History & overview · every faith gets one
Self-realisation and service, and neither one on its own.
Founded at Jamalpur, Bihar in 1955 by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, a railway accounts clerk who taught tantric meditation under the name Shrii Shrii Anandamurti: individual practice on one side and, on the other, a programme of schools, disaster relief and an economic theory called PROUT meant to replace capitalism and communism together. Its history in India and Australia includes both prosecutions of its members and a massacre of them.
Sarkar was arrested in 1971 on a charge of conspiring in the deaths of former members, convicted in November 1976 during the Emergency, and released in August 1978 when the case was reviewed on appeal and the charge found unsustainable. Three Ananda Marga members were convicted over the 1978 Sydney Hilton bombing, in which three people died; they were released in 1985 after the evidence against them was discredited, and a later conviction of Tim Anderson was quashed on appeal in 1991. On 30 April 1982 seventeen Ananda Marga monks and nuns were dragged from vehicles and killed in daylight at Bijon Setu in Kolkata. No one has ever been convicted of those killings.
Why it is filed this way
Ananda Marga presents itself as a practical path rather than a religion, and its service wing works with people of any faith or none. Its lineage claim is tantric — Sarkar taught that Shiva was the first teacher of the method — and it hangs from the Indic branch on that basis, though members frequently reject the label.
Sarkar died in 1990. The organisation continues under a central body at Anandanagar and Kolkata, with units in more than a hundred countries and a long-running internal split over succession.
The founding
Sarkar was an accounts clerk in the Jamalpur railway workshop who initiated colleagues in meditation by the tracks in the evenings. He founded Ananda Marga in 1955, set out the social theory PROUT in 1959, ordained the first monks in 1962, and condensed the whole system into eighty-five Sanskrit sutras as Ananda Sutram the same year.
Its founding is bound to Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (Shrii Shrii Anandamurti) — 1955 CE.
What it holds
Reality. One consciousness, moving out into matter and working its way back into mind.
The divine. Brahma — the one consciousness, understood as Shiva and Shakti inseparably — met in practice as Ista, a personal focus given privately at initiation. Sarkar is regarded by initiates as the guru through whom that focus is held. There are no temples and no image worship..
Death and after. Rebirth driven by samskara until the mind merges in consciousness.