Born in Trivandrum — now Thiruvananthapuram — in Kerala, southern India, Anantara grew up in a Brahmin family whose spiritual mission spans seven generations. Her great-grandfather served as royal astrologer to the Maharaja of Travancore. Her grandfather, the venerable Pandit Krishnaswami Devi, was considered one of the last great living Jyotish Masters of Kerala, guardian of an astral body of knowledge transmitted orally from father to son for centuries.
From the age of seven, young Anantara sat every morning at her grandfather’s feet in the family meditation hall, a space scented with sandalwood and jasmine incense. She learned to observe the sky before dawn, to name the Nakshatras — the twenty-seven lunar mansions of the Vedic zodiac — and to feel their influence on bodies and destinies. This was not abstract study: it was a living conversation with the cosmos.
The stars never lie. It is humans who forget to listen to them. My grandfather taught me to listen to the sky, and the sky told me everything.
— Anantara, to her students in Kerala, 2003From age seven to nineteen, Anantara had only one teacher: her grandfather Krishnaswami. Twelve years of rigorous, total training, passed down in the Guru-Shishya Parampara tradition — the direct master-to-disciple lineage, uninterrupted, without academic books. She memorized the 1008 shlokas of the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, the foundational text of Jyotish, recited aloud every morning at sunrise.
Alongside astral techniques, she was initiated into Graha Shanti rituals — the appeasement of planets — inherited from Kerala tantric traditions. She learned to craft sacred yantras, to chant planetary mantras with the melodic precision required by Nada Yoga, and to read subtle signs the cosmos sends through dreams, coincidences, and synchronicities.
At nineteen, during an intimate ceremony reserved for family and local sages, Krishnaswami symbolically handed her his own panjika — his handwritten ephemeris, darkened with fifty years of planetary calculations. It was the ultimate transmission: Anantara became officially a full Jyotishi.