After earlier visits and years traveling through Japan during the first World War, she returned to Pondicherry for good in 1920 to work alongside Sri Aurobindo, whom she had first met in 1914.

On 24 November 1926, Sri Aurobindo withdrew from public contact and entrusted her with running the ashram's daily life. From that day he called her the Mother, a name that stayed with her for the rest of her life.

From 1957 she described her inward work — bringing awareness into the body's own cells, changing what she called their old unconscious habits — in private conversations with her disciple Satprem, who recorded and later published them as Mother's Agenda.

On 28 February 1968, an international township called Auroville broke ground near Pondicherry, built to embody the ideals she and Aurobindo had worked toward — a place, she said, belonging to no nation and no religion.

She died in Pondicherry on 17 November 1973, at ninety-five. The cellular work she described for over a decade rests entirely on her own account of it — the community that carries it forward holds it as lived experience, not as something outside evidence can confirm.