Dadi Janki
Head of the Brahma Kumaris, who sought ‘soul-consciousness’ through meditation and abstinence
DADI JANKI, who has died aged 104, was the head of the Brahma Kumaris (“Daughters of Brahma”, the Hindu god of creation), the world’s largest spiritual organisation run by women.
The Brahma Kumaris (original name Om Mandali) emerged in India in 1937, when a wealthy Hindu diamond merchant, Lekhraj Kirpalani, began to claim that the Hindu god Shiva had entered him to begin the task of creating a new world order.
Lekhraj adopted the spiritual name of Prajapita Brahma (he became affectionately known as “Baba”) and began to gather devotees, mostly women, around him. Among Baba’s revelations was the idea that women deserved more control of religious institutions. So he put women in charge.
The aim of the Brahma Kumaris is to overcome “body-consciousness” and to achieve “soul-consciousness”. Believers strive to detach themselves from the world through meditation and through forsaking drugs, rock’n’roll, meat, eggs, onions and garlic, emotional dependence on others – and even sex, because “sexual intercourse, while capable of being an expression of love at the human level … pulls our consciousness firmly into the material domain.”
Dadi Janki (“Dadi” means “elder sister” in Hindi), a small woman with a single plait of hair and piercing eyes, joined the group soon after its inception. After Partition, the group moved to the hill station of Mount Abu in Rajasthan, where – after an unpromising beginning when it almost ran out of funds – it started an international expansion programme (eventually becoming known as the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University). In 1974 Dadi Janki travelled to London to begin serving “the foreign lands”.
With a tiny Air India bag and two white saris, and knowing only a few words of English, she moved to a small flat in a poor area, using a door as a makeshift bed. She was soon joined by Sister Jayanti, whose parents lived in London.
Dadi Janki soon began to attract followers and established the organisation’s first international meditation centre, in a cramped house in Kilburn. She spent 40 years in Britain as the organisation grew into a worldwide network of more than 8,500 centres in more than 100 countries. These included several hundred in Britain, together with a retreat centre in a Palladian Grade Ii-listed mansion near Oxford.
In 1992 Dadi Janki was invited to be one of the Ten Keepers of Wisdom, a group of world spiritual leaders convened to advise the Earth Summit in Brazil on the “spiritual dilemmas which underpin worldwide environment issues”. She also advised the UN on women’s issues.
By 2015 the Brahma Kumaris were reported to have around a million adherents worldwide and Dadi Janki herself acquired an impressive list of celebrity followers. Lynne Franks, the PR supremo and inspiration for Absolutely Fabulous’s Bollinger-swigging Edina Monsoon, cited her as a major influence, calling her “the most extraordinarily intelligent woman I have ever met”. The Bee Gee Robin Gibb credited her with helping him overcome the death of his twin brother Maurice and wrote a song in her honour, Mother of Love.
But some experts on cults (or New Religious Movements) had doubts. In 2007 Ian Howarth, of the Cult Information Centre, told The Mail on Sunday that he had the same concerns about the Brahma Kumaris as he had about the Moonies: “People have come to us complaining that some loved ones who have got involved with it have undergone personality changes and have become alienated from their families.”
In 2014, in The House is Full of Yogis: The story of a childhood turned upside down, the Times rock writer Will Hodgkinson gave a touching and hilarious account of growing up in a genteel south-west London semi after his father Nev, previously an awardwinning science writer, became involved with the group.
Nev Hodgkinson joined the group when his son was about 12 after almost dying from salmonella poisoning. As a result, Will Hodgkinson wrote, “We went from being boring suburbanites to meditating freaks in the space of a few months.”
Hodgkinson related his first encounter with the “incredibly wise” – and (to a child’s mind) “terrifying”– Dadi Janki when he was taken by his father to a meditation session in the living room of a small modern semi in
Kew, the group’s UK headquarters at the time.
“On the wall was a red plastic egg with a pinprick of light emanating from its centre. Sitting underneath the egg, cross-legged, was a small, solid-looking Indian woman. There was no way of guessing how old she was.
“Her hair was a mix of grey and black and her hands and face were wrinkled, but she had an ageless quality; with her thick black eyebrows under deep-set, calm eyes, perfectly round head and hint of a smile, she looked a lot like Yoda from Star Wars. A younger Indian woman sat cross-legged next to her. Both wore white saris.” The older one, his father said, was Dadi Janki, and the younger, Sister Jayanti.
The house was owned by Sister Jayanti, and when it had to be sold (Jayanti’s father had used the house as collateral in a business deal that had gone wrong), for a time the Hodgkinson family living room became the Brahma Kumaris’s headquarters – “meaning I would come home from school to find Dadi Janki expounding on the eternity of the soul before 30 acolytes in white saris and pyjama suits”.
For young Will it was bewildering, often mortifyingly embarrassing, and lonely – and his father’s transformation ultimately contributed to the collapse of his parents’ marriage. Yet because Nev Hodgkinson’s mind was on higher things, he left his son to find his own path: “So, in a strange sort of way, I think I do have the Brahma Kumaris to thank for that because he was looking at life in a deeper level.”
Will Hodgkinson himself went as far, aged 18, as making a pilgrimage to the movement’s headquarters in Mount Abu, but ended up feeling nothing. His own transcendental moment occurred in a west London pub at his first gig.
Dadi Janki was born Janki Kripalani on January 1 1916 at Hyderabad in the northern Indian province of Sindh (now in Pakistan). According to an obituary posted by the Brahma Kumaris, she had known “Baba”, the founder of Brahma Sumaris, from childhood, but it was an encounter with him when she was 19 that changed her life. She said that as he approached, his image dissolved into a field of light and she felt transported beyond the physical world into a timeless dimension and engulfed in pure love: “I felt that all the hopes and desires of my life were fulfilled – instantly!”
She wanted to attend the spiritual gatherings he had begun holding in his home. But by now she had entered an arranged marriage and her husband refused her request, making her a virtual prisoner in her home, allegedly even beating her.
Eventually her father helped her escape to Karachi, where the small community that had grown up around Baba had moved in 1939.
In 2007, after the death of Dadi Prakashmani, the then head of the Brahma Kumaris, Dadi Janki was called back to India to lead the organisation in Mount Abu. She paid her final visit to London last year.
Dadi Janki, born January 1 1916, died March 27 2020