Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (born 27 September 1953), known to her followers as Amma, “Mother”, is an Indian Hindu spiritual leader and humanitarian from Kerala. She is known around the world as the “hugging saint” for her practice of receiving every person who comes to her with an embrace; her organisation says she has hugged more than forty million people. The Mata Amritanandamayi Math, which she heads, runs hospitals, a university, schools, housing programmes and disaster relief on a very large scale.
Quick Facts
| Birth name | Sudhamani Idamannel |
| Born | 27 September 1953, Parayakadavu, Alappad, Kollam district, Kerala |
| Age | 73 |
| Known as | Amma; the “hugging saint” |
| Occupation | Spiritual leader, humanitarian |
| Organisation | Mata Amritanandamayi Math (founded 1981); Embracing the World |
| Headquarters | Amritapuri, Kollam district |
| Institutions | Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi; Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham |
Early Life
She was born Sudhamani in Parayakadavu, a village on a narrow strip of sand between the Arabian Sea and the backwaters, into a family of the fishing community. She was the third of several children. Her schooling ended when she was about nine, after her mother fell ill, and she took over the work of the household: cooking, washing, fetching water and gathering food scraps from neighbours for the family’s cows.
According to the accounts of her life, she was given to intense devotion to Krishna from childhood, composing songs and falling into states of absorption. Seeing the poverty of other households on her rounds, she began to take them food and clothing from her own home, for which she was punished, and to comfort people in distress by holding them, behaviour that scandalised the village in a girl of her age and caste.
Amma
By the late 1970s people were coming to her family’s house to receive her blessing. A few young men, some of them graduates, settled there as her first disciples. In 1981 the Mata Amritanandamayi Math was registered, and the family’s land became the ashram now called Amritapuri, a small township of pink tower blocks that houses several thousand residents. She made her first tour abroad in 1987 and has travelled almost every year since to Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
The central event of her public life is the darshan, at which she sits for many hours, sometimes through the night, taking each person in turn into her arms. She gives no formal sermons of a sectarian kind; her talks stress selfless service, compassion and meditation, and she does not ask followers to change their religion. She has addressed the Parliament of the World’s Religions and gatherings at the United Nations, and in 2014 she joined Pope Francis and other religious leaders at the Vatican in signing a declaration against modern slavery.
Charities
Her organisation’s humanitarian work operates internationally under the name Embracing the World. It includes the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi, a large teaching hospital opened in 1998 that provides a great deal of free treatment, and a second hospital at Faridabad near Delhi, inaugurated in 2022. Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, of which she is chancellor, is a multi-campus university ranked among the leading private institutions in India. The Math has built tens of thousands of houses for the homeless, pays pensions to widows and the disabled and runs orphanages.
After the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, which struck her own village, it committed about a hundred crore rupees to relief and rebuilding in India and Sri Lanka. It gave large sums after the Kerala floods of 2018 and, in 2015, pledged funds to government programmes for building toilets and cleaning the Ganga.
Criticism
Rationalists in Kerala have questioned the claims made about her and the wealth of her organisation. In 2013 a former personal attendant, an Australian woman who had lived at the ashram for two decades, published a memoir alleging abuse within it; the Math rejected the allegations as false.
Recognition
She has received the Gandhi-King Award for Non-Violence and honorary doctorates from several universities. She continues to live at Amritapuri, a short distance from the house where she was born.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was Mata Amritanandamayi born?
Mata Amritanandamayi was born on 27 September 1953 in Parayakadavu, Alappad, Kollam district, Kerala and is 73 years old.
What is Mata Amritanandamayi’s occupation?
Occupation: Spiritual leader, humanitarian.
Featured image: Mata Amritanandamayi at her ashram. Photo by an unknown photographer, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
