Does anyone know who this lady is?

The woman in the center of this photo has intrigued me for years. It’s not just her face. Look how relaxed her hands are.

The photo was taken in 1948 or 1949 at Sri Ramana Maharshi’s ashram by Eliot Elisofon for Life Magazine. She is sitting front and center in a crowd of people. Most of the others are looking to our right where Ramana is probably sitting off camera, but she is staring straight at us.

She seems to be outside her own time, looking straight at us in our present.

Last week my curiosity to know her name became so strong that I asked a friend of a friend at Sri Ramanasramam about her, and he very kindly made inquiries, but nobody recognizes her.

I don’t like to think that this lady’s name has been forgotten. Almost certainly it hasn’t been. She probably has living relatives who would recognize her from this picture.

So I’m putting this photo here on the Internet in the hopes that someday, somebody who recognizes her will stumble across this page in a search engine and write her name in a comment below and tell us a few facts about her.

The chances are slim that this will happen, but why not try?

Here’s the uncropped photo:

Here’s a similar photo by Elisofon:

8 thoughts to “Does anyone know who this lady is?”

  1. Well she is a widow, from her white sari. She doesn’t seem to be one of the cooks who were at the ashram at the time.

    The western woman sitting to her left is Thelma Rappold.

  2. There were a few women cooks who were widows, that’s the reason I mentioned them. I did a quick search, she doesn’t seem to be one of them.

    1. Thanks for searching. I probably should have said that the following people were asked: David Godman, John Maynard, V. Ganesan, and V.S. Mani. None of them knows who she is. So she’s probably not going to be in David or Ganesan’s books.

  3. Ramana devotee will never expose themself or try to be aknowledged by other.
    This woman is not staring at us, she’s not staring at anything, she’s in sahaja, she is I am.

Leave a Reply to Freddie Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *