History & overview · every faith gets one
You are a point of light behind the forehead, and the cycle is nearly round.
Begun in Hyderabad, Sindh in the late 1930s when a diamond merchant named Lekhraj Kripalani began having visions and gave away his business to a committee of eight young women: the soul is a point of light seated behind the forehead, world history runs in a fixed 5,000-year cycle now close to its turn, and Raja Yoga meditation is practised with the eyes open. Administered by women from the beginning and still, with headquarters at Mount Abu and around a million students worldwide.
Why it is filed this way
Indian and Western scholarship generally files the Brahma Kumaris as a Hindu-derived new religious movement. The organisation itself says it is restoring the original deity religion rather than branching off Hinduism, does not worship the Hindu pantheon, and has a scripture of its own delivered daily. It is carried as a root on that self-description.
The founding
Kripalani, a wealthy jewel merchant in his sixties, began having visions in 1936, and within a year had liquidated his business and vested the whole of it in a trust run by eight young women. The group, called Om Mandali, met local hostility and a government order against it, moved to Karachi in 1938, and settled at Mount Abu in Rajasthan in 1950.
Its founding is bound to Lekhraj Kripalani (Brahma Baba) — 1937 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world of souls wearing bodies, running a fixed cycle that repeats exactly.
The divine. God is Shiva — not the deity of that name in the Hindu pantheon, but an incorporeal point of light called the Supreme Soul, who never takes birth. The Hindu deities are read as human souls of an earlier age of the cycle. That reading is one reason many Brahma Kumaris resist being filed under Hinduism..
Death and after. Rebirth through up to eighty-four lives inside the cycle, then the return of all souls to the soul world.