The Mother

Difficulties facing the biographer

There are a number of different narratives interwoven in Mirra's life, most dramatically the transformation of a girl from a non-religious family in France into a woman worshipped by thousands in India as an incarnation of the Divine Mother (The Hindu 2001); the first Westerner to become an Indian guru (Rawlinson 1997).

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Mirra/The Mother herself did not care for biographies of her life, and never wrote a comprehensive or systematic account of her life. However a lot of biographical information is found scattered through her works, in her correspondence and talks with disciples, and in several Sri Aurobindo Ashram publications (K.D. Sethna, Forward, in Nolima Das 1978 p.v). These have been gathered in compilations by devotees, and the compilations and also the original material also serve as reference for several on-line biographies. In some cases there are inconsistencies in dates in the material; Sri Aurobindo has also said that The Mother was not interested in dates .

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A second problem is that many of the experiences related by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo to their disciples do not sit well with the secular Western mind, and hence cannot be easily presented without seeming incredible or fantastic.

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