India, Jan. 17 -- The Mother is part of a series of biographies titled Indian Lives, though neither this subject nor the author of this book is Indian. While the subject, the Paris-born and educated Mirra Alfassa, chose India to pursue the call of her spiritual life, American author Peter Heehs chose to settle in Pondicherry (as it was then called) in the 1970s. The book's foreword estab- lishes that "Indian Lives was never intended to be narrowly xenophobic." And indeed, The Mother is a biography that is global in essence. Heehs minutely tracks how Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa, a Jew of Turkish-Egyptian origin, born and raised in France, travelled to Japan and then India, staying back here to be with her spiritual mentor-turned-collaborator, Aurobindo Ghose. The transformative experiences that led them to be known as Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, though intertwined in real life, have been presented here with a clear focus on Alfassa who, as The Mother, eventually founded a place called Auroville that (in her words) "belongs to humanity as a whole", when she was 90 years old. She would die five years later, but what she enabled (including the ashram, educational institutions, carpentry units, garages, gardens and more) in material and philosophical terms still offers possibilities to people of diverse origins. The strength of this biography is its firm rooting in history rather than theology. The author has stated in a media interview that the book attempts "to put together authentic material that could fill in the account of what The Mother did and present it in such a way that people could use it to build up their own conception of what she was". Towards this end, the author chooses what he terms an alpha rather than omega approach. He explains in the book's prologue that "If omega biographies are structured like novels, alpha biographies are like diaries." While the former approach pushes the greatness or biographical worthiness of the subject on every page, the latter simply "records events as they happen, day by day, without knowing what will happen the day after." To quote Heehs from the prologue, "I write on the assumption that Mirra Alfassa was not born with a prevision that she would take to a spiritual life. Her sense of spiritual vocation emerged gradually over the course of five decades. Thus, in the beginning of the book, we meet "a serious little girl" who sat in on classes that a private tutor gave her brother Matteo Alfassa when he was preparing for the entrance examination to study at the Ecole Polytechnic, often solving the problems first. By 18, she was an artist; by 19, she had chosen to marry one. In her marriage, we see her as a follower whose "life revolved around her husband's". Though the author describes Mirra as having a rich "inner life", being "sensitive to music" and once surviving a fall of over 10 ft from a forest cliff without a scratch, he reports them all as memories she shared later in her own voice. He chooses not to "speak with feigned authority" about his subject. This allows the reader to closely follow Alfassa in her transition to The Mother. The turning points are woven in unobtrusively, as when Alfassa, amid an intense phase of wanting "to know," encounters the Bhagavad Gita through a talk by Gyanendra Nath Chakravarti, a member of the Theosophical Society. This happened at a time when she was almost envious of people who are "born into a religion and believe without questioning." The talk by Chakravarti and a meeting with him left her with "the idea of an inner divinity, ever present in the innermost depths of our heart." This need to viscerally know a greater power, that stood alongside her rejection of organised religion, is at the heart of Alfassa's spiritual sojourn. That quest came into its own when she met Aurobindo Ghose in Pondicherry, an erstwhile French colony, while on a visit to India with her second husband, Paul Richard. The second part of the book is devoted to The Mother and Aurobindo's work together. We see how she was responsible for "the organization of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the creation of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education and the foundation of Auroville" in the 47 years after she chose to stay back in Pondicherry. It is to the author's credit that, through all this, we hear a mother's voice in The Mother's, when she tells a disciple, "It is very hard to pursue both at the same time: the transformation of the body and taking care of people."...