Radhe Maa: Temptress or Goddess?

In one of Mumbai city’s poshest localities stands a grand sea-facing bungalow, its car park littered with Audis and BMWs. Outside the door, a large group of loud TV journalists have held a vigil for several days now. To pass their time, they’re discussing in lurid detail their various claimed encounters with Radhe Maa. One claims she felt him up on the pretext of searching for a surreptitiously wired recorder. Another recounts how this morning she was at the balcony suggestively consuming a rasgolla. A third says, “You know what she told me? She said, ‘Look at my feet. Look how fair and pretty they are. These people [who have filed police complaints against me] are just jealous of my feet.’ And then, all of a sudden, she told me she has not been with a man in many years.” And the group erupts in raucous laughter.

Ever since complaints were filed against her, Radhe Maa has moved out of her bhavan in Mumbai’s Borivali area, a six-storeyed building with the home of one of her devotees, and has located indefinitely to this property by the Arabian Sea. I am eventually called into the bungalow where people greet one another with the words found on the red bands they wear across their heads: ‘Jai Shri Radhe Maa.’ All over the walls are huge framed pictures of her. Under a chandelier in the living room, people sit on the floor or on chairs, their eyes glued to a TV set playing a Radhe Maa sermon.

I speak with Sanjeev Gupta, at whose house Radhe Maa had been living for 13 years before moving here. I meet Talli Baba, a man whose job it is to screen people worthy of an audience with Radhe Maa and forward the request to Chhoti Maa, whom the godwoman has granted divine power of attorney so that she can act and speak on her behalf. This seems to make sense, since Radhe Maa rarely ever speaks in public.

Talli Baba waves and smiles at me, but does not forward my request of an audience with Radhe Maa; when I ask, I am told Chhoti Maa is busy with her prayers. After a while, on a cue I seem to have missed, everyone rises, chants ‘Jai Shri Radhe Maa’ in unison, and begins to ascend a staircase. I stop a man to ask what is happening. He rolls his eyes, and, with his hands raised in reverence, says, “Maa ka bulaava aaya hai (Maa is calling us).”

I try joining the ascent, but Gupta stops me. “Maa ka bulaava aaya hai,” I explain, but he gently pushes me, drops a samosa in my hand, and tells me, “Maa ka prasaad hai.” And I am outside again, the blessed samosa in hand, facing the car park where the journalists are still sharing their stories of Radhe Maa.

A few years ago, Radhe Maa burst onto Mumbai’s firmament with hoardings in various parts of the city. Dressed in fierce red bridalwear, a pancake face and blood red lipstick, her neck weighed down by diamond necklaces and her hair blowing in the wind, Radhe Maa is around 50 years old now, a grandmother, but does not look a day older than 30 in the posters and claims of people who’ve met her.

Radhe Maa got another burst of publicity a few days ago, when Nikki Gupta, one of the several daughters-in-law of the Gupta family, filed a dowry harassment case against her and other members of the family. Soon pictures emerged on social media platforms showing Radhe Maa dressed in a pink mini-skirt, matching pink beret and boots. This was, as Nikki later tells me, Radhe Maa at a New Year’s party in a Dubai hotel.

More complaints have been filed against her, accusing her of obscenity and hurting religious sentiments, by a couple of advocates. “I think it is all part of a big conspiracy,” says Sanjeev Gupta. “They all want to vilify her.”

Mamtamai Shri Radhe Guru Maa was born as Sukhwinder Kaur in a village called Dorangla in Punjab’s Gurudaspur district. Her devotees claim her father worked as a government employee, and that she married at the age of 18 into an affluent family in the nearby village of Mukerian. According to Surinder Mittal, a businessman and former district president of the Vishva Hindu Parishad in Phagwara, a city in Punjab where Radhe Maa had once tried to establish herself as a spiritual guru, her father was actually a butcher and her husband worked at a sweetshop owned by his brother. “They were so poor,” Mittal says, “that she had to supplement his income by sewing clothes. When the sweetshop shut down, her husband travelled to Qatar to find employment.”

During this period, it is said, Radhe Maa, still in her early twenties, grew lonely and found solace in religion. She met a Hindu saint named Mahant Ramdin Das, supposedly 130 years old then, who gave her the name Radhe Maa. By the time she turned 23, she’d renounced life as a householder to become an ascetic. Sometime in 2002, Radhe Maa set up base in Phagwara. She morphed photographs of her face with images of Goddess Durga, according to Mittal, and began to distribute these to followers. She began to hold satsangs where she would dance and sometimes even embrace and kiss men. “I once saw her at a satsang, making a man crawl on his hands and legs as though he was an animal, and then she began to ride him like that,” claims Mittal. The former VHP leader led a demonstration against her at the time. A mob gathered around her building and began to pelt stones, recalls Mittal, and a motorbike was burnt in the ruckus. Radhe Maa then appeared at a balcony dressed in a red bridal outfit, holding a trishul. “The crowd got more upset and wilder,” he says. Radhe Maa eventually apologised and left Phagwara within an hour’s time, as he tells the tale, promising never to return. Mittal shared videos of that episode with a few media vehicles, and the godwoman can still be seen in them, looking rather less suave than she does now.

The godwoman’s next stop was Delhi, where Mittal says she met Sanjeev Gupta, the owner of Global Advertising, one of Mumbai’s largest outdoor advertising agencies. “He completely repackaged her,” Mittal says. “He built an aura around her. He asked her to refrain from speaking, otherwise she would be found out, and selected the right people to speak and act on her behalf.”

In 2012, she was bestowed with the title of Mahamandaleshwar (high priest/ priestess) by the Juna Akhara, a prominent Shaivite sect of ascetics. This title was controversial in itself; according to Mittal, it was granted only after several high ranking ascetics were bribed.

In 2012, an interior designer called Nikki Agarwal (her maiden name) was approached by a chartered accountant named Nakul Gupta on a matrimonial website. The two, they later realised, were members of families that knew each other. According to the version put out by Sanjeev Gupta, the two met and fell in love on Facebook. The marriage, as Nakul Gupta and the rest of his family informed Nikki’s parents, could not be performed without Radhe Maa’s approval. According to Nikki, a dowry of Rs 25 lakh was demanded (and provided). As preparations for the wedding began, the godwoman allegedly demanded that she be flown in a helicopter from her village in Punjab to Mumbai and then driven in a chauffeur-driven limousine to the wedding. “We did not agree,” says Nikki, “Later my family also refused to buy Nakul a house, something his family and Radhe Maa, through Chhoti Maa, had begun to demand. From then on, she began to hate me.”

Ever since her arrival in Mumbai sometime in 2003, Radhe Maa had been living with the Gupta family—well known in the city for its sweetshop MM Mithaiwala—in their six-storeyed building. The ground floor is open to devotees, and the 45 members of the Gupta family apparently live on the first floor up to the fourth floor. The fifth and sixth floors, called the ‘gufa’ (cave), are occupied by Radhe Maa and her family. “If you are poor, you will have to be satisfied by Maa’s darshan on a TV screen,” Nikki says. “If you are rich and considered trustworthy by the Gupta family, you will be taken to the fifth floor. But if you are an extremely important person, you will be taken to the sixth floor.”

The gufa, far from resembling a cave, is a lavish apartment. The flooring of the room, the beds, cushions and pillows, even the curtains, are all blood-red. Even the lights in the room glow disco red. It is her favourite colour.

According to Nikki, it is all an elaborate costume drama played out to fool people. The godwoman wears T-shirts and trousers, curses freely when angry, loves to dance and listen to Bollywood music, and lives with her husband and children. She sleeps through the day and emerges at midnight dressed as Radhe Maa to meet devotees. All the women who serve and tend to her and her family are apparently those of the Gupta family. “They are afraid to employ outsiders and let the secret out,” Nikki alleges.

Ashok Rajput, a Borivli-based lawyer who lives close to Radhe Maa Bhavan and who filed one of the police complaints against her, claims that on a 2008 visit to Sanjeev Gupta’s office, the ad agency owner introduced him to an ordinary- looking woman he called a godwoman with great magical powers. “I wanted to laugh then,” he says. “But in 2010, I was at the Bhavan, after a few friends had told me about a godwoman, and there she was, the same ordinary woman, now acting as though she was a living goddess.”

Although Nikki lived in another building, she says she was assigned the task of serving the godwoman. If Radhe Maa was in a foul mood, she would allegedly abuse Nikki physically, prodding with her feet and sometimes with her trishul; in a foul mood once, she even commanded Nikki to ‘die’ in front of other members of the Gupta family. “I didn’t know what I was expected to do,” she says. Someone then whispered to her that she should play dead. “I was on the floor acting [as if] I had died, while Radhe Maa began to kick me and I couldn’t even shout since I was supposed to play dead.” When she complained of it to her husband later, she says, he told her that Radhe Maa was ridding her of negativity by kicking her.

Earlier this year, Falguni Brahmbhatt, another lawyer who filed a case and petition against her in the Bombay High Court, attended a satsang of the godwoman. According to her, Radhe Maa spat out laddoos from her mouth and asked devotees to consume these as prasaad; she also made men lift and carry her, called young men to her side and kissed them, and then began to dance. “There was a lot of touching and groping of private parts. And a female devotee even offered her an expensive diamond necklace right in front of my eyes.”

One of her devotees, a Delhi-based garment businessman named Nakul Gupta (unrelated to the Gupta family), is in conversation with me about the godwoman’s powers. He has travelled to Mumbai alone, has been here for three days and is leaving for Delhi tonight, but has not managed get an audience with the godwoman so far. When I remark that Radhe Maa does not look 50 years old, he tells me it is all because of a special power within her. “She does not even wear makeup like other women,” he marvels. When I contest this, he says, “Maybe a little light touch-up. But it is all coming out from inside her, all this beauty and fairness.”

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Lhendup G Bhutia

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