On the Mother Divine

This booklet of 124 pages is a translation, by the author himself, of his Bengali book entitled Ke ai Ma which proved to be a very popular book and has already run into at least eight reprints. The English translation is now being issued in a second edition with some additional material.

The author explains at the start itself how he came into contact with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, occasioned by some serious personal problems in his life. His problems having been solved by this first contact, his interest was awakened and the initial disbelief and lack of faith vanished.

This book does not purport to be a biography of the Mother. It can serve as an interesting initial introduction to the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and if the interest of the reader is awakened, he could then read the more comprehensive biographies of the Mother available with the Ashram. There are several, one of them wide-ranging and exhaustive, a second one a brief but fairly detailed regular biography.

The book is a collection of assorted articles, some of them dealing with briefly stated incidents in the life of the Mother. Others are the author's own impressions of the Mother. Yet others deal with the various Ashram departments, like the printing press, the weaving section, the tailoring department, the farms, etc. There is also one section dealing with Auroville, the international city for universal brotherhood and harmony. Named after Sri Aurobindo, the township was initiated by the Mother's vision and is still being built with the guidance given by her. The book therefore presents a bird's-eye view of the Mother's life and the various activities that she encouraged and the institutions that she helped to inspire and build.

Some of the information given in the book regarding the departments of the Ashram is incomplete and needs to be updated.

In the article "The Mother's Blessings", the author has given the spiritual significances that the Mother had assigned to some flowers. The list is a short one and by no means complete. In fact, the Mother carried on this work of assigning spiritual significances to flowers for several decades. There is now available with the Ashram a complete set of two books with the spiritual significances of nearly nine hundred flowers, with colour photographs.

The book also contains one section with the short and aphorism-like sayings of the Mother that are simple, direct and appeal straight to the heart.

On the whole, it is a very good introduction to the Mother for the first-time reader.

— Ranganath Raghavan

Ranga-da came to Pondicherry in 1945 and studied at the Ashram's school. He worked at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press from 1961 to 2000, and currently is with the Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research Library.

November 2005