A Teaching Severe Enough to Be Outlawed

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Om Mandali's early teaching did not stay a private matter for long, and the reaction it provoked was severe enough to reshape the movement's whole history. Lekhraj taught female independence and celibacy at a moment and in a community where both directly threatened conventional household authority, and the Sindhi community around Hyderabad, along with established Hindu organizations, responded with sustained opposition that included legal action from followers' families and direct accusations against Lekhraj himself. The pressure grew severe enough that the group was declared unlawful in Sindh, forcing a relocation to Karachi, and then, after the 1947 partition of India split Sindh into Pakistan, a further relocation to Mount Abu in Rajasthan, where Lekhraj lived out his remaining years and died in 1969. The movement's international growth happened only after his death, from a base rebuilt in exile twice over, which makes the persecution not a footnote to the founding story but the reason Brahma Kumaris exists today at Mount Abu rather than in the Sindhi city where it began. A 1939 court case saw mothers claim their daughters had been wrongfully kept within the movement, part of a wider set of accusations against Lekhraj that included sorcery, lechery and hypnotism rather than merely unconventional teaching. The Brahma Kumaris reached Mount Abu on 5 May 1950, giving the movement a permanent home nearly two decades before Lekhraj's death.