Rajapalayam Ramani Ammal

Rajapalayam RAMANI AMMAL better known in and around the Ashram as ‘Rajapalayam Ammal’, was conquered before she came and saw Sri Bhagavan. She had been reading Vedantic books in Tamil from her fifteenth year. A grand uncle had become a sannyasi. And when her parents passed away in 1944, in her eighteenth year, her spirit of detachment and her spiritual yearning deepened.

It was then that a kinsman brought Ramana Vijayam, a biography of Sri Ramana in Tamil. When she opened the book and saw the photograph of Sri Ramana, she was totally overpowered. That picture opened up before young Ramani a path which she had no choice but to tread — the Path leading to the Mount, the Maharshi and MahaYoga. There was no question of asking for her relatives' permission because hers was an affluent, highly conservative family of ‘Rajus’, descendants of the Rajputs of Rajasthan, the womenfolk of whom rarely if ever stepped out of their homes.

She waited for a few years and then came away one day with the help of an understanding brother. The moment she saw Sri Ramana, bright like Flame, all her anxieties vanished. Later Sri Bhagavan told her that she had come to her own place. Indeed, it was homecoming for Rajapalayam Ammal and she was living happily ever after. She found here her Father who, nearly half a century earlier, had left home in quest of His Father. She said that when one goes to heaven, one cannot but be happy and there was no return because that was “really the return”.

Living in a charming little house with a nice portico, built with her brother's help, not far from the Ashram, she came regularly to the Ashram. She was held in esteem by everybody for her deep devotion to Sri Bhagavan, her graciousness, her dignity, mindfullness in word and deed, dispassion and exquisite sense of poise.

Of Sri Bhagavan she said: "Sri Bhagavan is beyond words. He is beyond Brahma, Vishnu and Siva. There have been Great Saints in the World, but here was a Perfect Jnani who lived with people as one among them, making himself available to them all the time".

Rajapalayam Ammal was given medical treatment away from Arunachala, but at he last moments in 1994, insisted she would die only “as a dust at the Foot of Sacred Arunachala — her Guru’s GURU!” Her last prayerful wish was fulfilled !