Here is a short life history of Sri Sarada Devi – Wife of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
- Sri Sarada Devi was born in December 1853; in a small rural family in Jayrambati village in the Bankura district of Bengal.
- She was the eldest child of Ramachandra Mukhopadhyay and Shyamasundari Devi.
- She had one sister and four brothers.
- At the age of five she was married to the twenty-three year old Gadadhar Chattopadhyay of nearby Kamarpukur village, who later came to be known as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
- Gadadhar used to live at the Dakshineswar temple compound as a priest.
- He was leading an austere life with rigorous spiritual practices and seemed to be a lunatic to the public eyes.
- Hearing all this, Sarada Devi visited her husband at Dakshineswar in 1872 and started living with him.
- There she used to take care of her husband, her mother-in-law, and the devotees who came to see Sri Ramakrishna.
- After the demise of Sri Ramakrishna, Sarada Devi spent most of her time in Kamarpukur and Jairambati. There she had to struggle with terrible poverty and social restrictions for about ten years.
- After that she was invited by the devotees of Sri Ramakrishna to come to the city of Calcutta.
- Then she started travelling to places of pilgrimage all over India.
- All through this period she continued her spiritual practices meticulously.
- In 1897 when the Ramakrishna Mission was founded, Swami Vivekananda declared her to be the spiritual leader or the mother of the monastic order.
- Since then she had to tackle her domestic affairs on the one hand and the spiritual as well as some key policy matters of the Ramakrishna Mission, on the other.
- But she performed these two very different roles from her domestic confines.
- She passed away in 1920, at the age of sixty-seven.
Source - Empowerment of a Different Kind: The Life and Teachings of Sri Sarada Devi by Sandipan Sen