The old Santro Xing hummed along NH-60, my wife beside me, both of us still carrying the dust of Ayodhya Hills on our clothes and the weight of the city we’d fled just days ago. Kolkata’s festive chaos during Durga Puja had become too much—the tunnel of humanity, the relentless noise, the fuel prices that made every journey an economic calculation. So we’d escaped westward, to where the Chota Nagpur Plateau meets West Bengal in a tumble of red laterite and sal forests.
Ayodhya Hills had been our refuge. That small tribal hamlet perched on the easternmost edge of the plateau, where dense forests wrap around you like a living thing and the red soil—characteristic of this geological transition zone between the Eastern Ghats and the Gangetic plains—seems to hold ancient secrets. We’d stayed at Niharika Lodge, one of those rare places where nature still dictates the terms of your existence. The lodge sits surrounded by thick Sal forests, and at night, the silence is so complete you can hear your own thoughts circling back.
But this post isn’t about those forest-wrapped mornings in Ayodhya. That story deserves its own telling. Today, I want to talk about the return journey—specifically, the detour we took through Bankura district to visit a place I’d last seen seventeen years ago.
The Road to Amarkanon
It was my wife who suggested it. “Shouldn’t we stop at that ashram?” she asked as we navigated the winding roads back toward Kolkata. She knew the story, of course—how seventeen years earlier, I’d visited Shamayita Math in Amarkanon and experienced something I still struggle to articulate, even to myself.
The math, as I’d later learned, was formally established in 2005, though its work had begun much earlier. It operates in one of the most challenging terrains in India—the tribal belt spanning Bankura, Purulia, and extending into Jharkhand. This is red and laterite soil country, where poverty runs deep and where the kind of systemic social work that changes lives requires not just dedication but a kind of stubborn faith in human potential.
What made Shamayita Math extraordinary, even back then, was its scale and scope. As an NGO working in rural development, it had built schools, hostels, training centers for differently-abled children, and extensive women’s empowerment programs. All of this in a region where basic infrastructure was—and largely remains—a distant dream. The organization had understood something fundamental: that true development required the full participation of women from every section of society. So they made women the driving force of their initiatives, not as an afterthought, but as the primary architects of change.
The Geography of Deprivation
The districts of Bankura and Purulia share more than just administrative boundaries. Geologically, they’re part of that undulating terrain where the Chota Nagpur Plateau gradually descends eastward. The western portions feature red laterite soil—acidic, porous, rich in iron oxide but desperately poor in the nutrients that make agriculture viable. During the dry season, which lasts interminably, these lands take on a scorched, almost lunar appearance. You drive through them and wonder how anyone survives here, let alone thrives.
Yet people do. Tribal communities have lived here for centuries, adapting to the harsh realities of this landscape. And it’s precisely in these forgotten pockets that Shamayita Math chose to work.
Seventeen Years Between Two Silences
The first time I visited, I was younger, more certain about my scientific temperament, my persistent disbelief in anything that couldn’t be measured or explained. I’d heard about Prabhuji—the enigmatic figure who’d founded this organization on 15th August 1996 —and about his unconventional approach to social work. What struck me then, and what struck me again now, was the sheer enormity of what had been built from nothing.
The infrastructure speaks for itself: office complexes, guest houses, schools, and hostels that meet national standards, all situated a few hundred meters from where Prabhuji himself lives in a simple thatched hut. The contrast is deliberate, I think—a reminder that leadership doesn’t require luxury, that influence flows from conviction rather than comfort.
But what I’d really come for, both times, was a glimpse of the man himself.
It happened in the same way seventeen years apart. Dusk settling over the land, the sun bleeding into the horizon, and a gathering of people standing in respectful silence among the tall sal trees. The failing light filtered through dark green creeper plants, making everything dreamlike, slightly unreal. And then, through that half-darkness, a figure emerged—tall, faded by the dim light, with flowing locks that seemed to belong to a different era entirely.
I can’t properly describe what happens in that moment. It’s not dramatic—there’s no thunder, no celestial music. Just a spreading calmness that seems to originate somewhere in your chest and radiates outward. Both times, seventeen years apart, I felt it: that strange, inexplicable peace that makes you question everything you think you know about cause and effect, about matter and energy, about the universe.
As someone who’s spent a lifetime cultivating scientific temperament, who tracks geopolitics and macroeconomics with the obsession of a man watching fuel prices creep upward, who worries about India’s depleting air assets with the anxiety of a true defense enthusiast—I have no framework for this experience. And yet it happened. Twice.
The Mystery of Origin
Nobody knows where Prabhuji came from. Which community he belongs to, who his parents were, why he chose this remote, underdeveloped corner of West Bengal to settle decades ago. Nobody asks anymore. When you’re a living North Star for thousands of people—when you’re the guide, the parent, the steady light in their lives—your origins become irrelevant.
What matters is the work. The women trained and empowered. The children educated. The differently-abled given dignity and opportunity. The slow, patient transformation of one of India’s most marginalized regions into something that resembles hope.
Prabhuji’s rejection of formal religion, his simple lifestyle, his emphasis on practical social work over ritual—these aren’t revolutionary ideas in the abstract. But executed here, in this specific place, with this particular consistency and scale? That’s alchemy of a different order.
The Economics of Idealism
Driving back toward Kolkata in the old Santro—borrowed from my wife, though she was with me this time—I found myself doing the calculations I always do. Fuel costs, road conditions, the gradual depletion of resources both mechanical and human. At my age, every journey feels like it’s marked by these diminishing returns, these slow declines that macroeconomics teaches you to recognize in nations and that aging teaches you to recognize in yourself.
But Shamayita Math represents a different kind of economics. One that compounds slowly but surely. Where investment in human potential generates returns that can’t be measured in quarterly statements but can be seen in transformed lives, in women leading development programs, in children from tribal villages accessing education that was unthinkable a generation ago.
The hermitage at Amarkanon—situated in village Ranbahal, P.O. Amarkanon, in the Gangajalghati police station area—stands as proof that another way is possible. That an organization can operate at national standards while its leader lives in a thatched hut. That women’s empowerment isn’t a slogan but a methodology. That the most underdeveloped regions can become laboratories for the most advanced forms of social work.
How to Reach
For those who might want to make this journey: Ayodhya Hills is approximately 30-40 kilometers from Purulia town, depending on your route. Fill your tank before you go—fuel stations are scarce once you enter the hills. Niharika Lodge and other accommodations dot the landscape, offering varying degrees of comfort but uniform access to that rare commodity: silence.
From Ayodhya Hills to Shamayita Math in Amarkanon, Bankura district, you’ll travel east and then south, through the red soil country that defines this region. The journey takes a few hours, depending on road conditions and your vehicle’s relationship with West Bengal’s highways. The Santro managed it, as it always does, with the stubborn reliability of machines that have outlived their warranties and learned to survive on determination alone.
The Return
As we drove away from the math, twilight deepening into night, my wife and I didn’t talk much. What was there to say? We’d witnessed something that exists outside the usual categories of explanation. A place where idealism had somehow survived contact with reality and emerged not just intact but strengthened. Where a mysterious sage continues to inspire thousands while living a life of deliberate simplicity. Where women lead, children learn, and the differently-abled find opportunity in one of India’s harshest landscapes.
Seventeen years is a long time—long enough for the world to change several times over, for technologies to rise and fall, for nations to stumble and recover. Long enough for a man to age, to watch defense capabilities decline, to track fuel prices with the anxiety of someone who knows that every rupee spent is a rupee less for the future.
But some things remain constant. The red soil of Bankura. The sal forests of Ayodhya. The quiet work of transformation happening in places the world has largely forgotten. And yes, that unexplainable moment at dusk when a tall figure with flowing locks emerges from the trees and something in you—something that has no business believing in such things—recognizes grace when it sees it.
The old Santro carried us home. The fuel gauge dropped steadily, as fuel gauges do. But something else—harder to measure, impossible to quantify—felt strangely replenished.
Author’s Note: This is part of an ongoing series of meandering drives and accidental discoveries. As a fast-aging dreamer in an old borrowed car, I’m racing against both fuel prices and time itself. Some detours are worth taking.
Some pictures are AI generated.
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