A Collection of photographs of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo

Compiled and preserved by: Tara Jauhar

Introduction

When I started learning serious photography in the early sixties I also took a lot of photographs of The Mother at the Terrace Darshanand more specifically in Her Private Chamber on several occasions. And since The Mother took a keen interest in my personal growth through photography and constantly encouraged me by asking me to make photos for her personal distribution among the disciples, I made them myself, working for hours in the photographic darkroom, day after day.

Besides this my keen interest in Mother's photographs continued to grow, and I dreamt of collecting and indexing every available photograph of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. I wrote a letter to The Mother asking for permission for this work and she wrote back to say "I approve and my blessings are always with you and what you do". When I found such an opportunity from 1970 onwards, I began this work and the base of this project was well advanced by 1976 when I shifted to Delhi.

Over the years I organized and copied the negatives laboriously, made index cards and recoded over 10,000 photos of The Mother, classifying them and cataloguing their description and details of each, according to my capacity and the time available to me.

All these years the majority of these pictures have remained unavailable to the devotees even to seeing them. I have always felt very strongly that The Mother belongs to all of us and we should be able to see and have her pictures around us.

With all the modern technology at our disposal, I feel that the time has now come to share this treasure with our fellow disciples. We have therefore reproduced a part of the collection on this portal and as our work on the remaining photos gets updated, gradually we will put our entire collection on the website.

In case you can help us to update any information of any photograph, please write to us at "taradidiwork@gmail.com".

Tara Jauhar
Sri Auronbindo Ashram
New Delhi - 110016
011-26524810