Johanne Shepherd

What happens when the life we have built no longer holds and something we cannot name begins to move through us instead?Calcutta in the early 1930s, a prosperous Sindhi diamond merchant named Lekhraj Kripalani reached exactly that threshold. Surrounded by wealth and status, he began to encounter a light that made everything he had built feel insubstantial. From that awakening, a small gathering formed around him, then a community, and finally a siege.
Om Mandli traces the founding years of what would become the global Brahma Kumaris movement through the lives that shaped it: Lekhraj Kripalani and the young woman who became his co-founder, Om Radhe; the legal battles and the court cases that threatened to destroy them. Drawing on primary sources held in the British Library, and written as historical fiction, this is the story that the official history has not quite told.