Ramana's devotees · The translator

Sadhu Om: the clerk who became Ramana's translator

If you have read an English Aksharamanamalai verse anywhere on this site, you have most likely read his words. Sadhu Om left a government clerk's desk for a life beside Ramana, and became one of the most trusted scholarly voices on the Tamil hymns ~ the quiet, exacting work behind translations still read around the world.

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Some devotees are remembered for a single dramatic encounter; Sadhu Om is remembered for four decades of patient, exacting devotion to getting Ramana's Tamil works right. He came to the ashram as a young clerk in 1946 and stayed, in effect, for the rest of his life, becoming one of the most careful and trusted scholarly voices on the sage's Tamil writings ~ and, through his English translations, the reason so many of Ramana's own words can be read in this language at all.

A clerk who went looking

Sadhu Om was born in the village of Punnai Nalloor, near Tanjore in South India, and worked as a clerk in the Revenue Department before his spiritual search began in earnest. He first sought guidance at the Sri Ramakrishna Mutt in Chennai; its president, hearing his questions, directed him instead toward Ramana Maharshi. He travelled to Tiruvannamalai and, introduced through the devotee Janaki Mata, met Bhagavan on 6 July 1946. He would remain closely connected to the ashram and its community, living at Sri Arunachala Ramana Nilayam, for roughly the next thirty years.

Working alongside Muruganar

One of Sadhu Om's most significant contributions was his close working relationship with Muruganar, the great poet-devotee whose thousands of verses in praise of Ramana existed, for years, scattered and unorganised. Sadhu Om undertook the painstaking work of compiling and editing these into the nine-volume Sri Ramana Jnana Bodham, a monumental act of preservation without which a great deal of Muruganar's outpouring might never have reached readers in an organised form at all. It was scholarship in service of devotion, and devotion in the form of scholarship.

If Muruganar sang the verses, Sadhu Om made sure they survived ~ and then made sure the world beyond Tamil could read them.

A body of careful Tamil writing

Sadhu Om's own written output was considerable. His principal work, Sri Ramana Vazhi ("The Path of Sri Ramana"), runs to four volumes covering self-enquiry, karma and bhakti, Ramana's spiritual instructions, and a question-and-answer section. He also wrote detailed commentaries on Ramana's Upadesa Undhiyar, Ulladu Narpadu, and the hymns to Arunachala, alongside his own devotional poetry ~ the collection Vetkai ("Divine longing") and the 172 verses of Sri Ramana Varugai, composed while praying for Bhagavan's darshan. For a time he also edited the devotional magazine Arul.

The translations read around the world today

It is Sadhu Om's English translation work, undertaken together with the scholar Michael James, that reaches the widest audience today. Their rendering of the Aksharamanamalai and of the companion text Ekatma Vivekam ~ the latter first published in The Mountain Path in January 1982 ~ remains one of the most trusted English versions of Ramana's Tamil hymns, freely available today through the online Ramana archive at archive.arunachala.org. Every time a verse of the Aksharamanamalai is quoted on this site in English, it is very likely Sadhu Om's careful work, carried forward by James, that is being read.

Why Sadhu Om matters

Sadhu Om's gift was neither the dramatic conversion story nor the decades of silent personal attendance that other devotees are remembered for. It was something quieter and, in its own way, just as essential: the unglamorous labour of compiling, editing and translating, done with such precision and devotion that it still carries Ramana's Tamil voice into English nearly eighty years after he first sat before him. He died in Tiruvannamalai on 17 March 1985, having spent very nearly his whole adult life at the work.

Last updated 17 September 2026. Drawing on the documented record of Sri Ramanasramam and published biographical sources; where a detail could not be independently confirmed, it has been left out.