Kasarkode to Kanyakumari and brought them over to Vallikavu. Thus began Amma’s efforts to rehabilitate the tsunami victims. "We were the first to construct 100 houses and hand them over to the beneficiaries.

Left to ourselves, we would have constructed houses for all the victims". Money is no longer a constraint for Amma, whose constant companions in her younger days were poverty and penury.

Swami Dhyanamrita took me to the 14th floor of her Ashram in a high-speed lift. As I came out of the lift, I had a mind-boggling fisheye-view of the Arabian sea, the verdant island and the mainland beyond the backwaters. I could see below a sea of humanity — white, brown and black — flitting in and out of her imposing seven-storied temple. Seeing, they say, is believing.

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