Om Mandli

The Story of the Brahma Kumaris

by J. R. Shepherd

What happens when the life we have built no longer holds, and something we cannot name begins to move through us instead?

Calcutta, 1930s. A prosperous Sindhi diamond merchant named Lekhraj Kripalani has achieved the life he set out to build, until a divine light he cannot explain begins to make all of it feel insubstantial. He came to experience this presence as Piyu, the Beloved. What starts as one man's awakening draws others toward him: first a small gathering, then a community, and finally a siege.

This is a work of historical fiction. While events in the novel are drawn from primary sources, including diary excerpts, letters and court records, the fiction gives us the conversations, along with the sights and sounds of life in Sindh at that time. The result is a sense of standing inside the story, rather than reading about it from outside.

Om Mandli traces the turbulent years of what would become the global Brahma Kumaris movement through the lives of those who shaped it: Dada Lekhraj, his wife Yashoda, and the young woman who became his co-founder, Om Radhe, together with the men and women who gathered around them.

As visions and spiritual experiences challenged established ideas about religion, family and social order, the community was drawn into controversy. Property disputes, legal battles, court cases and public hostility threatened to destroy what they had created.

This is the story of a movement before it became an institution, the years from 1932 to 1950, when its ideas were still emerging and its future was far from certain.