Mata Amritanandamayi

Mata Amritanandamayi was born Sudhamani in a fishing village in Kerala, India, to a poor family, and left school early to help with housework and caring for younger siblings. From childhood she reportedly comforted distressed neighbours by simply holding them, a gesture that became central to her later public role: she is best known worldwide for embracing individual visitors one by one, sometimes tens of thousands in a single sitting, which earned her the nickname "the hugging saint."

Around her spiritual following, formalised as the Mata Amritanandamayi Math, she built a much larger charitable operation. Her organisation has funded and built free hospitals, schools and homes for widows and orphans across India, and has repeatedly mobilised for disaster response, including after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, providing housing, boats and livelihoods support to fishing communities, and after subsequent floods and cyclones. It also runs Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, a multi-campus university, and has committed large sums to India's sanitation and clean cooking fuel drives.

She has faced periodic scrutiny over the scale and governance of her organisation's finances, criticism she has generally answered by pointing to audited disaster-relief spending. She continues to travel internationally holding public programmes that combine devotional practice with fundraising for her charitable projects.