Papa, Mataji, and a practice stripped down to one name

Anandashram was opened on **15 May 1931** by Swami Ramdas — universally called Papa — together with Mother Krishnabai. Its history is precisely dated, which is rare enough in this kind of material to be worth saying out loud.

How it came to be here

Ramdas had been born Vittal Rao, renounced ordinary life in 1922, and spent years wandering as a penniless mendicant across India and the Himalayas with the name of Ram continuously on his tongue. He settled first at a small ashram in the Kasaragod area, where Krishnabai came to him and gave her life to his service.

That first ashram had to be abandoned after Mataji was physically attacked. It was while they were staying at Kanhangad that friends and devotees proposed a new site near Manjapati hill — which is how one of the more remarkable spiritual addresses in south India came to be at a working town on the Kasaragod coast rather than anywhere chosen for its own sake.

A practice with nothing added

The practice there has always been the same and is unusually simple: the continuous chanting of **Ram Nam**, and a teaching of universal love and selfless service. The teaching that grew out of years of wandering did not add much to the wandering — and that is precisely the point of it. There is no elaborate theology to summarise here. Devotees describe an atmosphere of continuous chanting; **the chant is the institution**.

Mataji’s half is not decorative

Mother Krishnabai came to Ramdas, completed her own sadhana, and was attacked severely enough that their first ashram had to be given up. After his death in 1963 she led Anandashram for another twenty-six years, until her own death in **1989**.

In a tradition that usually narrows to a single male figure, the Kanhangad story keeps two names joined throughout, and the ashram’s own account of its founding names them together. That is worth noticing, and worth not flattening when you retell it.

How far it travelled

The ashram’s reach became international in a way few Kerala institutions have. Papa and Mataji travelled abroad, reaching **San Francisco on a world tour in 1954**. Ramdas died in 1963.

Anandashram is open to visitors without charge and explicitly welcomes people of every faith. It is a place of practice rather than a sight: dress modestly, keep quiet, and ask before photographing anyone.