In the Presence of Sai Baba

SRINIVAS_Prelims_i-iv.indd i 12/20/2007 4:11:01 PM Numen Book Series

Studies in the History of Religions

Series Editors Steven Engler (Mount Royal College, Canada) Richard King (Vanderbilt University, U.S.A.) Kocku von Stuckard (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Gerard Wiegers (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands)

VOLUME 118

SRINIVAS_Prelims_i-iv.indd ii 1/8/2008 1:24:13 PM In the Presence of Sai Baba

Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement

By Smriti Srinivas

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008

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SRINIVAS_Prelims_i-iv.indd iv 1/8/2008 1:24:26 PM CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... vii

Note on Translation ...... xi

List of Abbreviations ...... xiii

List of Figures, Maps, Tables, and Diagrams ...... xv

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One: The Mendicant of Shirdi ...... 23

Chapter Two: The Arrival of the Avatar ...... 49

Chapter Three: The Sense of the Presence ...... 76

Chapter Four: Healing, Service, and Character ...... 111

Chapter Five: The Ideal Polis ...... 162

Chapter Six: Producing Space in Bangalore ...... 216

Chapter Seven: Somatic Regimes of Citizenship in Nairobi .... 254

Chapter Eight: Sites of Sociality in Atlanta ...... 292

Conclusion ...... 333

Appendix: Overseas Sai Centers and Groups ...... 347

Bibliography ...... 353

Index ...... 373

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd v 1/4/2008 6:53:48 PM SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd vi 1/4/2008 6:53:49 PM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book, a project that has involved me for about a decade, evolved through the support of many institutions and persons. The Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore provided me with a research grant (1994–95) that funded my ﬁ rst exploration into Shirdi Sai Baba devotion in southern India. My transnational ﬁ eldwork on the Sai Baba movement in India, Kenya, and the United States was funded by a research grant from the Mershon Center at Ohio State University (2000–01), a Ohio State University Seed Grant (2001–02), an American Academy of Religion Individual Research Grant (2001–02), a New Faculty Research Grant from the University of California, Davis (2002–03), and Small Grants in Aid of Research from the University of California, Davis (2005–06, 2006–07). I would not have been able to complete the writing of this manuscript without the time made available by a Faculty Development Award at the Uni- versity of California, Davis (2005–06) and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2005–06). Members of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization, the Sathya Sai Central Trust, and Sai devotees in several countries contributed generously to this project and shared their understandings of Shirdi and Sathya Sai Baba, the Sai tradition, or their devotion with me. In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to devotees at Sai Darshan in Bangalore, the Atlanta Sai Center, and the Sai Center in Nairobi. I would also like to thank Brigadier S.C. Bali, Mr. K. Chakravarti, Mr. Nagesh Dhakappa, Dr. Anil Gokak, Ms. Prashanti Goswami, Mr. Hejmadi Sr., Col. S.B. Jogarao, Mr. A.S. Krishnamurthy, Mr. Kekie Mistry, Prof. V.N. Pandit, Mr. K.S. Rajan, Mr. Ravi Kumar, Dr. Partha Sarathi, Mr. C. Sreenivas, and Mr. A. Srivathsan. All interpretations of the Sai movement in this book, however, are my own. I was invited by various individuals and groups to present academic papers on the Sai Baba tradition that fed into the conceptualization and writing of this book. Vasudha Dalmia and Srilata Raman invited me to present my early thoughts on the Sai Baba movement at the University of Tübingen in 1995 and 1997. In 1996, I presented a paper that focused on root paradigms in the history of the Sai tradition at a seminar on “Knowledge and Language” organized by Dr.

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd vii 1/4/2008 6:53:49 PM viii acknowledgements

E. Annamalai, Dr. Hans Raj Dua, and Dr. Ranjit Singh Rangila at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. Catherine Clementin- Ojha and Gilles Tarabout invited me to share my work on urban religiosity and Shirdi Sai Baba at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Unité Associété CNRS, Paris, in 1996. In 1999, Leslie Orr organized a stimulating meeting on my Sai Baba research in the Department of Religion at Concordia University, Montreal, through the Indo-Cana- dian Shastri Foundation. Thomas Bender invited me to a terriﬁ c and convivial conference on “Locating the City” at Antalya, Turkey, in 2001 that allowed me to pull together ideas on space and religion in Bangalore city. I was invited to give a public lecture on transnational networks and the global imagining of faith in the Sai Baba movement at the French Institute for Research in Africa, Nairobi, in 2001. My understandings of darshan, sacred presence, and the senses were reﬁ ned and stimulated by a lecture invitation at the Ohio University in 2002; a wonderful symposium on “Global Saints, Local Lives” at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History in Los Angeles organized by Al Roberts and Polly Roberts in 2003; a meeting at the Center for South Asia, University of Washington, Seattle in 2005; Christoph Emmrich’s kind invitation to participate in a lecture series on “Ritual in South Asia” at the University of Heidelberg in 2005; and an invited talk at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, in 2006. Patrick Legales was instrumental in my presentation on Sai devotion in Nairobi at the plenary session of the International Socio- logical Conference, RC 21, in Paris in 2005. I would like to express my thanks to all these scholars for their support and the audiences at my talks for their comments and input. I would also like to thank the many scholars who have read parts of this work in various forms, answered my questions or requests for information as this work progressed, raised critical issues, and supported me in other ways during this process: Elisabeth Arweck, Tom Bender, Xiaomei Chen, Lawrence Cohen, Vasudha Dalmia, Veena Das, Jim Drobnick, John Eade, Dick Eaton, Jennifer Fischer, Daniel Gold, Paul Greenough, Mark Halperin, John Hawley, Alf Hiltebeitel, Lindsay Jones, Alexandra Kent, Phil Lutgendorf, Alamin Mazrui, Chris Mele, Catherine Clementin-Ojha, Leslie Orr, Al Roberts, Anuradha Shah, Michael Shapiro, Fred Smith, Mike Spurr, Jennifer Terry, Shiv Visvanathan, Joanne Waghorne, and Phillip Wagoner. V. Geetha, May Joseph, Srilata Raman, and Shubha Ramnath have been intellectual comrades and friends over the past two decades. Smita

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd viii 1/4/2008 6:53:50 PM acknowledgements ix

Srinivas and Dashiell D. Dog have been loving buddies. As always, my parents, S.N.S. Murthy and Nirmala Murthy, have inspired and sustained me spiritually and intellectually. Without the unselﬁ sh labor, demanding critique, and insightful comments of James Heitzman, my companion in all things and in my ﬁ eldwork for this book, I would not have been able to complete this project. Finally, I can only voice here the beautiful sentiments of Purandaradasa: Na munde, Ranga, Ni enna hinde (“I am in front, Ranga, You are behind me”).

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd ix 1/4/2008 6:53:50 PM SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd x 1/4/2008 6:53:50 PM NOTE ON TRANSLATION

Although this book has a research core located in South Asia, it is also based on work conducted in other world areas. In the interests of its readership, therefore, I have not used a scholarly system of translitera- tion or diacritical marks for Hindi/Hindustani, Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu, Urdu, or other South Asian language words that appear in this work, but the most common and recognizable English forms. I italicise those words derived from an Indian language when used frequently in the text such as bhajan (devotional song) or faqir (literally, “poor man,” a mendicant); to refer to a speciﬁ c idea or term such as “remembrance of the divine name” (namasmarana); or for texts like the Shri Sai Satcharita or Mahabharata. For simplicity, plurals are indicated by adding “s” to the end of Indian language words (e.g. bhajans). I do not italicise those words that have become familiar to an English-speaking audience such as “guru,” “avatar,” or “mantra.” Indian language terms used in the literature produced by the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust or the Sai Baba movement are translated or transliterated in several ways. When referring to a publication such as the newsletter, Sanathana Sarathi (Eternal Charioteer), or quotations, I reproduce the translated or transliterated term. Elsewhere, I might translate/transliterate the words differently (e.g. “eternal” as sanatana rather than sanathana or “committee” as samiti rather than samithi).

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xi 1/4/2008 6:53:50 PM SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xii 1/4/2008 6:53:50 PM LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AIDS Acquired Immune Deﬁ ciency Syndrome EHV Education in Human Values EPIP Export Promotion Industrial Park ISKCON International Society for Krishna Consciousness NS Narasimha Swami NRM New Religious Movement SS Sanathana Sarathi SSS Sathya Sai Speaks SSB Summer Showers in Brindavan SSSIHMS Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences UU Unitarian Universalist YWCA Young Womens Christian Association

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xiii 1/4/2008 6:53:50 PM SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xiv 1/4/2008 6:53:50 PM LIST OF FIGURES, MAPS, TABLES, DIAGRAMS

Figures

1. Sathya Sai Baba (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry) ... 2 2. Seated Shirdi Sai Baba (Poster) ...... 26 3. Shirdi Sai Baba amidst his devotees (Image on a pocket calendar) ...... 27 4. Sathya Sai Baba as a young man (Calendar fragment) ..... 55 5. Sathya Sai Baba and lingam (Image on a pocket calendar) 56 6. Shirdi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Baba, and Dattareya (Print bought in a market) ...... 73 7. Darshan (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry) ...... 80 8. Baba holding a lingam (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry) ...... 95 9. Gayatri image overlaid with Sathya Sai Baba’s (Image on a pocket calendar) ...... 97 10. Sathya Sai Baba in old Brindavan (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry) ...... 99 11. Juxtaposed images of Baba and other religious fi gures (Print bought in a market) ...... 100 12. SSSIHMS in Puttaparthi on a 2004 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 116 13. Exterior of SSSIHMS in Bangalore (Photograph courtesy of Public Relations Offi ce, SSSIHMS) ...... 117 14. Interior main hall of SSSIHMS in Bangalore (Photograph courtesy of Public Relations Offi ce, SSSIHMS) ...... 119 15. Seva Dal volunteers with Sathya Sai Baba (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry) ...... 144 16. School students with Sathya Sai Baba (Photograph courtesy of Sai Darshan offi ce) ...... 147 17. Emblems of the Sai Organization (Source: http://www. sathyasai.org) ...... 158 18. Market area outside the hermitage (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 163 19. Venugopalaswamy temple (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 169

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xv 1/4/2008 6:53:50 PM xvi list of figures, maps, tables, diagrams

20. Village road (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 170 21. Old Prashanti Nilayam building (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry) ...... 172 22. Vishnu’s hand amidst residences (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 174 23. Darshan area and Mandir (Photograph courtesy of Sai Darshan ofﬁ ce) ...... 176 24. Mandir, Kulwant Hall, Poornachandra auditorium, new residential buildings and Sarva Dharma Stupa (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 177 25. An Institute of Higher Learning building (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 180 26. Sri Sathya Sai Higher Secondary School entrance (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 181 27. Planetarium (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 182 28. Music College facade (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) 182 29. Hanuman at the Hill View Stadium (Print from a Larsen and Toubro Ltd. brochure) ...... 184 30. Chaitanya Jyoti Museum (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 186 31. Bus depot map by Sri Sathya Sai Urban Development Authority (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 188 32. 1958 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 190 33. 1961 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 191 34. November 1963 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 193 35. 1974 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 195 36. March 1981 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 197 37. May 1995 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 200 38. November 1999 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 202 39. November 2000 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 203 40. November 2002 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 205

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xvi 1/4/2008 6:53:50 PM list of figures, maps, tables, diagrams xvii

41. November 2004 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 206 42. November 2005 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust) ...... 207 43. Aerial view of Hill View Stadium (Photograph courtesy of Garuda Aerosport, Mysore) ...... 213 44. Shivamma Thayee’s house (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 226 45. Shirdi Sai Baba temple and images (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 226 46. Shirdi Sai Baba (left) and Narasimha Swami (right) (Print distributed by All-India Sai Samaj) ...... 230 47. Someshvarapura temple (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 235 48. Marble image of Shirdi Sai Baba (Photograph courtesy of Someshvarapura temple) ...... 236 49. Old Brindavan (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry) ..... 241 50. New Brindavan (Photograph courtesy of Sai Darshan ofﬁ ce) ...... 242 51. Sai Darshan exterior (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ... 245 52. Sai Darshan interior (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ... 246 53. Swaminarayan temple in Nairobi (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 273 54. Exterior of Sai Center, Nairobi (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 278 55. Prayer Hall in Sai Center, Nairobi (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 278 56. Narayana Seva in Nairobi (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 281 57. Unitarian Universalist congregation’s Chalice House in Atlanta (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 300 58. Altar at Sai Center, Atlanta (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 303 59. Wal-Mart copy of print of Sathya Sai Baba as Krishna (Courtesy of a devotee at the Atlanta Sai Center) ...... 321 60. Regional conference at Crowne Hotel ballroom (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas) ...... 324

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xvii 1/4/2008 6:53:51 PM xviii list of figures, maps, tables, diagrams

Maps

1. Sites connected with the Sathya Sai Baba movement in India (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman) ...... 4 2. Sites connected with Shirdi Sai Baba and the inheritors of his charisma in India (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman) ...... 31 3. State-wise distribution of Sai Centers (Samitis) and Groups (Bhajan Mandalis) in India (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman) ...... 134 4. Plan of hermitage and Puttaparthi area (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman; adapted from Prasanthi Nilayam Information Booklet 2000) ...... 168 5. Sri Sathya Sai Urban Development Authority area (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman; adapted from the base map courtesy of Dr. Raghavendra of Aarvee Associates, Hyderabad) ...... 189 6. Bangalore Metropolitan Region, 2005 (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman) ...... 219

Tables

1. Growth of Sai Centers (Samitis) and Groups (Bhajan Mandalis) in India from 1988–2002 (Source: Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization, Prashanti Nilayam) ...... 133 2. Sai Centers and Groups worldwide, 2000 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000) ...... 138 3. Student Enrolment, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, 2005–06 (Credit: Prof. V.N. Pandit) ...... 149 4. Sai Centers in the US, 2006 ...... 294 (Source: http://www.sathyasai.org/organize/z1reg01/contents.html) A 1. Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 1 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000) ...... 347 A 2. Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 2 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000) ...... 348 A 3. Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 3 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000) ...... 349 A 4. Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 4 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000) ...... 350

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xviii 1/4/2008 6:53:51 PM list of figures, maps, tables, diagrams xix

A 5. Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 5 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000) ...... 351

Diagrams

1. Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization structure, India (Source: Adapted from Rules & Regulations 2001) ...... 130

SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xix 1/4/2008 6:53:51 PM SRINIVAS_F1_v-xx.indd xx 1/4/2008 6:53:51 PM INTRODUCTION

A Beginner’s Baba

Sathya Sai Baba (b. 1926), one of South Asia’s most well-known gurus, is easily recognized by millions in India and overseas by his foot-length, silk, fl ame-color gown and mass of crinkly black hair (see Figure 1).1 Up close his eyes are magnetic, soft, piercing, or sometimes humorous; his frame is slight at about a few inches over fi ve feet; and his movements graceful. His picture appears on calendars, in vehicles, in household shrines, and in news items describing how well-known statesmen, including the former President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, have visited his hermitage in Puttaparthi in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (see Map 1). He has even inspired a documentary comic book called Sai Baba for Beginners (Berenstein 1998) in a series on topics ranging from Black History to the Buddha, and appears in another series on spiritual leaders and thinkers including such fi gures as the Dalai Lama, Mary Baker Eddy, and Mahatma Gandhi (see Kheirabadi 2005). He stands at the apex of the global Sai Organization: by 2001, there were about 9,000 offi cial centers of devotion in India and about 2,000 in over 130 countries outside India, most of them urban sites. The Prasanthi Council, with its headquarters in Puttaparthi, has the overall responsibility for coordinating an organization that has made a number of global interventions in education, health care, provision of social utilities, and disaster response. A wide range of institutional forms and practices, therefore, emerge from the movement centered on Sathya Sai Baba to generate infrastructure and social services as part of a cultural process of self-care and self-cure. For instance, within hours of the December 26, 2004 tsunami in Asia that devastated the coastlines of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and other countries, the Sai Organization responded through local centers by providing truckloads of clothes, blankets, and other items and by sending volunteers to assist

1 His name can also be spelled “Satya Sai Baba.” Here I follow the spelling usually used by the ofﬁ cial Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization and the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust.

SRINIVAS_F2_1-22.indd 1 12/20/2007 4:33:29 PM 2 introduction

Fig. 1. Sathya Sai Baba (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry)

SRINIVAS_F2_1-22.indd 2 12/20/2007 4:33:30 PM introduction 3

in relief work. On the one hand, its pacifi st program separates it from several other modern religious movements, in India or elsewhere, that have been accompanied by essentialist or nationalist constructions of identity and chauvinistic violence.2 On the other hand, while there are clearly resemblances between the Sathya Sai Baba movement and those centered on other global Indian gurus like Mata Amritanandamayi, there are also signifi cant parallels between the Sathya Sai Baba movement and non-South Asian global movements like Soka Gakkai or religions like the Baha’i.3 Sathya Sai Baba traces his genealogy to Shirdi Sai Baba (d. 1918), a mendicant identifi ed with various Sufi , devotional, and ascetic genealogies in the sub-continent, who lived in Shirdi village in Maharashtra for most of his life. Many devotees of Sathya Sai Baba believe that he is Shirdi Sai Baba reincarnated based on his claims and their experiences. While Sathya Sai Baba refl exively refers to several local and pan-Indian traditions and teachers in his speeches and writings, he also places signifi cance on various “world” religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism, making his philosophy attractive to devotees in South Asia and highly mobile outside it, both within and without the South Asian diaspora. The movement has “roots” in Shirdi Sai Baba and more generally in devotional Bhakti movements that grew in South Asia from about the sixth or seventh century onwards, but as it globalizes, it develops conjunctions with other religious traditions, New Religious movements, and New Age ideas. Sathya Sai Baba’s devotees are said to number about ten million including scientists, doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, managers, industrialists, and politicians.4 While he clearly has followers from different strata in society, including the rural poor, his most vocal, visible, and active global constituency is what may be loosely identifi ed as the urban middle class. Thousands of devotees travel to Puttaparthi to be in the presence of Sathya Sai Baba, hear his discourses, touch the hem of his garment,

2 The literature on these movements is enormous and a full review is impossible here. But see Juergensmeyer (2000) for an exploration of several of these movements such as Aum Shinrikyo, Christian militia, and others. Works such as Hansen (1999) or Jaffrelot (1996) explore the rise of Hindu nationalism in the Indian context. 3 See Warrier (2005) on resemblances between Sathya Sai Baba and Mata Amrita- nandamayi. Connections to the other movements and religions will be made elsewhere in this book but on Soka Gakkai, see Metraux (1996, 2002); Seager (2006); Waterhouse (2002). On Baha’i, see McMullen (2000); Warburg (2006). 4 See “Sathya Sai Baba,” http://www.adherents.com, accessed April 15, 2004.

SRINIVAS_F2_1-22.indd 3 12/20/2007 4:33:30 PM 4 introduction

Map 1. Sites connected with the Sathya Sai Baba movement in India (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman)

SRINIVAS_F2_1-22.indd 4 12/20/2007 4:33:30 PM introduction 5

or receive sacred ash from his hands. The central ritual moment is the event of “seeing” (darshan) when the guru sees his devotees and is reciprocally seen by them in an act of inter-ocular devotion. Sathya Sai Baba also daily receives hundreds of letters from his Indian and international devotees. Pictures of the guru, his appearances in dreams, the sudden scent of sacred ash, or reported miracles in distant places become signs of his presence. Every week, Sathya Sai Baba centers bring their community together for a collective event of devotional singing (bhajan). The session focuses on songs sung for about an hour with lead singers and accompaniment by the chorus of devotees. These songs are essentially a string of names or attributes of the divine—a recollection of divine presence through remembrance of the name (namasmarana). Sathya Sai Baba’s sphere of infl uence travels through other circuits: Hard Rock Cafés often display photographs of the guru along with sayings attributed to him (“Love all, serve all”), his name is featured on incense packets (“Sathya Sai Nag Champa”), and most New Age bookstores carry works about him. There are also audio cassettes of his speeches and devotional songs composed and sung for him, video cassettes and fi lms about him, and websites that offer information about local centers, photographs, and links to other sites. The movement has generated a huge body of literature from its ranks: hagiographies, biographies, accounts of devotees’ experiences with their guru, and offi cial publications of the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust that include a monthly newsletter. Sathya Sai Baba’s own discourses and works are a vast list that includes over thirty volumes entitled Sathya Sai Speaks besides other writings. At the center of global, ritual, organizational, somatic, commercial, visual or oral regimes of devotion is the fi gure of Sathya Sai Baba and the love and power attributed to him. For the movement in India, one of the few detailed case studies is the work of Lawrence Babb, who treats the Sathya Sai Baba devotion in a comparative study of three movements (Babb 1986a) and in other articles that examine the role of darshan, Sathya Sai Baba’s miracles, or his attraction for the middle class (Babb 1981, 1983, 1986b, 1987). Other writings are mostly isolated articles that treat aspects of the movement such as the role of media (Hawkins 1999), ritual, miracle, and myth (Swallow 1982), Sathya Sai Baba and consumer capitalism (Urban 2003), or the relationship between several “living saints” including Sathya Sai Baba (White 1972). Two monographs study the movement in Trinidad (Klass 1991) and Malaysia (Kent 2004a); the presence of the Sathya

SRINIVAS_F2_1-22.indd 5 12/20/2007 4:33:30 PM 6 introduction

Sai Baba movement has also been briefl y discussed in countries outside India chiefl y among the South Asian diaspora.5 While the devotion to Sathya Sai Baba has attracted scholars in the Euro-American context interested in new religions or New Religious Movements, for the most part, the analysis of the movement has tended to privilege Hinduism, “neo-Hinduism” (modern Hindu movements—some of which developed as early as the eighteenth century—that may have achieved an international audience), or “revitalization” and South Asian ethnicity. 6 There is no monograph that examines both the Indian and transnational context, and several interrelated questions remain: How did a local fi gure called Sai Baba become a global guru? What is the framework for analyzing the institutional forms and practices emerging from this movement as it crosses borders and develops transnational conjunctures with other movements, constituencies, and spaces? How is the devotion constructed in various urban milieus by the middle classes? What is the relationship between a global religious movement and modernity? This book offers an account of the religious movement centered on Sathya Sai Baba as a pathway for charting the varied cartographies, somatic dispositions, and cultural memories implicated in urbanization and transnationalism. It traverses the terrain between social theories for the study of religion or cities—themselves a product of modernity and a largely liberal discourse—and the modernity of many contemporary religious movements that reject the terms of secularism, fundamentalist violence, or nationalism to seek out other futures. The book analyzes the Sathya Sai Baba movement not as a neo-Hindu revival or anti- modern nostalgia for the past but as an experiment in the mnemonics

5 Scholars have noted the presence of Sai Baba devotees in Bali (Howe 2002), Sri Lanka (Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988), Malaysia (Ackerman and Lee 1988; Kent 1999, 2000b, 2004a, 2004b; Lee 1982; Mearns 1995), England (Bowen 1987, 1988; Knott 1986, 1987, 1993; Taylor 1984, 1987a, 1987b), Hong Kong (White 1994), Trinidad (Klass 1991) and the United States (Palmer 2005). 6 Passing references to the Sai Baba movement in Europe or North America include, for example, Braswell (1986); Clarke (2006); Coney (2000 and 2003); Lucas and Robbins (2004). More detailed studies of the movement as a new religion or New Religious Movement (NRM) in Europe or America are found in Chryssides (1999); Clarke (1987); Deutsch (1989); Knott (1987 and 1993); Valea (1993). An annotated bibliography on NRMs in Europe (Arweck and Clarke 1997) has 28 entries on Sathya Sai Baba. Ackerman and Lee (1988) also use the term new religion or NRM in their study of non-Muslim religious innovation in Malaysia to include the Sai Baba movement. Sharma (1986) refers to the Sai Baba movement in India as a new religious movement, by which he means one which achieved its prominence or arose after 1947. On New Age ideas and Sathya Sai Baba, see Storm (1991).

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of an alternative urban modernity. It demonstrates that devotional practice and meaning are not only textual or visual in nature, but involve tactility, tears, smell, eating, dreams, and other sensory and kinetic formations. The pages that follow describe the manner in which the devotion to Shirdi Sai Baba in the colonial period was inherited or claimed by several carriers of his charisma in the postcolonial world including Sathya Sai Baba—what I call a “Sai Baba tradition.” While there is a devotional movement centered exclusively on Shirdi Sai Baba that does not associate him with Sathya Sai Baba or any other fi gure in the Sai Baba tradition, this book focuses on the Sathya Sai Baba movement (sometimes abbreviated in the text as the Sai Baba movement or the Sai movement) within which the two fi gures are identifi ed. I, therefore, trace the transformation of Shirdi Sai Baba from a mendicant to a guru and the recasting of his memory within the mould of a divine incarnation in the global Sathya Sai Baba movement. I locate the shifts that have taken place in the recollection of Sathya Sai Baba over several decades based on pronouncements about his life as well its elaboration architecturally, textually, symbolically, ritually, and institutionally. The movement is a signifi cant example of a global religious movement with a well-established organization and a wide range of activities in civil and urban society. This book examines both its Indian and transnational context through ethnographic research in three countries and the construction of the devotion in several urban milieus. It also offers an analysis of the institutional forms and practices emerging from this movement: Sathya Sai Baba emphasizes various techniques of the body for realizing the spirit and this study examines how the program of bodily reform aims at the retraining, reform, or re-align- ment of society and the individual. The moral and somatic economy of the movement struggles with, strives to move beyond, or transmutes a de-divinized world to create new sensibilities and practices of space, citizenship, and sociality.

Two Babas and Three Selves of the Scholar

The Eternal Heritage Museum (sometimes called the Spiritual Museum) stands on a hill behind the vast complex of Sathya Sai Baba’s hermitage in Puttaparthi. Covering 20,000 square feet on three levels and inaugurated in 1990, it is meant to portray the experience of spirituality in

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human evolution and the eternal message of saints and sages of all the religions along with exhibits about Sathya Sai Baba’s role as an incarnation of the divine (avatar). Inside are tableaux covering classical textual and popular devotional traditions in South Asia as well as murals and exhibits about Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Shinto, Judaism, and Sikhism—a mixture of playful kitsch and earnest intent. There are also panels depicting Sathya Sai Baba’s life as well as that of Shirdi Baba, whom Sathya Sai Baba calls his previous “body.” I pay a visit to the museum on a hot afternoon in July 2001 glad to be inside its cool interiors. Streams of mostly Indian pilgrims and villagers are moving around silently watched by volunteers belonging to the service unit of the movement with boy-scout type scarves depicting the state from which they have come. There are hushed discussions about specifi c exhibits among visitors but most do not stop long to read the plaques and text that have been placed alongside them. Rather than the receipt of information, acts of recognition and familiarity with certain tableaux making graphic the events from the life of “Swami” (master), as Sathya Sai Baba is familiarly known, seem to be the practice of most visitors. I stand before one particular exhibit on the second fl oor. This is a horse cart with a note nearby carrying an account by Arani Rajamma, an old female devotee of Sathya Sai Baba, which provides a classic narrative of the miraculous events physically linking the two fi gures calling themselves Sai Baba: My brother-in-law, the Raja Saheb of Chincoli [Chincholi], was very much interested in Saints and God-men. He used to frequent Akkalkot Ashram. Maybe he heard of Shirdi there and once when he was living in Pune and Thane, he went to Shirdi, but no one knew where Shirdi was and nor about Sai Baba. After he came back home some Saint or Faker visited them and blessed. It was HE, who rode in that tonga [horse cart]. After the passing-away of my brother-in-law, my sister forgot about the incident. No one had heard Sai Baba’s name till then. Then I was given a photo of [Shirdi] Sai Baba by some Sai-devotee. We started worshipping it and had some experiences also. After some time, my son, who was a youngster went to Shirdi and was told by Abdulla Baba [Abdul Baba] that all our family members will have Baba’s Darshan in one year. Exactly within one year, we heard about our SWAMI and came to Puttaparthi. My sister also came along with us. Swami told us that it was He, who came to their house. He confi rmed everything and said it was He who rode in the tonga. So she brought the tonga to Puttaparthi. The Saint had left a kamandalu [drinking vessel]

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also on which two letters Sa-Ba were inscribed. Another proof of this great event was that there was a negative of the photo, which was similar to the photo I was worshipping. So she concluded fi nally that it must be Sai Baba and our beloved Swami confi rmed everything. The story narrated by Arani Rajamma speaks about events that occurred in the early twentieth century after the passing of Shirdi Sai Baba. It refers to one of Rajamma’s two sisters, the Rani of Chin- choli, whose husband was the local noble of a small principality in the erstwhile Hyderabad state (see Map 1). He is described as having once visited Shirdi while he was in Maharashtra. He was known to frequent the hermitage of a saint called Akkalkot Maharaj and may have been led to Shirdi via that connection. Rajamma and her other sister, Seethamma, were also introduced to the worship of Shirdi Sai Baba. Rajamma’s young son visited Shirdi and met Abdul Baba, an intimate of Shirdi Sai Baba, who told him that they would see Shirdi Sai Baba in a year. Soon afterwards, the sisters heard about Sathya Sai Baba and saw him during his visit to Bangalore. Rajamma and Seethamma also visited Puttaparthi and the frequency of their interaction with and their faith in him increased. On a visit to the Rani’s home in Hyderabad in 1949, Sathya Sai Baba confi rmed that he had visited the Rani and her husband at Chincholi in a horse cart in his previous body as Shirdi Sai Baba and left several items belonging to him there. A drinking vessel, a negative of the picture Rajamma was worshipping, and the horse cart were later found in the Rani’s family mansion in Chincholi. They concluded that the saint who visited them must have been Shirdi Sai Baba, whom they now identifi ed with Sathya Sai Baba. They brought the horse cart to Puttaparthi where it became part of the museum. I had heard this account many times from devotees or read some version of it in books retelling their experiences (for e.g. Padmanaban 2000: 457–471). I had also heard about it from my grandmother, for Rajamma was her maternal aunt. I was very disconcerted that July afternoon by the unexpected material presence of the cart because it had all simply been a story to me, one I had never really refl ected upon. The visit of the saint later believed by the sisters to be Shirdi Sai Baba would have taken place somewhere in the early twentieth century, while the meeting of the sisters with Sathya Sai Baba occurred probably in the 1940s. A distant memory of an encounter with an unknown saint had been transformed into part of the collective memory of the Sathya Sai Baba movement alongside other items of an “eternal heritage.” It

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was this accidental encounter, mine with the horse cart and that of the sisters with the two Sai Babas, which I was to refl ect on many times during the course of writing this book. It seemed to encrypt all kinds of times and places, a memory residing in the intimate landscape of personal devotion and remade through public form. Growing up in India, I encountered Sathya Sai Baba and Shirdi Sai Baba in one milieu or the other nearly all my life. I also met devotees during my years spent as a young girl in Malaysia and China. I remember that soon after the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, a small group of devotees formed to sing devotional songs and provide support to each other during the crisis among the diplomatic community in Beijing. Later, as an adult doing graduate work in the Delhi School of Economics Department of Sociology in the late 1980s, I came across the two Sai Babas as prints in the market, in family altars, or through devotees’ stories, and heard about the fi eldwork that the anthropologist, Lawrence Babb, was doing on the Sai Baba movement in Delhi. My own doctoral fi eldwork, however, was done in the Himalayan frontier in Ladakh ( Jammu and Kashmir state), although there were several army men posted there and Nepali laborers who knew one of the two Sai Babas. I fi rst began to write about the Sai Baba movement when invited to present my work at the University of Tübingen, Germany, in 1995—the year I received my doctorate—and then again in 1997. This evolved into an analysis of specifi c institutions of the movement, its urban constituency, and its deployment of representations about tradition, modernity, and charisma (Srinivas 2001b). In the meantime, while working as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the mid-1990s at the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, India, I had begun fi eldwork in the city studying various “cult” centers that attracted large inter-religious followings. One published article (Srinivas 1999a) based on this research examines the transmission of the charisma of Shirdi Sai Baba in postcolonial India and his reconstruction as a guru for the urban middle classes. Another argues that the category of “social memory” incorporating written and oral traditions is an important heuristic concept for the study of religious movements such as the Sai Baba movement (Srinivas 1999b). After publishing a monograph on urban memory and performance in Bangalore, I contributed another article (Srinivas 2002) to an edited volume called Understanding the City by anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers. This focuses on shrines and centers in Bangalore dedicated

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to the fi gures of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba and ties together the cultural, emotional, and spiritual worlds of urban subjects with the production of space based on fi eldwork done in the mid-1990s and more recent research carried out for several months in 2000 and 2001. In the meantime, I had also traveled in space, having moved from a position in Bangalore to a position in the University of California via stopovers in New York City, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and Columbus. I took the opportunity to do fi eldwork on the Sai Baba movement in Atlanta (for several months every year in 2000, 2001 and 2002) and Nairobi (in December 2001) and also returned to India several times for further months of fi eldwork (in 2000, 2001, 2003, and 2005). My fi eldwork and research on the Sai movement thus occurred between 1995 and 2005 and in several languages—Hindi, English, and Kannada. I was exposed to the global world of devotion, stories of cosmopolitan devotees’ experiences and dreams, practices at various Sai centers, emails and Internet postings, and had my own “Sai experiences” comprising of unexpected encounters, magical coincidences, and networks of meaning and community. The idea of writing a book took shape somewhere in this journey, my ethnography traveling with me between sites, as I tried to map networks, rhythms, similarities, and differences. My practice parallels the way in which many of the devotees of Sathya Sai Baba (particularly those in the urban middle class) also move between cities, cultivate many national and transnational connections, and are drawn back to a common core of performances, beliefs, local associations for their devotion and, of course, the fi gure of their avatar. Unlike the avatar, whose attributes include omniscience and omnipresence, it was not possible for me to be in all times and all places and there are many temporalities and spaces intertwined in this book. My trans-urban and transnational fi eldwork on the Sai movement, penetrated by memories of previous encounters and various selves as a scholar—as a sociologist in the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, as a cultural studies scholar in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, and as an anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis—forces me to refl ect on my position(s) in this project. I was trained in graduate work in the late 1980s in the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics. “D-School” began in 1949 soon after Indian independence and included fi gures like the econo- mist V.K.R.V. Rao and sociologist M.N. Srinivas. It built on traditions

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of social science that had begun under colonial rule, but which soon increased in quality and quantity with independence.7 By the time that I arrived at D-School to do my graduate and doctoral work, there was a serious tradition of world-class research in place (by intellectuals such as André Béteille, Veena Das, Dharma Kumar, or J.P.S. Uberoi and others in the neighborhood of D-School such as Shiv Visvanathan or Ashis Nandy). This tradition was willing to engage in a dialogue with other knowledge formations but was inspired by the problems of Indian society, economy, and history. In the interests of decolonization, my department steadfastly refused to make the choice between anthropology and sociology, in part because the classiﬁ catory apparatus of colonial knowledge girded the distinction, with anthropology being the study of the “Other” (usually non-Western, tribal, or peasant communities in the colonies or the postcolonies) and sociology being the study of the “Self ” (usually Western, modern, industrialized, urban cultures). This made no cognitive or social sense in a country like India where “tribal” groups, “modern,” industrial, and postindustrial strata and social formations have interacted for long periods of time. In practice, this separation usually meant that while Euro-American trained anthropologists could study India, Indian anthropologists could not easily study Europe and America. Or, paradoxically, a sociologist like me trained in India could ﬁ nd a job in an anthropology or cultural studies department in North America but was less recognizable to the sociologists. The truth, however, was that like my peers at D-School, I had received or imbibed an ambidextrous training in the two disciplines along with an interest in history. I was also exposed to the work of J.P.S. Uberoi, Ramachandra Gandhi, A.K. Saran, Ashis Nandy, and K.J. Shah, whose critique of a monolithic Western and Indian modernity and philosophy called for the reinvention of method and theory in the humanities and social and physical sciences. Although recognized sometimes as a religious studies scholar outside India, I was a sociologist in a country where there were really no religious studies departments in the universities. Today, I attend professional meetings (sometimes in different years and in different countries) of anthropology, sociology, religious studies, urban

7 For an account of the Delhi School of Economics that combines the biographical and the institutional, see Kumar and Mookherjee (1995). See also Guha (2003) on Indian social science including at D-School.

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studies, and South Asian studies—an act of hopeful dialogism rather than intellectual schizophrenia. I approach this book with the position that we need to move beyond the dualisms generated by different disciplines and work towards categories, methods, and theories that engage with the history of disciplinary formations and their inscription within modernity, as well as the radical, creative, and unexpected modernity of religious movements and their location within contemporary capitalism, transnational processes or urbanization. This means that the study of religion and religious movements may require different theories or methods than those based on the assumptions and categories of liberal or secular modernity or on an essentialized opposition between the religious and the secular—a suggestion made by other scholars as well (e.g. Asad 2003; Deeb 2006; Mahmood 2004). This book also aligns itself with the now enormous literature on contemporary global religious movements from different disciplines (e.g. Lucas and Robbins 2004; Pechilis 2004; Seager 2006; Vasquez and Marquardt 2003; Warburg 2006; Werbner 2003; Williams 2001). These works demonstrate that we need to focus attention on the ways in which devotees and religious movements actively engage with global processes, traverse borders and become vehicles of transnational networks or new global forms, while also being rooted in localities and enacting symbolic re-localizations. The complexity of this way of being is captured by Roberts and Roberts (2003) writing about the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement centered on a saint called Sheikh Amadou Bamba, whose body rests in a mausoleum in the city of Touba: . . . any notion of Mouride travel is complicated by the idea that despite being somewhere else in the world—Amsterdam or Jidda, say—Mourides are still at home because in some sense “Touba” has traveled too. (Roberts and Roberts 2003: 239) The tensions between space and religion are not unique to globalization (however defi ned) or “religious modernity,” as Hervieu-Léger terms it, but religious modernity leads to “the emergence, through novel forms of religious sociability, of new confi gurations of this tension” (2002: 103).8

8 Hervieu-Léger’s general argument (see Hervieu-Léger 2000) is that because modern societies are no longer societies of memory but societies of amnesia, where memories are plural, fragmented, and differentiated, there is religious modernity or innovation in the diverse attempts to reconstitute, reinvent, or re-establish the chain of belief.

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This study takes into account our immersion within what Marc Augé (1999) calls “contemporaneous worlds” that create new challenges for anthropology (and, I would argue, sociology and other disciplines). This multiplicity of worlds is brought about by phenomena such as rapid urbanization, globalization, multiplication of networks of transport and communication, and the condition of “supermodernity” resulting in the disappearance of the objects of traditional ethnology.9 An anthropology of the present, suggests Augé, must choose new ﬁ elds and objects such as the individual, religious phenomena such as movements, and the city (ibid. pp. 52, 92). To study these, I argue here, requires a transdisciplinary approach. This book, therefore, weaves back and forth between anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, South Asian studies, and urban studies. It links the senses, the body, images, temples, hospitals, homes, schools, streets, neighborhoods, or cyberspace with macro-processes of urbanization and transnationalism. To study both the South Asian context and the transnational one is not to pursue some sort of Panopticon ethnography but rather a multi-sited research program “around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtaposi- tions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites” (Marcus 1998: 90). Throughout this project, I remain inspired by the life and thought of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), whose work on art and architecture, metaphysics, symbolism, or comparative religion and philosophy are some of the most original writings of his time and ours.10 Born of a Ceylonese father and English mother in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), educated in science in England, a geologist turned art historian

Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), who preceded Hervieu-Léger’s French edition by ten years, also emphasized the need to study “invented traditions,” the creation of “ritual and symbolic complexes,” the processes of “formalization,” “ritualization” and “repetition” that link the present to the past (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983: 4). 9 For Augé, two pairs are central to our contemporaneity: place/non-place and modernity/supermodernity. Place “symbolizes the relation that each of its inhabitants has to him- or herself, to the other inhabitants, and to their common history. A space where neither identity, relation, or history are symbolized is a non-place . . .” (Augé 1999: 109–110). The multiplication of non-places and the social and representational relations arising from it is “supermodernity,” “an acceleration of history, a shrinking of space, and an individualizing of references, all of which subvert the cumulative processes of modernity” (Augé 1999: 110). See also Augé (1995). 10 Coomaraswamy was a proliﬁ c writer and several collections of his essays have appeared. See, for example, the two volumes edited by Lipsey (1977).

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who carried out extensive research in South Asia while also becoming involved in nationalist activities, Coomaraswamy fi nally became a cura- tor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I started reading his work as an undergraduate student (and he was one of the reasons I decided to study sociology at the Delhi School of Economics) and I return to his contributions many times in this book. Coomaraswamy is sometimes dismissed as reinforcing an Orientalist perspective on South Asia but this is not a particularly subtle or original reading of his work. Three aspects of Coomaraswamy’s work, as I understand it, are crucial. First, for him, South Asian culture with all its distinctiveness was also always part of a global history, material and intellectual. If he pursued comparisons between philosophies, languages, or arts, this is because he was a comparativist in the best sense of the term. We see it is his early polemical essay “What has India Contributed to Human Welfare?” as well as his mature writings on the signifi cance of the saint Ramakrishna for a comparative religion.11 Second, the distinctive nature of Coomaraswamy’s method was to combine the spatial and the material with the textual, whether he was writing about the Indian temple or Shaker furniture.12 Long before Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space (1991) here was a South Asian cosmopolitan voice for whom form and the formal were rooted linguistically or semanti- cally and spatially.13 Lastly, not only was he wrestling with problems of history in his work, he was also concerned with cultural memory, genealogies of remembering, and mnemonic forms and spaces. We see this, for example, in his writings on Buddhist iconography as well as his refl ections on recollection, Indian and Platonic.14 The comparative study of religion, South Asia’s role in global history and knowledge, a methodology including the textual and spatial/material, and the theme of cultural memory are also central to this book.

11 On India’s contribution to human welfare, see Coomaraswamy (1957: 3–21); on Ramakrishna, see Lipsey (1977, Vol. 2: 34–45). 12 See his essay on the Indian temple in Lipsey (1977, Vol. 1: 3–10); on Shaker furniture, see Lipsey (1977, Vol. 1: 255–259). 13 For a similar point about the importance of Coomaraswamy’s method for architectural history, see Wagoner (1999). 14 On Buddhist iconography, see Coomaraswamy (1972 [1935]); on recollection, see Lipsey (1977, Vol. 2: 49–65).

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Of Terms and Themes

Sathya Sai Baba is a focus for many kinds of existential circumstances, emotional and spiritual dispositions, and cultural trajectories. This book provides glimpses of several urban middle-class devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, the social understanding of his presence, and the routes and interfaces that allow devotees to perceive, experience, and be transformed by it. It studies the proliferation of Sathya Sai Baba’s charismatic presence through various physical and virtual channels: Miracles, the magical, and the guru’s power thrive rather than become attenuated in the contemporary world through new forms of connectivity such as the Internet or New Age ideas that link older networks and representations with an increasingly urban, transnational milieu. I choose in this book to engage in what Lawrence Babb (1983: 116) in an early paper on Sathya Sai Baba devotion insightfully calls “the anthropology of credibility.” He argues that miracles are central to creating and maintaining a relationship between the devotee and the deity-saint and their meanings are tied up with Baba as much as the devotees’ feelings about themselves: . . . the true source of the verisimilitude of his [Sathya Sai Baba’s] self- presentation lies only partly in physical appearances. At least as important is his devotees’ assent to their own hopefulness about themselves. (Babb 1983: 123) I, therefore, take devotees’ assertions about miracles or their experiences of Baba’s presence seriously, as descriptions of the “hopeful” reality that they inhabit, rather than trying to prove what “really” happened or trying to excavate some “true” presence. This is not a book about Sathya Sai Baba, his truth or fraudulence, or scholarly reason and objec- tivity versus faith but about the social and cultural world of devotion. I make use of many kinds of life-stories, biographical, autobiographical, hagiographical, written, printed, spoken, or elicited through interviews, about the experience of Sai Baba by his devotees. While life-stories have been receiving increasing attention by scholars in various ﬁ elds, it is not my purpose in this book to discuss various genres.15 For the most part, I present these stories in order to obtain glimpses of social

15 In the context of South Asia, a number of recent studies have made use of life-stories and oral accounts. See, for example, Arnold and Blackburn (2004); Butalia (2000); Eaton (2005).

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processes and cultural realities or as indexes of signifi cant conceptual categories. Inevitably, it is a retelling of these lives. I use the rather imprecise term “religious movement” to describe the practices, representations, organizational structure, membership, and so on, that have accumulated around the fi gure of Sathya Sai Baba. I am persuaded now by Lorenzen (2004: 2–6) that terms such as cult, sect, or sectarian movement are ultimately not very useful because of their implication within a Euro-American or Christian context, because historical and empirical reality do not quite fi t these typologies, and because many terms in South Asian languages used to describe religious movements do not coincide with these terms. Further, although the Sai Baba movement has roots in South Asia it is, depending on context, spatially dispersed and international (in part because of its organizational structure of world regions, zones, countries, regions, and localities) or global in the sense that it is based on cultural practices and ideas historically from one location that have traveled elsewhere and been translated—what King (2004: 29) calls “centrifugal” global culture. It is transnational, transreligious, and universalizing (because it seeks to go beyond any one national or religious community or at least point to some universals), and postcolonial (since its greatest growth has occurred in the post-independence period in India and elsewhere, but also because it is implicated in colonial histories and their effects, and seeks to invent other memories or spatialities). It is important to remember that devotees also use these terms in different ways to describe the Sai Baba movement without agreement on a single category. In this book I move between and invoke several of these terms unable to confi ne myself to one or the other while trying to be sensitive to their complex academic histories. I am concerned here with the “sensibility of devotion” as a fi eld of symbolic and embodied categories that have coherence, emotional, sensory, and institutional value, and recognition among devotees worldwide.16 This means that while this book is about meaning-making, devotional sensibility is not merely visual or textual in nature, rooted in a logo-centric and ocular-centric hermeneutics, but also somatic

16 This is also emphasized by other studies on Sikhism (Uberoi 1996), the Radhasoami religion ( Juergensmeyer 1991), Suﬁ sm (Roberts and Roberts 2003; Werbner and Basu 1998), and Buddhism (Queen and King 1996).

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and sensory.17 The central categories within the movement are the outcome of a decades-long process of active creation by devotees and the guru and do not form a closed or complete system: Today, the ﬁ eld of terms is triangulated between understandings of the guru as a divine incarnation, the true or ideal society, and a bio-civic ethics. Each term has an embodied and vernacular semantics rather than a purely classical or textual one. In the Sathya Sai Baba movement, the central term of value is the avatar or the descent of the divine in human form. Sathya Sai Baba is regarded by his devotees as a divine incarnation whose miracles (healing, teleporting, producing sacred ash from his palm, or material- izing watches, rings, necklaces, and religious icons for devotees) have contributed to a growing fund of folklore within the universe of belief. The idea that Sathya Sai Baba is an avatar is linked to the message and belief that he has come to restore or lead humanity back to the path of truth (sathya), righteousness (dharma), peace (shanti), love ( prema), and non-violence (ahimsa) in the modern world.18 This message refers to individual practice as well as a social project embedded in a number of institutions and programs in civil society such as educational institutions or hospitals. The axis of devotional life of the movement revolves around two poles. The ﬁ rst is Prashanti Nilayam (Abode of Supreme/Great Peace), the hermitage (ashram) of Sathya Sai Baba in Puttaparthi.19 Prashanti Nilayam is the central place of pilgrimage for devotees but it is also the site of many cultural institutions and a model for the ideal polis within the movement. The second pole is the Sai committee (samiti) or society (samaj), which is the local collective or center within which devotees carry out prayer, meditation, study, service, and congregational singing; this is also called the Sathya Sai Center or Sai bhajan group, depending on its activities. It is primarily a locus of true company (satsangh), the center of inspiration, devotional life, and praxis. Where there is real satsangh, there the guru or the divine is believed to be present. Sathya Sai Baba’s teachings, love, and power inform and mediate both social

17 There is now a large body of work focusing on the senses and sensory formations from a variety of disciplines. See, for example, Classen (2005); Howes (2005); Morgan (2005). 18 In the early days, non-violence was not invoked but seems to have become part of the vocabulary in the past two decades or so. 19 This is sometimes spelled “Prasanthi Nilayam.”

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poles while organizationally a number of intermediate personnel and levels of direction obtain. Bodily and sensory reform—dismembering, erasing, controlling orifi ces, surfaces, or body fl uids, or creating new habits—is a crucial practice for religious and social transformation as Comaroff and Comaroff (1992: 69–91) remind us. The programs set up by Sathya Sai Baba are premised on his somatic philosophy in which there is an epistemological distinction between the body (deham) and resident Self (dehi) although the two are interrelated: the purpose of the body and senses is to act as a means for remembering, being in the presence of, or realizing the Self, divinity, truth, or right conduct with the physical and the metaphysical crucially entwined. Embodiment is also emphasized through seeing the guru and being seen by him and the senses and various mediums (from posters and prints to the World Wide Web) are pathways for the perception of the divine presence. There is a metonymical relationship between the body and society and Sathya Sai Baba emphasizes a bio-civic ethics chiefl y through service (seva), individual remembrance of the divine name or congregational singing. In fact, spiritual performance (sadhana) occurs through these somatic practices where self-care is intimately related to care of the other, being morally present to others is to be in the presence of Sai Baba. This book, therefore, is concerned with embodiment and sensoriality, the body’s role in spiritual practice, devotional body-cultures, and the understandings of the body within the movement.20 The purpose of this study is to conduct an inquiry into the specifi c confi gurations of spatiality and religiosity within the Sathya Sai Baba movement particularly as it became a global network of devotional fellowship centers since the 1960s. In much of the literature on contemporary global religious movements, the city or urban space appears merely as a static stage or local setting even though many religious

20 My focus is aligned not only with the emergence of the body as a central tool and concept in social science due to the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas, Marcel Mauss, or Victor Turner, but also with the signiﬁ cant recent corpus of work on the body and society in South Asia on themes as diverse as yoga (Alter 2004); Ayurveda (Langford 2002); sport and physicality in colonial and postcolonial India (Appadurai 1995; Mills and Sen 2004; Mills 2005; Zarrilli 2000); Gandhi (Alter 2000); and religion ( Juergensmeyer 1991; Queen and King 1996; Werbner and Basu 1998; Werbner 2003; Uberoi 1996). On the role of the body, somatic practices, or body ﬂ uids in religion see, for example, Frankenberg (2004); Law (1995); Morgan (2005); Patton and Hawley (2005).

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movements are vitally and visibly intertwined with civic spaces and cities, nodes of a global world. At the same time, most urban theories have largely ignored the range of religious imaginations and related practices that have produced the modern city treating the urban as a largely secularized space or focusing mainly on religious fundamental- isms or terror. This book brings the study of contemporary religion and religious movements into dialogue with urban studies. It locates itself in literature about cities, urban modernity, and citizenship from anthropology, cultural geography, or sociology (e.g. Ghannam 2002; Holston 1999; Jacobs 1996; Joseph 1999; Robinson 2006; Simone 2004) but asks: How are religious imaginations and practices mediated and inﬂ ected by urban landscapes? How do believers inhabit, understand, or co-produce these realms? This study presents insights for the understanding of “urban religion,” the maps and idioms that emerge from the interaction of religious traditions with contemporary cityscapes, as Orsi (1999) deﬁ nes it. While Prashanti Nilayam represents the ideal of the polis, this book also explores how this ideal is extended to other sites, localized, or invented. It examines the Sathya Sai Baba movement in three cities—Bangalore (India), Atlanta (the United States), and Nairobi (Kenya) —linking regimes of spatial, somatic, and religious production. These sites have been regional centers, capitals, primary cities, and growth areas since the late nineteenth century, but have experienced very rapid expansion during the last three decades. The chapter on Bangalore, India’s “Silicon Valley,” which has about 71 Sai Centers, provides a case study of the movement in India and the manner in which the moral and devotional universes of devotees mark and inform the meanings of space or produce understandings of the city that intersect or parallel those created by the information society. As for Nairobi, in 1968, Sathya Sai Baba left for a tour of East Africa, his only foreign visit, where he interacted closely with the South Asian expatriate community just before many left East Africa because of Africanization programs. Nairobi today has two Sai Centers with South Asian and some African devotees, who carry out complex negotiations of the city and Kenyan citizenship. The Sai Center in Atlanta, a city increasingly home to a global bourgeoisie and working class, has members of different ethnicities involved in various niches within the metropolitan region as well as transnational networks of devotion, belonging, and economy. These three chapters together explore the urban nature of religious transnationalism as well as its connections to the hermitage at Puttaparthi and the presence of the avatar.

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I am concerned here with the formation of “devotional memory,” the forms and practices of the Sathya Sai Baba movement that represent its ideas of, and continuities with, the past in the present and their links to a possible future. In this effort, I am informed by Maurice Halbwachs (1992), who argues that social groups use various instruments to retrieve their recollections. In the case of religious memories, these instruments may include commemorative cults, rites, texts, their scholastic elaboration, and material traces. New communities take up the traditions of older ones but also rewrite them by changing their position in time and space; they renew them by unusual parallels, by unexpected oppositions, and by combinations; there can be a concentration of events in a single place and a duality of locations across regions (ibid. pp. 219–222). I build on these and other insights (e.g. Connerton 1989; Hervieu-Léger 2000) and examine several instruments of devotional memory in the Sai Baba movement as well as their transformations in time and space. These include the creation of museums like the Eternal Heritage Museum, the pilgrimage site at Puttaparthi, the newsletter of the movement, practices such as bhajans, visual media such as prints and posters, or the medium of the Internet. Sathya Sai Baba, the movement centered on him, and the Sai Baba tradition have signiﬁ cant conjunctures with other religious movements, leaders, texts, and ideas in the contemporary world that are important to recall. For instance, Shirdi Sai Baba was a contemporary of the saint Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–1886) in Bengal. Ramakrishna largely attracted the clerical lower middle class in his own lifetime and it was with Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) that the Ramakrishna tradition became a “religion of urban domesticity” (Sarkar 1998: 285) and successful middle class life. Clear parallels exist with Shirdi Sai Baba, a saint who attracted villagers and an emerging colonial middle class during his lifetime, and Sathya Sai Baba, who is claimed by the middle classes as an avatar in a transnational urban movement. There are further continuities between the Sathya Sai Baba movement and organizations in South Asia like the Arya Samaj, the Theosophical Society, or the Swaminarayan movement, and religions such as Sikhism or the Radhasoami. Again, Sathya Sai Baba’s program of educational reform complements earlier such efforts for youth in the colonial and postcolonial milieu inspired by Vivekananda, J. Krishnamurti (1895–1986), Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), the Arya Samaj, and the Theosophical Society. One is also reminded of M.K. Gandhi (1869–1948), whose ideas of the body, health, education, and modernity in Hind Swaraj and Key to Health (see Alter 2000) ﬁ nd parallels in Sathya Sai Baba’s program

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of individual and social reform. Further aﬁ eld, the Sathya Sai Baba movement today can be compared to several Asian Buddhist movements in the second half of the twentieth century that have also focused on service and this-worldly activity, the awakening of the self and the awakening of society (see Queen and King 1996) or transnational Christian movements like Habitat for Humanity (see Giri 2002) that emphasize voluntary labor. These contrapuntal, colonial, postcolonial, and global references form a recurring theme of this book.

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THE MENDICANT OF SHIRDI

The Visual and the Textual1

Shirdi Sai Baba, a nineteenth century mendicant from the Deccan region of Maharashtra, is a religious fi gure of considerable status in postcolonial South Asia and commands a global devotion in the diaspora. The Hindi blockbuster fi lm, Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), which tells the story of the separation and reconciliation of three brothers (one is raised a Hindu, one Muslim, and one Christian) featured a popular song dedicated to him (“Shirdi Wale Sai Baba”) and he was also the subject of another fi lm, Shirdi Ke Sai Baba (1977)—testament to the popularity of this fi gure in Bombay (now Mumbai), in the Hindi fi lm industry, and for a wider South Asian audience. More recently in 2005, the fi lm company Sagar Arts launched a television serial, Sai Baba, on Star Plus network, based on his life-story. There is even a popular comic book produced by the children’s series, Amar Chitra Katha, called Tales of Sai Baba (1996) and temples are dedicated to Shirdi Sai Baba in cities like Houston or Bangalore. The charisma of Shirdi Sai Baba was transmitted to several gurus and leaders in the decades after his passing away in 1918. In the sections that follow, I rely mainly on textual materials, hagiographies, devotional accounts, and reminiscences to locate Shirdi Sai Baba in his colonial milieu and also to trace the transformation of this mendicant into an icon of the middle classes through the efforts of contemporary devotees and inheritors of his charisma. I will begin, however, with two images of Shirdi Sai Baba (see Figures 2 and 3). Pinney (2004: 8) argues that the visual history of images is something more than simply a mirror of society and that images forge novel identities that are “disjunct from the familiar stories of a non-visual history.” While I acknowledge that the visual is not merely a refl ection of social and

1 Parts of this chapter, now signiﬁ cantly revised, were ﬁ rst published in Srinivas (1999a) and (1999b).

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political reality but constitutive of it as several other scholars have also shown (see Ramaswamy 2003), I would argue that in addition to visuality and inter-ocularity, we need to consider how visual, textual, sensorial, and performative practices interpenetrate each other in a devotional world. In the course of this and other chapters, we will encounter a number of images—religious images meant for worship in stone or marble, calendar art, posters, photographs—but also music, orality, sound, festivals, smells, written accounts, markets, pilgrimage sites, tombs, temples, or publishing houses, all of which produce spaces for a body of devotion. This body of devotion does not coincide with a single religious tradition or nationalism. It is accurate to point out that the rise of mechanically produced prints in the colonial period “created a new ‘iconic’ society” and “a new sense of the nationhood” and that Maha- rashtra and Bengal, the centers of this development in the 1880s–1900s were also “fl ashpoints for early revolutionary Hindu nationalism” (Mitter 2003: 3, 25). However, both of these were also centers for emerging devotional regimes around fi gures such as Shirdi Sai Baba and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa that cannot be easily collapsed into Hindu nationalism. I begin by indexing these images about Shirdi Sai Baba since they alert one to several interpretive strands about his life story in textual discourses and other iconic practices as much as they constitute emerging social worlds. Like his contemporary Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (see Beckerlegge 2000; 2001a), Baba’s several images oscillate between their immersion in local cultures and more abstract deifi cation (as in Amar Akbar Anthony) and were important vehicles in the production of devotion for this saint in two different modes.2 For many of his urban middle-class devotees, the fi rst image of Shirdi Sai Baba that comes to mind is a tall fi gure draped in a single-pieced garment sitting on a stone seat, right leg bent over the left one, his left hand causally resting on the raised foot (see Figure 2). He wears uncolored or white garments, his hair is covered with a white cloth and tied into a knot at the back of his head, and he sports a white beard.

2 Beckerlegge (2000: 113–142; 2001a) shows that the iconography of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was molded by three of ﬁ ve photographs taken of him between 1879 and 1886. Images created by the Ramakrishna Math and Mission resemble the photographs closely; in prints produced by commercial artists, links between Ramakrishna and popular religion emerge rather than the vision of Ramakrishna as a prophet of religious universalism.

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He gazes at the viewer directly, if quizzically. The background is stark and contains no other person or spatial landmark to identify it. In fact, this picture seems removed from any particular cultural location, con- stituting an abstract devotional reality. This is an image often placed on devotees’ altars amidst other deities and gurus. It appears on calendars, in stores, or graces the interiors of three-wheeled auto-rickshaws in India. Cast in marble in some temples, this image can also be dressed in ochre or in vibrant silks, crowned and garlanded in the royal manner of deities with coconuts, fruits, and offerings of incense placed in front of it. Many people would not realize that the original garments were similar to those worn by a faqir (“poor man,” also a term used to refer to a Muslim mystic, Sufi , or mendicant) or other ascetics. Opening a copy of the devotional account of Shirdi Sai Baba—Shri Sai Satcharita—given to my mother, I fi nd a similar rendering by an artist on the frontispiece of its somewhat threadbare cloth cover. Tucked within it is a small pocket calendar with a different representation: a black-and-white picture that could have been based on a photograph of Shirdi Sai Baba. It shows him standing amidst two devotees who are supporting him, one younger than the other but both sporting mous- taches (see Figure 3). A third, whose turbaned face is in the shadows, holds a large umbrella that looks like it is made of cloth. To the far left of Shirdi Sai Baba is another devotee holding a staff and to the far right a small child. Shirdi Sai Baba seems to be resting momentarily against the walls of a mud-brick or stone building. While his garments and head-cloth resemble the fi rst image, he is surrounded by men whose clothing places them in Maharashtra. The setting is clearly rural and seems rather humble. In contrast to the static aura that surrounds the fi rst image, obviously meant for worship as the direct frontal gaze shows, the second is more supple, suggesting the presence of several local histories and requiring the devotee to attend to them. Both of these pictures refer to the latter part of Shirdi Baba’s life but the fi rst has come to dominate the devotional fi eld, at least for the urban middle class, as a mobile signifi er of holiness. The copy of the text given to my mother is the sixth edition of the English Shri Sai Satcharita by N.V. Gunaji adapted from the original Marathi text by Hemadpant.3 G.R. Dabholkar (1859–1929), named

3 While the author, N.V. Gunaji, had not met Shirdi Sai Baba personally, in 1941 he made a pilgrimage to Shirdi and visited various sites associated with the life of Shirdi

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Fig. 2. Seated Shirdi Sai Baba (Poster)

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Fig. 3. Shirdi Sai Baba amidst his devotees (Image on a pocket calendar)

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“Hemadpant” by Shirdi Sai Baba, prayed that he might be permitted to write a book about him.4 Baba, placing his hand on his head and giving him sacred ash (udi), asked him to make a collection of stories, experiences, and talks but reminded him that he was only an instrument and that he, Shirdi Sai Baba, would write his own life (Gunaji 1972: 6; Kher 1999: 23). The various chapters of the Shri Sai Satcharita were based on materials largely collected during the last eight years of Shirdi Sai Baba’s life. They began appearing serially in the Sai Leela magazine after the passing away of Sai Baba in 1918 and became a book by 1929.5 As Warren (2004) shows, while this is considered an authoritative biography, it is important to recall that the author was a Brahmin with little or no detailed knowledge of Sufi sm or Islam. Although he tried to record conscientiously the life of his master, these aspects of Shirdi Sai Baba’s life do not receive much treatment. The Shri Sai Satcharita, meant to be a religious text for reading, hearing, and refl ection, contains within it many temporalities that it handles deftly and insouciantly. It includes verses that are invocations of praise and an almost abject incoherence when confronted with the power and grace of the saint; at the same time, it is full of anecdotal details about persons from the clerical underbelly of the colonial apparatus as well as the more successful new middle classes from Maharashtra and elsewhere, who sought out Shirdi Sai Baba. Some persons, like Hemadpant, straddled both strata in their lifetime. The text registers the ambivalence about Shirdi Sai Baba’s identity articulated by different devotees that intersected in complex ways with their religious and sectarian affi liations. Two crucial issues concerned these devotees: whether Shirdi Sai Baba was born a Hindu, a Brahmin or a Muslim, and what tradition he represented. For instance, Hemad- pant hyperbolically refers to Shirdi Sai Baba as the true teacher (sadguru) or avatar although he admits that Sai Baba himself would say that “I

Sai Baba. A couple of years later, the editor of the Sai Leela magazine requested him to render the chapters of the Marathi Shri Sai Satcharita into English for the benefi t of South Indian devotees and this rapidly grew into a complete book by 1944 (see Gunaji 1972). This is a reinterpretation of the Marathi text rather than an exact translation. Since I do not read Marathi, I rely in this chapter on Indira Kher’s English translation of the Marathi text (Kher 1999). 4 Hemadpant belonged to a poor Brahmin family from a small town in Thana district, Maharashtra. He had worked as a schoolmaster, an English clerk, a special offi cer on famine relief works in Gujarat, and fi nally as a Resident magistrate in Bombay in 1910, at which time he met Shirdi Sai Baba (see Gunaji 1972). 5 The actual writing of the book began around 1922–23, was completed in 1929, and consisted of 53 chapters of 9,308 verses (Kher 1999).

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am a slave in Allah’s service” (Kher 1999: 371). A manuscript left by Abdul Baba (1871–1954), Shirdi Sai Baba’s Muslim disciple and servant, suggests that his master was familiar with Islam, Sufi sm, and various Sufi lineages in the sub-continent and the Deccan and was probably a Sufi mystic (see Warren 2004). The Shri Sai Satcharita states that no one knew defi nitely whether Sai Baba was Hindu or Muslim. He practised yoga, encouraged the building of temples and the celebration of Id, Muharram, and the Rama Navami festival, and enjoyed wrestling-bouts. He advocated circumcision, lived in a mosque, and ate meat and fi sh with other faqirs. He also sat in front of a sacred fi re and Hindus fell prostrate before him. Ascetics, mendicants, renouncers, and others came to see him; king and beggar received equal welcome (Gunaji 1972: 38–39; Kher 1999: 104–110, 152). His polyvalent persona is even made explicit by Ganapat Rao Dat- tatreya Sahasrabuddhe (1868–1962), popularly known by Shirdi Baba’s devotees as “Das Ganu,” who seemed to see Sai Baba as a manifestation of Vithoba (Vitthala), the resident deity of Pandharpur, an important focus for the Maharashtrian devotional tradition.6 One of his verses begins, “Shirdi is my Pandharpur and the deity worshipped there is Sai Baba” (Shirdi majhe Pandharipura Sai Baba Rama vara). In spite of his clear preferences, Das Ganu admits in another verse “Ganu is the broomstick of your mosque and you are our master Sai Baba” (Apane masidakaa jhaadoo Ganu hai malik hamaare thuma Baaba Sai), suggesting Baba’s links with Islam (both verses are translated and cited in NS 1994, Vol. II: 138, 140). It is not surprising, then, that Shirdi Sai Baba has been compared to Kabir, the archetype of a multivocal heritage.7 It is likely, as War- ren (2004) argues persuasively, that he emerged out of a Deccani Sufi tradition. Whatever his heritage, after he took up residence at Shirdi, he aroused much speculation among villagers and devotees and debates about his identity continued well after his passing away.

6 Das Ganu hailed from a Brahmin family in Akolner village, Maharashtra, and was employed for some time in the police service. He went to see Baba in 1890 and settled in Nanded (Maharashtra) after 1903. He spent his time performing devotional songs and religious discourses throughout the region, including at the annual celebrations at Shirdi from 1914 onwards (Gunaji 1972). 7 As Lorenzen (1987) suggests, we know nothing about Kabir the man except for the fact that he belonged to a family of Muslim weavers in Banaras. Scholars are divided as to his dates (between 1448–50 and 1504–1518). He represents the culmination of the tradition of saints with elements drawn from Vaishnava Bhakti, Nathpanthi traditions and Suﬁ sm. See also Rigopoulos (1993: 298–305) on the connections between Baba and Kabir, for instance, the fact that both used to deﬁ ne themselves as the servant of God or as faqir.

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The Faqir Who Came to Shirdi

At the time of Baba’s arrival in the middle of the nineteenth century, Shirdi was a little village in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra (see Map 2) with a cluster of homes surrounded by agricultural ﬁ elds. It had between 80–200 houses and the nearest villages were Nimgaon and Rahata, the latter featuring a permanent market (NS 1994, Vol. I: 255; Rigopoulos 1993: 59). In keeping with accounts of Maharashtra at this point of time (O’Hanlon 1985; Omvedt 1976), one might assume that many villagers belonged to the cultivating castes with few Maratha or elite families; there were probably a number of castes with occupational specializations—goldsmiths, shepherds, potters, and others.8 The Muslims, who comprised about ten percent of the population, worked mainly as artisans or agricultural laborers. There were three temples in the village—one dedicated to Maruti, one to Khandoba, and the other to Vittala—in addition to the mosque which was in a poor condition (NS 1994, Vol. I: 256–257; Rigopoulos 1993: 59–60). According to the Shri Sai Satcharita, Baba ﬁ rst appeared to residents of Shirdi as a lad of sixteen sitting in meditation under a neem tree (probably around 1854).9 Devotees had few details about Sai Baba’s life or birth prior to his Shirdi stay and this led to various conjectures. On one occasion, Baba is said to have told Mhalsapati, the priest of the Khandoba temple and a close devotee, that he was a Brahmin from the village of Pathri and had been entrusted to a faqir in his infancy (Gunaji 1972: 39n).10 It is popularly believed that he was raised by a

8 An article in the Sai Leela magazine in 1932 by a visitor to Shirdi in 1910 states that the village had about 400 houses and 2,568 people: the Hindus were divided into the Brahmins, Marwaris, Marathas, Dhangars (shepherds), Malis (growers of fruits and vegetables), Sonars (goldsmiths), Sutars (carpenters), Lohars (blacksmiths), Kumbhars (potters), Parits (washermen), Mahars, Mangs, Chamars (leather workers and tanners), Kolis, Bhils (scheduled tribes), Guravs and Vadars (cited in Kamath and Kher 1991: 85). 9 This date is subject to speculation (see Rigopoulos 1993: 45–46). 10 Narasimha Swami’s account (NS 1994, Vol. I: 10–16), fi rst published in 1955 and based on research conducted after the author’s fi rst visit to Shirdi in 1936, also states that Sai Baba claimed that his Brahmin parents handed him to a faqir and his wife while he was still a child. After the death of the faqir, his wife left the child with Gopalrao Deshmukh. Swami Sai Sharan Anand, a devotee of Sai Baba who visited him fi rst in 1911 and lived with him for eleven months in 1913, corroborates this claim that Sai Baba regarded himself as a Brahmin (Sai Sharan Anand 1997: 10; 1986: 11–13). Sai Baba apparently remarked to Sai Sharan Anand that his guru’s name was Roshan Shah Miya (possibly indicating that he was a Muslim or Sufi ). Sai Sharan Anand

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Map 2. Sites connected with Shirdi Sai Baba and the inheritors of his charisma in India (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman)

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faqir and his wife after his birth parents abandoned him. He was then placed by the faqir’s wife at about the age of fi ve with a teacher called Venkusha (or Venkusa) of Selu (about fi fteen kilometers northwest of Pathri where he was supposedly born). After some years spent with his teacher, he arrived at Shirdi (Warren 2004: 35–49). Whether or not he was born a Brahmin or a Muslim, Baba referred to his master, guru and God obliquely as the faqir in various parables in the Shri Sai Satcharita. It is generally agreed that his teacher was a Sufi or that he was under direct Sufi infl uence for a considerable period of time. The relationship of Baba to Sufi traditions in Maharashtra and Bijapur (in Karnataka) has also been suggested (Shepherd 1985).11 Certainly a number of Sufi brotherhoods and ascetics existed in that region and Baba’s dress and certain practices allow this possibility.12 Pathri, Aurangabad, Khulabad, and the Deccan region where Shirdi Sai Baba spent his childhood and youth were home to Qadiri, Chishti, and other Sufi brotherhoods (see Warren 2004). Shirdi Sai Baba is also regarded as a qutb (axis of the universe) or Perfect Master and a wali, friend of God (Warren 2004: 62–66). Shirdi Sai Baba stayed for about three years in Shirdi and then disappeared for some time.13 He appeared the second time in 1858 near the Khandoba temple with the marriage party of a Muslim gentleman

states, however, that this was a symbolic statement and referred to the sun, light, and the self-effulgent spirit (Sai Sharan Anand 1997: 33–34; 1986: 17–20). 11 See also Eaton (1978) for a discussion of Sufi s in Bijapur. 12 Rigopoulos (1993: 284–297) also points out that if one compares Baba’s life and teachings with the classical Sufi spiritual path, three stations of the path are attested in Baba’s life—poverty ( faqr), patience (sabr), and surrender (tawakkul). Two other features—the practice of dance and music (sama) and the recollection of the name of Allah (dhikr) common to many Sufi orders—are also evidenced in his life. 13 The period between his two appearances at Shirdi has been discussed. Shepherd claims that Das Ganu mentions that Sai Baba maintained “an itinerant life until he came to a mountain in the area of Aurangabad. He retired into a cave here, leading a severely ascetic existence for some years” (Shepherd 1985: 11). Another report by Abdul Karim Abdulla based on statements of his teacher Meher Baba suggests that the cave was near Khulabad, a small town close to Aurangabad. According to Shepherd, Meher Baba claimed that the master of Sai Baba was Hazrat Zarzarizarbaksha, a medieval Sufi of the Deccan, by which he meant that the Hazrat was his teacher in an earlier life (Shepherd 1985: 11–12). Sai Sharan Anand, by contrast, does not maintain the theory of the two appearances. He states that Sai Baba told him that he was eight years old when he left his parents; he came to Shirdi thereafter. He found his master and served him for twelve years. After his teacher’s passing away, he entombed him near the neem tree in an underground cave or cellar. Sai Baba did penance there for several years and when he emerged he made the neem tree his abode, which is when the villagers of Shirdi fi rst caught sight of him (Sai Sharan Anand 1986: 16–23).

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called Chand Patil (see Gunaji 1972: 22–23; Kher 1999: 74–75).14 The temple to Khandoba, a folk deity regarded as Shiva but also associated with Muslims (Warren 2004: 44), was in the hands of a priest, the gold- smith Mhalsapati. Mhalsapati is said to have addressed him with the words “Ya Sai” (welcome Sai). The term “Sai” is probably of Persian origin and means “holy one” and could refer to a faqir while “Baba” or “father” indicates a senior or older man (see Rigopoulos 1993: 3). According to the testimony of the Shri Sai Satcharita (Gunaji 1972: 23–27; Kher 1999: 61, 75–81; Warren 2004: 45), after his second appearance Shirdi Sai Baba spent his time in the company of other ascetics and seekers, living in a resting place or traveling lodge for faqirs. It was there that he tied jingling bells around his ankles and danced to music. In his young days he dressed like an athlete and did not shave his head. He would go to Rahata and bring back fl owers with him, and he created a garden with his own labor. Later, after being defeated in a wrestling match, he started wearing a long robe (kafni), a loin cloth, and a piece of cloth tied around his head. The dress was adopted, states Rigopoulos (1993: 67), in a spirit of humility and identifi cation with the poor, reminding us of a saying ascribed to the Prophet Mohammed that “poverty is my pride” (al-fakr fakhri). He used to sit beneath a neem tree during the day and in the afternoon wander around the vicinity of Shirdi. He was persuaded to live in a dilapidated mosque that was repaired only around 1911 or 1912. In the mosque, he received many seekers, probably Sufi s and faqirs like him. Sai Baba’s belongings at this time consisted of a pipe, tobacco, a tin pot, the robe that he wore, and a staff. The cloth on his head was not washed for weeks and he wore nothing on his feet. From the time that the mosque became a center of his life, Shirdi Sai Baba came to be identifi ed with the production of ash (udi) from his wood fi re (dhuni) that he kept constantly burning. He is described as sitting on a sack cloth in front of the fi re in silent contemplation or repeating sacred formulae, practices that link him also to the Sufi and Nath tradition (Rigopoulos 1993: 68). He seems to have chosen Allah Malik as his formula for the constant remembrance of God’s name (dhikr). This may have been derived, states Rigopoulos (1993: 293–294), from al-Malik, the fourth of the traditional list of 99 names of Allah, signifying that Allah is the universal king or from Malik al-Mulk, the eighty-fourth of the 99 names signifying that Allah is the

14 This date is subject to speculation (see Rigopoulos 1993: 45–46).

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possessor of royal power or the kingdom. In Marathi, as in Hindustani, malik meant the lord, master, or owner. The year 1886 marks an important threshold in his life in Shirdi (Warren 2004: 46). Following an attack of asthma, he told Mhalsapati that he was going to die and not to rouse or abandon him. Three days later, life returned to his body (Kher 1999: 727–729). Sometime after this event, another turning point occurred: Shirdi Sai Baba would go around asking for oil from the village shopkeepers to keep the lights in the mosque burning. Once, it is said, they decided not to give him any; undeterred, he put some water into his tin-pot containing a few drops of oil and drank some of it. After consecrating it in this manner, he ﬁ lled the lamps with water from the tin-pot and the lamps burned all night (Gunaji 1972: 27–28; Kher 1999: 81–82). This is regarded as a crucial moment in Sai Baba’s career when the crazy faqir came to be regarded as a saint or god-man (NS 1994, Vol. I: 20–22). Some assign the date of this event to 1892 (Kamath and Kher 1991: 8). It appears certain that the years between 1886 and 1900 witnessed an expansion in Sai Baba’s reputation as a miracle worker based on the testimonies of various pilgrims who found their way to Shirdi, including Das Ganu and Narayan Govind Chandorkar (Rigopoulos 1993: 99; Shepherd 1985: 47). The two had somewhat different relationships to the colonial apparatus. Das Ganu, once a police employee and later a singer of devotional songs and religious discourses (kirtan), seems closer to the rural literati. Chandorkar, a Deputy Collector and scholar of Vedanta, had achieved greater success and mobility within the colonial bureaucracy. According to the Shri Sai Satcharita, Chandorkar by his personal contacts and Das Ganu by his devotional songs spread Sai Baba’s fame in the Bombay Presidency. In fact, it was Chandorkar who was responsible for Hemadpant arriving to see Shirdi Sai Baba for the ﬁ rst time in 1910 (Gunaji 1972: 84; Kher 1999: 25–27, 204). Acts of healing were central to his fame. Villagers were already known to come to Sai Baba for medicines he used to make, for he was known as an herbalist or healer even though his methods were sometimes unorthodox. Once, Bala Ganpat Shimpi came to him with a malignant type of malaria. Sai Baba told him to give a black dog some rice mixed with curds in front of the Lakshmi temple and that it would rid him of his malaria. Some healings were produced by personally taking on the illnesses. Mrs. Kharpade’s son contracted bubonic plague and she approached Sai Baba fearing that her son would die. Baba lifted up

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his kafni, showed to all present four huge swellings there, and said that he was suffering for his devotee. On another occasion, while sitting at his dhuni, he suddenly thrust his hand into the fi re before his devotees dragged him back. Sai Baba explained that the wife of a blacksmith was working the bellows of a furnace at some distant place. Her husband called her, and forgetting her child, she ran to him. The child fell into the furnace and Sai Baba was thrusting his hand into the furnace to save him. At other times, healing and cures were produced by mere speech. Bapusaheb Booty once suffered from dysentery and vomiting; Sai Baba sent for him, and waving a fi nger at him, ordered the vomiting to stop. Baba even controlled the elements: once there was a terrible storm at Shirdi with thick black clouds and heavy rain. All the animals and men gathered at Sai Baba’s mosque for shelter. Sai Baba went outside and addressed the storm in a mighty voice. In a short while, the rain abated and then stopped. Others were healed though his mere glance or presence. Ash that Baba distributed from the sacred fi re was also used as a cure: to remove a scorpion’s poison, heal a woman of the plague, rid someone of fi ts, assist a woman’s delivery, or increase the food served to guests. Among his other powers were clairvoyance, the ability to grant children to infertile couples, and guidance of disciples on their spiritual paths. He also knew the previous births of human beings, animals, and even insects (Gunjai 1972: 40–84, 181–204; Kher 1999: 25–27, 108–113, 201–211, 532–588; Warren 2004: 67–74). Shirdi Sai Baba left no writings but his ways of instruction included analogy, example, numerical symbolism, dreams, or jokes. To some he recommended study, meditation, the reading of scriptures or simply chanting the names of Vishnu or Allah. Others he sent to various temples and saints. He explained the meaning of certain sacred formulae personally or in visions and dreams. He apparently even demonstrated knowledge of Sanskrit in his interpretation of verses from the Bhagavad Gita. There appears to be little record of specifi c Sufi or Islamic texts or his comments on the Quran. However, Warren (2004) shows, based on a manuscript written by Abdul Baba, that he had knowledge of Islam and Sufi sm and probably provided instruction to other Muslim seekers and faqirs who may have sought him out as a master. Above all, he emphasized devotion to the guru and often spoke about his own devotion to his faqir.

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The Transition to Congregational Worship

Shirdi Sai Baba resisted attempts to worship him or most kinds of routinized or regular ritual for most of his life at Shirdi. From time to time, individual devotion occurred with sandal paste and fl owers, music, or offerings of betel-nut, each devotee according to his faith, although sometimes it made Baba exceedingly angry (Gunaji 1972: 64–65; Kher 1999: 169). In 1897, the transformation from individual to collective worship began. Gopalrao Gund, a devotee who had been blessed with a child by Shirdi Sai Baba, suggested that an urs (festival marking the death of a Muslim saint or union with God) be held at Shirdi (Gunaji 1972: 32–33; Kher 1999: 93–94). Public celebrations thus began while Shirdi Sai Baba was still alive with a sandalwood paste procession, incense, fl ags, and wrestling matches; around 1908 or 1909 other rituals were created (NS 1994, Vol. I: 36–39; Rigopoulos 1993: 140–144; Warren 2004: 120–121). K.G. Bhishma created a plan for worship in the mode of that conducted at Pandharpur. Megha, a Brah- min worshipper of Shiva, was appointed to be the priest carrying on the congregational worship. Ramakrishna Ayi, a widow devotee, fi tted Baba and his mosque as if Baba were a royal deity and worship with silver whisks, maces, candelabras, a palanquin, and a horse became a common feature. From 1909, as part of collective worship, large crowds would gather near a set of rooms (chavadi) close to the mosque and the practice of taking Baba in a procession from the mosque began; he used to spend every other night in the chavadi (Kher 1999: 615–625). The Shri Sai Satcharita also notes that in 1912, certain devotees decided to hold a Rama Navami festival (to celebrate the birth of Rama) along with the urs that had been celebrated since 1897. With Baba’s permission and participation, this became an annual feature at Shirdi, the numbers increasing from about 5,000–7,000 persons to about 75,000 in some years (Gunaji 1972: 34–36; Kher 1999: 94–99). In the early days, Sai Baba would go around with his tin pot and a rectangular piece of cloth begging for food. All he received would be thrown into an earthen pot from which dogs, cats, crows, and cows also ate. Sometimes he would distribute food, buy various items from the bazaar, grind the ingredients, and cook sweet rice or rice with meat in the open courtyard of the mosque. To see whether the food was ready, he would thrust his bare arm into the boiling cauldron and churn the food. Afterwards, however, when large crowds began to gather and people would bring all kinds of food-offerings, these would be sancti-

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fi ed by Baba and then distributed among them (Gunaji 1972: 47–48; Kher 1999: 125–127, 628–641). From about 1908, Sai Baba began the practice of collecting sacrifi cial fees (dakshina) from pilgrims who began to fl ock to Shirdi (Rigopoulos 1993: 144). He demanded money from people and often specifi ed the exact sum he wanted; from others, he refused their offerings. He stated that he only took from those who were formerly indebted to his faqir. Stories from the Shri Sai Satcharita suggest that Shirdi Sai Baba’s asking and receiving dakshina constituted an invisible moral exchange between devotee and teacher: “He regarded money, like everything else, symbolically, and those who gave him it were laying up a better treasure for themselves” (Osborne 1957: 72). Shirdi Sai Baba’s requests for dakshina were based on various reasons or explanations: as Allah’s will; to convey a spiritual teaching using numerical symbolism; as a pledge or prophecy of corresponding future gain; a condition of indigence for the donor and a call to renounce the world; to acknowledge a mental desire on the part of the devotee; because the person was in debt to someone else or had acquired the money dishonestly; or to restore some debt of one’s actions in this or a previous life (Rigopoulos 1993: 145–149). The amount he asked from these devotees eventually became equivalent to the Provincial Governor’s income and the authorities intended to levy an income tax; but, by the evening of each day, he had distributed the money to the devotees and he was once again a poor faqir (NS 1994, Vol. I: 39–40). The shift from the public perception of Baba as a faqir to his congregational worship as saint, guru, or deity was paralleled by a shift in the economy of the Godavari river region in which Shirdi lies. Until the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, Ahmednagar district was stricken by frequent droughts and epidemics of cholera and the plague; with the construction of the Godavari and the Pravara canals and the government’s active promotion of cane cultivation, this region was transformed into a prosperous sugar zone (see Rigopoulos 1993: 59). Meanwhile, the city of Bombay was changing from a trading center to a manufacturing magnet drawing labor from a vast hinterland (Markovits 1995). In Maharashtra, between 1901–1951, the share of agriculture declined and the shares of manufacturing and the services increased, along with employment in administrative, medical, and legal services (Krishnamurthy 1982). Except for a setback reported by the 1911 Census, the number of towns and the proportion of the urban population steadily increased between 1891–1941 (Visaria and Visaria

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1982). There is ample evidence in the Shri Sai Satcharita that clerks and offi cials of the district, traders, businessmen, doctors, pleaders, advocates, magistrates, commission agents, priests, Muslims, Brahmins, Kay- asthas, Prarthana-Samajists, Agnihotris, Hajis, Parsis, Irani gentlemen, and Indian National Congress members began to visit Shirdi. Even the nationalist leader, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, is said to have visited Shirdi in 1917, perhaps due to the infl uence of G.S. Kharpade, an Indian National Congress party leader (Rigopoulos 1993: 171, 227–228). The activity space of the devotional community included Pandharpur, Nasik, Nanded, Thane, Bombay, Pune, Nagpur, Amraoti (Amravati), Kalyan, Jamner, Sholapur, Bikaner, Madras (now Chennai), or Goa (see Map 2). Most of these bureaucratic and business strata were urban, and many of the Hindus seemed to belong to Brahmin, Kayasta and Bania communities. They had some knowledge of English, were in contact with centers in other parts of the country through the press and the railway, were exposed to the benefi ts of “modern” education, as well as opportunities opened up by the British Raj’s presence. Shirdi Sai Baba’s attraction for these upwardly mobile strata may be comparable to that of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa in colonial Bengal. Ramakrishna “subverted the distinctions between adult and child, male and female, work and play, which the ‘civilizing’ mission of the west was making more rigid” (Sarkar 1998: 303), a subversion particularly attractive for those excluded from independent entrepreneurship, political and military offi ce, and relegated to lowly clerical jobs, bourgeois time, and discipline. Shirdi Sai Baba’s polyvalent personality and support of several traditions proved to be a powerful draw for emerging middle classes, providing categories and practices that could be interpreted by many communities and traditions. At the same time, his acts of healing and miracles contravened or interrogated bourgeois rationality that exerted increasing power over these classes. Their contact with Shirdi Sai Baba was largely restricted to the last decade of his life. On 28th September 1918, in the Muslim month of Muharram, Sai Baba had an attack of fever. In the days that followed he stopped his morning peregrinations and sat in the mosque. He sent away several of his devotees to their houses although some of them remained close by. After giving nine rupees to one of his female devotees, Laxmibai Shinde, he passed away. According to the Shri Sai Satcharita, he appears to have given indications several years previous to this moment that Vijayadashami (the tenth day of the autumn “nine- night” navaratri festival) would be the time of his passing (Kher 1999:

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690–704). It appears that, sensing his death was near, he sent word to two faqirs in Aurangabad, Shamsuddin Mea and Bannemian, request- ing that certain rituals be performed such as the feeding of the poor (Warren 2004: 343). A dispute arose as to where he should be buried: some of the Mus- lims wished him to rest in an open piece of land in Shirdi while some Hindus preferred a devotee’s building where a Krishna image was to have been placed (apparently, Baba had indicated that he would come to stay there). The dispute was settled in a manner favorable to Hindu devotees and Sai Baba’s body was interred in the building (Gunaji 1972: 230–238; Kher 643–658; 690–737). At his death, he had only Rs.16 and no property (NS 1994, Vol. II: 312). The tomb was covered with a cloth on top of which fl ower offerings were made and a picture of the saint was also placed nearby. For a few years, Abdul Baba became the custodian of the tomb. His authority was challenged by a court order creating the Shirdi Sai Sanstan, a trust formed by the order of the Ahmednagar District Court in the early 1920s. In 1952, a couple of years before Abdul Baba’s death, the Sanstan installed a marble image of Shirdi Sai Baba behind the tomb and a few years later, it sat on a silver throne beneath an umbrella (Gunaji 1972: xvi; Warren 2004: 346–347). Although Rigopoulos (1993: 241) remarks that Sai Baba’s burial within the building constructed by Booty “brought to completion the process of Hinduization of the saint,” and Warren (2004) argues that the Sufi aspects of Baba’s identity and life were largely eclipsed by “the Hindu embrace,” one might argue that there is still a rich oral tradition that regards him as a Sufi or connected to other Sufi ascetics. Some years ago, when I commented to a Kutchi Memon friend at the tomb of a Qadiri pir in Bangalore about the saffronization of Shirdi Sai Baba in poster art (especially through the color of his clothing), he remarked that this was not unusual because many Sufi s in the Qadiri tradition also wore this color and Baba was a Sufi . Today, his body lies in a tomb in Booty’s building and behind it is the seated image made of Italian marble that is reproduced in most popular renditions of Baba on calendars, in other temples, and in photographs. However, Shirdi also contains reminders of Baba’s varied heritage within its sacred geography such as the neem tree under which he sat, the pillar against which he used to rest in the mosque, the mosque itself (known as Dwarakamayi), the fi re he used to burn, and various other objects and sites associated with his life. The economy of pilgrimage in

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Shirdi today is dominated by the Shirdi Sai Sanstan, which has become a vast organizational network run by a Board of Trustees with hotels, rest-houses, the Sai Leela magazine, and other publications. The constituency of pilgrims is still culturally diverse and Shirdi is believed to be a place where miracles once happened and still happen. Many who visit Shirdi believe that Baba continues to “speak from his tomb” and immediacy of contact with that sacred site, especially through touch or sight, is considered a source of blessing.

The Transmission of Shirdi Sai Baba’s Charisma

Two fi gures who had met Shirdi Sai Baba—Upasni Maharaj and Meher Baba—subsequently went on to become pan-Indian spiritual leaders in their own right and their careers spanned the movement from a colonial to a postcolonial milieu in South Asia. They appear with some frequency in works dealing with Shirdi Sai Baba and created important pathways for the transmission of Shirdi Sai Baba’s charisma, one in a Vedantic mode and another in largely Sufi terms, in the transitional decades from the 1920s onwards. Upasni Maharaj was born Kashinath Govindrao Upasni in 1870 as a child of a Brahmin couple at Satana in Maharashtra (see Map 2).15 He received training in Vedanta from his grandfather and tried several times to follow the ascetic life at a young age. His parents tried to counter this tendency by marrying him early to a girl who unfor- tunately passed away suddenly. At sixteen his parents pressed him to marry again, but realizing eventually that his second marriage weighed heavily on him, they gave him permission to leave home. He applied himself to a course of spiritual discipline that resulted eventually in a state of illumination in a cave near Nasik in 1899. He returned to Satana in 1900, but lost several members of his family including his second wife and was pressed into marrying a third time. He began to practice as an Ayurvedic doctor, fi rst in Satana and then in Amraoti (Amravati) where he established a nursing-home. His experiences with spiritual practices led to acute breathing diffi culties that plagued him

15 This account follows Shepherd’s biography (1985: 83–142) of Upasni Maharaj. Like his account of Shirdi Sai Baba, it relies heavily on interpretations by those who were connected with Meher Baba. See also NS and Subbarao (1966).

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for several years and prompted travels to visit several doctors, gurus, and yogis including the sage Narayan Maharaj and Kulkarni Maha- raj. The latter advised him to see Sai Baba of Shirdi, an idea that he initially rejected since he thought Sai Baba was a Muslim. Traveling to meet Narayan Maharaj, who seems to have bestowed some special blessing on him, he was urged by Kulkarni Maharaj again to seek out Sai Baba. He arrived at Shirdi in 1911. Although at ﬁ rst he tried to leave Shirdi several times, he was drawn back to Sai Baba and eventually accepted his supervision. Sai Baba seems to have stipulated that Upasni was to stay at Shirdi for four years in Vithoba’s temple (as he referred to the Khandoba temple on the outskirts of the village) and Upasni made his abode there. Some of the villagers regarded him as a saint, others as a seeker, while others were unaware of his presence. Sai Baba is said to have told Gustadji Hansotia, “I have given Maharaj everything. Whatever he is, he is mine. There is no spiritual difference between him and me” (Shepherd 1985: 106). This statement suggested to some that he was an heir of Shirdi Sai Baba’s charisma. Upasni Maharaj left Shirdi in 1916 and for some time set up his residence in Kharagpur in Bengal. He moved into the Untouchable quarter of the city, choosing to live with a Mahar and his wife. He had already begun to attract devotees from different religions although his lifestyle sometimes tested the mettle of more orthodox caste Hindus. He left Kharagpur in mid-1916 for Nagpur and arrived ﬁ nally in Shirdi where he stayed in the Khandoba temple again. This time, a large number of people sought him out and he began to give discourses couched in Hindu categories. After a stay of about three months, he left in 1917 to arrive at Sakori, a small village south of Shirdi, and made a burial ground his hermitage (ashram). He returned to Shirdi only once in 1924 after the passing of Shirdi Sai Baba. His main constituency was Brahmin and towards the latter part of his life, he conceded to the performance of more rituals and construction of buildings including a large temple in the hermitage. On festival days in the Hindu calendar, large crowds would gather in Sakori to participate in the rituals. He also strongly advocated a program of social reform for depressed classes and condemned the caste system; in this sense, many of his ideas paralleled those of Mahatma Gandhi (the two had apparently met around 1931). Among his devotees were several that had known Shirdi Baba, including Bapusaheb Jog and Gustadji

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Hansotia. He taught non-dualism and devotion and alternated between periods of activity and long confi nements within a cage, sometimes lasting over a year. He also began to travel after 1927 to major cities in India like Hyderabad, Bombay, and Indore. He supported women’s spiritual lives, creating a community of young women and girls at Sakori, female novices who were known as kanyas. At age 68, faced by interference and opposition to the kanya community, he married six of them, an episode that created a scandal. He remained celibate, however, and continued to live an ascetic life separate from the novices. After 14 months of his last confi nement in 1940–1941, he left Sakori for his birthplace but returned the next day. He passed away on December 24, 1941. One of kanyas, Godavari Mai, whom he had designated as his successor, came to head the community. A young man, later to be known as Meher Baba, had met both Shirdi Sai Baba and Upasni Maharaj and stayed for some years at Sakori while Upasni Maharaj was still living. Meher Baba was born in Pune in 1894 as Merwan Sheriar Irani (see Map 2).16 His parents were Zoroastrians, who had migrated to India, and his father, familiar with Persian and Arabic, was said to have been a dervish in Iran. This gave Merwan a familiarity with some of the literatures in these languages, such as the poetry of Rumi and Hafi z, alongside Gujarati, Urdu and English (Shepherd 1986: 16). Merwan entered the Deccan College in Pune in 1911 and in 1913 encountered the Sufi , Hazrat Babajan, who infl uenced him strongly. In 1914, he seems to have undergone a period in which he had no consciousness of his body, a condition that was attributed to Babajan’s infl uence (Shepherd 1986: 17–18). Babajan called him to her one day as he was cycling past the tree that she had made her abode. She kissed him on his forehead and for nine months he was in a special state that began the process of unveiling (1914–1921), when fi ve Perfect Masters—Hazrat Babajan, Sai Baba, Upasni Maharaj, Tajuddin Baba and Narayan Maharaj—worked with Merwan to make him aware of his special status (Haynes 1989: 37–38).17

16 Meher Baba has been written about widely; Shepherd (1986: 248–297) gives an annotated bibliography of written and oral sources on Meher Baba. An early account of Meher Baba is given in Brunton (1985 [1934]: 46–65, 253–262) describing his links with Upasni Maharaj and Hazrat Babajan. Another account, that notices his mark on the American landscape, is Needleman (1984 [1970]: 75–102). 17 The idea that there were ﬁ ve Perfect Masters (at the head of a larger group of ﬁ fty-six invisible ones) is also suggested by Adriel (1947: 49–50). She states that the

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After Babajan’s kiss, around 1915, Merwan went to see Shirdi Sai Baba, who, on seeing him, shouted “Parvardigar” or preserver and protector of all (Haynes 1989: 38). Meher Baba is said to have given Sai Baba the position of the head of an “invisible hierarchy” of saints or qutub-e-irshad using Sufi terminology (Shepherd 1985: 78): One might take it that Meher Baba had tapped something of the eclipsed Muslim repertory at Shirdi . . . Meher Baba himself connected with the ascetic ingredients of Sai Baba’s Shirdi milieu; his close disciple Gustadji Hansotia (a Zoroastrian) had been one of the more ascetic pupils of Sai Baba, and inevitably in closer contact than householders with the fl oating population of Muslim ascetics who visited Shirdi. (Shepherd 1985: 12) Meher Baba also visited Upasni Maharaj from 1915 onwards up until 1921. Upasni Maharaj, on meeting him, struck him with a stone that hit him on the exact spot that Babajan had kissed. In 1921, Upasni declared that Meher Baba was an avatar (Haynes 1989: 39). Upasni is said to have told Gustadji Hansotia to henceforth serve Merwan, the true teacher of this age (Shepherd 1986: 19). From 1922 began a period in which Merwan chose to lead an ascetic existence and he gathered a group of forty men around him. By this time he was known as Meher Baba. He also adopted a vow of complete silence in 1925 and never again spoke a single word, communicating only with an alphabet board. Around this time, he created an ashram near Ahmednagar called Meherabad. He closed it down in 1926 but returned to that site the following year to start an inter-religious educational institution called Meher Ashram for over a hundred boys: this lasted from 1927–1928. This was also closed down and in 1929 he left for Iran. On his return, he moved from Meherabad to Nasik where his multi-religious community maintained a simple lifestyle (Shepherd 1986: 19–24). In the 1930s, he undertook various travels outside India to Europe, the United States, China, Africa and the Middle East (Haynes 1989: 40–44). The most signifi cant aspect of his work during this period, commencing in 1936, was his attempt to contact and serve hundreds of God-intoxicated persons (masts) and other pilgrims who were in advanced states of consciousness. They worked with him sometimes in mast communities that he convened and sometimes outside it (Haynes 1989: 46–52; Shepherd 1986: 30–35). In 1941, he met his former

head of these is a supreme master who, during times of crisis, appears to the world as a saviour or avatar. This avatar was Meher Baba.

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teacher Upasni for the last time and in 1944, he shifted the ashram to a new location called Meherazad. The mast work continued until the “Great Seclusion” that lasted for forty days in 1949, after which a phase known as the “New Life” began (Shepherd 1986: 35–37). Disbanding all the institutions, he and some companions left in 1949 to travel to different sites in India such as Banaras, Sarnath, and Hardwar. He characterized the New Life as one of the seeker and servant of God, an enactment of a way of life that was marked by begging, walking great distances, physical labor, and seeking out masts, ascetics, and others in the role of a servant. At the end of this period, he returned to the “Old Life” including staying in Meherazad (Haynes 1989: 58; Shepherd 1986: 37–41). In the 1950s, during the “Free Life” that contained many sub-phases, he made himself accessible to thousands of people in India by giving mass darshan and also visited many holy shrines. He traveled overseas to the United States in addition to visiting Europe and Australia. He also began to call his followers and companions “lovers.” A 1953 message emphasized that prior to his death he would have to suffer humiliation, apparent defeat, and violent death and that this would precede the victory of truth. The manifestation of divine truth would accompany the breaking of his silence (Shepherd 1986: 43–48). Seclusion became more frequent after 1954. In spite of his decreased contact with most people, his following in India and among Americans and Europeans grew in the 1960s. On July 30th, 1968 he declared: “My work is done. It is completed one hundred per cent to my satisfaction” (Shepherd 1986: 63). He died after suffering for some months on January 31, 1969 and was buried in a tomb on Meherabad Hill.

The Sai Baba Tradition

What is the relationship between Upasni Maharaj, Meher Baba, and Shirdi Sai Baba? Was Upasni a disciple or direct successor of Shirdi Sai Baba? Did Meher Baba inherit the charisma of Upasni and Shirdi Sai Baba or was he an independent avatar? The Shri Sai Satcharita attests that Sai Baba appeared after his death to Laxman Mama Jog, the village astrologer, in a dream (Gunaji 1972: 236; Kher 1999: 719–720). He also appeared to various other devotees, as a plethora of their testimonies have claimed (e.g. Sai Sharan Anand 1986: 64–71, 120–124), but there

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is no explicit naming of any heirs. The Shirdi Sai Sanstan does not recognize any successors to Sai Baba. Various explanations, however, have been extended about the relationship between these fi gures. It is possible to see Upasni as being transformed during his spiritual path and receiving explicit legitimation as a guru through his interactions with Shirdi Sai Baba. Narasimha Swami, for instance, describes Upasni’s austerities at Shirdi by the Sanskrit word tapas (penance) and describes how in 1913, on Gurupurnima day, Shirdi Sai Baba sent his female devotee, Chandrabai, to the Khandoba temple with the order that Upasni Maharaj was to be worshipped that day in the same way as Sai Baba himself and thus inaugurated his worship as a guru. Narasimha Swami states that Upasni’s mission was “to carry further the work of his Guru Sri Sai Baba” (NS and Subbarao 1966: 104).18 As far as Meher Baba is concerned, there appear to be two main interpretations. One, such as that adopted by Haynes (1989), states that he was an avatar of his age: It links this idea, however, to one that is more Sufi or theosophical than Hindu in its conceptualization claiming that fi ve Perfect Masters worked with Merwan to make him realize his role. According to Shepherd (1986: 49), while Meher Baba later referred to the avatar theme and stated that Zarathustra was an avatar along with Rama, Krishna or the Buddha, he did not identify himself explicitly as an avatar. Instead of a debate about succession and discipleship that depends on contact, tutelage, and legitimation by the physical guru, it is more meaningful to conceptualize a “Sai Baba tradition” including a number of spiritual agents and sites affi liated through relations of complementarity, parallelism, reinvention, and reincarnation rather than purely a lineage of leaders and successors. As Halbwachs (1992: 219–222) reminds us, new groups take up the traditions of older ones but also appropriate them through rewriting and repositioning them temporally, spatially, and structurally. As I have shown elsewhere (Srinivas 2001a), the transformation of memory relies on oral, kinetic, material, sensory,

18 Narasimha Swami’s biography of Upasni Maharaj was ﬁ rst published in 1934 and later included in NS and Subbarao (1966). In another work written in 1955, Narasimha Swami was less appreciative of Upasni Maharaj’s role, claiming that while several people hoped that he would take the place of Shirdi Sai Baba, there was a marked difference between the two and that “Sri Upasni did not develop completely on the lines expected of him during his Shirdi stay and his tutelage under Baba” (NS 1994, Vol. II: 271).

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performative or other practices that re-orient cultural materials in several semantic directions. Apart from the development of Shirdi as a pan- Indian site for pilgrimage where the physical body of Shirdi Sai Baba lies entombed, removed spatially and temporally from the body of the saint, we can see four other mnemonic pathways for the transmission of Shirdi Sai Baba’s charisma to several publics, including the urban middle classes, in postcolonial South Asia. The fi rst mnemonic pathway is based on a performative and thematic repertoire that creates connections between religious fi gures in the past and the present. This is not a question about whether the genealogy invoked is true or borne out by an explicit historical record but rather that a lineage or sense of belonging to “a chain of memory” (Hervieu- Léger 2000) and belief is recollected or performed. Works on Shirdi Sai Baba have recognized his links with Sufi sm, Vaishnava and Vedanta traditions, Kabir, Dattatreya, Gorakhnath, and the Nathpanthi order.19 Thus, White (1972: 63–78) brings together a number of saints in the Pune and Bangalore areas as a coherent and interconnected group that he calls the “Sai Baba movement” (he includes Shirdi Sai Baba, Upasni Maharaj, Godavari Mata, and Sathya Sai Baba). He identifi es Gorakhnath (regarded as the origin of the Nathpanthi order in South Asia), Dattatreya (a deifi ed early ascetic popularly identifi ed with Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu) and Kabir (a medieval saint) as contributors to important themes and content in the Sai Baba movement.20 The Shirdi Sanstan committee also suggests that Shirdi Sai Baba is an incarnation of Dattatreya—a protean fi gure appropriated by a wide variety of traditions from Tantrism to Sufi sm, Maharashtra being a center of Datta worship (see Rigopoulos 1998).21 Rigopoulos (1998: 251) states

19 On his connections to Sufi sm, see Kamath and Kher (1991); Narayan (1995); Shepherd (1985); Warren (2004). On Vaishnava and Vedantic links, see NS (1994); Sai Sharan Anand (1986). On Baba and Kabir, see Rigopoulos (1993); Ruhela (1994); White (1972). On Dattatreya, the Nath, and Baba, see Rigopoulos (1998); Ruhela (1994); White (1972). 20 Sham Rao (1972) cites Shirdi Sai Baba, Upasni Maharaj, Godavari Mata, Meher Baba and Sathya Sai Baba as contemporary gurus in a Shirdi Sai Baba tradition but does not make explicit what the connection is between them. 21 Dattatreya emerges primarily in the epic literature as a powerful sage and is elevated in the Puranas to the status of a yogi, guru and avatar; the fi rst datable evidence of the deity comes from the thirteenth century Mahanubhava sect, where Dattatreya is regarded as one of the fi ve manifestations of the supreme God, Parameshwara (see Rigopoulos 1998: xi–xiii, 89–108). The two key fi gures in the Datta tradition of Maharashtra were Sripada Srivallabha (1323–53) and Narsimha Sarasvati (1378–1458), considered to be the two fi rst historical avatars of Dattatreya (Rigopoulos 1998: 109). A triadic iconography of Dattatreya combining aspects of the deities Brahma, Vishnu

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that Upasni Maharaj’s connection with Dattatreya is obvious from the temple that he built in the deity’s honor; Dattatreya’s “interreligious eclecticism” is also evident in Meher Baba and Sathya Sai Baba. Thus, Dattatreya, Kabir, and others become signifi cant archetypes or provide resources for a “script” or chain of remembrance. The second mnemonic pathway is one of complementarity or correspondence between spiritual leaders or pilgrimage sites. We have already noted that Meher Baba and Upasni Maharaj interpreted and embedded Shirdi Sai Baba’s teachings and persona differently—one in a largely Sufi and the other a Vedantic mode. Again, Shepherd (1985: 129) views Upasni Maharaj as a fi erce type of ascetic, who complemented the benign teacher Narayan Maharaj; he also believes that the duo were the “Hindu equivalents” of Sufi s Tajuddin Baba and Hazrat Babajan. Another kind of scheme of correspondence and complementarity might be the idea of the fi ve Perfect Masters, a cosmology in which the fi ve head an invisible hierarchy of saints and seers. While this cosmology seems to be drawn largely from a Sufi universe, authors can sometimes invoke Perfect Masters who belong to a number of traditions. Thus, Satpathy (2001: 117) and Haynes (1989: 37–38) suggest a Maharashtrian network of Perfect Masters including Hazrat Baba Tajuddin of Nagpur, Hazrat Babajan of Pune, Upasni Maharaj of Sakori, Narayan Maharaj of Keda Gaon and Sai Baba of Shirdi. Within Maharashtra, there is a also a complementarity between the two largest pilgrimage sites today, Shirdi in the north and Pandharpur in the south, and a network of sites connected with Meher Baba, Upasni Maharaj, and Shirdi Sai Baba. This complementarity is both spatial and imaginative, and it is quite possible to be led from one site to the other as a seeker or a scholar. The third pathway, like the fi rst and the second, does not require physical contact or spatial juxtapositioning but relies on other agents who did not meet Shirdi Sai Baba during his lifetime but chose to retell his story for new and dispersed audiences. By doing so, they extended the charisma of Shirdi Sai Baba into the postcolonial nation-state and for the South Asian diaspora and reinvented him largely as a Hindu guru, his Sufi connections disappearing into a zone of relative amnesia. The several volumes published by Narasimha Swami, who never met

and Shiva emerges during this period; within the broader Dattatreya movement, there were Muslim ascetics and holy men who are considered avatars of Dattatreya pointing to a climate of religious exchange in Maharashtra (Rigopoulos 1998: 116).

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Shirdi Sai Baba but regarded him as the guru of the age, have achieved a wide circulation and somewhat uncritical acceptance by later writers infl uencing a tradition of remembering (see Chapter 6 for a treatment of Narasimha Swami).22 The last pathway is based on the idea that Shirdi Sai Baba could be reborn or reincarnated, his charisma now embodied in another. Nara- simha Swami states that while Sai Baba promised one of his devotees (Kaka Dixit) that he would appear as a boy of eight, no such boy has appeared (NS 1994, Vol. II: 310–321). He says emphatically: Sai left no successor to his seat . . . there was no seat to succeed to, as God’s seat can never be vacant and . . . there is no person living who can be recognized by all as having the entire Sai spirit or Soul in his body, that is, who can be regarded as the Avatar of Sai. (NS 1994, Vol. II: 320) However, in 1940, a young lad called Sathyanarayana Raju in Andhra Pradesh claimed to be exactly that—an avatar of Sai or Sai reborn. In the Sathya Sai Baba movement that grew around this lad, Shirdi Sai Baba appears as one in a temporal chain of avatars linking spatially several states in the Deccan. This chapter has narrated the story of Shirdi Sai Baba’s life based on a number of accounts including hagiographies and has traced some important transformations in his role at Shirdi: from a eccentric mendicant to a guru of the emerging colonial middle classes, from a wandering faqir to a focus of congregational worship, from a living saint to an entombed and deeply revered fi gure. It also focused on Meher Baba and Upasni Maharaj, important transmitters of Shirdi Sai Baba’s charisma in the transition from a colonial to a postcolonial world. Tracing several mnemonic pathways emphasizes the spatial and imaginative complexity of the Sai Baba tradition and the fact that the attention paid to “Hinduism” or a militant, muscular religiosity does not do justice to the full range of religious belief and practice in this tradition. The next chapter explores the last of these pathways through the fi gure of Sathya Sai Baba.

22 Arthur Osborne’s account (1957), for instance, is based largely on the materials of Narasimha Swami and became popular among a non-Indian audience. See also Warren (2004) for a discussion of Narasimha Swami’s role.

SRINIVAS_F3_23-48.indd 48 12/21/2007 1:43:13 PM CHAPTER TWO

THE ARRIVAL OF THE AVATAR

The Public Self of Sai1

Many photographs of Sathya Sai Baba show him seated on a chair, his feet resting on a cushion or a footstool, his hands half-raised with palms slightly turned upward as if in inquiry or with his right palm facing the viewer in blessing (see Figure 1). In Sai Centers where regular devotional activities are carried out, his presence might be invoked by placing a stuffed chair in the altar area, sometimes with a photograph of his face or full fi gure on it and another of his feet at the base. The chair is not simply an ordinary seat but regarded as a sacred throne, one fi t for a royal being. The idea of the divine kingship of Sathya Sai Baba is made explicit during his birthday celebrations when he is seated in a golden motorized chariot—the rays of the sun emanating from behind him as part of his backrest and crowned by an umbrella—and taken out in a procession for his devotees to have darshan. The iconographic density surrounding Sathya Sai Baba is also evident in his offi cial biography, Sathyam Sivam Sundaram, written by N. Kasturi (1897–1987), a devotee and associate of Baba for several decades, who came into contact with Sathya Sai Baba in 1948. Sathyam Sivam Sundaram runs into four volumes or parts, updating the career of Sathya Sai Baba from his birth and early years up until 1980. It is rich in historical detail but shares the assumption of traditional hagiography in India that, for the most part, establishes a holy person’s life and identity as more than human. Thus, for example, Kasturi’s narrative begins by reminding us that Sathya Sai Baba’s native village was once called Gollapalli, or the village of cowherds, and that a cobra was found near the newborn baby—obvious references to the deities Krishna and Shiva. Most biographical or devotees’ accounts rely heavily on Kasturi’s narrative, which was translated

1 This chapter substantially revises two previously published articles (Srinivas 1999b and Srinivas 2001b).

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into English and several Indian languages.2 From such narratives that “emphasize their subject’s refl ection of the universal, grace-bestowing power of the absolute” (Hallstrom 1999: 22), Sathya Sai Baba emerges as a divine fi gure. Although he has “human” aspects—a wry sense of humor, observations about national or U.S. politics, a sense of style and color, or fondness for dogs and other animals—he is considered omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, a font of grace, or a divine and compassionate parent. In the case of a fi gure like the Buddha, the benefi t of historical hindsight allows us to trace the development of his iconography over several centuries from, for example, his footprints to a fi gurative image, and the concomitant process of deifi cation. This process is harder to conceptualize in the case of a “living deity,” as gurus such as Sathya Sai Baba are regarded, in part because the transformations are still relatively recent and shifting. While individual devotees who have spent a lifetime with Sathya Sai Baba may recognize the man behind the icon or others in private interviews may obtain glimpses of his personality, for any sociology/anthropology of the Sathya Sai Baba movement, it is necessary to recognize that the “real” personhood of Sathya Sai Baba or who he is as a private individual cannot be the focus of analysis nor can the issue of the truth or falsity of his divinity.3 Babb (1986a) makes the trenchant observation that the details of Sathya Sai Baba’s life are

2 Kasturi’s account has the most authoritative status in the movement as the earliest sanctioned biography of Sathya Sai Baba (Kasturi 1962, 1968, 1972, 1980). A more recent biography is Love is My Form (Padmanaban 2000) that deals with the years 1926–1950. It is meant to be a documentary history and is based on detailed interviews and other fi eld research while retaining a strong devotional sentiment. The same year, Thapovanam was published in English, Telugu, Hindi, and several other languages: it is meant to be a devotional text to be read in seven consecutive days (Venkateswara Sastry 2000). The earliest biography, however, might have been in Telugu (Sri Sayeeshuni Charitra). This was written by V.C. Kondappa, Sathya Sai Baba’s teacher in a school in Bukkapatnam, in the form of a poem and is said to have been fi rst published in 1944; it appeared recently as an English translation (Kondappa 2004). Bill Aitken’s Sri Sathya Sai Baba: A Life (Aitken 2004) is perhaps the most readable general account yet and one that can easily speak to a non-devotee. A few scholar-devotees have tried to understand Sathya Sai Baba, his philosophy, and the movement based on philosophical and social criteria: V.K. Gokak, once a devotee of the spiritual teacher Aurobindo and later of Sathya Sai Baba, was a well-known literary fi gure and educationist in India. His book, Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba (Gokak 1983), is an exploration of the personality and philosophy of his guru, the work of the Sai Organization, sayings and writings of Sathya Sai Baba, and his impact worldwide. 3 See also Ruhela and Robinson (1976), who explore the challenge of Sathya Sai Baba and his message for the social/behavioural sciences.

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buried beneath several hagiographical layers and an objective account of his life by anyone close to him is probably impossible: Thus Sathya Sai Baba himself cannot be the actual subject of an account of his cult . . . All that is available are his public surfaces, his self as formally presented as an object for the devotional attitudes of his followers . . . . This Sathya Sai Baba is what is known as an avatar, a ‘descent’ of God to earth. And of this Sathya Sai Baba one can indeed give an account, because his persona is fully available in the public domain of religious symbolism. (Babb 1986a: 161–162) What is implied here is that we can analyze the iconic representations about Sathya Sai Baba and the practices, organizational structures, or spaces that embed these representations over time; such an analysis is, in fact, a necessary step before we move on to a study of the movement that has grown around him. This chapter traces, therefore, important aspects of the public persona of Sathya Sai Baba based on secondary accounts and biographies: it examines his early life and the declaration of his identity with Shirdi Sai Baba that constructed a discrete mnemonic pathway for the recollection of the saint by his old devotees and attracted new audiences in South Asia and overseas. I describe the transformation of a boy-guru from a remote village in Andhra Pradesh into a pan-Indian teacher and global avatar and the importance of personal counsel as well as public lectures in his role. Some of the signiﬁ cant milestones in his public career appear here, as well as conceptual innovations that created new spaces for the emerging body of devotion. The chapter also alludes to several institutions created by him that gave an organizational structure and civic role to the movement; some of the central ones—in healing, service, and education—are analyzed in more detail in Chapter 4. Three types of iconic representations—guru, sant, and avatar—emerge in the history and hagiography of the Sai Baba movement. This chapter examines these representations and the signiﬁ cance of the idea of the avatar for a devotional imaginary and organization that over the decades has become pan-Indian and global in its scope.

The Early Life of Sathya Sai Baba

Sathya Sai Baba was born on 23rd November 1926 to a family that belonged to Puttaparthi village in Andhra Pradesh (see Map 1) and was

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named Sathyanarayana (Kasturi 1962: 7).4 His father, Pedda Venkappa (Venkama) Raju, and mother, Easwaramma, lived with other members of the Raju family known by the caste name of Bhat Raju for their role in “interpreting and popularising sacred literature” (Padmanaban 2000: 11).5 Members of the family, including his paternal grandfather, were known for their piety, musical and dramatic talents, and as bards. His uncle, Chinna Venkappa (Venkama) Raju, was also proﬁ cient in astrology, herbal medicines, and talismans (Padmanaban 2000: 17). The patriarch of the family, Kondama Raju, appears to have had great affection for his grandson, Sathyanarayana, who like him was a vegetarian and had inherited many of his performative skills. Sathya seems to have had a fairly normal childhood although biographers and oral accounts claim a number of mysterious events at the time of his birth such as the sound of musical instruments playing (Kasturi 1962: 7). As a young boy, he seems to have possessed some intuitive powers, being able to divine lost articles of value, including a horse that a Muslim carriage driver had lost (Kasturi 1962: 31). While at school, Sathyanarayana had formed a boys’ musical ensemble called the Pandhari Bhajan group, performed a number of folk-songs, ballads, and devotional songs, and also acted in various plays (Kasturi 1962: 18–22, 28–30; Padmanaban 2000: 35–36, 39, 42). There were also prosaic moments such as his earning money from the merchant Kote (Kotte) Subbanna during his school years by composing attractive songs and ditties to be sung on the streets to launch a new article or boost sales (Kasturi 1962: 25–26; Padmanaban 2000: 57–60). In fact, many of the aphorisms that circulate in the movement today have the quality of street signs and slogans such as “Hands that serve are holier than lips that pray.” He attended school in Puttaparthi and in neighboring places such as Kamlapuram, Bukkapatnam, and Uravakonda (Padmanaban 2000: 128–129). He went through a prolonged period of “illness” and erratic behavior after apparently being stung by a black scorpion on 8th March, 1940 (Kasturi 1962: 31–39).6 Although no scorpion was ever

4 According to Kasturi, he was born in Puttaparthi (Kasturi 1962: 8). Another account (Padmanaban 2000: 21) suggests that he may have been born in Karnatana- gapalli, the village of his mother’s family that is adjacent to Puttaparthi. 5 On this Telugu-speaking non-Brahmin caste as musicians and bards attached to the court, see Thurston (1909, Vol. 1: 223–228). See Spurr 2007 for a detailed discussion. 6 Padmanaban’s account (2000: 95–103, 128–129) seems to suggest this could have been around 1943 since he was in Uravakonda at that time. While Venkateswara

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discovered, he refused to speak for long periods of time or would break into laughter, weeping, and song, and sometimes recite Sanskrit verses. The family took him to various doctors and even an exorcist to drive out the “evil spirit” possessing him but to no avail. On 23rd May 1940, after a prolonged period of “illness,” Sathya declared: I belong to Apasthamba Suthra [sutra, literally, aphorism; a reference to texts attributed to Apastamba]; I am of the Bharadwaja Gothra [gotra, a concept referring to descent from a male ancestor]; I am Sai Baba; I have come to ward off all your troubles; keep your houses clean and pure. (Kasturi 1962: 39)7 His family and villagers learnt that a government offi cer at nearby Penukonda was a devotee of the faqir. The offi cer declared that the boy was deranged; Sathya is supposed to have interposed by pointing out that this devotee did not recognize the Sai he worshipped and produced handfuls of ash (vibhuti) and scattered it around (Kasturi 1962: 40).8 A few months later, on 20th October, he cast off his school books and said that he was no longer the Sathya they knew, but Sai: I am going; I don’t belong to you; Maya [illusion] has gone; My Bhak- tas [devotees] are calling Me; I have My work; I can’t stay any longer. (Kasturi 1962: 44) He stayed initially in the garden of an excise inspector’s bungalow in Uravakonda village and attracted a small following. He taught what is recalled as his fi rst devotional song: “Maanasa bhajare gurucharanam, dusthara bhava saagara tharanam” translated as “Meditate in thy mind

Sastry (2000: 112–134) agrees with the place, he agrees with Kasturi’s dates for the major events of this period. Kondappa (2004: 7–8) writes that Sathya Sai Baba studied in Puttaparthi until he was about 14 or 15 and then joined school in Bukkapatnam. Around this time, he started exhibiting strange behavior that led his parents to make efforts to cure him. He seemed to have returned to his earlier self for a while and was sent to high school at Uravakonda. It was around this time that he claimed he was stung by a scorpion and soon thereafter threw away his schoolbooks and claimed he was Sai. He then returned to Puttaparthi. 7 Spurr (2007) suggests that previous scholars have tended to see Sathya Sai Baba making a claim to a Brahmin status by invoking descent through Bharadwaja but this need not be the case since the gotra idea was not conﬁ ned to the Brahmin castes. He points out that Thurston (1909, Vol. 1: 223–224) states that Bharadwaja is a gotra of the Bhatrajus. 8 Padmanaban (2000: 67, 71, 114, 117) argues that Sathya was already acquainted with Shirdi Sai Baba and had a picture of him at Bukkapatnam; there were also devotees of the saint there and in Penukonda and his uncles in Puttaparthi were worshippers of Shirdi Sai Baba.

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on the feet of the guru; that can take you across the diffi cult sea of Samsara [world]” (Kasturi 1962: 44). He returned to Puttaparthi and after some time shifted to the house of a Brahmin woman, Subbamma (Padmanaban 2000: 165–169). This house belonged to the village accountant (karanam), a liaison offi cer between the government and a cluster of villages. In these early years—a slim teenager with bountiful hair—he continued to compose songs and hold bhajan sessions, carried out acts of healing and exorcisms, went into trances, materialized ash, and met devotees who were beginning to arrive from surrounding villages, towns in Andhra Pradesh, and Bangalore (see Figure 4). He also visited Bangalore, Mysore and Madras for the fi rst time in 1944 and later went to other urban centers such as Karur and Tiruchirapalli, gathering followers outside of the region in which he was born (Kasturi 1962: 47–76; Padmanaban 2000: 165–177, 183–222). At the same time, there seem to have been objections and doubts about him in his village and he was compelled to move out of Subbamma’s house to a small residence constructed for him on land donated by her on the western bank of the Chitravati River; he also seems to have lived in caves near the river for several months (Padmanaban 2000: 237, 241). Through the support of Thirumala Rao from Bangalore and others, devotees fi nally built a building for him in 1945—known as the “Old Mandir [temple]” today—close to the Sathyabhama or Sathyamma and Venugopalaswamy or Gopalakrishna temples on the edge of the village (Kasturi 1962: 59). From this point onwards, his mission began to achieve architectural form accompanied by ritual activity. The fi rst ever recorded public procession carrying two images of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba took place on the occasion of the inauguration of the Old Mandir (Padmanaban 2000: 255). Sathya Sai Baba carried out regular worship within the temple where the main images were busts of Shirdi and Sathya Sai Baba made of concrete, and he would lead the community in bhajans in a room that could almost accommodate fi fty people (Padmanaban 2000: 259, 263). In 1946, he traveled to Tirupati and Hyderabad and laid the foundation for a Sai Baba temple in Guindy in Madras (Padmanaban 2000: 289, 307). The fi rst Akhand Bhajans (unbroken sequence of bhajans for 24 hours) were also held by devotees in Bangalore (who had begun a group around 1944) under his direction, which he attended along with hundreds of devotees in the city (Padmanaban 2000: 315, 319). This was soon to become a permanent institutional feature of the Sai movement taking place annually around the world at Sai Centers from 6:00 PM of November 7th to 6:00 PM

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Fig. 4. Sathya Sai Baba as a young man (Calendar fragment)

of November 8th. The Dassera festival and Baba’s birthday were celebrated in Puttaparthi for the fi rst time in 1946. During the Shivaratri festival dedicated to Shiva the following year, Baba is reported to have manifested a spheroid lingam from his mouth (Padmanaban 2000: 323, 331, 345), emphasizing his identifi cation with Shiva, an aspect reproduced in popular prints today (see Figure 5). This period of his growing ministry was marked by the appearance of elite devotees such as the royal families of Sandur, Mysore, Venkatgiri, and Chincholi, and landlords, merchants, and government offi cials in various cities. Their support resulted in the construction of an expanded hermitage (ashram) for him inaugurated in 1950 (Kasturi 1962: 77–82;

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Fig. 5. Sathya Sai Baba and lingam (Image on a pocket calendar)

Padmanaban 2000: 536). Sakamma, a coffee planter and philanthropist, gifted about 3.86 acres of land in 1947; a foundation stone was laid the following year, and “Prashanti Nilayam” (Abode of Supreme Peace) was completed a few years later with a new temple. Its dimensions were the same as the Shivaji Theater belonging to Arsoji Rao in Bangalore, the vicinity of which Baba had often visited. The architect who designed the building was Malur Srinivasa Thirumala Iyengar, a public servant in charge of the Tungabhadra Dam project between 1944 and 1952

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(when he came into contact with Baba) and later the Hirakud Dam and other road and bridge constructions in Madras state (Padmanaban 2000: 424–431). A second hermitage came up subsequently in White- ﬁ eld near Bangalore called “Brindavan” and a third summer retreat in the hill-station of Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu. Baba also maintains residences today at Hyderabad, Madras, and Bombay. Through the choice of these centers, an alternative network of pilgrimage sites in southern India has emerged which complements older ones such as Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, Sringeri in Karnataka, and Pandharpur and Shirdi in Maharashtra. Four main festivals have been celebrated since the early years—Sathya Sai Baba’s birthday, Shivaratri, Gurupurnima (dedicated to the guru), and the autumn nine-day Dassera festival culminating in Vijayadashami. Today, a number of others—his mother’s birthday, Christmas, the birthday of Buddha, New Year festivals based on various calendars, Rama Navami, and numerous others—have been added to the list and the forms of many of the older festivals have also become more elaborate. Sathya Sai Baba’s miracles or paranormal abilities, both in the early part of his life and in later years, have attracted a great deal of attention. In most devotees’ narratives, these miracles appear time and again as signposts in their relationship with Baba, signaling the ﬁ rst encounter, a turning point in their lives, an event when all hope was lost, or an answer to a crisis (see, for example, Murphet 1971). His abilities include the materialization of objects ranging from candy and fruit to watches, ash, or lingams, “mobile material vehicles” of his power that is trans- ferred to the devotee (Babb 1987: 178). Objects have emerged from his hand, by him digging into the earth, or simply appearing from the air. His powers also include acts of healing, teleporting, the knowledge of devotees’ lives or many languages, or appearing in distant places and in dreams to give guidance.9 While such powers may be accepted in India

9 See Steel (1999: 14–16) for a classifi cation of the paranormal powers and miracles attributed to Sathya Sai Baba. Parapsychologists Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson also investigated the claims of paranormal experience associated with Sathya Sai Baba. Since Sathya Sai Baba did not agree to requests that he participate in experimental tests to evaluate his abilities, they base their fi ndings on informal observations, interviews with eye-witnesses, fi lms and videotapes, and evaluate claims that this may be trickery and sleight-of-hand (Haraldsson 1987, 1988, 1990; Haraldsson and Osis 1975; Haraldsson and Wiseman 1995; Osis and Haraldsson 1977, 1979). Although their aims are different, this literature intersects with reporting in English and vernacular presses that have also focused on this “miracle-man.”

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as natural extensions of the charisma of holy men, some teachers and traditionalists have frowned upon the exhibition of such powers. It has also been argued that these abilities offer rich and powerful followers “a self-indulgent, guilt-free experience of the magicality of objects” (McKean 1996: 22). Rationalists and skeptics have also branded him a charlatan or magician.10 Sathya Sai Baba, however, has spoken about miracles as his “visiting cards” or as means by which he draws people towards him initially in order to interest them in the message he has to give. As Babb (1986a: 187) notes, for Indian devotees, Sathya Sai Baba’s miracles are embedded in ideas about divine-human relationships as sport and play (lila); his devotees, then, are his “playmates.” One of the sayings attributed to Baba that expresses this cosmology is “Life is a challenge, meet it; life is a game, play it; life is love, enjoy it; life is a dream, realize it.” For devotees, this play creates a world that appears magical and enchanted. This does not mean that devotees do not go through experiences in which they wrestle with issues of belief and doubt, loss and faith: this is the stuff of spiritual experience. However, for most devotees, the idea of Baba as a constant presence ensures a belief in a loving and miraculous universe.

A Pan-Indian Teacher

For Sathya Sai Baba, these miracles form part of a categorization of his life in terms of three time periods. He stated as far back as 1953 (SSS, Vol. I: 3) that the ﬁ rst sixteen years of his life were a time of childhood miracles and sport; the next sixteen when divine miracles would dominate; after this time, his task would be preaching, spiritual instruction, and the guiding of humanity back to the path of truth, righteousness, peace, and love.11 It appears that he used the term avatar at least as

10 See, for instance, Kovoor (1976: 19–24) and B. Premanand’s writings in The Indian Skeptic, http://www.indian-skeptic.org/html. 11 Sathya Sai Speaks (SSS) have been published in several editions. The ﬁ rst eleven volumes of the original Indian edition prepared by N. Kasturi are translations of his discourses given between 1953 and 1972. There is now a revised and enlarged Indian edition that includes over 30 volumes for the years from 1953 onwards published by the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust in Prashanti Nilayam. There is also an American edition that has different titles for some chapters in the Indian editions. See Steel (1997: 227–239; 319) for a concordance of chapters for the American edition and the Indian revised and enlarged edition for the years 1953–1982. In my book, all

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far back as 1955, if not earlier, to describe himself and his mission: in this incarnation, the wicked would not be destroyed but corrected and reformed. The center for the mission would be the place in which the avatar took birth. Unlike other avatars such as Rama and Krishna, this avatar was for devotees, renouncers, and aspirants only—he had no afﬁ nity or attachment to his family members (SSS, Vol. I: 15–16, 209). He also predicted in 1960 that he would be in his “mortal human form for 59 more years” to achieve his purpose (SSS, Vol. I: 198). Alongside such intermittent pronouncements came an increase in the kinds of publics that he addressed. Until 1957, contact appears to have been intimate and devotees seem to have had direct access to Baba. He would often take devotees to the sands of the Chitravati River, conduct bhajans under the sky, give discourses on various topics and answer any questions that they had. After 1957, although still accessible to devotees, he began to tour urban centers in north and south India and address various forums. He had presided over the celebrations of the Divine Life Society convention at Venkatgiri in 1957 and through the efforts of the personnel there made contact with the center in Rishikesh. He then left for a tour of north Indian cities and sacred sites including Delhi, Rishikesh, Mathura-Brindavan, and Srinagar (Kasturi 1962: 101–121). In the next few years, he spoke at gatherings of devotees, at temples, hospitals, and schools where he was invited, shared platforms with ministers or other leaders such as those of the Divine Life Society, or visited language associations and music groups. He also reinforced the fact that he had not come to create a new religious path: I will never force you to take up a particular Name or Form of the Lord . . . The Lord has a million Names and a million Forms, and He wants that faith and attachment should be evoked in you by any of them, as you recite the names or contemplate the Forms. (SSS, Vol. I: 218) In concert with this project, the newsletter, Sanathana Sarathi (The Eternal Charioteer, a reference to the deity, Krishna), devoted to the moral and spiritual upliftment of humanity through truth, righteousness, peace, and love, was inaugurated during the festival of Shivaratri in 1958 (Kasturi 1962: 204). In 1961, he left for another tour of shrines and towns in North India such as Badrinath, Hardwar, Allahabad, Lucknow, Ayodhya, Banaras, Srinagar, and Nainital (Kasturi 1962: 218–231;

references to Sathya Sai Speaks are from the revised and enlarged Indian edition unless otherwise noted.

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Venkateswara Sastry 2000: 137–141). At a temple in Coimbatore in 1961, he stated that he was beginning the task of his incarnation—the establishment of righteousness—and installed an image prior to the work’s commencement (SSS, Vol. II: 5). At his birthday celebrations that year, the fi rst volume of his biography (Sathyam, Sivam, Sundaram) written by N. Kasturi was placed before Sathya Sai Baba (Kasturi 1968: 19). In 1963, he visited Srisailam and in 1965, Pandharpur (Kasturi 1968: 29–31; Venkateswara Sastry 2000: 141–142). Sathya Sai Baba also inaugurated an academy for the study of the Vedas and Sanskrit in Prashanti Nilayam and an all-India academy of Vedic scholars in the early 1960s (Kasturi 1968: 41, 52–53). This period has been described as one in which Sathya Sai Baba seems to have retreated into orthodoxy and indulged the religious sentiments of landlords and Hindu sympathies (Aitken 2004: 100–101). However, sometime around the mid-1960s, as the next section shows, he seemed to be moving away from this posture and although many leaders of the Hindu Right appear in Prashanti Nilayam from time to time (along with a host of other leaders of other hues), Sathya Sai Baba has not publicly endorsed any of their activities or agendas. There are two interrelated aspects of his public role during this time: fi rst, the posthumous recasting of the memory of Shirdi Sai Baba; and second, the production of a number of oral discourses and written works providing spiritual instruction and counsel. Both of them carved out a specifi c cultural space in the Sathya Sai Baba movement—one in which the paradigm of the pan-Indian teacher was absorbed by the representation of the global avatar.

Becoming a Global Avatar

Sathya Sai Baba had spoken earlier about the fact that Shirdi Sai Baba had intimated to his devotees that he would be reborn eight years after his passing away.12 On Gurupurnima day (6th July) in 1963, however, after a stroke and paralysis of his left side which he later cured, he made a startling announcement: I am Siva-Sakthi . . . born in the gothra of Bharadwaja according to a boon won by that sage from Siva and Sakthi. Sakthi Herself was born

12 For instance, in 1961 (see SSS, Vol. II: 102).

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of the gothra of that sage as Sai Baba of Shirdi; Siva and Sakthi have incarnated as Myself in his gothra now; Siva alone will incarnate as the third Sai in the same gothra in Mysore state. (Kasturi 1968: 84) In other compilations, such as in Kasturi’s original compilation and translation of Baba’s speeches, this claim is reported differently: Siva said that They would take Human Form and be born in the Bha- radwaja lineage or Gothra thrice:—Siva alone as Shirdi Sai Baba, Siva and Sakthi together at Puttaparthy as Sathya Sai Baba and Sakthi alone as Prema Sai, later. (SSS, Vol. III, original edition: 22) Within the Sai movement, including the new revised and enlarged Indian edition of Sathya Sai Speaks and the website of the International Sai Organization, this latter version is the one followed.13 Whatever the sequence, this declaration invoked not only descent through Bharadwaja but made explicit links to Shaiva and Shakti traditions.14 It also posits divine androgyny: the Sai “trinity” includes not only Shirdi Baba, who is the avatar of the female (or male, depending on the version) principle of divinity, but Sathya Sai Baba as the unity of both male and female principles, and another future avatar of the male (or female) principle of divinity, Prema Sai. The announcement accompanied the pan-Indian and incipient international status of Sathya Sai Baba and the beginnings of a world organization dedicated to service (seva). The First All-India Conference of the Sai Organization was held in Madras in 1967 (Kasturi 1968: 231). At the First World Conference of Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organizations at Bombay in 1968, during which the center of the Sai Organization called “Dharmakshetra” was inaugurated, Baba announced that he was the embodiment of every divine entity and that he had come to establish eternal religion or Sanatana Dharma (Kasturi 1972: 3–21; SSS, Vol. VIII: 99–100). In June the same year, he left for a tour of

13 See “Shiva Shakthi,” http://www.sathyasai.org/discour/1963/d630706.htm, accessed November 5, 2004. 14 Kondappa (2004) refers to this genealogy in his account of Shirdi Sai Baba’s early life. He claims that Shirdi Sai Baba was born as the third child of a Brahmin couple from Pathri village in the Godavari River basin. Shiva and Parvati appeared to the couple and blessed them with children, Shiva himself appearing as their third child. The child was abandoned in the forest after his birth and then picked up by a childless faqir and his wife who called the child Baba and raised the child for some years. Eventually he was driven away from his home and wandered around for some years. He reached Shirdi at the age of 16. After his passing away, he was reborn in the Raju family (Kondappa 2004: 1–7).

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East Africa, his fi rst and only foreign visit, assuring those gathered there in several discourses that he had not come to speak on the behalf of any particular path such as the Hindu dharma: I have no plan to attract disciples or devotees into My fold or any fold. I have come to tell you of this Universal unitary faith, this Aathmic principle, this path of love, this dharma of prema, this duty of love, this obligation of love. (SSS, Vol. VIII: 118) On the occasion of his birthday on 23rd November, 1968, he is reported as having said that he bore the name of the avatar of Sai Baba and he had a specifi c role: Every step in the career of the avatar is predetermined. Rama came to feed the roots of Satya or truth and Dharma or righteousness. Krishna came to foster Shanti—peace and Prema—love. Now all these four are in danger of being dried up. That is why the present avatar has come. (Sathya Sai Baba 1976: 24)15 In a discourse in 1974, he elaborated further on the characteristics of the Sai avatar and explained that the name indicated the divine (sa) mother (ai or ayi) and father (baba) creating a novel etymology for it. He also alluded to his miracles as his visiting cards, and the talismans, rings, and so on given by him to others as a signal of a bond between them, while saying that his grace was available to anyone, love being the bond that won grace: “I am the embodiment of Love; Love is My instrument” (SSS, Vol. XII: 229). The architectural symbol of the Sai avatar is the Sarva Mathaikya Stupa or Sarva Dharma Stupa, a pillar between the main temple and the auditorium in Prashanti Nilayam designed to hold a lotus on its peak, inaugurated in 1975 on the occasion of Baba’s fi ftieth birthday celebrations. Its base is made up of fi ve sides with symbols from “world” religions—Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. As part of the mission of the avatar, several institutions emerged through the active encouragement of Sathya Sai Baba. Some of these were educational institutions, including colleges set up in the 1960s and 1970s for men and women. In 1981, the “Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning,” deemed a university, was set up in Puttaparthi. Others were medical institutions: a super-speciality hospital called the

15 This discourse is not published in the new and revised version of Sathya Sai Speaks but seems to be available in other collections. See for instance, “The Revelation,” http://www.sathyasai.org/discour/1968/d680517.htm, accessed November 5, 2004.

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“Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences” (SSSIHMS) was established in 1990–91 in Puttaparthi and another one was completed in Bangalore in 2001. One of the most ambitious of the new projects provides drinking water for Anantapur (covering 731 villages), Medak (179 villages) and Mehaboobnagar (141 villages) districts in Andhra Pradesh completed between 1995 and 2000. Another drinking water project for Madras city was begun in 2003 and a new one for east and west Godavari districts is underway. The Puttaparthi area, the site for many of these projects, has changed radically since Baba’s declaration of his mission. A small hamlet earlier, it was declared a taluk headquarters of the Sri Sathya Sai Taluk in 1991 carved out of Penukonda taluk in 1980. It now contains an airport, ready since 1990–91, besides the institutions mentioned above, that receives seasonal fl ights and international and Indian devotees. It is an urbanized center teeming with pilgrims and tourists, all of whom come to see Sathya Sai Baba (see Chapter 5). The role of transnational or regional economic fl ows in the development of Puttaparthi, Bangalore, or elsewhere needs to be briefl y considered here. As accounts of his early life and growing ministry show, Sathya Sai Baba received support from many individuals who contributed funds, initiative, and materials towards the creation of new institutions. For example, as stated earlier, a coffee planter called Sakamma donated land that later became the site of Prashanti Nilayam. This process of individual philanthropy has continued into the present: Isaac Tigrett, the businessman linked to the Hard Rock Café, is often associated with the super-speciality hospital in Puttaparthi. There are other collaborations between devotees, the state, fi rms, and non-devotees. Chaitanya Jyoti, a museum in Puttaparthi that was inaugurated in 2000, involved an architect, Goh Say Tong, who worked with the engineers of a construction division of Larsen and Toubro, and devotees from Malaysia and Singapore. The SSSIHMS in Bangalore was constructed by Larsen and Toubro on land donated by the Government of Karnataka. Much of the housing development around Prashanti Nilayam and near Sathya Sai Baba’s hermitage in Bangalore is a result of economic investments made by local and international devotees and developers. Financial contributions, however, are most often anonymous and made to the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust. Founded by Sathya Sai Baba (its trustee) in 1972 as a public charitable trust with its central offi ce at Prashanti Nilayam, this is a nodal agency responsible for many of these

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institutions as well as other projects such as the water projects. The Trust also provides relief to the poor through the provision of food, clothing, the celebration of mass marriages, and other activities. It is the agency that provides guidelines for service activities carried out by State Trusts in the country. The total amount of money funneled into the Trust by a transnational network of devotees (South Asian or otherwise) is diffi cult to estimate: the Anantapur drinking water project, a collaborative effort between the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, the Government of Andhra Pradesh and Larsen and Toubro Limited-ECC Construction Group that began in 1995 was estimated to cost approximately US $70 million and covered over 700 villages.16 The drinking water project to Medak district that commenced in 1999 cost about 300 million Indian rupees (The Mission of Sathya Sai 2005: 81), approximately US $6.8 million in 2007 terms. One source suggests that in 2000–2001, the Trust received 882 million Indian rupees from foreign donors alone, approximately US $20 million in 2007.17 Another estimate of its treasury is about US $1.5 to $2 billion (Palmer 2005: 114). As important as monetary contributions is the voluntary service performed by devotees as a labor of love for Sathya Sai Baba in a range of activities such as running medical camps, engaging in rural outreach, or relief work during disasters. These often take place through local Sai Centers (or samiti) in India and elsewhere, where funds, materials, and labor are raised or volunteered by devotees for these works, as the later chapters on Bangalore, Nairobi, and Atlanta reveal. The construction of the Sai Center building in Nairobi, for example, seems to have been fi nanced and carried out almost entirely through Kenyan devotees’ efforts. Again, the monthly meal scheme at one Sai Center in Bangalore (which feeds about 350–400 poor people) or the Atlanta Sai Center’s sandwich service to the homeless and urban poor on three Saturdays of each month is funded and carried out entirely by devotees. The role of global fi nancial fl ows to the Trust, therefore, has to be balanced against these localized initiatives.

16 See “Access to safe drinking water: effects on health and time management,” by Garimella Rama Rao, Sita K., and M.N.V. Prasad, http://paa2003.princeton.edu/ abstractViewer.asp?submissionId=62141, accessed June 8, 2004. 17 See “Generosity of foreign donors funding NGO’s in India,” by Devi Yesod- haran, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/433557.cms, accessed May 21, 2004.

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The Oral and the Written

The event that most devotees long for is a chance to speak with Sathya Sai Baba. While this has become more difﬁ cult as the crowds gathered have increased in the hermitage, practically every single day for the last six decades, Baba has called a group of people into the Mandir for an “interview” as it is known (or “inner-view,” as Baba has humorously referred to it). The group may include couples, families or single people, leaders of various Sai Centers, devotees from India and overseas, statesmen, or businessmen. The choice of who goes into the interview room is made by Baba during darshan time, the main performative event in the hermitage when devotees gather to see their guru and be seen by him. He indicates with speech or a signal to groups or individuals that they have been chosen for a meeting. The interview is a private affair and during the course of the meeting, the devotees direct various questions to him about their life, careers, health, hopes for their children, or service work, and seek his advice and blessings. Spiritual queries are also addressed to Baba. He also asks devotees questions about their lives and, in many cases, seems to know intimate details. Devotees emerge from the room crying happy tears, moved, excited, and bearing packets of ash, a ring, a necklace, a watch, or nothing at all except his advice and blessings. His counsel to devotees can be extremely personal, based on their life-circumstances, and he can give advice that could seem extremely unorthodox or incomprehensible to others. Beyond this oral counsel that occurs day after day and creates an intimate, direct relationship between Baba and devotee, there are numerous occasions of public orality. This, along with private dialogue, is an example of his declaration that after his thirty-second year, preaching and spiritual instruction would be the dominant aspects of his public role. Sathya Sai Baba is an indefatigable public speaker. In the early days of his mission, these speeches were intimate—on the banks of the river, in devotees’ homes, in the Mandir. Now he gives lectures to enormous gatherings of Indian and international devotees, students, or volunteers. Poornachandra auditorium in the ashram, the main venue for discourses, is estimated to hold about 15,000 people. He usually begins his discourses or lectures with a poem, a devotional song, or a Sanskrit verse, and then proceeds to elaborate on it. In doing so, he covers a number of themes, illustrating them with stories of sacred personalities or mythological references. He uses examples of saints, sages, kings, princes, ordinary peasants, animals, birds, or inanimate objects like

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pots, gold, or cloth. Most of his speeches have been collected in Sathya Sai Speaks. A separate set of books called Summer Showers in Brindavan are compilations of speeches given by him to college students during courses held for them. Many additional discourses fi nd their way into Sanathana Sarathi. Within Sathya Sai Speaks, perhaps more than any other work, we fi nd Baba returning time and again to certain important themes such as the role of the body and the senses, the signifi cance of service, the relationship between thoughts, words, and actions, or health and healing. Within this voluminous body of work, it is possible for critics and others to cast Sai Baba as orthodox, liberal, capitalist, or non-conformist (see Aitken 2004: 128–129). In certain places, it appears as if he is providing a nativist reading of India’s past or has a conservative attitude towards women. However, if one puts his ideas in context and reads them across the various volumes, a more nuanced understanding emerges. Baba speaks in Telugu, and when the lectures are translated from the original into English and published, they can seem rather diffuse, unedited, and are sometimes misspelled in translation. Any serious attempt to study these speeches, therefore, has to grapple with all kinds of issues of translation and context.18 Besides these speeches, there is a vast and growing corpus of written literature on Baba including several hundred books by devotees of their experiences. There are also works penned by Baba: one set of written works include individual texts called Prema Vahini, Dharma Vahini, Jnana Vahini, Sutra Vahini, Prasanthi Vahini, Upanishad Vahini, or Dhyana Vahini, which were articles written by Baba in Telugu and fi rst published in the Sanathana Sarathi serially. They are essays on specifi c themes such as love, righteousness, knowledge, the Brahma Sutras, peace, the Upani- shads, or meditation. There are also retellings of different scriptures: the Geetha Vahini is an interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita; two of his works—the Bhagavata Vahini and the Ramakatha Rasavahini—are based on the Bhagavata Purana and the Ramayana, respectively. This re-narrativization of scripture, philosophical texts, or themes in Indian religious culture by Sathya Sai Baba has parallels with the activity of other pan-Indian leaders in the twentieth century. Thus,

18 My own reading of these texts is from the English translations and while I have obviously lost out on the poetry of Telugu and Baba’s speaking style, this is a situation that many devotees who do not speak Telugu confront.

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the Untouchable/Dalit leader, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), provided a reinterpretation of the central ideas of Buddhism in his opus, The Buddha and the Dhamma, that stressed social injustice, suffering, and liberation (see Queen 1996). The retelling of epics between 1937 and 1957 by C. Rajagopalachari (1878–1972), the ﬁ rst Indian Governor- General, was a response to a historical and personal crisis, appeared to be a means of paving the road for the emergence of a new order, and created a modality that connected India’s ancient past and present. In doing so, C. Rajagopalachari was tapping into a traditional style of leadership—the bard—to which his family was connected as members of the Brahmin caste, inheritors of traditional scripture and learning, with linkages to the court (Waghorne 1985: 8–9). In the case of Sathya Sai Baba, his family was also linked to a bardic tradition although they were closer to popular religious forms of storytelling and musical performance. While he was occupied with such musical, oral, and dramatic activities during his childhood for a village audience, in the period of his public ministry, Sathya Sai Baba retold these texts for an increasingly national and even international constituency through the written and spoken word.

Guru, Sant, and Avatar

Three types of iconic representations—guru, sant, and avatar—inform understandings of Sathya Sai Baba’s public persona (see also White 1972). While scholars of religion may be able to discuss the specifi c historical context or textual traditions from which each of these iconic representations have emerged and their evolving meanings, in this section I want to register some general aspects of these representations as they pertain to Sathya Sai Baba’s public self. It is important to note that the use of one of the terms to describe religious leaders may not preclude the use of others: Radhasoami gurus, for instance, clearly emerge from a strong sant background and people use both terms to refer to them. In the case of other teachers and religious fi gures, these terms may be publicly adopted at different life stages: Meher Baba, for instance, was associated with the word avatar mainly in the last few decades of his life. Each of these concepts may also be absorbed into the fi eld of the other: a sant may be a guru, and vice versa, but all gurus may not emerge from the sant tradition, nor are all gurus

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avatars. In the case of Sathya Sai Baba, each of these representations continues to have social valence today but the idea of the avatar has garnered greater value and seems to have incorporated others as the Sai movement has become a global network of devotees. The term guru has two main meanings: “weighty” or “big” i.e., “one who is very great inwardly” or “one who dispels darkness” (Sarasvati Svami 1991: 35, 37). The guru tradition has considerable antiquity in South Asia being at least as old as the Upanishads (about 600 BCE) that invoke the image of teachers living in forests and students gathered close by receiving instruction in matters of spiritual knowledge. The epistemology of religion in a South Asian milieu accepts one’s guru as divine or the divine as having come in the form of a guru, for the visible guru is seen to lead one to the divine, truth, or spiritual instruction. The guru is a term applied to many contemporary personages such as Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, Chinmayananda, Aurobindo, Bhaktivedanta, Maharshi Mahesh Yogi, and Anandamayi Ma, many of whom have followings in India and elsewhere in the world.19 A guru can be male or female, although the connection of a woman with a Sanskrit term associated with the masculine gender can be challenging as the example of many contemporary female gurus has shown (Pechilis 2004: 5). A guru need not do anything perceptible in the world, be learned, be an example of any tradition, teach, or be bound by an sectarian system or scripture: a person who is great inwardly becomes a guru “by virtue of his being connected with his disciple” (Sarasvati Svami 1991: 35). This connection may be established through initiation or a transmission (by sight, word, touch, and so on) that originates from the guru and is communicated to the disciple, inspiring him to seek a particular path. There are many devotees who have been born into the Sathya Sai Baba movement by virtue of their familial association with him (and perhaps Shirdi Sai Baba as well). They are familiar faces during darshan. Sathya Sai Baba also seems to recognize them, knows details of their personal lives, asks them about their families during darshan time, or calls them in for an interview when they come to seek his counsel. In this role as guru, Sathya Sai Baba seems like a family pastor or an intimate friend. For others, Baba is less proximate physically but not necessarily less personal: they come for blessings during darshan, mail a

19 See, for instance, Harper (1972) and Mitchiner (1991) on gurus and other spiritual masters from India including Sathya Sai Baba.

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letter to him during a crisis or weep before his photograph, and see him in their dreams. Both groups of devotees may also study his teachings, especially his discourses, come to listen to his public speeches and seek spiritual instruction. They may engage in acts of service to the guru by serving society. The sant (from the word sat or truth) means one who knows the truth or has experienced ultimate reality. While it can be used more generally to mean a good person or holy man, it refers historically to poet-saints who belong to two groups: the Vaishnava poet-saints, devoted to Vitthala at Pandharpur in Maharashtra, who fl ourished from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries; and the northern poet-saints, who largely practised in the fi fteenth century and later and conceived of a supreme being beyond qualifi cations (see Schomer 1987: 2–3). While the worship of a person as a divine manifestation has old roots in South Asia, it gained signifi cance among the sants of North India, who sometimes exalted “the guru at the expense of rituals and gods” (Gold 1987: 3). Around these sants, such as Kabir or Dadu, sometimes developed elaborate lineages of devotion and succession and even sometimes a separate religion (as in the case of Nanak and Sikhism). The vocabulary of kinship informed relationships between devotees of the same guru and disciples were seen as entering into a voluntary exchange with the guru, providing service and obedience in return for protection—a situation that had parallels in political relationships of the period. The sant tradition differs from the sampradaya, a tradition linked to a teacher (acharya) that fi nds its roots in the Vedas or Brah- manic practices. The verses of the Hindi poet singers and sants and their extended lineages, by contrast, suggest a variety of relationships to and models drawn from Vaishnava, Nath, Sanskrit, popular, and Sufi traditions (see Gold 1987: 18–20, 49). The Sathya Sai Baba movement shares many ideas and practices with the sant tradition: for example, the centrality of songs, the idea of kinship forged through devotional bonds to the same fi gure, the lack of emphasis on caste, and the allusions to several religious traditions. At the same time, Sathya Sai Baba emphasizes the Vedas as do various sampradaya although his devotees are not drawn from a single caste or community. There is one crucial difference: there is no explicit lineage of gurus or acharyas and successors in the Sathya Sai Baba movement. Sathya Sai Baba does not claim that Shirdi Sai Baba was his guru: he claims to be Shirdi Sai Baba. “The two bodies are different but the divinity is one” is his common formulation of this identity. This is somewhat like the idea of reincarnation among Tibetan Buddhist

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lamas rather than the sants and their successors in the Radhasoami lineages. While it is possible to show that some aspects of the avatar concept were available earlier, the idea of the avatar is invoked clearly in the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and the Bhagavad Gita texts (about 1000 BCE onwards) and refers mainly to the deity Vishnu and his incarnations, Krishna and Rama. In popular religious imagination there are ten avatars of Vishnu, who are believed to have special attributes by virtue of being a descent of God in a (sometimes human) form. The avatar is contrasted with a sadhu, siddha or sadguru, who represents an ascent of the human towards the divine. Many contemporary gurus have been identiﬁ ed with the term avatar (e.g. Meher Baba and Aurobindo). Some of them are female: Coney (1999), for instance, points out that Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi is regarded as the Kalki avatar (the ﬁ nal avatar of Vishnu), the Adi Shakti or Great Goddess of South Asian mythology, or the Virgin Mary; Anandamayi Ma and Ammachi are also seen sometimes as avatars (Hallstrom 1999; Warrier 2005). While the status of a guru is attributed to Baba and there are continuities with the sant tradition, Sathya Sai Baba’s main claim is to be an avatar (see Bassuk 1987; Spurr 2007), an idea linked to devotees’ perception that he is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, or all-loving.20 He has also stated that Shirdi Sai Baba had predicted his coming and several devotees believe that Aurobindo’s writings also support his divine advent. There are some unique aspects of this claim: for example, Sathya Sai Baba suggests that he behaves as ordinary people do because he has assumed human form and that it allows people to feel kinship with him; a number of auspicious signs are given as evidence of his divinity; miracles and powers become a natural product of his divine nature. Avatars appear again and again, according to Sathya Sai Baba, with the primary goal of restoring dharma when righteous practice has declined. Within the movement, a differentiation is sometimes made between previous avatars and the present incarnation in terms of the possession of certain attributes of divinity of which there are sixteen: only Krishna is believed to be a complete avatar ( purnavatar) like Baba (see Gokak 1983:15).

20 Spurr (2007) provides an understanding of traditional avatar concepts and myths to which Sathya Sai Baba refers. In contrast to some previous studies of Sathya Sai Baba, he notes the afﬁ nity of his ideas with Vaishnava and Advaita traditions as well as the teachings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda.

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While Sathya Sai Baba is often compared to Krishna and many of his pronouncements can be located within Vaishnava ideas of the avatar, the idea of being an avatar of Shiva is relatively uncommon and the avatar-hood of Shiva and Shakti seems to be a claim unique to Sathya Sai Baba in contemporary times. Religious androgyny has a long devotional, yogic, and iconographic history in South Asia, specifi cally in the deity Shiva-Shakti as the lord who is half woman (see Goldberg 2002). The divine bisexual polarity or unity of Sathya Sai Baba, of course, also has historical parallels in Buddhist, Tantric and Gnostic traditions, and among some contemporary Indian gurus such as Ammachi (see Warrier 2005). What is signifi cant about Sathya Sai Baba’s claim is that publicly and performatively, at least, the Shiva half (right and male side) dominates the Shakti half (left and female side).21 This was revealed in the stroke that paralyzed his left side and had to be cured by the right in 1963 but also in the annual production of lingams during Shivaratri. Privately, however, many devotees experience his love and concern as a deeply maternal act. Sathya Sai Baba is also considered an avatar of Sai and Shirdi Sai Baba reborn. Certain symbols used by Shirdi Sai Baba, for instance, the use of sacred ash, the festivals celebrated by him, his role as a healer, his attempt to mediate between two or more religious traditions, are also part of the repertoire of Sathya Sai Baba. In doing so, he has not only absorbed some of the charisma of Shirdi Sai Baba but he has inserted himself within a chain of remembering that connects him with other traditions in South Asia, some of which have overseas mobility. Sathya Sai Baba has sometimes played down the Sufi content of Shirdi Sai Baba’s message in favor of the Vedic (see also Aitken 2004: 44) but some devotees recognize that there are parallels between his message and Sufi sm.22 He has mentioned in public that Shirdi Sai Baba was born of Hindu and Brahmin parents. 23 Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai

21 See Goldberg (2002), who suggests that duality in unity in the case of the divine androgyne is not equality but a hierarchy in which male dominates over female. 22 See, for example, Zeba Bashiruddin’s Sai Baba and Suﬁ sm ( Journey of Love), http:// sss.vn.ua/sbs.htm, accessed September 18, 2003. 23 On 28th September, 1990, Sathya Sai Baba revealed certain details about Shirdi Baba during a discourse at Puttaparthi. He stated that Shirdi Sai Baba was born in 1835 to Hindu parents as a consequence of a boon from Shiva and Parvati. They became mendicants and abandoned their newly born child. The infant was found by a childless faqir and his wife and ﬁ nally came to study with a pious scholar called Venkusa from 1839 to 1851. He reached Shirdi in 1851, then left to return in 1858. He lived there for the next sixty years and died in 1918. Towards the end of his life,

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Baba are also connected through the fi gure of Dattatreya (see Figure 6). Many believed Shirdi Sai Baba was an incarnation of Dattatreya and Sathya Sai Baba is often identifi ed with the same fi gure. His primary biographer, Kasturi, recalls him revealing himself as Dattatreya and his fondness for animals is often read as a reference to Dattatreya. Sathya Sai Baba’s triple incarnation scheme—Shirdi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Baba, and Prema Sai Baba—“mirrors Dattatreya’s triadic typology” (Rigopoulos 1998: 251).

Smarana-as-Devotional Memory

Over the nearly seven decades of Sathya Sai Baba’s public role, the terms guru and sant have been absorbed into the sacred terrain of the avatar. In his early life, he was recognized as a particularly precocious boy-guru who taught devotional songs like the sants (one might recall that he led a musical ensemble called the Pandhari Bhajan group reso- nant with references to the Maharashtrian sant tradition) and gathered a fellowship of believers around him. From the 1950s onwards, he was perceived as a pan-Indian guru attracting many classes of devotees, giving public discourses, and visiting various cities and sacred sites. A perceptible shift in his public persona is identiﬁ able in the 1960s—he made his Shiva-Shakti declaration, visited East Africa, announced to the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization that he had come to establish eternal religion, and set up a number of institutions in conjunction with his increasingly global role. For devotees today, the idea of Baba as avatar is sometimes associated with an almost millenarian sense that a new Sathya age ( yuga) or the Age of Aquarius has dawned. As avatar,

Shirdi Baba told Abdul Baba, a close devotee, that he would appear again after eight years (see Sanathana Sarathi, November 1990: 289–297). In another discourse given on September 27, 1992, Sathya Sai Baba said that Shirdi Sai Baba was born to poor Brahmin parents in Pathri village in Aurangabad district on September 27, 1838. He was abandoned by his parents and then found by a faqir. After some time, the boy was handed over to Gopal Rao Deshmukh or Venkusa and stayed with him for some time. He went to Shirdi in 1854 at the age of 16. He then disappeared to return to Shirdi in 1858 with Chandubhai Patel and his marriage party. He was addressed as “Sai” and “Baba” by Mhalaspathi and later also gave his father’s name as Baba. He lived in Shirdi until he left his body on October 15, 1918 (see Sanathana Sarathi, November 1992: 255–266).

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Fig. 6. Shirdi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Baba, and Dattareya (Print bought in a market)

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Baba stands at the center of a vast organization and devotional movement—urban, global, transnational, and transcultural—that intersects with a variety of New Age ideas and New Religious Movements. We have to place the status of Sathya Sai Baba as avatar and the posthumous recollection of Shirdi Baba within the larger social process of reconstructing devotional memory. The word smarana, which means recollection and memory in a vernacular semantics, points to a tradition of recollection where the written, the oral, the performative, the visual, or the musical interpenetrate and enrich each other in the individual or collective remembrance of the name or form of god, a historical narrative, the deeds of ancestors, deities, or heroes (see Srinivas 2001a). The transformation of smarana-as-devotional memory in the Sathya Sai Baba movement has occurred through several institutions (museums, publications, or the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization), pronouncements (such as the 1963 Shiva-Shakti declaration), and practices such as the re-narrativization of texts such as the Ramayana or the Mahabharata by Sathya Sai Baba. New sacred spaces were also created in Puttaparthi and Bangalore—a dry land agricultural area and a “science city”—and can be contrasted with older pilgrimage centers such as Pandharpur or Tirupati. In a spatial sense, through the idea of three Babas, three states in modern India—Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka (where Prema Sai is supposed to take birth)—have been connected in a novel symbolic geography that is a uniquely Deccan development. The trinitarian formula also creates a temporal sequence and framework for institutional and spiritual succession in a way reminiscent of the Baha’i.24 It is as if a neo-epic is being written: the little village of Puttaparthi is a Brindavan or Mathura of the new complete avatar. Brindavan is also the name of Baba’s ashram in Bangalore in which stands a giant statue of Venugopala, the youthful cowherd Krishna with the ﬂ ute. It is important to remember, however, that devotional memory is not unitary (or purely Shaiva or Vaishnava), but encodes many representations and is (frustratingly or playfully) multivocal. The Sarva Dharma pillar in Prashanti Nilayam, for instance, symbolizes the movement in the writing of this epic story from Shirdi and a regional tradition of devotion to an international ashram. This internationalism is not a

24 On the Baha’i, see Hatcher and Martin (1985); McMullen (2000); Warburg (2006).

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medieval syncretism but a theosophical unity emphasizing a common spiritual core at the heart of all world religions; it displays a historical continuity with Indian Theosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and creates resonances with contemporary ideas of self-spirituality.25 Before 1918, devotion to Shirdi Sai Baba largely participated in regional traditions of worship and was dependent on the presence and the power of a living saint. Although congregational worship emerged as a mode during Shirdi Sai Baba’s own lifetime, after 1918 new fi gures came to represent the vast terrain that had opened up including the modern nation. When we consider the development of the Sathya Sai Baba movement in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries, symbols, written works, ritual practices, archives, and institutions become packed extremely densely into the fabric of devotion. It is as if the vastness of space traversed by the railways, air travel, media, bureaucracy, information systems, and the imagination of an increasingly international constituency requires this complexity of cultural practices. Sathya Sai Baba has come to stand at the epicenter of both national and transnational fl ows of constituencies, symbols, and infrastructures. The role of a local faqir has been replaced by that of a global avatar.

25 See also van der Veer (2001: 55–82) on spiritualism and Theosophy’s role in anti-colonial and anti-establishment politics in Britain and India.

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THE SENSE OF THE PRESENCE

Towards a Sensorium of the Sacred

The devotional song, “Sai deva nama smaranam, sarva papa dukha kshamanam, Sai deva charana sharanam, nitya bhakti mukti pradayakam” (The remembrance of god Sai’s name, forgives/remits all sin and sorrow, surrendering at the feet of god Sai, gives daily devotion and liberation), suggests one the most important aspects of religiosity in South Asia: the sensory and somatic nature of encounters with the divine or holy persons. The primacy of sound, music, and various versions of auditory theology have long been recognized in the study of religion in South Asia, whether it is it is the revelatory nature of the Veda, the sacredness of mantra in yoga or Transcendental Meditation, the centrality of the Granth Sahib in Sikhism, the Suﬁ dhikr or listening to music (sama), and the singing of devotional songs by Hare Krishna devotees (Beck 1993; Coward and Goa 2004; Lawrence 1983; Qureshi 1986; Wulff 1983). The guru’s speech is powerful. He or she may transmit special formulae during initiation or other key moments; repeating them can become a path to material and spiritual wealth. The exchange of gazes between the deity-image and the devotee is a crucial spiritual act, a form of knowing and possible revelation, a mode of drinking in divine power through the eyes (Babb 1981; Eck 1981). In the case of a “living deity,” the eye is also an organ of touch in the sense that it is used to form a connection between guru and devotees, who may compete for the guru’s visual attention believing that the guru sees everybody. Even when he/she is not physically present, a photograph, dreams and waking visions convey darshan (Babb 1986a: 62–89).1

1 See also DuPertuis (1986), who examines the Radhasoami and the Divine Light Mission suggesting that the recognition of charisma is an active social process involving the ratiﬁ cation of beliefs through non-cognitive methods of perceptual change such as meditation and the ritual of darshan. Giving darshan is a common practice among female gurus such as Mother Meera, Gurumayi, or Ammachi (see Pechlis 2004).

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For example, Radhasoami teachings “maintain that the eyes are energy centers and transmitters; hence the meeting of eyes between master and devotee is a moment of dramatic spiritual interaction” ( Juergens- meyer 1991: 84). While living masters may appear to disciples and see them or be seen by them, away from the guru’s presence disciples try to remember his/her face alongside the repetition of the name. The Radhasoami movement also places emphasis on other types of relationships between devotees and gurus’ bodies through relics or symbolic food leavings. For devotees of Ammachi, the female guru from Kerala, regardless of the devotee’s age, caste, gender or ethnicity, the divine encounter and darshan involves receiving a hug, an emotional embrace suggesting love, surrender, and a mother-child relationship (Raj 2004; Warrier 2005). The holiness and sanctity of Muslim holy men and saintly fi gures ( pirs) in the Sufi tradition is associated with objects and spaces that are considered extensions of their bodies, “the hardware of sanctity manifesting the reality of saintliness” (Mills 1998: 41). Like ashrams that extend the guru’s energetic presence and also concentrate it in a place where he/she is situated so that it can continue to exist even after death of the guru (Gold 1995: 245), the pir’s spiritual court (darbar) or the site of his tomb (dargah/mazar) are penetrated by his embodied power and disciples seek grace there (Mills 1998; see also Werbner and Basu 1998). The perception of the guru, pir, or a deity emerges not only from visuality or sound but may include smell, dreams, touch, taste, or tears—religious experience is also an experience of the senses. “Religious tactility” involves binding, burning, moving, handling, kinesthesia, laying on of hands, or handling the challenges of “what cannot be seen or heard” (Chidester 2005: 62). Weeping is both a physical act and has metaphysical meanings in the religious imagination and parallels can be drawn between tears and other body fl uids (Patton and Hawley 2005). The senses are not separated from each other; descriptions such as “to be touched by darshan” refl ect the limits of language, “the multi-directional interaction of the senses and of sensory ideologies” (Howes 2005: 9), or a kind of sensual alchemy. Intersensoriality but also intersubjectiv- ity occurs through dreams, miracles or coincidences, where devotees and the guru intersect with each other within and without. Where the senses go, so do memories of other places and bodies, proximity and distance, presence and absence, the sensory and the mnemonic working together. This reminds us, as Coomaraswamy argues, that psychology

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can be a pneumatology (Lipsey 1977, vol. 2: 333–386) or what I would call sensology. This chapter explores the sensory and interactive modes for approaching the presence of Sathya Sai Baba in the devotional world centered on him. Devotees long to touch his feet, receive his words or a mantra such as the Gayatri, or ash from his hands. Dreams of him are also signs of encounter and his touch (even in a dream) is felt to have healing power. Separation from his form is painful and one may weep tears of longing. Seeing him at darshan time (crushed up against other bodies of the same sex) is like receiving an electric charge. This “sacred sensorium” or perceptual apparatus for approaching the guru or the divine is cultural, historical, social and political in nature rather than merely psychological.2 There are obviously many cultures of the senses and the body and while there is no single sensorium of the sacred, there are shared conventions and departures that we can explore particularly among the urban middle-class devotees of Baba. The sensorium is also affected by changes in media and this chapter emphasizes both the patterned and unexpected contact between the guru and the devotee through the performance of darshan, congregational singing and remembering the divine name, objects and substances such as ash, ambrosia, and the lingam, print media such as posters and photographs, and electronic media. It argues that we have to embed the sensory perception of the sacred and its corporeality within a larger discursive framework that addresses both the phenomenology of the event and its historical, epistemological, performative, and social registers. In this context, it is important to recall that for most middle-class devotees this sacred sensorium is also an “urban” sensorium: it is anchored ultimately in the processes, media, and institutions of their city lives and mediates their experience of the urban as much as the guru himself.3 Although this is not the primary direction of this chapter, this aspect of the sensorium emerges more clearly in later chapters as we encounter devotees in Bangalore, Nairobi, and Atlanta.

2 See the introduction in Senses and Society, 2006, vol. 1, Issue I: 5–8. 3 See Goonewardena (2005), who also proposes the concept of an urban sensorium for exploring the theoretical relationship of ideology and space. While there may be some overlap in my use of the term and his, my own concern is to explore the textures and registers of the sacred sensorium while acknowledging its urban nature.

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At First Sight

Darshan is a key visual performance in the case of Sathya Sai Baba, a “central communion” within the movement (Aitken 2004: 26). Every morning and afternoon when he is in residence, thousands gather in Prashanti Nilayam for Sathya Sai Baba’s darshan (see Figure 7). Most male residents and devotees are dressed in white pants and shirts while women are more colorfully arrayed. Some people arrive in groups, their scarves designating their Sai Center (or samiti) in India or abroad. They sit in queues to be let inside the darshan area monitored closely by service volunteers who are also cleaning and preparing the space for the ritual. About two hours before darshan, devotees’ queues are let into the Sai Kulwant Hall enclosing the temple, men and women sitting separately. They pass through a security check fi rst: they are scanned by a metal detector held by a volunteer, other volunteers sitting on the ground pat people’s bodies down, and no one is allowed to carry anything apart from keys or a small purse into the darshan area. Devotees are seated in quadrangles, with paths in between, and the lines of seating are carefully monitored: one may not stand up for long, talk loudly, or simply wander around. Devotees sitting in the fi rst few rows are excited because here they may have a chance to see Sathya Sai Baba up close; the majority will see him from a distance of about 25–75 meters. Students from the campus outside also arrive a little before darshan, occupying the pride of place near the Mandir. Offi ce bearers of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization, the Central Trust, faculty at the university, or visiting dignitaries—only the men—are allowed to sit in the temple verandah. Old residents of the hermitage, the sick and the infi rm, women offi ce- bearers or VIPs also have special areas and benches for seating on the hall’s periphery. For several hours, devotees sit on the stone fl oors waiting for Baba to appear. Men sit separated from women and there are volunteers that clean the area, make sure that the devotees do not disturb the silence or orderly lines, or push or grab others. Devotees may be holding letters in their hands, hopeful that Baba will receive them, cradling children to be blessed by him, chanting softly, meditating, or speaking in hushed whispers with each other. Once in a while, a ripple runs through the crowd when it appears that Baba may come out of his residence. The real signal that darshan has “begun” is the sound of music playing through the public address system, typically Indian classical instrumental music. The association of this music (now available in cassettes) with darshan is a familiar mnemonic indicating that Baba will appear soon in the line of vision.

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Fig. 7. Darshan (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry)

At fi rst he is a fl ame-colored speck with a halo of hair in the distance. The music continues to play while he comes closer and moves around. Until recently, he walked along a path created for him amidst the crowd, took letters, talked to others, or produced sacred ash (vibhuti). Today, he is driven in a golf cart or car, or pushed around in a wheeled arm- chair. For the many traveling from afar to Puttaparthi, as Klass (1991: 151–152) describes for devotees from Trinidad, the fi rst sight of Sai Baba coming out for darshan seems to repay them for the expensive and strenuous trip; they hope that he will notice them personally, perhaps speak or smile at them, or choose them for a personal interview. Many ponder about every word and gesture he makes, for they feel that

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everything he does has profound meaning. He indicates to fortunate individuals, families, or groups that they should go into his rooms for a personal interview. Once he goes into the “interview room” where he meets people, the music stops playing. Public darshan is over but inside the interview room, some devotees are engaged in a private encounter with the guru, speaking to him about family matters, careers, or spiritual issues. Many people sitting outside leave; others wait or return later because, after some time, Baba will come out of the room to listen to devotional songs that are sung in his presence. After this is over, he returns to his rooms. This is the moment for another vision of Baba. The performance of darshan, almost the same routine from day to day, provides rather different experiences and meanings for cultural subjects based on their personal and social histories, as numerous devotional accounts testify. For some this darshan is a spectacle, and Sathya Sai Baba is like a charismatic media personality whom they hope to glimpse. For others, this is one stop on a pilgrimage-tourism route among other such devotional sites, and they will return home with prints and other memorabilia recording their brief encounter with Baba. There are hundreds of devotees, however, who seem to hunger to see their guru, hear his discourses and have a few words with him, touch the hem of his fl ame-color gown as he passes by, or receive sacred ash and other substances from him—a “visual, tactile, and even alimentary intimacy” (Babb 1983: 117). Nagamani Purnaiya, an old devotee of Sathya Sai Baba, describes how she came to see him for the fi rst time, probably before 1950 (Pur- naiya 1976: 21–24). Affl icted by troubles, she sat crying in front of the deity Krishna’s picture, when there was a knock on her door at her home in Bangalore. Her cousin and childhood playmate had brought her a coin bearing an image of Shirdi Sai Baba; he asked her to wear it on her person, telling her that all her troubles would soon come to an end. Coming from an orthodox background, at fi rst she was loath to do so since his name sounded Muslim, but she learned from her cousin that Shirdi Sai Baba had been born to a pious Hindu Brahmin couple and brought up by a Muslim one. Later that same evening she read the life-story of Shirdi Sai Baba in a newspaper and also heard from a relative that Shirdi Sai Baba had been reborn in Puttaparthi. These serendipitous events quickly led to a trip the very next day to see Sathya Sai Baba: I was very eager to see Swami [master] whom I imagined to be a tall person with a long beard and moustache. But when I fi rst saw Swami, I

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was surprised that He looked so small and sweet that I felt like physically carrying him away to my house . . . He was standing wearing a thick and fragrant rose garland that reached down to His divine feet. Next I offered my namaskarams [obeisance] to Swami’s holy feet. I felt so peaceful at that moment that I forgot the world and all my cares and was quite content to lie prostrate at His feet only. (Purnaiya 1976: 24) Nagamani Purnaiya stayed along with her friends for about a week at Puttaparthi at the invitation of Sathya Sai Baba, who often joined the meals they prepared and every morning and evening sang bhajans in the temple. On the day of their departure, Baba walked them to the banks of the Chitravati River on the other side of which their car was parked. As they waded through the water, Nagamani took some of the water that touched Baba’s feet and drank it, regarding it as holy water. Baba also took some water and asked her to stretch her hand out to receive it. When she did, it changed into a golden talisman. He instructed her to wear it around her neck, saying that no harm would come to her thereafter. As they climbed into the car, he waved goodbye with his handkerchief. Nagamani’s description of Sathya Sai Baba’s darshan in the early days of the movement attests to the intimacy that other devotees have written about. The role of tears in her narrative is a physical event signifying distress, but it also has a long history within the devotional imagination in South Asia, especially as it relates to the deity Krishna, the object of devotion and also suffering for the cowherd girls in narratives, poems and songs (Hawley 2005). Just as Nagamani’s weeping and tears signify her devotion to and separation from Krishna, she is connected to and separated from Sathya Sai Baba by the river: she drinks the water that touches his feet and also receives it from him.4 If a parallel is visible between tears and river water, the two parts of the story are also symmetrical in another way: in one she is given a talisman by her cousin; in the other, Baba gives her one. Both ask her to keep it on her person. What is speciﬁ c to her account is the metonymic cultural chain that leads from Krishna to Sathya Sai Baba, whom she associates with her chosen deity. Her reactions seeing Baba the ﬁ rst time, in fact, echo sentiments that Krishna devotees may express regarding him in the aspect of a lovable and precocious boy. Her recontextualization of

4 My analysis here is inspired by Hawley’s article (2005) on tears and Krishna.

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Sathya Sai Baba as Krishna, however, is mediated by the ambivalent fi gure of Shirdi Sai Baba. By contrast, Arnold Schulman, an American screen writer and playwright from New York, visited Puttaparthi when Baba was in his forties, led by a chain of events that began with Schulman’s study of Zen Buddhism. He describes his impressions thus: He wore a bright orange silk dress that hung loosely down to his chunky bare feet; but the fi rst thing one noticed was his Afro-electric hair standing straight out from all parts of his head like a black, kinky halo fi ve or six inches wide. (Schulman 1972: 8) The “Afro” hairstyle is not an allusion that many Indian devotees would have made but Schulman’s route to darshan seems to be fairly typical of large number of American devotees who were visiting Puttaparthi by the 1970s and 1980s. Many of them had emerged from the political and cultural crises of the 1960s with an interest in parapsychology, alternative healing practices, the Esalen Institute, Taoism or Buddhism. By this time, the fi rst two Sai Centers had also opened in California in 1969. Rita Bruce describes how the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the despair of middle-class suburban living, and emotional depression drew her to the Sai Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The literature made available through the Sai Center, lectures, and visual images had familiarized her with Baba’s form. Her account, on fi rst arrival in 1979 in Puttaparthi, highlights the role of this institutional complex and its media: “The time for darshan fi nally arrived . . . I shook myself. Is this the video I’d watched so many times, or was I really here?” (Bruce 1991: 48, my emphasis). Through the images, however, there was a somatic burst. She states that seeing the fl ash of orange of his gown on the verandah of the temple touched her deeply: I tried to quieten the sobs that came forth from the pit of stomach. I had never experienced a yearning or any desire that affected me so deeply as this. (Bruce 1991: 49) Jack Scher, coming from an orthodox Jewish and Christian Scientist background, writes that he fi rst heard about Sai Baba from a friend who was a psychic healer in the 1970s. Later in 1984, he read two books on Baba, one by Dr. Samuel Sandweiss called The Holy Man and the Psychiatrist, and the other by the theosophist Howard Murphet called Sai Baba Avatar. Liking the description of Sai Baba’s “Christ-like existence” and miracles (Scher 1990: 5), he decided to make a trip to India:

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Just before we left, I saw Baba in a dream. He looked at me very sternly and in a deep voice said, “What do you want?” I said I wanted to know that death is not the end and that I will have a continuing awareness of myself after death. (Scher 1990: 6) At the austere ashram, which by this time had grown into a large complex, he writes that he was “angry, hopeful, disappointed, fascinated and sometimes very lonely” (ibid. p. 6). He longed above all for an interview with Baba that would prove he was God. Each day he would line up and wait among the crowds that gathered. Although Baba often came close enough to touch him, the guru never looked at him, an event that was not to be fulﬁ lled until many darshans later. The cataclysmic moment for him was the peaceful death of Jon, a Jewish boy from New York like Scher, which resulted in a funeral being held in the ashram by other Jewish devotees. The experience appears to have been transformative for Scher: At that moment all the faces of all the people from the funeral suddenly came to life like characters in a movie. I sobbed with joy. This was Baba’s divinity play . . . orchestrated . . . so that I could understand and lose my fear of death. (Scher 1990: 10) Dr. H.K. Takyi, born in Ghana and trained as a surgeon in England and Ireland, writes that he ﬁ rst came to hear about Sathya Sai Baba in Accra in 1997 (Kanu no date: 53–57). A lady from the Philippines told him about the healing power of sacred ash. He started reading about Baba and ordered a picture of him from the Sai Center in Tustin, California. Within weeks of its arrival, it began to exude ash. By the next year he had joined the Sai Center in Accra and was traveling to Puttaparthi, a trip that he describes as being foretold in a dream that he had in 1950 while staying at the Salvation Army hostel in England. In his dream, two white beings with wings came for him and carried him between them to a beautiful garden. They pointed to a house in the distance telling him that that was where God lived. Twenty-eight years later at Puttaparthi, he sat in front of the temple awaiting Baba’s emergence: I found myself seated in between two friends from Ghana and all three of us were dressed in white. Baba came and stood a few yards from where we were seated and gave us a very sweet smile. I had the presence of mind to smile back and He stood long enough to enable me to take a few pictures of Him. One of the pictures came out with a blue halo around His head. (Kanu no date: 55, my emphasis)

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For Dr. Takyi, there was no doubt that the teachings of Sathya Sai Baba and Jesus were the same. Another devotee, Victor Kanu from Sierra Leone, once ambassador to the United Kingdom, describes in the same volume how African traditional religions and Christianity infl uenced him as a child, but that over the years the latter had made it diffi cult for him to penetrate his African heritage. At Puttaparthi in 1980, he had no doubt that he was in the presence of the being his African ancestors described as God (Kanu no date: 119–148). In the postcolonial situation or in the context of various diasporas, as Stuart Hall (1994) suggests, identities must be viewed as a tripartite representation where different presences operate. There is, fi rst, the site of the repressed, which has been diffi cult to voice but is present everywhere; second, the dominant, which constantly speaks to us and is inscribed in a relation of power to the fi rst site; and third, the new world, a territory of encounters, assimilations and creolizations. For Kanu and Takyi, these identities ascribed to Baba are “names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (Hall 1994: 196). Thus, for example, the textured perception of Sathya Sai Baba as the God described by one’s African ancestors signals a new world of border-crossings between spiritualism, revitalization movements, and Christianity for which the postcolonial experience creates a hospitable conjuncture. Sathya Sai Baba’s visit to East Africa in 1968 and the travel by African intellectuals and professionals to the United Kingdom, the United States, and also India in the postcolonial period are moments in the development of these representations. The narratives of Nagamani, Schulman, Scher, and Bruce are also amenable to this analysis although the sites are not the same: we might speak of Islam as the site of the repressed for Nagamani, while the dominant is Vaishnava devotion. For Schulman, Scher, and Bruce the role of the dominant is played by their Judaism or Christianity, while the new world is expressed in the form of parapsychology, Zen, or a language of energies, auras, and forces. Mapped onto the event of Baba’s darshan, these representations produce a dense fi eld of negotiated gazes and memories.

Remembering the Name

Practices of recollection are central to the sense of the guru’s presence. Sathya Sai Baba himself does not stress darshan as an aspect of

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spiritual practice but states that in this age, the most important acts are reciting and singing the name of one’s god, listening to the name or voice of god, and remembering the name and form of one’s god. This is evident even in his earliest discourses:5 Take up the Name of God, any of his innumerable ones, any that appeals to you most and the Form appropriate to that Name and start repeating it from now on; that is the royal road to ensure Joy and Peace. That will train you in the feeling of brotherhood and remove enmity towards fellowmen. (SSS, Vol. I: 210–11) According to Baba, trying out a series of names and forms and fl it- ting from one to the other wastes time and energy. One needs to focus on one name, ingest it, or breathe it, as it were. The name itself is “sweet,” confers “sweetness latent in you,” and can become as essential as “air for the lungs” (SSS, Vol. I: 214). He uses a somatic and organic idiom in several discourses suggesting the signifi cance of the name as a mode of corporeal and mental reform. Devotion can be compared to “water” that washes away the “dirt” of egoism and possessiveness; the “soap” is the repetition of God’s name (SSS, Vol. I: 19). The name is “food” that gives spiritual energy and is transmuted into virtue (SSS, Vol. II: 11). It is the alchemy by which a “rock” can be transformed into “clay” (SSS, Vol. II: 184). Hearing the name is the “medicine” to be taken internally while singing the name is the “balm” applied externally (SSS, Vol. I: 127). While this program of bodily reform renders the sense organs and mind pure, it is also tied to a program in which the elements of the world (space, air, fi re, water, and earth) that are today polluted can also be purifi ed as a result of sacred sound waves. He has spoken about the signifi cance of the name “Rama.”6 He insists, however, that any name and form that appeals to one should be used. Based on the practice, alone and in company, one becomes egoless and empty like a fl ute: . . . then the Lord will come to you, pick you up, put you to His lips and breathe through you and . . . He will create captivating music for all Cre- ation to enjoy. (SSS, Vol. I: 25)

5 He describes nine chief means of devotion (bhakti) by which the mind is trained and controlled; the ﬁ rst three are hearing (sravana), singing (kirtana) and remembering (smarana) god’s name (see, for instance, SSS, Vol. 1: 129). 6 According to him, it has the seed letters of both the Shiva and Narayana mantras (SSS, Vol. 1: 81).

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The musical metaphor used by Baba here alludes to the signiﬁ cance of performing devotional songs (bhajans) in the Sathya Sai Baba movement. Sathya Sai Baba is a performer himself: as a young boy, he led an ensemble of singers called the Pandhari Bhajan group and in the early days of his ministry led devotees in song during bhajan sessions in the Old Mandir. His family members were known for their dramatic and musical abilities as bards interpreting and popularizing religious literature. Baba has composed several bhajans and many pictures show him listening to bhajans, his eyes closed, or encouraging the singers through movements with his hands. Many recordings of him singing bhajans are available, under labels such as “Baba Chants the Bhajans.” He distinguishes between individual singing (kirtan) and community singing (sankirtan) of devotional songs; it is the latter that is connected to the well-being of the world.7 These practices—the insistence on the recollection of the divine name, the importance of the guru, devotion to a personal god, congregational singing, and musical performance—link the Sai Baba movement with older Bhakti movements in the sub-continent from about the sixth or seventh century onwards. Indeed, the words bhakti and bhajan share the same Sanskrit root, bhaj, including meanings such as partaking of, to share, or enjoy.8 Groups of poet-saints differed on metaphysical grounds, there were social differences between followers of different traditions, and scholars have debated whether to treat them under a general term, as two separate schools, or as movements having some kind of family resemblance between them. For instance, it can be argued that all poet-saints agreed on the means to achieve liberation: the necessity of devotion to and practice of the divine name, devotion

7 He identiﬁ es four types of collective singing: guna sankirtana refers to a song in which the devotee deals with the auspicious qualities (guna) of the divine; lila sankirtana refers to the joy a devotee feels about the sacred sport (lila) of the divine; bhava sankirtana is the expression of emotions (bhava) for the divine such as eternal love, sweetness, friendship and so on; and nama sankirtana is one in which the names of the divine are revealed (SSS, Vol. XXV: 79–80). 8 These bhakti movements include Tamil regional cults of Shiva and Vishnu that later grew into Tamil Shaiva and Vaishnava sects with their poet-singer saints such as the Nayanars and Alvars; the Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra regions’ poet-saints such as Tukaram, Purandaradasa, and Tyagaraja; and devotional traditions in North India including ﬁ gures like Mirabai, Kabir, Guru Nanak, and Dadu. There is a fairly large literature on these saints and a comprehensive bibliography is not possible here. See, for instance, Hawley and Juergensmeyer (1988); Jackson (1991, 1998); Lorenzen (2004); Peterson (1989); Ramanujam (1973, 1981); Schomer and McLeod (1987).

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to the divine guru, and the company of saints (see Vaudeville 1987: 31). The concept of nine steps on the path of devotion— listening to the Lord’s glory, singing of Him, thinking of Him, serving His feet, performing His worship, saluting Him, serving Him, friendship with Him, surrendering to Him (de Bary 1958: 333)—expressed in the Bhagavata Purana was common to devotees and poet-saints from several traditions. There is evidence that there were professional bhajan singers, large festivals of bhajan singing, and Bhakti lineages that made written collections of their favorite bhajans from about the second half of the sixteenth century (Callewaert and Lath 1989: 58–63).9 For Tyagaraja (1767–1847), the south Indian musician-composer and saint, music was a medium and message of divinity as well as a spiritual practice ( Jackson 1991). In fact, he is regularly invoked by Sathya Sai Baba, who often begins his discourses by singing a few lines in Telugu from songs composed by Tyagaraja, the lines framing his discourse for the day to thousands gathered to hear his singing and speaking voice. These traditions of singing continue to enjoy life in contemporary India: Singer (1972: 199–241), for instance, explored the social and cultural role of Radha-Krishna bhajan gatherings in Madras city in relationship to modernization, urbanization, and the middle class.10 Bhajans are a part of spiritual practice in many contemporary religious movements focused on religious leaders such as Chinmayananda and Ammachi. Musical genres and their performances such as qawwali have also been sustained by Sufi sm in South Asia: a group of performers present songs meant to arouse mystical love in the devotional gathering at the shrines of Sufi saints (see Lawrence 1983; Qureshi 1986). Some songs within the Sai movement such as “Sai bina raha na jaye” (Without Sai one cannot remain) clearly refl ect a connection with the qawwali. Baba’s encouragement of performance traditions is evident in his close relationship with well-known musicians in India (such as the Karnatak music vocalist M.S. Subbalakshmi) who have performed in Puttaparthi

9 See also Damle (1955, 1960) on harikatha (singing of Hari or Vishnu, telling tales of the gods’ heroic deeds in song). 10 Singer suggested that these cultural performances enact the ideals of bhakti and social equality and also permit an easier path to individual salvation (in contrast to ritual or scholastic traditions of family, caste, or sect) for many middle-class and professional people in the context of urban life. They also meet the challenges of regional, anti-Brahmin, anti-Sanskrit, and other movements in contemporary South India by promoting forms and activities that bridge castes, temples, domestic cults and “secular forms of urban association” (Singer 1972: 200).

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during key festivals as well as the inauguration of a Music College for students in his educational campus. In the Sathya Sai Baba movement, men and women sit separately from each other during the bhajan session and in India, usually on the fl oor, cross-legged, and without shoes. Musical instruments are kept to a minimum and include the harmonium, drums (tabla and dholak), tiny cymbals that also keep the beat (manjira), and sometimes in Europe or North America, a guitar. Bhajans are generally composed of four lines, the verses and the tunes simple rather than elaborately classical. A lead singer (male or female) will sing the fi rst line that is then repeated by the chorus of other devotees, who accompany the words with rhythmic clapping. The fi rst line is followed by the second line, which is then repeated by the chorus, and so on. After all the lines in the bhajan have been sung once, then the lead singer will sing them all over again followed by other devotees at a much faster beat and speed. Devotees can be seen swaying and clapping enthusiastically to the sounds and words of a bhajan or just singing softly and trying to follow the words. Sometimes there are tears in a devotee’s eyes. A typical bhajan session lasts for about an hour or so. It begins with “Om” chanted three times, followed by the chanting of 108 attributes of Sathya Sai Baba and salutations to him (Sri Sathya Sai Ashtotarashat- anamavali). Such prayers are common among sectarian and devotional traditions in India and focus on a series of divine qualities and names (namavali). Other prayers may be interposed before the main bhajan session. The core of the session begins with a bhajan to Ganesha, followed by a bhajan sung to the guru. For the rest of the session any devotee may sing a bhajan of his or her choice. Many of the bhajans have been composed by Baba, are adaptations of bhajans sung in other parts of India (sometimes through the mere act of insertion of “Sai”), part of a repertoire shared with many other gurus, or simply recollections of the names of various deities. Many of them have a vocabulary drawn from Sanskrit or Hindustani, terms usually understood by an Indian audience, although regional language bhajans are sung as well. They can be very ecumenical and include references to Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Mahavira and Guru Nanak, consistent with Sathya Sai Baba’s advice that any name can be used. Several collections of Sai bhajans are available in the market: the Sai Bhajana Mala (2000), for instance, published by the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust, is a collection of 1,008 bhajans dedicated to Sathya Sai Baba, the Guru, Ganesha, Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Rama, the Goddess, and Sarva

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Dharma (invoking various religious traditions and leaders). Before the hour is up, the session ends with a bhajan to the deity, Subrahmanya (I have noticed that this is skipped in some centers in the U.S.).11 Closing prayers (the order can change a bit from center to center) include the Sarva Dharma Prayer invoking a single God present in different names and forms or the truth of all religions; this is a composition attributed to the Gandhian and Sarvodaya movement leader, Vinoba Bhave (1895–1982). There is also a short meditation period and a verse from the Rig Veda: “Lead me from untruth to truth, from darkness to light, from death to immortality.” The Gayatri mantra (from the Rig Veda) is also recited three times.12 The arati (which usually involves waving a ﬂ ame in a clockwise manner in front of the deity or picture) is carried out and a song is sung during the distribution of ash (vibhuti). The arati is an adaptation of a song (“Om Jaya Jagadisha Hare”) from the Hindi ﬁ lm, Purab aur Paschim (1970), also used in many temples and homes across India and elsewhere. This is followed by a prayer for universal welfare: “loka samasta sukhino bhavantu” (usually translated in bhajan collections as “let all the beings in all the worlds be happy”). Bhajans form the heart of collective spiritual practice for many devotees, their consistency and relative uniformity (like the chanting of the “daimoku” and the representation of the “gohonzon” in the Soka Gakkai movement) unifying devotees worldwide. But what is the relationship between reciting, singing, listening to or remembering the name and the presence of the guru? Sathya Sai Baba insists on the integrity of the name and form rather than an arbitrary connection. The name can compel the concretization of the divine in the form and name one yearns for: “The Lord has to assume the Form you choose, the Name you fancy; in fact, you shape Him so” (SSS, Vol. I: 29). The nama or noumenon involves primarily the concept of thought or sound, while rupa or phenomenon involves mainly the concept of vision; the

11 Bowen (1988: 107–112) also discusses the exclusion of Subrahmanya (unfamiliar to a mainly Gujarati Hindu constituency) in the Bradford Center, UK. 12 Sathya Sai Baba has often spoken about the signiﬁ cance of the Gayatri mantra. According to him, the prayer is addressed to the immanent or transcendent divine and has three parts: description, meditation and prayer. After the divine is praised and meditated upon as being present in all times, all worlds, and all qualities, one appeals to the divine to awaken and enlighten one’s intellect. He urges people to recite it at least three times a day at sunrise, noon, and sunset, or as many times as one wants. Although the chanting of the Gayatri is traditionally associated with upper-caste Hindus (and men), he has democratized its recitation (like some other gurus in India) and also freed it from a gender-bar.

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utterance and the manifestation do not imply a temporal chain of events but simultaneity, as Coomaraswamy argues (Lipsey 1977, Vol. 2: 192–193). For devotees, the name or the song, therefore, is intended to invoke a vision of the guru. Devotional singing is accompanied by speciﬁ c objects of vision such as a chair placed at the altar signifying Baba’s presence or photographs of him. Stories abound about other signs of his presence during a session of singing: the garland on his photograph falls down or begins to swing; there appear to be footprints on the cushion placed before the chair for Baba to rest his feet; ash or other substances associated with him appear on his photograph; occasionally, some devotees, “see” him sitting on the chair. I have also heard of photographs being taken during a bhajan that, when developed, show his ﬁ gure in the background as a shadowy presence. The hermeneutic of sounds and vision includes the appearance of such signs based on his grace.

The Semiology of Substances and Forms

For devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, his spiritual identity with Shirdi Sai Baba is an accepted fact even though as legal entities they are different. For some, this identity is established through the juxtapositioning of the two within the movement through the template of the three incarnations—Shirdi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Baba and Prema Sai Baba. For some, it is ratifi ed through personal experiences, dreams, the lockets that Sathya Sai Baba gives some devotees that include the pictures of both Shirdi Sai Baba and himself, the message of the unity of religions, and, of course, the production of ash (Gokak 1983: 66–70; Kasturi 1962: 142–174). Receiving ash (vibhuti) from Sathya Sai Baba is considered a blessing that endows one with prosperity, increases spiritual splendor, removes danger, and heals. Not only does ash emerge from his right palm, but Sathya Sai himself has been known to exude ash from other parts of his body including his forehead in his younger days. While not a body fl uid, ash is a signifi cant body substance that fl ows out or falls from his palm. It appears that he started distributing ash, not from a “fi replace” like Shirdi Sai Baba, but “straight from nowhere” as early as 1940 when he declared his identifi cation with the mendicant of Shirdi (Kasturi 1962: 41). He has remarked that while Shirdi Sai Baba produced ash externally in a wood fi re, today the fi re is internal and emerges from

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within his body. According to Baba, the inner signifi cance of ash is non-dualism and renunciation: It is a symbol of the indestructible basic substance which every being is. All things become ash; but ash remains ash, however much you may burn it . . . It is a valuable Upadesha (instruction) about your identity. It also reminds you that the body is liable any moment to be reduced into a handful of ash. Ash will be a lesson in detachment and renunciation. (SSS, Vol. VII: 87) Ash is also intimately related to Shiva: You know that Shiva burnt the God of Desire or Kaama . . . into a heap of ashes. Shiva adorned Himself with that ash, and thus He shone in His Glory, as the Conqueror of Desire. When Kaama was destroyed, Prema (Love) reigned supreme. (SSS, Vol. XII: 159) Devotees outside of India, e.g. in Malaysia, may not be aware of the symbolic meaning of ash in Indian thought but regard it as a sign of Sathya Sai Baba’s power, as a cure, or one that confers other benefi ts (Kent 2000a: 47). A Catholic priest writes that apart from its powerful healing properties, ash represents a redeeming death, a state of death that is a prelude to life. In Baba’s discourses, it refers to the death of the ego from which man rises to “the state of imperishable divinity” (Mazzoleni 1994: 88). Another account suggests that the meaning of ash is fi ltered through Christian understandings among Indo-Trinidadian devotees rather than purely Hindu ones (Klass 1995: 14). A Zoroas- trian devotee writes that fi re is a sacred symbol in Vedic rites but also a symbol of purity for followers of Zarathustra—the residue of the burning process is a symbol both of purity and wisdom “because it teaches renunciation and detachment” (Fanibunda 1976: 268). While some are fortunate to receive ash from Sathya Sai Baba’s own hands during darshan time or an interview, many procure the substance in little packets produced commercially in Puttaparthi and bring it to darshan hoping that Sathya Sai Baba will bless it. Sathya Sai Baba has given people containers fi lled with ash that are considered to be “ever abundant vessels” (akshaya patre) because they refi ll themselves as they are used. Ash can appear on pictures of Christ, Guru Nanak, and other fi gures, and spontaneously in people’s houses on their photographs of Baba, often inside the glass covering the picture, but also on top of it. At Colusa in California, for instance, is a large shrine that belongs to the household of Ami Mangru. Every single picture there is overfl owing with ash. This started happening about 1980 even though Mr. Ami

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Mangru was not initially a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba. The Mangrus had to convert their living room into a shrine because people started gathering at their home from afar and today they have two meetings a week (on Thursdays and Saturdays) for which people will drive up from San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento and other places in the Bay Area and Central Valley. In other cases, footprints of ash are discovered as if Baba has walked into the house or prayer-room. People can exude ash by contact: the mother-in-law of a Sai Baba devotee in Bahrain began to exude ash spontaneously on her hair and body for several months during her visit to see her daughter’s family. This would happen during bhajan sessions when ash also began to appear on photographs of Baba. It was particularly disconcerting since she was not a devotee but a staunch worshipper of Vishnu and ash is identifi ed largely with Shiva (this incident is cited in detail in Chapter 6). The taste of ash or its quality is as signifi cant as its production. Ash can be coarse, fi ne, grainy, white, grey, and so on, and have a distinctive smell. How often have I talked to devotees about their experience of Sathya Sai Baba when someone remarks: “Can you smell THAT?!” It is the fragrance of ash wafting into the room signaling Sathya Sai Baba’s presence. Ash has medicinal properties for devotees: they may apply it on their forehead, drink it with water, or rub it over parts of the body that need healing. Ash carried by someone to a patient at a distance also has the ability to cure, but many others have had the experience of Baba visiting them in dreams and applying ash to an affl icted body part (Kasturi 1962: 122–127). Other substances or fl uids are also associated with Sathya Sai Baba such as the production of ambrosia (amrita) that connects him to a primarily Vaishnava narrative about its production when the primor- dial milk ocean was churned by the gods and the demons. Sometimes ambrosia emerges from his hand and has a specifi c taste and smell that any devotee who has consumed it can attest to; it was also distributed by Baba from various vessels or containers to devotees in the early years of his career. Ambrosia can also appear in sites away from his physical body. There is a shrine in Karnataka state at Srirangapattana overseen by a devotee called Halagappa where this has been happening for several decades. Out of pendants of Shirdi and Sathya Sai Baba, ambrosia oozes like honey or oil. It fi lls up to the brim any container in which it is placed but stops before it overfl ows. This ambrosia is believed to have curative properties and devotees will come from a long distance with containers to collect it.

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Perhaps one of the most signifi cant formal objects produced by Baba is the lingam—a spheroid or egg-shaped object made of jade, alabaster, gold, and other substances—that emerges from his mouth annually during Shivaratri, the festival associated with Shiva (see Figure 8).13 While Shivaratri was celebrated at Puttaparthi from about 1950 or 1952 onwards, the lingams have been materialized since his declaration that he was Sai Baba (Kasturi 1962: 94). According to Kasturi, during Shivaratri in the early days, devotees typically performed an all-night vigil and sang bhajans in Baba’s presence. During this time, ash exuded from his forehead, face, and hands. He would also consecrate an image of Shirdi Sai Baba by pouring ash over it from a large empty container. During the evening, Baba would give a discourse that was interrupted by what appeared to be spasmodic struggles in his stomach area that then shifted to his chest and neck. Suddenly lingams would emerge from his mouth. These were then placed near the image of Shirdi Sai Baba and afterwards given to some devotee to be worshipped according to specifi c instructions. The lingams were different in number, size, and composition: sometimes only one was formed of gold, silver, or some other material; sometimes as many as two to nine emerged, each about one and a half inches in height with a base and three horizontal lines across it to signify ash (Kasturi 1962: 93–94). He also privately produced lingams from his hand and gave them for worship to devotees (Kasturi 1962: 139–140). The public materializations of lingams during Shivaratri was discontinued from 1977 and the consecration of Shirdi Sai Baba’s image with ash from 1979. The production of lingams began again in 2000. The April 2000 issue of the newsletter, Sanathana Sarathi, mentions the excitement felt by devotees when, after 22 years, Sathya Sai Baba manifested an oval-shaped golden lingam from his mouth on Shivaratri evening on 4th March, 2000. The congregation of devotees included the Chief Minister of Karnataka, S.M. Krishna. Sathya Sai Baba explains that the lingam is “the symbol of creation,” (SSS, Vol. I: 113) and “the symbolic form of the Godhead” (SSS, Vol. II: 114). Shivaratri is signifi cant because it is associated with the waning of the moon and its counterpart in man, the mind. Every day during the dark half of the month, the moon declines slightly up until the fourteenth night when there is only a fraction left. This night is

13 See also Bowen (1988: 161–244) for a discussion of the meaning of amrita, vibhuti and the lingam in the context of the Sai Baba fellowship in Bradford, UK.

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Fig. 8. Baba holding a lingam (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry)

Shivaratri when “a special spurt of spiritual activity is recommended, so that what is shavam (corpse) can become Shivam (God) by the removal of this dross called manas [mind]” (SSS, Vol. I: 112). Therefore, vigilance and sleeplessness are required on this night so that the senses and mind are mastered, discrimination is used, and man can realize his liberation (SSS, Vol. VII: 36). The production of the lingam from Sathya Sai Baba’s body during Shivaratri is a reminder of the lingam in everyone, a mark of Shiva that resides in the shell of the body. Of all the substances and forms in the Sathya Sai Baba movement, ash and lingams appear to be the most signiﬁ cant dyad linking Sathya Sai Baba to Shiva. Swallow (1982) points out that the connection with

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Shiva’s erotic, creative, and ascetic persona and the enactment of “the drama of regeneration” through rituals such as the annual production of lingams during Shivaratri veils and modiﬁ es “sexual imagery” for Sathya Sai Baba’s middle class devotees (Swallow 1982: 151). In addition, the semiology of ash and the lingam must be located in a metaphysics of presence. Even if ash and lingam emerge from Baba’s body, they do not signify his body. Instead they are signs of his powers, have curative properties, indicate his subtle or energetic presence, and are symbols of correspondence between the material and formal world and non- material and spiritual reality. They embody the transformations of the material and formal into another reality (becoming ash or becoming divine through the praxis of the removal of the mind and ego). They suggest a theory of the world but also a practice that each devotee is urged to consider. Ultimately, they are physical substances and forms, or objects and metaphysical truths, partaking simultaneously of the nature of both.14

Framing the Sacred

The popularity of the Gayatri verse in the Sathya Sai Baba movement has resulted in many posters of this female deity circulating in shops near the hermitage in Puttaparthi as well as a temple with an image of Gayatri with fi ve faces in Prashanti Nilayam (see Figure 9). The emergence of new deities and goddesses in India through visual forms such as fi lm and devotional prints is, of course, not new: we have examples of the fi lm Jai Santoshi Ma (1975) that help to popularize the cult of a relatively unknown goddess and the worship of Bharat Mata in a new temple in Hardwar linked to the campaigns of the Hindu Right (see Beckerlegge 2001a: 91–92; 105–106; Hawley and Wulff 1996). The Gayatri posters and the temple image demonstrate connections to mass-produced devotional prints and chromolithographs that became available to the public in India from the late nineteenth

14 See Uberoi (1978: 21), who argues that the modernist notion of the sign makes the relationship between the signiﬁ er and the signiﬁ ed purely arbitrary and intentional (a signal or sign), cultural (a symbol), or purely a natural and necessary coexistence (a symptom); he suggests that a post-modern semiology, instead, would be “the science and philosophy of forms, i.e. of natural as well as cultural formations and transformations and malformations.”

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Fig. 9. Gayatri image overlaid with Sathya Sai Baba’s (Image on a pocket calendar)

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century onwards (see Pinney 2004). Other frames for the sacred in the Sathya Sai Baba movement are more varied: they include images of Christ, Nanak, or the Quran, refl ecting the symbolic world of special constituencies and are not necessarily based on original producers or artists from India. The most signifi cant frame, of course, is a picture of Sathya Sai Baba that may stand in a private altar or hang from a wall in public spaces. This is usually a photograph of his face, torso or full body, sitting or standing (see Figure 10). Sometimes there are photographs of his feet, which also become objects of worship. The photograph is a religious image even though it is a realistic picture, photo-realism bordering on photo-iconography being typically associated with recent religious teachers such as Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (Beckerlegge 2001a: 80). Its realism encodes iconic messages: a photograph of the guru’s feet is linked to a long tradition in South Asia of revering the feet of the master. In various pictures, Baba holds his right hand up, palm open, facing the devotee, a formal sign of blessing, or he sits on a chair or stands in a frontal position, his eyes making direct contact with those who gaze at him. Apart from photographs, various kinds of posters and mini-calendars also make use of his image. In some, the photo-realism of Baba’s face and body are juxtaposed with other images and words creating complex iconic references, some located in a South Asian milieu and others more universal and global in intention (see Figure 11).15 Photographs, posters, or calendars emerge from commercial producers, local businesses, grateful devotees, professional photographers, or the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust. While graphic images act as a focus for congregational practices, they also suggest more “informal, individualistic and privatized religious practice” (Beckerlegge 2001a: 89), the growth of “omnipraxy,” or refl ect the “religious microdialects” (Babb 1990: 73–74) of families, individuals, and businesses. There are clearly differences in the attitude of consumers, who may treat images as sacred objects, tourist mementos, or decorative artifacts (Beckerlegge 2001a: 88). For devotees, however, these images are profoundly corporeal: one bows to the image of Baba, seeks contact with his eyes, touches one’s

15 Hawkins (1999) suggests that the aesthetics of the posters of Sathya Sai Baba seem localized and linked to their sites of production and do not translate well into a global milieu.

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Fig. 10. Sathya Sai Baba in old Brindavan (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry)

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Fig. 11. Juxtaposed images of Baba and other religious ﬁ gures (Print bought in a market)

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head, eyes, or hands to the picture of his feet. Pinney (2004) calls this practice of aesthetics “corpothetics,” a sensory and corporeal aesthetics that can be contrasted with a disinterested aesthetics that “over-cere- bralizes and textualizes the image” (ibid. p. 8). These images have power, they intervene in the world. The frames of the image, everyday life, and dreamtime can also become porous, as this narrative of a female devotee indicates: I was studying in college in Madras in the mid-1980s and staying at the YWCA hostel when I started reading about Sathya Sai Baba. I had already begun to have experiences in which he came into my life in odd ways. For instance, I remember that a young teacher, Christian by faith and a sort of energy-healer, came one evening to my room. I did not know her then but she was also staying in the hostel and she used to ride in the electric train with me daily. At that time, I was suffering from very bad migraines and that evening I was having one of my attacks. The teacher said that she had a dream where she was directed by Baba—who appeared connected somehow with snakes—to come and help me. She was not a devotee as far as I know. I was also very tearful in those days, feeling separated from Baba, and not knowing how to reach him. The event that I remember most vividly happened one night while I was reading Howard Murphet’s book on Baba called Man of Miracles. I was lying on my bed, it must have been about midnight or 1 AM in the morning, and it was dark and quiet outside. I had a small altar near the bed where there was a picture of Swami. Suddenly, I felt a presence in the room and when I looked up I saw bright golden light streaming into the room. The light was so powerful that my body gave a jerk as if touched by electricity. Slowly it cleared and Baba walked into my room. He sat on a chair and I sat near his feet. He asked me why I wept so much these days. We talked for a while about my feelings and headaches. He then took me to a large room, a temple of some kind which I had never seen before, where all kinds of framed pictures of gods and Baba were hanging from the wall on all sides. In the center was an image of Shirdi Sai Baba. When we returned, I rushed out of my room to call someone and let them know that Baba was here. Instead, I found that it was daylight and I was in my bed. I had been dreaming. The next morning, taking the train to my college, I sat with a young girl who was wearing a locket with an image of Baba. Out of the blue, she asked me if I knew the Guindy Sai temple—which I did not—and proceeded to tell me how to get there. Later in the day, however, returning on the train to the ‘Y’, I had almost forgotten all about the conversation when I noticed a man with a briefcase with an ‘Om’ sticker on it sitting directly across from me. We had pulled into the Guindy train station. I suddenly realized where we were and jumped out of the train just in time. I followed the girl’s direction to the temple. It was about noon on

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Thursday and the priests were just completing their rituals. I stepped inside. It was the room to which Baba had taken me in my dream with pictures on the wall and an image of Shirdi Sai Baba. (Interview with a female devotee, November 3, 2005) These kinds of accounts are not unusual among Sathya Sai Baba devotees. Books, ash, lockets, as well as images of both Shirdi and Sathya Sai Baba appear regularly in many narratives. The power and reach of images are intertwined with other objects, concatenated frames in which the presence of the guru is perceived in several modalities. Even individuals, their dreams and everyday realities, are not privatized: the young teacher in this account is led by her dream of Baba to the devotee suffering with a migraine attack. The framed or material image of Baba penetrates both dreamtime and everyday life, dreams of his presence fl ow into the quotidian urban, and the waking fulfi ls the promise of the dream. What is signifi cant here, as in Nagamani Purnaiya’s account of darshan, is the role of tears in the narrative: the female devotee has wept because she feels separated from Baba, who responds to her tears and makes his presence felt. Tears, as Hawley (2005) reminds us, can be ritualized or enacted, are forms of communication, often gendered female, and may imply death and separation. They are sensory responses to the absence of the guru and the guru graces the devotee by arriving in person or in a dream. Anthony Chukwudum Anoyika, a senior mechanical engineer at the Nigerian Ports Authority in Lagos, Nigeria, writes that he fi rst heard about Sathya Sai Baba in 1982 from a friend, who had heard about him in London. His friend fl ooded him with books and pictures and Anthony began to read about Sathya Sai Baba. He was not convinced about Baba’s divinity and feared that he was a false god warned about in the Bible. In 1983, he fell ill and was diagnosed with acute appendicitis. Before his operation, his friend gave him some ash that he drank mixed with water. Although the doctors operated, they found that the appendicitis had disappeared. In several subsequent dreams, he saw Sai Baba and Jesus together but remained puzzled about the relationship between the two. In one of his readings, he found Sathya Sai Baba’s words: I have come not to disturb or destroy, but to confi rm each in his own faith. After this event, he began to participate in devotional songs and other activities, stopped drinking and smoking, and became a member of the Sathya Sai Nigeria Society for Education in Human Values. His altar had pictures of both Jesus and Sai Baba. In one of

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the pictures, honey-like substances began to fl ow out of Baba’s hair sometime in 1986. Anthony tasted it and found it to be sweet. Two other pictures—one of Sathya Sai Baba and one of Jesus—became waxed together from base to top one day as he was meditating in front of a candle placed between them. This fi nally sealed his doubts (Kanu no date: 108–110). Lowenberg (1983), writing about his experiences in South Africa, states that a month after the shattering blow of his son’s death in 1973, a mysterious coincidence put Murphet’s book in his hands. He had some acquaintance with South Asian philosophy and had been practicing yoga for twenty years. On reading the book, he realized that his search for a guru was over. Through him, his African clerk was also introduced to Sathya Sai Baba and became convinced of his power through several incidents. For instance, Lowenberg brought back a ring for him with Baba’s picture on it. Traveling in his car with his family to Zululand, the clerk’s car skidded and veered towards a precipice. He called out for Baba’s help and the car came gently to a stop. The ring was still on his fi nger but the picture of Baba had disappeared, which he interpreted as a sign that Baba had answered his call. When he visited India in 1978, before he could complete thanking Baba for his intervention in that incident, Baba promised him another ring. Many of these accounts have a recognizable pattern: a chance encounter with a book about Sathya Sai Baba or a picture of him, a personal crisis, cosmopolitan networks leading to other devotees or centers, dreams, miracles, and the appearance of ash, tears, and other substances confi rming or inviting Sai Baba’s presence. But Baba’s image also travels through other routes, leads to unexpected convergences and conjunctures, and acquires many plural meanings. Rush (1999), for instance, describes how chromolithographic imagery from India fi nds its way into contemporary vodun arts and religious consciousness in West Africa. Although the potential for the spread of these color prints existed from the second half of the nineteenth century, around World War I, when Indian mercantile activity spread along the west coast of Africa, the appeal of gods and prints began to travel as well and led to a growing market in Benin, Togo, and Ghana. Various images are incorporated today into the aesthetic theology of vodun and marketplaces display prints of Shirdi Sai Baba, Ganesha, Shiva, Hanuman, Jesus, Sathya Sai Baba and the Buddha. The images are “outwardly mobile” as they can be easily transported and reproduced, and “inwardly mobile”

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as their signs acquire multiple readings in different vodun; the ﬁ gures “represented in the prints have not been combined with local gods; they are local gods” (Rush 1999: 62).

The Electronic Presence of the Avatar

New communication media have enhanced the attraction and mobility of religious symbols; the use of videotapes, for instance, has allowed charismatic fi gures of religious movements to be “multilocational” (Babb 1990: 76) yet completely whole to an extended constituency. Films or cassettes show that it is possible to “assimilate new materials and media within long-established but far from uniform and rigid understandings of the status and power of murti [images]” (Beckerlegge 2001a: 108). The interface between religion and technology (including electronic and digital forms) creates new publics, public spheres, and geographies of religion affecting forms of religious mediation (see Babb and Wadley 1997; Højsgaard and Warburg 2005; Kong 2001; Meyer and Moors 2006). Electronic channels such as cassettes, videos, television, and the Internet have proliferated Sathya Sai Baba’s presence. While devotional music has been represented in Indian fi lm for a long time, it enjoyed a marginal place in commercial recordings; cassette technology made the mass marketing of religious music and bhajans possible, especially from the 1980s onwards, initially to a primarily Hindu and middle-class audience. As the technology spread to other classes, the music industry also diversifi ed with hundreds of smaller producers and devotional subgenres emerging (Manuel 2001: 105–130). CD’s have also become part of popular fare since the end of the twentieth century, competing with the cassette industry. In the case of the Sathya Sai Baba movement, there are a number of producers of devotional songs and music. Cassettes and CDs by live bhajan groups are recorded and sold by Ostara Music, Sundaram Service Society, Unicorn Music and Marketing, or the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust. Some of them are inspired by fi lm music and are sung by well-known professional singers who are devotees or by ordinary devotees. Most are based on live performances at the hermitage or at different Sai Centers. While most of them are in Hindustani, several collections of English and regional-language bhajans are also available. The Atlanta Sai Center, for instance, produced its own cassette a few years ago called “Sai Songs from the Heart,” a combination of English and Hindustani

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devotional songs. In spite of its use at home or to accompany rituals, cassette and CD technology is not replacing participatory performances of bhajans. Since the liberalization of Indian television broadcasting and the proliferation of satellite networks and channels (particularly from the 1990s), shows with religious content such as Maharshi Mahesh Yogi’s discourses or epics such as the Ramayana have become fairly routine fare. The Sai movement has also entered broadcasting space. In August 1999, for instance, a cable television network in India began a weekly serial broadcast entitled “The Divine Story of Shirdi Sai and Puttaparthi Sai” (Shirdi Sai Parthi Sai Divya Katha) sponsored by one of India’s largest engineering fi rms, Larsen and Toubro. The show was particularly moving for many because, inserted within the narratives describing Sai Baba, footage showed Baba moving among his devotees at the ashram, gazing directly into viewers’ eyes, and bestowing on them his smile. For about an hour every Sunday life came to a standstill in devotees’ homes while they avidly watched this serial. Radio Sai Global Harmony is a satellite radio channel inaugurated in 2001 on WorldSpace Satellite Network. It broadcasts Baba’s discourses, talks, interviews, devotional songs, instrumental songs and special concerts all day to Africa, most parts of Asia, and Europe. The content generation is done using staff at the Prashanti Nilayam audio visual center and planetarium. They make CDs with audio fi les encoded in MP3 format that are sent to the WorldSpace Bangalore offi ce, and then forwarded by them to the uplink facility in Melbourne.16 Based on geographical location, through the AsiaStar or AfriStar network, one can tune into Baba’s voice and other programs. Websites offering information about local Sai Centers, Baba’s discourses at recent festival events or a “Thought for the Day” have mushroomed. The Internet sites are largely produced outside India. A Google search for “Sathya Sai Baba” in December 2005 brings up as many as 335,000 sites. Beckerlegge (2001b) suggests that given the large number of Internet websites devoted to religion, it is diffi cult to claim to do a representative survey; what one can explore are typical uses of the Internet. In the case of the Sathya Sai Baba movement, these include some of the standard functions cited by Beckerlegge

16 “Welcome to Radio Sai Global Harmony,” http://www.radiosai.org, accessed August 28, 2003.

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such as a notice-board of events, a carrier of email, the creation of small devotional groups for prayer, a link to the hermitage in India for devotees dispersed globally and as a resource for Sathya Sai Baba’s discourses, compilations of devotional songs, and other archives. The website of the International Sai Organization (www.sathyasai.org), for instance, has links to the Central Trust, different ashrams, projects of the organization, events, Baba’s location, or his discourses. The search engine for the discourses is quite effective: a search for darshan results within seconds in double digit links to speeches usually based on the ﬁ rst line of the discourse. The bhajans link brings up audio components of Baba leading bhajans in addition to the texts of various compositions. Once they load, these MP3 ﬁ les are very good. The bhajans are clear and the experience is like listening to a cassette at home on a player or, because of the voices of other devotees, as if one is at the hermitage. For those unable to visit Puttaparthi frequently and able to afford access to this kind of media, these websites can be a crucial link with the Sai movement. Can the Internet act as a medium for exchange between the guru and the devotee? Sai Darshan (www.eaisai.com) is a personal website maintained by devotees in New Jersey. It has a link to Baba’s discourses, information about bhajans, a thought for the day, a picture gallery and slide show, information on mid-Atlantic and New Jersey Sai Centers, links to other Sai Center websites, articles, and media. There is no audio component. The “Glimpses” link features a slide show with sayings of Baba alongside images of him. One page, for example, says, “My grace is available to all who call on Me in any form or Name.” Baba has both hands raised and is looking fairly directly into the camera. The other images show him with devotees, eating a meal, or engaged in routine activities. There is a picture of his feet. The meeting of eyes does not seem to be central to these glimpses and the site does not attempt to transmit his presence explicitly; however, there is a subtext that makes his presence available by messages such as this: “An e-mail address is not available for Swami. Your prayers to Him in any form reach Him directly.” Other encounters are more unexpected. A South Asian devotee in Washington D.C. in 1999 described to me her experience one night while working at her computer. She had been feeling lost spiritually, separated from the physical presence of her guru and from the religious community in which she had participated regularly while in India. Deeply depressed, she sat at her terminal idly searching the Web. She stumbled across a site devoted to Sathya Sai Baba with these words:

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The bird with you, the wing with Me; the foot with you, the Way with Me; the eye with you, the dream with Me; the world with you, the Heaven with Me—so are we free, so are we bound, so we begin and so we end, you in Me and I in you. She felt that she had magically accessed the world of the ashram, falling through a tunnel as it were, and experienced Baba’s presence as he assured her that she was not facing the travails of a diasporic journey alone. Hawkins argues that while darshan is possible through such electronic media and much depends on the spiritual receptivity of the devotee, these images cannot be objects of prayer or worship, and most often the Internet is used for networking and access to information (Hawkins 1999: 148–151). As far as electronic or virtual presence is concerned, however, the central question is not so much about individual receptivity but what cultural or historical conventions and ideas make possible authentic communication between Sathya Sai Baba and the devotee. At least four possible ones may be identiﬁ ed within the movement: First, many traditions, including the Sai Baba tradition, are based on the belief that if the guru’s will is behind it, spiritual transmission can happen anywhere. The medium can be the guru’s body, a picture, a letter, videos, or cyber-messages. The Shri Sai Satcharita mentions that darshan of Shirdi Sai Baba in a photograph or in a dream is the same as darshan in physical form (Kher 1999: 543–547). Second, when the disciple is ready the guru appears—a magical convergence of inner and outer. Thus, the virtual presence of the guru and electronic exchange can be regarded as similar to synchronicity. Third, healing arts such as Reiki, which has great currency in the Sathya Sai Baba movement, allow for the possibility of non-local initiations or distance healing based on concepts of a universal life-force and energy. There are also examples of characters in Indian lore like Ekalavya, who learnt archery from a distance by watching the guru Drona teach Arjuna, one of the heroes of the Mahabharata. In principle, action at a distance can happen elec- tronically as well. Fourth, it is possible to make a case that multimedia computers evoke and create a dense sensory response. As technology grows more sophisticated, so do sensory and religious experience.17

17 Jordan Gruber, CEO and founder of www.enlightenment.com, moderated a digital forum as part of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology’s Cyberconference in 1999 on “Digital Darshan.” Some of the insights in my discussion here are inspired by this forum. See “Digital Darshan—The Transmission of Enlightenment,” http://

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Conventions and ideas such as these, often expressed by a wide range of Baba devotees, make electronic presence a possible reality. The reliance on electronic communication has led to arguments that individuals have been freed or dislocated from localized groups; however, it also creates new types of associations and community.18 In the case of the Sathya Sai Baba movement, I support the position of Prebish (1999: 230), who writes about a similar phenomenon among Buddhist virtual communities in North America. He states that virtuality has given the term “sangha of the four quarters,” which historically referred to the community of ordained Buddhist monks and nuns, a new meaning. It now must include the cybersangha that transcends spatial boundaries as well as the geographically located community.19 In the same way, the devotional community in the Sathya Sai Baba movement includes both the local Sai Centers and the hermitage in India as well as the cyber-satsangh created through the World Wide Web, which does not displace the Sai Centers or the hermitage. At the center of the web binding all these together is the ﬁ gure of Sathya Sai Baba.

Touching the Fingers of God’s Outstretched Hand

The copious production of written texts, the chain of distribution including stores outside the ashram, local Sai Centers in different parts of the world that act as a locus for bhajans and other activities, television, the Internet, the appearance of ash or other substances, all ensure that Sathya Sai Baba’s words, images, and presence move across vast

www.enlightenment.com/media/atpcyberconf/digitaldarshanforum.html, accessed September 18, 2003. 18 There is a growing fi eld that discusses the issue of cyberculture and religion, both online and offl ine. See, for instance, the excellent discussion of Islam, the Internet, Muslim diversity, the digital umma, politics, and other issues in Bunt (2000). See also Beckerlegge (2001b) and Dawson (2004) on computer-mediated religion. Cybersociol- ogy, an e-magazine (www.cybersociology.com), devoted an issue to the discussion of religion online: “Religion Online and Techno-Spiritualism,” http://www.socio.demon. co.uk/magazine/7/issue7.html, accessed April 27, 2004. 19 In general, Beckerlegge (2001b: 257–258) states that while cybersanghas and cyberchurches have led to debates about social benefi ts and costs, it appears that their growth has not really challenged the central visions of the religions involved and cyberspace exists alongside older cosmologies. However, ideas of techgnosis, technoso- phy, or the cybersoul offer possibilities of more complex ideas of interaction between technology and humans.

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spaces. Even the act of seeing and being seen by the guru has become increasingly complex over the last few years. Instead of devotees sitting quietly on the sands waiting for Baba to come out of his house and speak to them, the darshan area is now a concrete pavilion, volunteers control pathways and access, and literally thousands gather everyday to ﬁ nd that he is often only a speck in the distance. This visual, verbal, substantial, and electronic proliferation is what a devotee is embedded in today. What does all this mean for the sense of the sacred in the Sathya Sai Baba movement? Shall we argue that the presence of guru is primarily conveyed by the exchange of eyes, touch, and words between the guru and his devotee and secondarily, by images, tears, dreams, ash, lingams, or the Internet? Or shall we claim that we are in the presence of a postmodern chain of simulacra where the materiality of perception is altered and its effects are the depthlessness and decentering of meaning? This chapter shows that the sense of the presence of the guru or signiﬁ cant exchange with him occurs through various media—eye contact, the recitation of the name and devotional songs, images, the Internet and other electronic media, and ash, lingam, ambrosia or other objects. Each of these is inscribed in cultural conventions and understandings—the relationship between name and form, for instance, in the case of bhajans, or the material and the non-material in the case of ash, lingams, or ambrosia. The sensorium of the sacred in the Sathya Sai Baba movement is ultimately based on an ontology of multiple presences. Darshan, as we have seen, is an engagement with various kinds of historical and cultural presences—the site of the repressed, the dominant, and the new world—that are negotiated by the devotee in order to be in sight of the physical guru. Away from his physical form, his presence can be conveyed and experienced through ash, images, dreams, and other mediums. This experience is rooted in Sathya Sai Baba’s claim of being an avatar and various statements about the nature of his being; for instance, when he describes his birth as not occurring through con- ception but through descent, or having chosen his own mother. This ontology creates several presences—the physical and historical body, a universal divine essence, and a kind of apparent, immaterial or fabri- cated presence that travels in time, space, or dreams—that has parallels with Gnostic beliefs and Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism (see Fil- liozat 1991: 127–134). As in devotional prints that are not art objects

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or kitsch but tangible deities whose power can reside in images (Pinney 2004), Baba as avatar can transcend time and space and become accessible to devotees via dreams and through other persons. He can also communicate through the Internet. In other words, there is an elective afﬁ nity and a historical congruence between the visible and the virtual presence of Sathya Sai Baba, between the nature of Baba as avatar and space-mastering technology. Through the ontology of multiple presences, the leap from his physicality to posters and prints or to electronic virtuality is not impossible. Multiplicity makes the relationship between the senses, the corporeal and the non-corporeal within various media always hinge on the logic of presence and absence, proximity and distance.20 One devotee describes the act of reaching out for a small book on a table at a home in California, the biography of Baba written by Kasturi, as feeling like “touching the ﬁ ngers of God’s outstretched hand” (Penn 1990: 63). Tears are signs of separation from the presence but also call forth the guru. In much the same way, “contact” can be virtual. Sathya Sai Baba personally receives hundreds of letters directly from his devotees daily or by mail, and many pictures depict him carrying letters in his hand, a sort of divine mailman. Devotees believe that he reads every letter, or better, knows their contents by the mere act of receiving them. His appearance in dreams, in what appears to be his physical form although he is “actually” elsewhere, his appearance in the form of a mysterious “stranger” who offers assistance to a devotee, the scent of sacred ash, the sign of garlands falling during a bhajan, the development of writing on pictures, or the appearance of footprints of ash, also indicate his presence/absence. The desire and longing for Baba’s darshan and objects such as an empty chair or his photograph during worship form part of this subtle dialectic of presences and absences. In addition, his far reaching power, its (im)materiality, and his ability to communicate across distances are complemented by various substances such as ash that suggest absolute proximity and the materialization of charisma.

20 My thanks to Christoph Emmrich and Alexander Henn, whose observations during my talk on darshan at Heidelberg inspired these reﬂ ections. See also Eckel (2005), who makes a somewhat similar argument about Buddhist philosophy, signs of the Buddha, and tears.

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HEALING, SERVICE, AND CHARACTER

Bio-Civic Ethics

For devotees, Sathya Sai Baba is perceived as providing a framework for a new social order in the contemporary world, one created through concrete programs and institutions in society and through the physical, mental, and spiritual labor of devotees. For this project to be persua- sive or effective, the problems of suffering, ignorance, or injustice—the stuff of the human condition—must be addressed. Every devotee has a story of struggling with a life-crisis or challenge. Accounts testify that although the spiritual journey is a joyful process of discovery, growth can also be experienced as painful. N. Sai Kishore, who joined the one of Sathya Sai Baba’s colleges as a commerce student in 1993, says that although he had long cher- ished the desire of being Baba’s student and was at fi rst very happy in the college, some diffi cult lessons were in store for him. He developed eczema in his second year and there were rashes all over his body, oozing, bleeding, itching and burning. People tended to avoid him and he suffered a great deal. However, Baba talked to him almost daily, counseled him, and fi nally gave him some ash to take for three days. This led to the disease receding. Sai Kishore says that the suffering he experienced taught him several lessons: Firstly . . . I found someone who loved me more than anyone else in the world. Secondly, it taught me the value of patience. Any joy or sorrow, however overwhelming or overpowering it may seem to be at present, has to pass . . . Thirdly, it increased my faith in Swami and my love for Him. Last . . . Life is too precious to waste worrying and brooding over petty things. (Trayee Saptamayee no date: 48) Stories of Baba’s miracles, healing touch, or words of advice abound in devotees’ accounts, as they wrestle with modes of putting into practice their understanding of his message: I wanted to do something for Baba and the ashram. It has always been my way to “take on projects.” On the way home [to the U.S.] in the

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plane, I fantasized about how I could volunteer to do something in India. I wanted to be important in Baba’s eyes. I feel deeply asleep on the plane and had a dream: The roof of the temple at the ashram was leaking. Everyone was running over with ladders to try and fi x it. I ran over with a ladder too. Baba stopped me and said, “No, you go home and fi x your own roof fi rst.” I woke up embarrassed at my need for self-importance. But I got the message. I went home to study Sai Baba’s message and to work on my own life. (Shander 2000: 155–156) Some of these accounts may seem familiar and refl ect experiences that can be shared by non-devotees. At the same time, like other religious subjects, devotees must make sense of their place in the world and the modalities in which they do so refl ects the sensibility of the movement. Their meaning-making is not a static enterprise but a process that lends itself to growing refi nement or shifts over time. There is always a realm of play: it is accepted that Baba is divine and omniscient and his unexpected grace, compassion, or presence is available. The message imbibed is deeply personal and embodied but also located in shared institutional frameworks, providing what I shall call “bio-civic ethics”—a sensory moral praxis that establishes a meaningful and transformative relationship between the body-self and civic space—a sphere of embodied citizenship. Within the Sathya Sai Baba movement, the individual (seen as a composite of body, mind, and soul) and the civic are ineluctably intertwined, the transformation of the one engendering the transformation of the other. In this sense, the Sathya Sai Baba movement has striking parallels with several other contemporary religious movements. Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka, for example, led by A.T. Ariyaratne and inspired by Buddhism and Gandhi, is based on the idea that the awakening and liberation of the self and the world are interrelated. The Noble Truths—about suffering and the end of suffering—are given both a mundane and extramundane meaning (Bond 1996, 2004). Similarly, Soka Gakkai has become a global force through Daisaku Ikeda’s Buddhist Human- ism (with its pillars of peace, education, and culture) that teaches the empowerment of the self and other to attain happiness and create value (Seager 2006). Or, as Giri (2002: 23) reminds us in the case of Habitat for Humanity, self-sacrifi ce is also self-nurture. Bodily reform—retraining, re-schooling, refocusing physical habits—is crucial to the creation of new subjects and new worlds, as Comaroff and Comaroff (1992: 69–91) argue for the Tshidi Zionist churches. The body, they suggest, is not just a metaphor or template for social classifi cations but also metonymic with material and cultural processes.

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The various programs initiated by Sathya Sai Baba, as we shall see, have as their rationale an explanation for the sometimes immaterial dilemmas of life in a deeply material, embodied, and civic language. Three kinds of subjects—the suffering and affl icted, the householder, and the student—are the focus of his mission. Eating, breathing, serving, or singing, are means by which individual subjects are remade; service, remembrance of the name, and other practices are presented as the active modes of salvation in civic space. While vectors within the movement are geared towards specifi c social constituencies, they apply more generally to any devotee. This chapter focuses on three programs and their related institutions in the Sathya Sai Baba movement. The fi rst is a program of healing and includes a hospital that was founded at Puttaparthi and two Sri Sathya Sai Institutes of Higher Medical Sciences—one in Puttaparthi and the other in Bangalore. The second program is service (seva) carried out through the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization with its branches in different states in India and other countries. The third program is pedagogic in nature including the Sri Sathya Sai Arts and Science College for Women in Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, a similar institution for men in Brindavan near Bangalore city and Puttaparthi, the Summer Course in Indian culture and spirituality, the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, and the initiative called “Educare.” The sections below discuss the empirical content of these programs and their history and growth. They also analyze how each of these programs illustrates some special feature of the movement’s sensibility and Sathya Sai Baba’s and devotees’ refl ections on the problems of theodicy, disease, grace, strife, or unknowing. Their rationale emerges from specifi c understandings of the senses and the body, service as devotional praxis, and constructions of character, culture, and citizenship.

Healing the Body and Society

The role of Sathya Sai Baba as a healer-physician is documented in countless narratives of devotees’ experiences of his touch, look, words, and personal presence. Multiple stories are told about how symptoms and illnesses have decreased or simply disappeared because of his intervention. While ash is felt to have curative powers, other objects given by Baba also have healing properties: lingams, gems and crystals, rings, necklaces, icons, rosaries, lockets and other talismans. He has been known to produce drugs, pills, ointments, oils, and fruits.

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Social institutions for healing have also been established. In October 1957, a small hospital was inaugurated on the hill behind Prashanti Nilayam at Puttaparthi. The hospital was built on top of terraces cut into the rocky hill by devotees toiling together. Baba reminded his audience on the occasion of the foundation-laying ceremony that everyone—rich or poor, pious or non-pious, educated or illiterate—is subject to disease. He had planned the hospital because there was no good one for miles around and establishing it was an example of service. On the fi rst anniversary of the hospital, Baba stated that many of the recoveries occurring there were due to the spirit of love and service that saturated it. He personally visited patients, persuaded them to swallow medicines, guided doctors, and also gave practical advice on the maintenance of personal, mental, and physical health through chants, recitation, and meditation (Kasturi 1962: 95–96). Kasturi writes that the hospital’s case reports published in the annals of Sanathana Sarathi attest to Baba’s persona as a divine healer and reveal how chronic illnesses are cured by his infl uence: While ardent devotees are content to leave the welfare of their physical frames to His will, there are some who on His advice take as a curative the Vibhuti that He ‘gives’ or, the medical treatment that he recommends; for, as Baba says, He does not have the same prescription for all . . . He is the Greatest Physician of All. (Kasturi 1962: 96–97) The hospital today offers free medical care to the villages in the Put- taparthi area and in 2004, it carried out 2,406 obstetric deliveries, treated 222,068 patients through the out-patient department, and conducted 381 surgeries (The Mission of Sathya Sai 2005: 7). The Sri Sathya Sai General Hospital in Bangalore started as a small clinic established in 1969–70 by N.G. Ganpuley, who had settled in Whitefi eld after working in Germany. He distributed medicines free of charge to villagers and a couple of doctors also worked there until the land and the tiny clinic were donated to the Sri Sathya Sai Health and Education Trust. Dr. C. Rajeshwari, running at that time a 400- bed hospital in Ghana, was asked by Baba to work at the new hospital, which was inaugurated with 30 beds in 1976. In 1980, another ward with 15 beds was established and surgeries commenced there making it a secondary health care institution. In 2001, it treated 134,683 out- patients and 2,688 in-patients and conducted 1,459 surgeries. Today, it treats as many as 750 patients a day from over 2,100 villages and other urban areas in out-patient facilities (Mano Hriday, Vol. 2, 1, 2002: 38–41).

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The Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences (SSSIHMS) was established in 1991 in Puttaparthi for providing tertiary care and advanced procedures that are both technology- and skill-intensive (see Figure 12). Departments of cardiology and cardio-thoracic surgery were established in 1991, and other units came into being later for uro-nephrology, ophthalmology, plastic surgery, and lithioscopy. Between 1991 and 2005, the institute conducted 14,886 heart surgeries, 26,920 urology surgeries, 26,483 eye surgeries, and 1,166,546 outpatient consultations. The SSSIHMS has thirteen operating theatres, four intensive care units, blood banks, laboratories, a kitchen, and a laundry manned by qualifi ed surgeons, physicians, and staff. The hospital is intended for the disempowered and economically backward and all treatment, in-patient and out-patient, is free. The building looks like a pink palace sitting on plush lawns with arches and corridors on both the ground and fi rst fl oor. Its lotus-crowned main dome (there are 20 others) has a diameter of 24 meters (The Mission of Sathya Sai 2005: 23; A Temple of Healing no date: 7–8). Its shape has been described as “a human being with folded arms, symbolising love, affection, and care” (A Temple of Healing no date: 8). In 2001, a second SSSIHMS was established in Bangalore (see Figure 13) built on 52.26 acres of land donated by the Government of Karnataka. Work on the project was begun in September 1999 and completed in October 2000 by the construction division of Larsen and Toubro Limited, the value of the work being 640,000,000 Indian rupees (A Temple of Healing no date: 3), approximately US $14.5 million in 2007. The SSSIHMS is free of charge and has diagnostic, pre-operative, postoperative, and surgical facilities chiefl y in cardiology and neurology. Its records show that between 19 January 2001 and 31 May 2005, 5,415 cardiac surgeries, 4,790 neurological surgeries, 15,572 CT scans and 17,872 MRI exams were performed.1 The SSSIHMS has computerized registration and other parts of the institute are undergoing various stages of networking. It is recognized by the National Board of Examinations of India to conduct postgraduate education and training for doctors (Mano Hriday, Vol. 2, 1, 2002: 5). Patients are referred to the SSSIHMS chiefl y by primary-level health centers of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization in different parts of India (Mano Hriday, Vol. 2, 1, 2002: 5). Primary health care is promoted

1 See “Radio Sai Listener’s Journal,” http://www.radiosai.org/Journals/Vol_ 03/07JUL01/ht_hs.htm, accessed July 14, 2005.

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Fig. 12. SSSIHMS in Puttaparthi on a 2004 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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Fig. 13. Exterior of SSSIHMS in Bangalore (Photograph courtesy of Public Relations Ofﬁ ce, SSSIHMS)

through medical camps in urban and rural areas where patients are given medicines free of cost. Thousands are treated for eye ailments, cataract operations are performed, and blood donations organized. The Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization also runs free dispensaries through local centers where allopathic, homeopathic, and other treatments are offered. Medical teams visit orphanages, old age homes, leprosy homes, and villages in order to provide free medical checkups on a regular basis, and doctors and other devotees carry out their services as volunteers. Patients encountered through these outreach activities who are prospective beneﬁ ciaries of treatment at the SSSIHMS are examined and screened through the Sri Sathya Sai General Hospital close to the institute or at screening clinics within the SSSIHMS. If special care is necessary, the patients are admitted, treated, and then referred back to their local areas for follow-up care. The patients come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Many of them are clearly poor and from rural areas. While a majority of patients come from southern India, there are also patients from north India and a few from Nepal and Pakistan; twenty percent are Muslim. The doctors operate under Government of India pay-scales;

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thus most of those working in the SSSIHMS do so for considerably less than what they would make in the private sector or in their own practices. In 2001, there were about 55 doctors and 160 nurses and a patient-nurse ratio of 1:1 in the SSSIHMS. Besides the regular faculty and staff, the hospital had 110 Seva Organization volunteers. Most of them come from Bangalore, or elsewhere in Karnataka, taking a week off from their regular duties to work in the hospital.2 They can be seen engaged in cleaning the ﬂ oors, manning the gates, cooking, counseling, or in the laundry room. As one walks towards the main entrance of the SSSIHMS, one goes past a garden in front containing a fountain jetting around an image of Dhanvantri, the divine physician associated with the Indian medical tradition of Ayurveda (a similar image is found in front of the Puttaparthi SSSIHMS): he holds in one hand a medicine chest and in the other hand a vessel of nectar for longevity. Inside the main door is a large lobby with a high ceiling beneath the central dome and an elevated area surrounded by pillars (see Figure 14). One’s eyes are drawn to the photograph of Sathya Sai Baba and a statue of Ganesha in the elevated prayer hall. Open on all sides, the prayer hall has stained glass panels and a huge chandelier from Moreno (Italy); devotional songs and prayers are held here regularly. Ravishankar (of Ravi Associates), one of the architects of the institute, was very articulate about the role of architecture in embodying Sathya Sai Baba’s vision for the SSSIHMS.3 First, the main objective was serving the people and the welfare of the country; thus, the building needed to be one that could stand for a hundred years and be large enough for that purpose. Second, it had to promote peace of mind; patients should not feel as if they were coming into a jungle or a prison. Third, while the main idea was to create “a temple of healing,” it could not merely replicate temple architecture. Since the institute was represented by a trust it had to be a monumental building like Bangalore’s state capital, Calcutta’s (Kolkata) Victoria Memorial Hall, or the Bahaxi Center in Delhi. The spiritual focus of the site is suggested by crowning the central dome with a golden vessel, the image of Dhanvantri in front of the building, and the altar area with a picture of Sathya Sai Baba.

2 Interview with Brigadier S.C. Bali, July 4, 2001. 3 Informal interview, summer 2001.

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Fig. 14. Interior main hall of SSSIHMS in Bangalore (Photograph courtesy of Public Relations Ofﬁ ce, SSSIHMS)

The SSSIHMS, like the hospitals in Puttaparthi, exemplifi es the therapeutic program of the Sai movement.4 It stands in contrast to four other models of tertiary health care in India: The fi rst is the model of church-run hospitals, such as St. Martha’s Hospital in Bangalore, some of them dating back to colonial times. The second is largely a post- independence development, a vast national network best represented by the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi at the apex and the primary health care clinics at the lower level. The third is a corporate or family-owned business such as the Apollo Hospital in Madras or Manipal Hospital in Bangalore that provides tertiary care at reasonably high rates. The fourth is represented by non-governmental organizations, many of them founded as non-profi t trusts, which do a

4 There are both positive (see “Sai Baba’s hospital for the poor,” http://www. aquarius-atlanta.com/choices/hospital.shtml, accessed September 18, 2003) and negative assessments (see “Sathya Sai Baba’s super speciality hospitals as two-faced projects” by Serguei Badaev, http://home.no.net/anir/Sai/enigma/hospital.htm, accessed September 18, 2003) of the SSSIHMS on the Internet, but no scholarly one to my knowledge.

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combination of charitable work and fee-based work; many of these are funded by Hindu, Jain, Muslim and other religious organizations. Each of these models has had a different relationship to primary, secondary, and tertiary health care. However, in the last two decades, alongside economic liberalization, there has been a decline in government spending on health care and a shift towards provision of secondary and tertiary care by non-government bodies. This means that tertiary care in particular, which is capital- and skill-intensive, is increasingly out of reach for large segments of the population. However, the epidemiological transition in India—with infectious diseases receding as the main cause of adult mortality and morbidity and non-infectious diseases rising—makes tertiary care crucial.5 According to A. Srivathsan, the medical consultant involved with the construction of the Bangalore SSSIHMS, the institute is a crucial intervention in this situation as it is meant to provide modern and high-technology medicine mainly to underprivileged populations.6 A veteran of 50–60 other hospital projects, he suggested that for hospitals in the private sector, returns per square foot are important; in the case of the SSSIHMS, however, this is not a determining issue for health care provision. While the project itself was built by donations that went into a trust for meeting capital costs, the continued ﬂ ow of funds is also not an issue. A large number of devotees are eager to participate in some way in this project and doctors come from overseas to be associated with the institute. In the context of recent Indian state policy, the institute can play a crucial role in linking its work to that of primary health care. A similar ethic is emphasized by Brigadier S.C. Bali, a retired army ofﬁ cer in charge of public relations at the Bangalore SSSIHMS.7 He described the context for the institute as two-fold: On the one hand, Bangalore is becoming a hub for medical sciences alongside information technology. While some medical institutions are in the private sector (such as Wockhardt for cardiac sciences), others are in public sector (such as the National Institute of Mental Health and Applied

5 According to the data provided by the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, India has an estimated 2.5 million victims of heart disease a year and the World Bank has projected a doubling of the cardio-vascular disease mortality rate in India between 1985 and 2015 (Super Speciality Hospital Project no date: 2, 5). 6 Informal interview, summer 2001. 7 Interview, July 4, 2001.

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Neurological Sciences). The fi rst sector raises issues of equity, the second raises issues of effi ciency. This is the rationale for the establishment of a different type of institution such as the Bangalore SSSIHMS. Brigadier Bali attributes it all to Sathya Sai Baba: “Only the power of Love can conceive such projects.” Dr. A.N. Safaya, Director of the SSSIHMS in Bangalore and Put- taparthi, located the institute’s position within the relationship of healing to spirituality: advice and treatment should be freely available from any medical institution on a global basis as the birthright of every human being (“globalization”); healing and treatment should not be commodities for the market and profi t but should be absorbed by society and kept affordable (“de-commercialization”); the human agents of health care delivery should adhere to the fi ve human values in their thoughts, words and deeds because a good or bad hospital is made by the people who work there (“humanization”); and modern medicine, in order to become holistic, has to recognize the spirit as the driving force behind every human being (“spiritualization”) (Mano Hriday, Vol. 2, 1, 2002: 5). C. Sreenivas, a member of the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, also emphasizes that this project is based on a specifi c spiritual and social vision: Health is both an issue of compassion and economics. The main emotion that pours out to the suffering and the affl icted is compassion . . . When compassion covers the best of skills, the best of medical technology, and is given with love and kindness, it transforms mere medicare from the process of disease curing to complete healing. This, when made into a movement to provide such care free of cost to the masses, becomes a potent force, and brings health and dignity to many for whom it would otherwise have been beyond reach. Healing the affl icted, apart from being a matter of compassion, is a matter of economics too. People in the third world are sick because they are poor, and they are also poor because they are sick. (Mano Hriday, Vol. 2, 1, 2002: 7) The vision guiding many of the doctors and other staff is embodied in this account of Dr. Shekhar Rao, the head of cardiac surgery: Above all, it is the Divine Grace of Bhagawan Baba that is making it possible to do all this work . . . One example will illustrate this. We had performed a complex surgical correction on a one-year-old baby with cyanotic congenital heart disease [transposition of the great arteries]. On the second postoperative day the child developed multiple compli- cations . . . After exhausting all diagnostic and therapeutic efforts we gave the child Baba’s vibhuti prasad [ash] and prayed to Him for His Divine

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Intervention . . . . We continued to do our level best round the clock and witnessed that the child made a gradual and complete recovery. (Mano Hriday, Vol. 2, 1, 2002: 17)

Self-Care and Cure

The therapeutic program supported by the Sathya Sai Baba movement is based on a speciﬁ c understanding of the relationship between the divine or the self and the body.8 This is Sathya Sai Baba’s somatic philosophy rooted in an epistemological distinction between the body (deham) and its resident (dehi), separate but related. The former is likened to a vehicle, a chariot, a car, a temple, or a mansion, while the latter refers to the driver, charioteer, in-dwelling spirit, or deity.9 One should not, therefore, identify with the body but develop the correct vision about the relationship between the body and its resident: “Without the power of the Divine, the eyes cannot see or the ears hear or the mind think” (SSS, Vol. XVII: 61). The purpose of the body is to serve as a means for realizing divinity, liberation, or truth. The terms of this somatic psychology also inﬂ uence ideas of health and healing because a healthy body is a requisite means for spiritual discipline. “The body is the vehicle which you have to use for attain- ing the state of bliss and so, it has to be kept safe and strong for that high purpose” (SSS, Vol. V: 211). In several discourses, Sathya Sai Baba has elaborated on the relationship between the senses, the body, and intelligence or will. For example, the senses are regarded as unruly horses yoked to the body-chariot that must be controlled by the charioteer. Anything that comes in through the senses is also regarded as “food” for the body and therefore affects one’s mental, emotional and physical health:

8 I am grateful to Dr. Srikanth Sola for sharing with me his work, The Teachings of Sathya Sai Baba on Health (2000, unpublished compendium) that guided me to many of Baba’s ideas on health. The interpretations, however, are my own. 9 Sathya Sai Baba has also elaborated on various kinds of bodies—the gross, the causal, and the subtle—but there is no elaborate system of practice that relies on these ideas within the devotional community as there is among some other movements. Coney (1999: 29–33), for instance, describes how within the religious movement focused on Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi spiritual practices seem to be inspired mainly by Tantra and its understanding of the body as a vehicle of the divine. The body is seen in terms of four bodies connected by spiritual centers, channels, and a force called the kundalini.

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As is the food, so is the mind; As is the mind, so are the thoughts; As are the thoughts, so is the conduct; As is the conduct, so is the health. (Sathya Sai Newsletter, 18: 4, 1994: 4) For Sathya Sai Baba, as the aphorism above suggests, food is a critical medium.10 “Moderation in food, moderation in talk, and in desires and pursuits, contentment with what little can be got by honest labor, eager- ness to serve others and to impart joy to all” are tonics for health (SSS, Vol. I: 176). Baba strongly recommends foods such as milk, yoghurt, fruits, and so on, which he views as “pure” (sattvika), but also states that we need to pay attention to the company or the state of mind in which we eat, and the emotions of the person who has cooked the food. He advocates mild fasting once a week. He is against the use of meat, poultry or fi sh, and prefers that eggs not be used: Meat eating promotes animal qualities. It has been well said that the food one consumes determines one’s thoughts. You develop cruelty when you eat the fl esh of animals. Not only this, but how cruel it is to kill other living things that are sustained by the same fi ve elements as human beings. So people who want to be devotees of God must give up eating meat completely. (Sathya Sai Newsletter, 19:3, 1995: 33) He recommends avoiding white sugar and promotes the use of uncooked foods, drinking large quantities of water before and after a meal, and always offering food to the divine before eating. He has told his devotees to give up all types of intoxicants or stimulants, especially alcohol and tobacco, because they reduce the power of the will. Physical exercise is important but, like food, requires moderation. Sathya Sai Baba suggests cycling as a form of exercise and also to reduce expenditure on automobiles. He has spoken of the salutary effects of fi ve types of baths—mud, sun, water, air, and vibhuti. He also emphasizes correct posture, the amount of sleep needed at different ages, and maintaining physical cleanliness.

10 Khare (2005: 156) calls the ability of food to symbolize and communicate multiple meanings “gastrosemantics” and notes that in “anthropological terms, food becomes a powerful, multivocal interlocutor between matter and spirit, and body and self.” Saints and holy persons inﬂ uence the gastrosemantics of society and householders look upon them as guides and for cures. For instance, the food eaten or touched by the saint may be consumed as a blessing, the holy person may derive self-control through fasting, or may recommend speciﬁ c diets, foods, or herbs for healing the body or unhealthy mental dispositions.

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Purity of the body is important but non-physical and spiritual praxis means inner and external cleanliness: . . . look upon the body as your vesture or clothing, and resort to wash- ing it clean from time to time, just as soiled clothes are cleaned by the washerman . . . therefore you should get it cleaned with the help of God as the washerman, by resorting to such practices as prayer, japa [repetition of the name of God], meditation, and love of God. The washerman alone can wash the clothes, but not a barber. So also, God alone—and none else—can cleanse your heart of its impurities. Never forget that this body is only a garment. It is due to ignorance that you look upon the body as your real Self. Only when you get rid of this ignorance will you shine as the effulgent Sun of Wisdom. (SSB 1990: 21–22) Health is based on laws of nature, at once spiritual and natural, inner and outer: . . . the air we breathe is not pure. The food we eat is not pure. The sounds we hear are not pure. All the fi ve elements of nature are polluted. This pollution has caused diseases never heard of before. Any violation of the laws of nature leads to sickness. There is a teacher for nature. That teacher is God. (Sathya Sai Newsletter, 18:3, 1994: 10) Thus, we need to purify the environment around us by increasing the planting of trees, reducing the use of automobiles, controlling the emission of harmful effl uents, reducing wastefulness through the Ceil- ing on Desires Program (which recommends that time, food, energy, and money should not be wasted), and by such practices as community singing that produce waves of vibrations that purify the polluted atmosphere: “When you sing the glory of God, the bad germs in the air are destroyed and the air gets purifi ed by a treatment of antibiotics as it were” (SS, January 1995: 27). This careful attention to diet and other practices is reminiscent of Gandhi’s Key to Health, fi rst published in 1948. Sathya Sai Baba, like Gandhi, places value on practices such as yoga, breathing, vegetarianism, or various types of baths for increasing self-control. However, as Alter (2000: 13–14) points out, Gandhi was infl uenced by forms of healing that were derived from nineteenth century Western European systems of naturopathy and hydrotherapy rather than purely Indic therapeutics and he remained skeptical of Ayurveda. Sathya Sai Baba, on the other hand, feels that allopathic treatment and Ayurveda have to be coordinated for better results. He does not recommend limiting birth by artifi cial means or family planning methods but, unlike Gandhi,

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he does not promote celibacy (brahmacharya). He states that regulation must come from within because artifi cial means will lead in the long run to the weakening of moral stamina and character. The ideas on health expressed by Sathya Sai Baba also show continuity with those in circulation in the early twentieth century among the Arya Samaj, the Theosophical Society, and other organizations, whose ideas of the body were based on traditions of humors, wrestling and martial cultures, practices of celibacy, and the Indian interest in Baden- Powell’s Boy Scout movement (see Watt 2005: 130–170). Like these organizations and movements, Baba’s ideas of the body and healing go beyond physical culture, diet, or sexuality to include nature (and human nature) and civic institutions. This is a bio-civic ethics in which the vision of the body/self is intimately linked to the understanding of embodied citizenship. Health rests primarily on a language of self-responsibility, care, and cure that requires minimal or no intervention by the medical specialist but has, nevertheless, civic implications. While this vision exists alongside highly medicalized institutions for biomedicine within the movement, the two are in a hierarchical relationship: Sathya Sai Baba emphasizes that hospitals, the medical profession, and medicine must rest on a spiritual vision and not on the number of patients treated. Not only is disease completely democratic (since it makes no distinction between rich and poor, devout and non-devout) but specialized medical knowledge can also be made democratic by providing it free of cost to the economically disempowered, disengaging it from the principle of profi t, and stressing the principle of service. Ultimately, the rationale for the hospital and medicine would disappear altogether: The hospital is for those who have faith in drugs and doctors. But what can drugs and doctors do without the Grace of God? The day will surely come when the hospital will be superfl uous since all will be healthy and free from illness, accepting the sadhana [spiritual practice] way, the Ananda [bliss] way to peace and happiness. (SSS, Vol. V: 218) Sathya Sai Baba thus urges people to transfer their faith in drugs to God, to place it “not in medicine, but in Madhava [God].” Prayer, spiritual practice, chanting and meditation are restorative “vitamins.” “No tablet is as effi cacious as Ramnam [the name of God]” (SSS, Vol. V: 218). In many ways, this view is similar to the Bapu Nature Cure Hospital and Yogashram discussed by Alter (2004: 109–141), who argues that although it appears like a system of alternative medicine, it is an anti-clinic because, among other things, it challenges the ontological

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basis of biomedicine and disease. Similarly, modern Ayurvedic practitioners may refuse assimilation by employing “the biomedical techniques that make Ayurveda parallel to biomedicine while circumventing the biomedical epistemologies that would make Ayurveda subordinate to biomedicine” (Langford 2002: 141). In the Sathya Sai Baba movement, not only is biomedicine subordinated to a spiritualized body, but it is also relativized. Baba is believed to encourage healing systems such as Reiki, a practice of “laying on of hands” or healing by touch and at a distance through the use of key symbols.11 Reiki is based on the idea of spiritually guided life-energy that one can learn to channel and use therapeutically after due initiation procedures.12 A million people worldwide are believed to practice Reiki, described sometimes as a “quasi-religion.”13 Many of Sathya Sai Baba’s devotees in India and elsewhere are Reiki practitioners and incorporate Reiki with the use of ash or prayer. Another healing regime that has enjoyed currency among devotees from the mid-1990s is the “Sai Sanjeevini” system that tries to awaken the body’s own healing power. The presiding deity of the system is the simian hero of the Ramayana epic, Hanuman. In the epic, during a key battle between prince Rama and his adversary Ravana, Hanuman is charged with the responsibility of ﬂ ying to a Himalayan mountain and bringing back an herb with the power to revive the dead. Unable to recognize the healing herb, the monkey hero picks up the entire

11 Teachers like Bhagwan Rajneesh also emphasized a number of different practices including yogic breathing, Freudian and Reichian techniques, bioenergetics, and Suﬁ practices (Thompson and Heelas 1986: 51–69). 12 Dr. Mikao Usui (1865–1926), founder of the Usui system of healing or Usui Shiki Ryoho, is said to have “discovered” this healing practice sometime around 1914. Due to certain crises in his life, he traveled to Mt. Kurama in Japan and engaged in a 21-day retreat (apparently sponsored by the Tendai Buddhist temple located on Mt. Kurama). It is believed that during the training, Reiki energy ﬂ owed into him through the top of his head, enhancing his healing abilities and giving him the knowledge of healing others without depleting his own energy. He opened a clinic in Tokyo in 1922 and, during the devastating earthquake the next year, used his abilities to heal victims. He died due to a stroke at the age of 62. Through Usui and other teachers, both in Japan and in Hawaii, the knowledge of Reiki spread through initiation procedures called “attunements” that also include oral and written instructions. See “The International Centers for Reiki Training,” www.reiki.org, accessed August 17, 2003, and Rand (1991). 13 See Andrea Menegotto, “The ‘Quasi-Religion’ of Reiki,” Centre for Studies on New Religions (http://www.censur.org/2003/vil2003_menegotto.htm, accessed November 28, 2004) on the relationship between the practice of Reiki, the New Age, and its position as a quasi-religion rather than a religion.

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mountain and fl ies back with it. As soon as the fragrance of the herb reaches the fallen, they revive. According to the Sai Sanjeevini Founda- tion, “healing fragrances” are focused prayers in the form of healing cards to the divine mother (Sai) to awaken the timeless healing force within individuals. In 2003, there were 246 such cards for different parts of the body and various diseases, used by practitioners in combination with each other. Remedies are prepared by keeping each medium to be taken orally—water, food, ash, or homoeopathic globules—on the Sanjeevini cards for fi fteen seconds. Repeating an affi rmation, verse, or a prayer while preparing the remedies will enhance healing vibrations. Once a remedy is prepared, it can be duplicated for refi lls by using the “multiplication and broadcasting card” also applicable for distance healing.14 Healer-devotees mediate alternative practices such as Reiki and Sai Sanjeevini. For example, “Doctor” Partha Sarathi, has a regular job at the Bangalore International Airport but his healing practices are his true vocation. He offers alternative and holistic treatment that he calls life therapy ( prana chikithsa) to at least a hundred persons daily from 3:00 PM to almost midnight at his home on the east side of Banga- lore. On one wall of his living room is a picture of the human body with dozens of channels, energy centers (chakras) and meridian points (nadis) passing through it. On another is a photograph of the doctor’s grandmother from whom he inherited his healing talents. There are also several large photographs of Sathya Sai Baba (in two of them he is with Dr. Partha Sarathi, who is holding Baba’s hands and smiling happily). His consultations with patients occur in his living room as the patient sits facing him on a small stool; dressed in white, he is seated opposite on a chair. There is no privacy as waiting patients observe his interactions with persons suffering from a wide variety of affl ictions. A well dressed elderly lady, for example, brings to him the complete blood count report done at a hospital showing that her condition has been resolved through his treatment. The doctor may talk about that particular case to those listening or deliver advice in general about health, the ability of the body to heal itself, or breathing practices that can expel toxins from the body. A mentally challenged boy is treated by Dr. Partha Sarathi with his regular form of treatment: the taping of

14 See the Sai Sanjeevini website, http://www.saisanjeevini.org, accessed August 15, 2003.

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seeds and grains to different meridian points on the fi ngers and palms of the hands, the back of the hands, or the ears. Sometimes seeds are taped onto meridian points on the back or other parts of the body. Most people come to see him for ten days of treatment that initiate a purifying and normalizing process through which the spirit, vital breath, or life-force is strengthened and healing can occur. Patients come from various religious and economic backgrounds—servants, watchmen, corporate types, housewives, and others. Treatment is inexpensive: as one leaves, one deposits about thirty rupees in a little box and sometimes applies to one’s forehead ash from a container kept near a photograph of Baba. Dr. Partha Sarathi is generous with his time, always smiling, and indefatigable. Sathya Sai Baba’s views on food, his advocacy of temperance and vegetarianism, his insistence that meditation and remembrance of the sacred name are vitamins, or the role of healers like Dr. Partha Sarathi make healing and medicine as much an issue of non-profi t civic morality as a spiritualized understanding of the body. Do these views coincide with the beliefs of devotee-doctors? While I will not discuss them in detail here, there are many narratives that suggest Sathya Sai Baba’s infl uence on medical specialists. These include testimonies of their journey to him, the transformation of their understanding of their role as doctors, their belief in the power of the remembrance of the name and prayer, the power of sound and music, the appli- cation of ash, psycho-spiritual techniques for healing, the feeling of being guided during surgery by a divine force, attempts at arriving at a more holistic practice, and their spirit of volunteerism and service (see Seshadri and Harihar 2002; Warner 2000).

Organizing for Baba: India

The Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization is the second oldest program initiated by Baba. The local chapters of the organization are known as samiti in India or “Sai Centers” overseas whose main function is to undertake spiritual, educational, and service activities. A samiti usually begins as a locus for singing devotional songs and prayer and gradually encompasses organizational directives applicable to three wings— service, educational, and spiritual. The service wing may carry out relief work for the poor, provide educational scholarships, deliver

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medical care through free dispensaries and camps, or sponsor village development activities. The educational wing includes the Bal Vikas Program and the Education in Human Values Program for children in the age group of six to fi fteen. The spiritual wing is concerned with the practices of devotional singing, study circles, prayers, and meditation. Devotees undertake spiritual exercise (sadhana) at the individual, family and community level within the framework of the three wings. All parts of India are meant to have a uniform structure (see Dia- gram 1). Local chapters come under presidents at the district, state, and all-India levels. Any group of devotees numbering not less than nine and engaging themselves in the activities of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization’s three wings may constitute themselves as a samiti with a convener and apply for affi liation to the state president via the district president. The district president is supported by a district coordinator for youth, i.e. men and women between 18 and 35 years in the Sai Organization. At the state level, the president is assisted by coordinators for the three wing activities. The all-India president consults and directs coordinators for four geographic zones of the country as well as all-India coordinators for the three wings and their deputies. A group of devotees who engage themselves in only one or two of the wings (irrespective of number) and those numbering less than nine, even if they are engaged in all three wings, are called bhajan mandali or “groups” if they are overseas (called “Sai Groups” or “Groups” here in this book) (Rules & Regulations 2001). The fi rst Sai samiti was registered in 1965 in Bombay although there were a number of informal devotional groups already in existence by that time. In 2002, there were 8,447 bhajan mandali and samiti in India. Mr. Nagesh Dhakappa, state president of the Karnataka State Sathya Sai Seva Organization, refl ects on the growth of the organization in his account: The fi rst batches of devotees came to Swami in the early 1960s. Many of these were from Shimoga, North Kanara [both districts in Karnataka], and Bangalore. Swami used to visit Bangalore even earlier . . . There was no organized activity, no organization as such but only after 1958 or 1960 you could make out that there is considerable amount of devotees—though not lakhs and thousands, a few hundreds, you know. In a small village like Puttaparthi it was a big gathering. So probably in 1965 these devotees approached Swami: so how we should go about, having met you, what is it that you want us to do? So that is how the fi rst samiti was formed. Swami’s fi rst message to humanity was “Manasa Bhajare”

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ALL-INDIA CENTRAL OFFICE PRESIDENT PRASHANTI NILAYAM

ALL-INDIA AND DEPUTY ZONAL COORDINATORS FOR COORDINATORS FOR EDUCATIONAL, EAST, WEST, NORTH SPIRITUAL, AND SERVICE AND SOUTH ZONES WINGS

STATE PRESIDENT

STATE COORDINATORS FOR EDUCATIONAL, SPIRITUAL, AND SERVICE WINGS

DISTRICT PRESIDENT

DISTRICT COORDINATOR (YOUTH)

CONVENOR SEVA SAMITI

SPIRITUAL EDUCATIONAL SERVICE COORDINATOR COORDINATOR COORDINATOR

Diagram 1. Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization structure, India (Source: Adapted from Rules & Regulations 2001)

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in 1940. So he said that you should start with bhajans and if you see most of the samitis in the early sixties it was only bhajans and no other activity. So somehow these bhajans were very attractive. Even today in the entire world, devotees or non-devotees, they come to the organization even if they have not seen Swami by listening to the bhajans. So attractive. So this is how the fi rst seed of the organization started ...... You will fi nd devotees from the north coming to Swami only after 1970 . . . One of the main reason why it started on a big scale probably was Swami started the Summer Courses where boys were selected from all over India, Summer Courses were held in Brindavan. Swami had visited some of these states and that is how it went on increasing. . . . Only after 1975 . . . more and more devotees started coming from different states as well as different countries . . . This shows us that Swami’s presence of divinity started manifesting. Now it did not get spread because of the organization or devotees; Swami has his own way of reaching out in different parts. Physically he has not visited any of these places. He has his own ways and means of creating the impact . . . Now on one hand, this development—village, city, state, country— now has reached out to the entire world. This has not been done by the organization or I should say exclusively by the activities carried out. Certainly not! It is because of Swami himself this change has taken place. (Interview, November 28, 2002) The growth of samitis and bhajan mandalis in India from 1988 (after the Sai Organization was divided into two parts—Indian and international) to 2002 appears in Table 1. The samitis and mandalis have more than doubled their number from 3,864 to 8,447. The total percentage change in their number in the period 1988–2002 is 118.61 with an average all-India increase of about 306 each year. The smallest number of samitis and bhajan mandalis is to be found in northwestern states such as Jammu and Kashmir (13), Rajasthan (29), Delhi (50), Haryana and Chandigarh (63), Punjab (68), and the less populous northeastern states such as Assam, Manipur or Mizoram (77). An intermediate range of states with between 100 and 500 samitis and bhajan mandalis stretches from Gujarat in the west across central India and Uttar Pradesh to Bihar in the east. The largest number of samitis and bhajan mandalis is to be found in the states of Maharashtra (2,000), Andhra Pradesh (1,885), West Bengal (776), Orissa (618), Tamil Nadu (597) and Kerala (506), with Karnataka (482) following closely behind; in many of these states, there are overlapping constituencies devoted to Sathya Sai Baba and also other fi gures such as Sabarimalai Ayyappan, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, or Tirupati Venkateshwara. In fact, many Sai bhajans incorporate deities or fi gures associated with these traditions. Some of

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these states—such as Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka—are also associated with the ﬁ gure of Shirdi Sai Baba through various charismatic leaders and institutions (see Maps 1 and 2). Nearly all of the states with high involvement in the movement are proximate to Andhra Pradesh and the central hermitage of Sathya Sai Baba. In fact, Baba has regularly visited states in the southern zone and knows hundreds of families personally. The southern states and Maharashtra contain some of his oldest devotees. As Map 3 reveals, the Sai movement is most prominent in peninsular India where there are more than 500 samitis and bhajan mandalis in each state except Goa and Karnataka, the latter including numbers just under 500. The movement’s core has grown chieﬂ y in a northeastern direction in states not originally linked with Shirdi Sai Baba or the inheritors of his charisma (e.g. West Bengal and Orissa). In terms of the number of members, states with over 20,000 members include Sik- kim (82,650), West Bengal (62,680), Andhra Pradesh (47,150), Kerala (46,500), Tamil Nadu (46,266), Maharashtra (45,950), Gujarat (27,848), Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh (27,733), and Orissa (20,745). This matches the visual image of service volunteers in Puttaparthi, who arrive periodically to help with cooking in the canteen, cleaning the ashram, and performing other tasks inside Prashanti Nilayam. Sikkim, which lies in the middle range along with Uttar Pradesh, is one of the most interesting cases of Sai devotion that future scholarship might explore. With over 82,650 members who are mainly Buddhists or Hindus, it has more Sai devotees than any other state even though it is one of the smallest states of the country with about 540,493 persons according to the 2001 census (about 0.05 percent of the country’s total population). This means that one in 6.5 people in Sikkim is a member of a samiti or bhajan mandali. Himachal Pradesh is another mountainous state with relatively low population and relatively high involvement in the movement. Uttar Pradesh, one the other hand, which is one of the largest and most populous states in India with about 166 million according to the 2001 census (about 16.17 percent of the country’s total population), has only 6,860 members even when combined with Uttarkhand. One in about 24,000 people is a samiti and bhajan mandali member. We may say, then, that the Sathya Sai Baba movement is a pan-Indian phenomenon that has expanded from a peninsular stronghold and becomes attenuated toward the northwest, with a high penetration in the Himalayan states.

SRINIVAS_F6_111-161.indd 132 12/20/2007 4:34:42 PM healing, service, and character 133 2002 in 2002* samiti in year increase/ (%) 1988–2002 50 –86.91 –22.13 5100 102.00 ) in India from 1988–2002 (Source: Sri Sathya Sai Seva Sai Seva Sri Sathya 1988–2002 (Source: ) in India from 59 77 54.00 5.13 5300 68.83 122 132 164.00 5.47670 3260 597 18.22 24.70 6.13 46266 77.50 75 177 182 213.79 8.27 13550 74.45 470 480 482 237.06 22.60 11100 23.03 Organization, Prashanti Nilayam) Organization, ) and Groups ( Bhajan Mandalis ) and Groups 50 43 49 75 Samitis 58 103 56 59 66 93 68 68 17.24 0.67 3150 46.32 50 45 54 12 103 15 39 42 26 33 29 141.67 1.13 880 30.34 58 120 123 123 13 19 5 1155 12 70 21 85 10 94 112 13 124 0.00 127 140 0.00 154.55 600 5.67 46.15 82650 590.36 589 683382 740194 854 30 194 1526 31 216 1650 210 41 1790 195 1885 48 220.03 278 50 288 86.40505 303 550218 47150 56.19 700 149 852 151 7.27 25.01 715 490 588 27848 716 763 91.91 776 255.96 37.20 62680 80.77 172 195506 275 563 339 614 591 781 315 912 1598 404 1790 506 2000 194.19 295.26 22.27 99.60 46500 45950 91.90 22.98 143 251 328 304 632 415 456 515 575 603 618 103.29 20.93 20745 33.57 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 Changeper Members Average Members 3864 4006 4137 4727 5785 6481 7961 8447 118.61 305.53 461198 54.60 Table 1. Table of Growth Sai Centers ( Northeastern States* Delhi Punjab* Bihar and Jharkhand States Andhra Pradesh Gujarat Haryana and Chandigarh* Pradesh* Himachal and Kashmir Jammu 145 42 50Rajasthan* Sikkim 54 Nadu* Tamil Uttar Pradesh and Uttarkhand 64 335 67 106 71 113 124 63 –56.55 128 132 –5.47 123 143 3876 –57.31 –12.80 61.52 6860 47.97 Madhya Pradesh/Chattisgarh*Madhya Maharashtra* Orissa 125 101 123 151 196 291 383 383 206.40 17.20 27733 72.41 Total West Bengal West Karnataka* Kerala* * of period. June from the last available under 2002 are Figures and from year that

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Map 3. State-wise distribution of Sai Centers (Samitis) and Groups (Bhajan Mandalis) in India (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman)

The total number of members of the Seva Organization in 2002 was 461,198, an increase of over 57,000 from 2000, with Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, and West Bengal contributing most to this increase. The all-India average of the number of members per samiti is 54.60 and the states with the largest number of members per samiti in 2002 include Sikkim (590.36), Delhi (102), Gujarat (91.91), Kerala (91.9), and West Bengal (80.77). Most states show an increase in the number of samitis and bhajan mandalis over time with the largest percentage increases over the period 1988–2002 being in Maharashtra (295.26%), West Bengal (255.96%), Karnataka (237.06%), Andhra Pradesh (220.03%), and Bihar and Jharkhand (213.74%). The sharp- est declines occur in Delhi (–86.91%), Uttar Pradesh and Uttarkhand

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(–57.31%), and Haryana and Chandigarh (–56.55%). While it is diffi cult to provide a complete explanation for this lack of growth in the northwestern parts of the country, one reason might be that other religious movements such as the Radhasoami or the Brahmakumaris enjoy a great deal of allegiance in these states. Although Sathya Sai Baba has regularly visited most of the southern states every year, his trips to the north have been few and far between. Members of a samiti may have very different experiences and understandings of their role in the Sai movement. Nagesh Dhakappa says: Coming to the Organization . . . I fi nd there are four or fi ve types of devotees. One set of people, they are retired, they are local people, they want to spend time in a satsangh [true company] . . . because they believe in God and they want to be peaceful. Their commitment is nothing more. They might have or might not have seen Swami at all, might or might not have devotion but they still come for bhajans. Then there is a second category of people—they have seen Swami. They are not sure to believe him or not believe him; they like these activities, they understand these values a little more and they get involved. They come for bhajans and some activities. There is another set of devotees who are totally committed. They have had their own experiences with Bhagwan [“God,” here Baba], they realize that he is divine, and they have understood his teachings which they want to sincerely implement in their lives . . . Then there are people who come to Swami and neither they get any benefi t and neither can they have any physical interaction with Swami nor they get impressed and they go away. Another kind of people who come to Swami they get something materially, benefi ts from Swami like interviews, some miracles, and then they are happy all their life telling about the same thing and doing nothing further. Then there is another category of devotees who understand that Swami has done something for them and what they should do in return and they get involved in these activities and do some seva; whether they understand the full meaning of that or not we do not know but they get involved . . . Most important category is those who have not got any physical attention from Swami, nor any interviews or anything. Still they believe in Swami, they believe in his teachings and make it a way of their lives. They are the most important category of our workers, the hard core dedicated workers. (Interview, November 28, 2002)

Organizing for Baba: Overseas

Within a few years of the ﬁ rst samiti’s registration in Bombay under the Societies Registration Act in 1965, Sai Centers began to be formed outside India. It appears that the ﬁ rst Sai Center was opened in 1967

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in Sri Lanka. In the United States, a Sai Center in Hollywood started functioning and a bookstore was opened at Tustin, California, in 1969. Centers also opened in the United Kingdom (1969), South Africa (1973), Italy (1974), Mauritius and Australia (1978), and the West Indies (1983). By 1985, there were 421 Sai Centers reported around the world, excluding India. Of these, 149 were situated in the western hemisphere, the United States leading with nearly 100 Centers; 136 in Southeast Asia, Malaysia leading with 78 Centers; 72 in Europe, the United Kingdom contributing 45; and 25 in South Africa and 27 others in the African region, with 15 Centers in Madagascar alone (Rao 1995: 252–255). Overseas Sai Centers are often located in the capital of a country, or in a major city. Thus, the fi rst Center in Germany was founded in Berlin in 1977, in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil in 1987, in Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic in 1988, and St. Petersburg in Russia in 1992 (Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000). Several Sai Cen- ters and Sai Groups together form part of the national Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization. As in India, any group of devotees of Sathya Sai Baba numbering not less than nine and desiring to engage themselves in activities under at least two of the three wings (spiritual, educational, and service) may constitute themselves into a Sai Center.15 Any group of devotees engaging themselves in activities under only one or two of the three wings, irrespective of number, and those numbering less than nine even if they are engaged in activities under all the three wings, may constitute themselves into a Sai Group. Members who devote at least four hours a week to activities are treated as “active workers.” Every country which has ten or more Sai Centers has a Central Council; a Coordinating Committee is in place in every country where there are less than ten but more than three Sai Centers. The Central Council or the Coordinating Committee, as the case may be, selects the heads of every Sai Center and grants Groups and Centers affi liation.16 Not all devotees are part of a Center and not all Groups are offi cially recognized. While there are some advantages in being part of the offi cial organization (fl ows of information, resources, or contact with Puttaparthi), “some groups readily embrace the Organization, some groups are calling for the embrace, and some do not want the

15 See the website of the International Sai Organization, http://www.sathyasai.org, for links to the national web sites. 16 See “Sathya Sai Seva Organization,” http://www.srisathyasai.org.in/Pages/ Sai_Organizations/Sai_Organizations.htm, accessed March 1, 2006.

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embrace of the Sai Organization,” as one devotee in Kenya remarked to me in December 2001. Each Sai Center is part of a region that has one or more Central Coordinators, who are appointed by the Overseas Chairman of the International Sai Organization. Regions are then subsumed under fi ve zones (see Appendix, Tables A1 to A5). The zones are not organized in terms of common continental units but may include regions sometimes drawn from several continents. In 2000, Zone 3, including parts of Asia and Austronesia (but excluding India), was by far the largest zone comprising 598 Sai Centers and Sai Groups, followed by Zone 1 (511 Centers and Groups), Zone 5 (485 Centers and Groups), Zone 2 (288 Centers and Groups) and Zone 4 (240 Centers and Groups). At the sub-continental and regional level, other trends emerge. In North America, Regions 1 and 2 (USA) have greater number of Sai Centers and Groups (192) than Canada (74). Italy seems to be most active organizationally in Southern Europe (50 Centers and Groups), the United Kingdom in Western Europe (170), and Poland in Eastern Europe (19). The former states of the USSR (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Byelorussia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tad- zhikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine) have 54 Sai Centers and Groups totally. In the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago have by far the largest number of Sai Centers and Groups (60), followed by Mexico (32) in Central America, and Argentina in South America (76). In Austronesia, Australia dominates with 127 Sai Centers and Groups. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia has the greatest number of Sai Centers and Groups (73) and within East Asia, Japan (20). Within South Asia (excluding India), Sri Lanka has a fl ourishing organizational base with 120 Sai Centers and Groups. In the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates has 7 Sai Centers and Groups, only two more than Bahrain and Oman. In Africa, South Africa has more Sai Centers and Groups (144) than any other country, although it is followed closely by Mauritius (127) in the Indian Ocean. According to the zonal data of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organiza- tion, Europe clearly has the largest number of overseas Sai Centers and Sai Groups (569) followed by Central and South America and the Caribbean (380). These data do not refl ect continental patterns since India is excluded. As Table 2 reveals, Asia is the largest organizational venue of the Sathya Sai movement (including 8,324 Centers in 2000) with India as its hub, followed by Europe (569), Central and South America and the Caribbean (380), Africa (282), North America (266) and Austronesia (204).

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Table 2. Sai Centers and Groups worldwide, 2000 (Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000) Geographic Region Centers Groups Total

North America 266 Region 1 and 2: Eastern USA and Western USA 192 Region 4: Canada 33 41

Central and South America and the Caribbean 380 Region 5: West Indies 92 Region 6: Central America and Puerto Rico 41 38 Region 7: South America and Guyana 88 121

Austronesia 204 Region 8: Australia and Papua New Guinea *127 Region 9: New Zealand, Fiji and Paciﬁ c Islands 32 45

Asia (except India) 363 Region 10: Far East (South) 113 Region 11: Far East (Middle) 43 26 Region 12: Far East (North) 15 19 Region 13: Sri Lanka *120 Region 21: Middle East and Gulf except Israel 21 6

Europe 569 Region 3: Southern Europe 101 52 Region 14: Western Europe 46 103 Region 15: Eastern Europe 16 21 Region 16: Russian-speaking countries of former USSR *54 Region 17: United Kingdom 170 Region 18: Ireland 6

Africa 282 Region 19: Southern Africa 96 51 Region 20: Northern Africa, Zambia and Mauritius 34 101

Total Centers and Groups excluding India 2,064

Total Centers and Groups in India in 2000 7,961

Total 10,025

* Includes both Centers and Groups.

It is clear from the range of countries involved and the visible presence of devotees from different countries in Puttaparthi that the movement does not have a purely South Asian or Indian constituency although it maybe dominated by it in some sites. While some of the trends in the United States, the United Kingdom, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, South Africa and Mauritius can be explained, at least partly, due to the presence of the South Asian diaspora, and Indonesian Sai Centers seem to be ﬂ ourishing among Hindu populations in Bali, the number of Argentinean and Italian Sai Centers (where the South Asian diaspora

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is not signiﬁ cant) raises questions about speciﬁ c national and historical contexts and the channels for the spread of Sai devotion to these countries. Introvigne (2004), for instance, points out that there are several cultural reasons why Italy has been so favorable to religious minorities (in contrast to many other European countries), so that a number of new movements, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and Soka Gakkai, have their largest European followings in Italy.

The Transnational Project

In N. Kasturi’s offi cial biography of Sathya Sai Baba, Sathyam, Sivam, Sundaram, the second volume mentions for the fi rst time that foreigners were visiting Baba or refers to overseas devotees by name: a Sanskrit scholar from the Sorbonne, who had an interview with Sathya Sai Baba in Prashanti Nilayam in 1960; Opal Macrae, a writer and social worker from the United States, who visited the ashram in 1966; devotees such as Charles Penn from Los Angeles and Hilda Charlton from New York; the Australian Howard Murphet, whose book Man of Miracles must rank as the most popular global introduction to Sai Baba; and Indra Devi, a Russian-born yoga teacher living in Mexico (Kasturi 1968: 52, 97–98, 205, 242–244). The globalization of the movement by the early 1960s was paralleled by the creation of new symbols and institutions. Although it appears that by 1963, bhajan mandalis functioned in several states of India such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Orissa, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, and Punjab, and a resolution was made to hold bhajans in a systematic way, the fi rst All-India Conference of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization held in Madras in 1967 decided to bring all samitis under one body. In 1967, when Kasturi approached Baba for instructions for a special cover for the Shivaratri issue of Sanathana Sarathi, the guru drew a fi ve-disked design, with petals in between, enclosing a circle. On the disks, he drew symbols of the major religions of mankind (Kasturi 1968: 219). Institutional innovation soon followed. On May 12, 1968, Baba inaugurated “Dharmakshetra,” a building in Bombay intended to be his residence and the center of the International Sai Organiza- tion. The First World Conference of Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organizations began on May 16 and included devotees from India as well as many countries and cities overseas: devotees arrived from Ceylon, Singapore, Jakarta, Kuwait, Casablanca, Mombasa, Nairobi, Kampala, Arusha,

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Malta, Fiji, Hong Kong, Teheran, Tokyo, America, West Indies and Peru. The Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust was founded in 1972, with Sathya Sai Baba as a founder trustee, to manage the properties and activities at Prashanti Nilayam and Brindavan. It became the central executing agency for all the works carried out in his name. In 1975, at the Second World Conference and the Seventh All-India Conference, a “World Council of Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organizations” located at Dharmakshetra in Bombay was formed. The years 1980–81, when the Third World Conference and the Ninth All-India Conference were held, were a landmark in the history of the Sai Organization: a permanent charter was granted by Sathya Sai Baba, a nine-point code of conduct was created, the rules and regulations for all samiti/Centers were amended, and the World Council ofﬁ ce was shifted to Prashanti Nilayam. The charter states that the organization is a spiritual one founded for the establishment of Sanatana Dharma (eternal religion) and does not recognize any separateness based on religion, caste, color, or creed.17 It has three principal objectives: (1) to help the individual to become aware of one’s inherent divinity and to conduct oneself accordingly; (2) to ensure that all human relations are governed by the principles of truth, right conduct, love, peace, and non-violence; and (3) to make devotees of various religions more sincere and dedicated in the practice of their respective religions. These objectives are to be attained by observing the principles laid by Sathya Sai Baba: there is only one religion, the religion of love; there is only one language, the language of heart; there is only one caste, the caste of humanity; and there is only one God, who is omnipresent. All members shall follow a nine-point code of conduct that includes daily meditation and prayer; devotional singing and prayer with the family members once a week; participation in Bal Vikas programs by children; attendance once a month at bhajans or group devotional singing around the streets of locality; participation in community service and other programs of the organization; regular study of Sai literature; speaking softly and lovingly with everyone; avoidance of talking ill of others especially in their absence; putting into practice the principle of “ceiling on desires” that minimizes the waste of time, food, and other

17 See “Charter of the Sathya Sai Organization,” http://www.saiaustralia.org. au/charter.html, accessed July 28, 2006.

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resources and utilizing any savings thereby generated for the service of mankind (Rules & Regulations 2001: 8). At the Fourth World Conference and the Eleventh All-India Con- ference in 1985, the three wings of the organization were recognized as its principal arms of activity. The World Council was dissolved in 1987 at the Twelfth All-India Conference: the new Seva Organiza- tion would henceforth consist of two parts—one based in India and the other consisting of all other countries in the world—with an All- India President for one and an International Chairman for the other. In 1990, at the Fifth World Conference and the Thirteenth All-India Conference, it was resolved that local chapters would be established in underrepresented areas. At the Sixth World Conference in 1995, Sathya Sai Baba emphasized that devotees must try to give up smoking, drinking, non-vegetarian food, and gambling, and maximize the use of time and energy for organizational activity. The Seventh World Conference in 2000, which included 18,000 delegates from India and abroad, was based on the theme “Journey to Sai.” In the inaugural address, Baba emphasized that love and service were the two wings that help humans reach the goal of life. In 2003, the Prasanthi Coun- cil, with its headquarters in Prashanti Nilayam, was convened for the formulation of plans, guidelines, policies and decisions for the overall global governance of the Sai Organization. It consists of the All-India President, the Chairman of the overseas Sai Organization and few other members.18 There are ten guiding principles for the transnational Sai Organiza- tion (Guidelines 1998: 2–4): (1) Love and serve your country and do not be critical of other’s countries; (2) Honor and respect all religions as pathways to God; (3) Love all humanity as part of a family; (4) Keep home and surroundings clean; (5) Help the needy with food, clothing and shelter and help them become self-reliant if possible; (6) Be examples of honesty; (7) Curb jealousy, hatred and envy; (8) Develop self-reliance; (9) Observe your country’s laws and be exemplary citizens; and (10) Adore God, abhor sin. While devotees are urged to love and serve one’s country (ﬁ rst guideline) and observe their country’s laws and be exemplary citizens (ninth guideline), the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization cannot be mapped easily onto the nation-state. In fact,

18 “Sathya Sai Seva Organization,” http://www.srisathyasai.org.in/Pages/Sai_Orga- nizations/Sai_Organizations.htm, accessed March 1, 2006.

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the ninth guideline elaborates: “You should never go against the law of the land. We must follow the letter of the law. The members of the Sri Sathya Sai Organizations should follow the law in spirit also and be models for the government” (Guidelines 1998: 4, my emphasis). Thus, the Sai community of service plays the role of exemplar for the government embodying the “law in spirit;” it is also grounded locally by its emphasis on self- reliance, both individually and socially (as the ﬁ fth and eighth guidelines emphasize), and located translocally by devotion to Sai Baba.

Service as Praxis

While the aims and procedures of the organization have crystallized over time, one constant theme that has run through it over the years it that of service as a spiritual path. The link between seva and self or public reform stems from Sathya Sai Baba’s understanding of the body a means for realizing the self and as mediatory between the individual and society, inner nature and external nature. The ﬁ rst step is taken by cleansing the tongue and engaging in the recitation of the name or devotional singing. Another step is service because the world is the body of the divine: “Service to man is service to God, for He is in every man and every living being and in every stone and stump” (SSS, Vol. IV: 251). One of the primary goals of a healthy body, mind and will is that they should be directed towards civic service. Alternately, the direction of mind, senses, and other activities towards service leads to well-being and freedom from disease. Nagesh Dhakappa reasons: Why are these activities required? See when you are in this life, you cannot always be happy, you cannot always be successful; there are all kinds of situations. By getting involved in these activities—you go for medical camp, you go for service, you take up Bal Vikas classes, you do bhajans—your mind is always concentrated and you are involved in good activity. Otherwise, the same time you can spend watching TV, a movie, or you go to a club . . . then the entire reaction is different. Swami says: suppose you go on watching something bad, ten times or twenty times . . . in a subconscious way gets impressed. What you see, what you hear, what you talk—everything affects your well-being. That is why Swami says: samyak drishti [right vision], samyak vak [right speech], samyak srava- nam [right hearing], and so on . . . So how do we ensure that? By getting involved in good activities. He says you need not only do this in Sathya Sai Organizations, do it otherwise also. But here because of like-minded devotees . . . it is easier. (Interview, November 28, 2002)

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This emphasis on service in the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization has roots in the nineteenth century when new semantics for the idea of serving the guru or God began to emerge in many South Asian religious movements in the context of colonialism.19 Sahajanand Swami or Swaminarayan (1781–1830), the founder of the Swaminarayan fellowship, encouraged social welfare works and manual labor by ascetics such as digging wells, repairing roads, building temples and residences, or providing famine relief, which continues to be a model today for the Swaminarayan religion (see Williams 2001). The fi rst organized expressions of service in the Ramakrishna movement emerged from the novel response of Vivekananda (1863–1902) to famine and disaster relief; the practice of service anticipates the language of human rights although the understanding of the implicit divinity of human beings in the Ramakrishna movement rejects an empirical/legal quantifi cation of social transformation (Beckerlegge 2000: 79–112). The Arya Samaj, the Theosophical Society, Servants of India Society and the Seva Samiti of Allahabad in the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century, “drew on dynamic and deep-rooted ‘living traditions’ while also being infl uenced by contemporary Indian social conditions and global developments in the realms of organized philanthropy and civics” (Watt 2005: 13). Older ideas were given new connotations and embedded social service efforts: for example, the concept of service changed from individual acts of piety or homage to a guru or deity to include social service explicitly by linking the word seva with words such as sabha or samiti. A direct connection was made between service to man and service to God (Watt 2005: 97–129). In recent times, the Buddhist movement Sarvodaya began as a work camp in 1958 where students and teachers gifted their labor to dig wells, plant gardens, or build toilets in a depressed low-caste village near Colombo (see Bond 1996 and 2004). Other contemporary gurus and their organizations, such as the female guru Ammachi, emphasize service to humanity as a duty to God and have undertaken to provide relief for the poor through health care or soup kitchens (see Warrier 2005). The dress adopted by

19 Gold (1995) writes that service to religious teachers is mentioned in the early Upanishads, and with the emergence and development of devotional forms of religion in the Common Era, seva came to include ritual forms of service to a divine image as well as practical activities and physical service to a teacher or guru. He suggests that seva and darshan complement each other: the assimilation of the guru’s divine nature occurs through a vision of him/her while service is participation in the guru’s work.

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Fig. 15. Seva Dal volunteers with Sathya Sai Baba (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry)

Sathya Sai Seva volunteers and active workers that includes a scarf with the emblem of the Sai Organization (see Figure 15) also seems inspired by Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement and Indian national service cadres.20 The model of service as spiritual praxis in the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization is based on an anthropocentric idea of civic reform. At the heart of this paradigm is the individual, whose care of others is simultaneously a cure of the self. It is humanistic insofar as the understanding of humanity is that divinity is inherent within. At the same time, these activities are carried out within civic collectives that nest into each other—family, village or community, nation, and the world. This means that most decisions about speciﬁ c seva activities are made locally, primarily within samitis, based on local needs and available resources. While such service work is believed to have a cumulative effect, ultimately its rationale does not lie within a developmental model of social change. Devotees carrying out service see themselves as citizens

20 See also Watt (2005) on the convergence between these older service organizations and the Boy Scout movement.

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with a civic role but ideas of citizenship cannot be collapsed easily into monolithic, liberal, legal, or state-based understandings. Citizenship is cast primarily in local terms within immediate social collectives such as the neighborhood or the city. At the same time, devotees, regardless of local context or even nationality, feel bound to each other through a common practice and the fi gure of Sathya Sai Baba. For a devotee moving from Bangalore to Atlanta or Nairobi, mobility is relatively fl uid because of this devotional network and participating in service activities in another location becomes the ground for acquiring local citizenship. The main work of the Sai Centers at the local level is to bridge the relationship between the individual as householder, the family, and the community through service and other spiritual exercises. Yet, this mediation occurs through a different kind of logic than simply the “outward” manifestation of “inner” devotion or the unintended social consequences of piety. Instead, the daily life of an active devotee carrying out seva is constructed in terms of miraculous events and synchronicities. A female devotee in Bangalore refl ects on the way in which unexpected grace can infi ltrate service activities through the presence of Sathya Sai Baba: The fi rst time that Sai Darshan was inaugurated, we needed money for Narayana Seva [literally “service of God,” the gift of food to the poor]. Mr. Kushalappa and I were sitting on the steps wondering what we could do. As I was saying that we could all contribute to this amount, Neelu came with 750 rupees, which is exactly what was needed. It seems that one lady had brought money to Swami for service purposes. He took it and gave it to Neelu and said: “Give it to Sai Darshan.” Swami sent it to us through Neelu. If you start a good program, Swami provides. (Interview, September 22, 1999) The synchronicity suggested in this account also alludes to a gift economy that is at work in the communities in which Sai Centers function. Most of the money within a Sai Center comes from contributions by samiti members and active workers in an act of personal devotion to their guru. Central to the gift economy are the countless hours spent doing service. Contractual giving, which is identifi ed with modernity and materialism, is subordinated to selfl ess sacrifi ce within the Sai movement as it strives to transform interestedness into socially-committed gift- giving and disinterestedness (see Kent 2004b). This voluntary activity, however, is not regarded as “charity” but a process simultaneously of self-care and care of the other.

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Educating the Young

In his role as an avatar, Sathya Sai Baba casts himself as an educator or teacher, both for devotees and aspirants in general and for young children and youth in particular (see Figure 16). According to Kasturi, Baba felt that the establishment of morality and righteousness had to be undertaken also in educational institutions because otherwise they pump “irreverence, indiscipline, ineffi ciency, and rootless culture” into national life (Kasturi 1972: 51). There was an educational crisis in India and moral regeneration depended on the regeneration of education.21 Thus, the Bal Vihar Program for children—renamed Bal Vikas (child development) in 1970—was inaugurated by Baba in the late 1960s. Women acted as gurus for children and conducted classes once a week that included retelling stories from the scriptures, devotional singing, performing plays, or discussing how to tackle negative emotions and promote positive ones. A structured program with syllabuses and courses for child education emerged over the years. In 1981, the Education in Human Values (EHV) framework was established to create a curriculum and methodology for the spiritual development of children based on truth, non-violence, peace, right conduct, and love (The Mission of Sathya Sai 2005: 42). While the Bal Vikas Program was designed for devotees’ children, the Sathya Sai EHV approach is theoretically applicable to all schools on the premise that human values are essentially non-denominational and affect holistically a child’s personality. The Sathya Sai EHV program has been adopted by several local schools in different parts of the world.22 Today, the idea of “Educare,” positing a holistic and uniform framework for realizing divinity and self-transformation, is achieving currency in the movement. Educare, an ecology of education and selfhood, states that the fi ve elements of nature (space, water, air, fi re, and earth), which are expressions of the divine, are similarly elements of human nature. This micro- and macrocosmic correspondence (similar to the framework elaborated by Gandhi in Key to Health) relates an imbalance within to an imbalance without. Thus, the fi ve senses,

21 See also Gokak (1983) for a discussion of Sathya Sai Baba’s views on education. 22 See Arweck, Nesbitt and Jackson (2005) for a report on two values education programs adopted by some UK schools—the Sathya Sai Education in Human Values and the Brahma Kumaris’ Living Values Educational Program.

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Fig. 16. School students with Sathya Sai Baba (Photograph courtesy of Sai Darshan ofﬁ ce)

which receive these elements, have to be used properly and related to the ﬁ ve human values.23 In the last 16 years, 19 Sathya Sai Institutes of Education across the world have trained about 50,000 teachers. Sathya Sai Schools in 31 countries including India integrate these programs with formal education.24 The Sathya Sai Schools are an international network, philan- thropically-funded, providing free education where human values and Educare permeate the subject matter of different disciplines along with ecumenical prayers, devotional singing, chanting, and prayer based on the local cultural context and the children’s backgrounds. For example, the school in Thailand utilizes primarily Buddhist prayers and chants. While they bear the name of Sathya Sai Baba, these institutes and

23 See “Proceedings of the International Convention of Sri Sathya Sai Bal Vikas Gurus,” http://www.sathyasai.org/education/reports/reporteducare.pdf, accessed November 12, 2005. 24 See “Proceedings of the International Convention of Sri Sathya Sai Bal Vikas Gurus,” http://www.sathyasai.org/education/reports/reporteducare.pdf, accessed November 12, 2005.

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schools are not run by the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust but are maintained by the individual Sai Organizations in various countries.25 Sathya Sai Baba has personally opened a number of institutions for young people’s education. Inaugurating a college for women in Anan- tapur in July 1968, he stated that he was planning a college or two in every state in India to be knit together later into a university (Kasturi 1972: 54–55). In June 1969, another college for men was opened in Brindavan near Bangalore. Baba stated on that occasion that the college was meant give a complete education; besides the curriculum, the students had to learn “the principles of right action, right social behavior and spiritual advancement” (Kasturi 1972: 61). The college motto translated from Sanskrit read: “Dharma guards those that adhere to it; there is no dharma higher than truth” (Kasturi 1972: 62). In 1978, a college for men came up in Prashanti Nilayam in Puttaparthi. The college campuses became part of the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning in Prashanti Nilayam founded in 1981 by Baba as its trustee and chancellor. This is an autonomous body recognized as a deemed university by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, and the University Grants Commission. It has a vice-chancellor (currently Anil Gokak) in addition to other executive ofﬁ cers. Academic instruction in arts, sciences, commerce, and education takes place on the campuses at Anantapur (for women), Brindavan (for men), and Prashanti Nilayam (for men). In 2005–06, there were 699 male students and 479 female students on the three campuses. While all three campuses offer undergraduate courses, postgraduate education is offered only at Anantapur and Prashanti Nilayam and only the latter has professional courses in business administration, ﬁ nancial management, and computer science (see Table 3). In general, the gender of the faculty and teaching staff at the campuses is based on the gender of the student body: the Prashanti Nilayam campus had 48 faculty and teaching staff, the Anan- tapur campus had 42, and the Brindavan campus had 19 persons. An additional librarian and director of physical education worked on each campus.26 A music college located in Prashanti Nilayam with male and female students became part of the Institute in 2000. Its participation in the curriculum of the university “provides a sense of completeness

25 See “Sathya Sai Schools and Institutes,” http://www.saieducare.org/html/index. asp, accessed November 13, 2005. 26 My thanks to Prof. V.N. Pandit for providing me with these statistics.

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Table 3. Student Enrolment, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, 2005–06 (Credit: Prof. V.N. Pandit)

Prashanti Anantpur Brindavan Total Nilayam

Bachelors in Arts 47 69 116 Bachelors in Science 94 187 148 429 Bachelors in Commerce 135 143 278 Bachelors in Home Science 28 28 Bachelors in Education 21 21 Postgraduate Diploma in Indian Culture and Philosophy 3 3 Masters in Arts 19 11 30 Masters in Science 105 27 132 Masters in Business Administration 54 54 Masters in Business Administration (Finance) 38 38 Masters in Technology (Computer Science) 25 25 Master of Philosophy 13 13 Doctor of Philosophy 9 1 1 11 Music 55 55 Total 462 479 292 1,233

to the integral education philosophy at Prashanti Nilayam,” claims the newsletter (SS, November 2000: 378). In 2005–06, there were 55 music students in the college. The university has an open admission policy based on merit and encourages the enrolment of youth from all over the country. No fees are charged for tuition, laboratories, hostels, or other facilities. Residential living is mandatory and students undertake responsibility in running their hostels under the coordination of a faculty member. All undergraduates have to take a course on the environment in addition to languages and other core subjects. “Spiritual awareness” courses are taken by both undergraduate and graduate students and “integral items of education” such as yoga, games and sports, prayer and meditation, cultural events, social work and self-reliance programs are compulsory. Every year in October, the students and faculty also conduct a village service program. In 2004, for instance, they carried out a program for 13 days distributing food and clothing among households in 145 villages with a population of about 200,000. The highlight of the academic calendar is the annual sports and cultural meet conducted every year on January 11 at the Hill View Stadium in Prashanti Nilayam. Students from all three campuses as well as the Prashanti Nilayam schools march past Sathya Sai Baba, who is seated on a dais. In 2005, after the oath- taking ceremony and the lighting of a torch modeled on that of the

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Olympic Games, the campuses also put up special displays. Anantapur campus, for instance, made a presentation called “The Path of Dharma is the Path of Sai” that included martial arts, fencing, sword fi ghting, and motor-bike stunts. Whether it is class-room work, hostel life, or extracurricular programs such as the training for the annual meet, all activities are based on Baba’s directive that there should be coherent development of the student’s body, mind and soul.27 Arun Kumar Jain, who received a business degree from the Prashanti Nilayam campus in the early 1990s, points out: In these institutions and hostels attached to them, dignity of labor is not merely preached but practiced . . . A lot of work is done by the students themselves, be it in the kitchen or the co-operative stores, the dispensary or the maintenance department. (Trayee Saptamayee no date: 41) J.B. Vijay Simha, a science student of the Brindavan campus in the mid-1990s says: Swami gives a lot of importance to academic excellence. At the same time, He cautions us that we should not get lost in academics, and forget the real purpose for which we have come. Mere academic advancement, without spiritual insight, is not only useless but positively dangerous . . . Education should be for life, not for a living. (Trayee Saptamayee no date: 29) The signifi cance placed on educational reform is apparent in the countless discourses addressed by Baba to students as well as the visual impressions gained at darshan time in Puttaparthi or elsewhere, when the central places are occupied by students and faculty. Dressed in white clothes, sitting in disciplined lines, they arrive with their books or other materials such as letters, sweets or ash to be blessed by Baba. Hardly a day goes by without Baba speaking to students and faculty. Some students are from devotees’ families while others are present simply for educational purposes. The accounts of both types of students within these institutions reveal bonds of loyalty to each other, the experience of peer pressure, the development of devotion to Baba or a turning away from him, fond ties to some teachers, and encounters with diffi cult ones. Obviously, not all students are happy in these institutions and some drop out. There has been criticism by some students about the university’s constraints and strict discipline, and diffi culties

27 My thanks to Prof. V.N. Pandit for providing me a report of these activities.

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faced when they leave for the “outside world.” There have also been some allegations made against Baba, mostly on the Internet, about his relationship with the students.28 To my knowledge, there has been no balanced yet frank evaluation, either from within or without, of these institutions on the scale made, for example, of ISKCON’s schools (Bryant and Ekstrand 2004). Even for young persons committed to the educational process, it is evident from several accounts that being a student in one of the campuses of the Institute can require a serious shift in understandings of the world. A male student, Tribhuvan Sachdev, whose parents are devotees, describes his early reluctance at being in one of Baba’s colleges: It was my parents’ earnest wish to see me as a student of Sri Sathya Sai College. But in the beginning . . . I just could not think of myself coming here and leading a simple life with no comforts and freedom at all. It was only at a later stage that I was to understand the real meaning of freedom . . . (Smruti ’83 no date: 24) The moral responsibility of being a student of one of Baba’s institutions and interpreting one’s life based on ideals derived from the immersion in his educational system seems to preoccupy many of them. Shanti (a pseudonym), for example, is a charming, conﬁ dent, and articulate woman in her mid-thirties who works for a company in Bangalore’s Export Promotion Industrial Park. Her mother is a Sai devotee. She joined Baba’s school in Ootacamund when she was in the fourth standard. She remembers her years in Ootacamund as being very happy. The students spent a great deal of time with Swami; it was a “playful” and “protected” rather than an especially “disciplined” life. She then moved to the Easwaramma School in Puttaparthi which was quite different in atmosphere: rather than a “blending of East and West,” it was a local Telugu school that seemed rather restricted and required some major adjustments on her part. Eventually she moved to Baba’s college for women in Anantapur where she completed a degree in science. Shanti says that Swami does not give instructions but sets out a curriculum that is interpreted by teachers according to their abilities. Their interpretations can vary, some teachers are more conservative than others, but the differences are not so vast that there is a real gap between

28 See, for instance, www.sathyasaivictims.com, http://home.no.net/anir/Sai, or www.exbaba.com.

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them. She experienced a very carefree time; many of the teachers had known Swami for many years and were important infl uences on her life. Dr. Kasturi (Baba’s offi cial biographer), for instance, used to visit the students every two weeks and told many stories about Swami. They were taught many values such as the importance of integrity or non-violence that were helpful in the outside world. “Swami looks after everything,” she said, but when they came out it was not so simple. They had to adapt and look out for themselves because not everyone was the same or shared the same beliefs. However, even today, she tries to follow many of the values inculcated in Baba’s educational system. For example, Swami does not like the television although he has occasionally enjoyed mythological fi lms such as Bhakta Prahalada or Meera. Even today, she claims that she hardly ever watches TV. What is it like being a female student? She says frankly that in Anantapur it seems sometimes one is mainly being prepared to be a good daughter, wife, or mother. There are some postgraduate courses such as in home science or philosophy but the male students have many more educational possibilities. The demands made on the male students are also more exacting and strict in part because they are face to face with Swami regularly in Puttaparthi or Brindavan. Of course, students are also not all the same. In the early years, many male and female students who studied in college had also studied in Swami’s schools and there was a great deal of continuity. Now many of them have had experiences in other places and also may fi nd it more diffi cult to be a student in Baba’s campuses, she stated. In any case, male or female, it is very challenging to be a student of Baba’s because there are great expectations from others about one’s behavior whether one marries or joins a Sai Center. According to Shanti, “it took four or fi ve years of introspection” to realize that the main point of the education was that its values could be used in the outside world as well as one’s personal life. She recalls that Swami talks a great deal about the power of the youth. She feels, however, that “we have failed Swami sometimes because we are not doing enough.” More than three decades of students have emerged from Swami’s colleges and schools and “the responsibility lies with us to be a force.” Of course, nothing will happen without Swami’s will, for “he is a master planner,” she refl ects. For most devotees, it is his physical proximity that drives them, but it may be time to move beyond that experience to a different understanding of the relationship between

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Baba and the devotee: “If I look retrospectively at my day to day, then I see his inﬂ uence in so many things.”29

Character, Culture, and Citizenship

Dr. V.K. Gokak, the fi rst vice-chancellor of the Institute of Higher Learning, argues that Sathya Sai Baba is committed to an educational renaissance through which the bankrupt educational system is over- hauled and new types of students and leaders are created who can serve the country (Gokak 1983). I wish to analyze here the content given to the idea of character and its relationship to culture and citizenship since this is central to Sathya Sai Baba’s new sociology and anthropology of education. This content is highlighted in a series of annual discourses given by Baba to students called Summer Showers in Brindavan. I focus here particularly on the discourses given in 1972 when Sathya Sai Baba inaugurated the fi rst “summer courses” on Indian culture and spirituality for students in his colleges and from other parts of India. Well-known scholars, literary fi gures, and teachers conducted sessions and gave lectures during the day on Vedanta, other religions, science and its relationship to cultural values, mysticism, and philosophy over several weeks. These were complemented by Baba’s discourses. Many of the ethical frameworks outlined in the 1972 discourses were emphasized again in later ones to students as well as in Sathya Sai Speaks. Sathya Sai Baba has stated several times that education is for life, not for making a living. Education that results in healthy bodies, strong minds, and the care of the soul (instead of jobs) creates youth who are self-reliant and can serve society: The bond between jobs and degrees has to be cut asunder. Education should foster moral and spiritual excellence. Students should cultivate the intelligence needed to cleanse the mind to stand on one’s own feet and tender service to fellowmen. (SSS, Vol. XV: 316) In the summer courses, he exhorted the students not to simply gain “information” but also discrimination and character:

29 Notes of interview, January 31, 2006.

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The end of wisdom is freedom. The end of culture is perfection. The end of knowledge is love. The end of education is character. (SSB 1972: 3) The emphasis on the development of character—viewed a composite of mind, body, and soul—is consistent with the bio-civic ethics stressed in the therapeutic and service programs. Baba also stated that many new ideas, habits, and cultures had been introduced in the name of education and these were creating a lack of confi dence and distortion among youth because they were pursuing “western civilization” or giving importance to temporary gains and material successes (SSB 1972: 2): The emphasis long placed on the development of character and the promotion of virtue through education has now been dropped. In their place are enthroned as ideals worldly success, self-aggrandizement, and high living. (SSB 1972: v–vi) The students of today have been enticed by “so-called modernity” and have become oblivious to their own divinity (SSB 1990: 2). Although science, technology, or industrialization have contributed to material progress they have also undermined spiritual values of selfl essness, divinity, and dignity. Instead, one should cultivate truth and righteousness emphasized in the Vedas, which are the basis for Indian culture: Indians have become weak by imitation and by running after the wrong traditions . . . We generally fi nd the cheap preparations of our neighbors much more tasteful than the rich delicacies made in our own houses. This trend is more prevalent among modern students. We must try to revitalize and resuscitate Indian culture, Indian dharma and Indian religion. (SSB 1972: 189–190) A central concern for Sathya Sai Baba is creating generations of new leaders and citizens who have pride in the ideals of Indian culture and heritage, respect universal values, and reform social evils. Today, India’s culture is becoming weaker and weaker. For that reason, the students from various parts of this country who are going to be our future citizens are brought here . . . So far as you are concerned it is essential that you should develop the feeling of ‘prema’ [love] which is the highest experience proclaimed by the Vedas and other texts that the teachers are giving you. I bless you, after having this experience, to go back and to grow into good citizens of India and re-establish the glory and shining ancient path of this country. (SSB 1972: 23–24) Speaking to a moral and cultural crisis, he says that students need to learn about their true self: “Our culture and traditions are such

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that they enable you to know who you are and help you understand yourself ” (SSB 1972: 6–7). Once they cleanse their own hearts, they need to purify their village, their district, their country, and the world. Their responsibility and duties as citizens need to be recognized and the methods of education have to be changed alongside a redefi nition of citizenship: “love and peace . . . are the essential qualities of a good citizen” (SSB 1972: 5); “The honour of a nation depends on the morality of that nation” (SSB 1972: 196). Sathya Sai Baba spoke in 1972 on a number of topics such as the lessons taught by the Bhagavad Gita, on desire and anger, self-control and detachment, the path of devotion, meditation, and customs and character. He also stressed the importance of Vedic religion which he described in a classical way as the “breath of God” (SSB 1972: 13) and divine in origin. This description, however, was qualifi ed: although religions show us different paths, or differ in the matter of details or “in the matter of their destination,” their “essential content” is the same—the divine self or atma (SSB 1972: 13). There is, therefore, only one religion that is the “religion of love” (SSB 1972: 17). This formulation is similar to Gandhi’s invoking of the one religion underlying all religions, which he identifi ed with “Truth;” thus, there could be no reason for hatred on the basis of religious traditions between Hindus, Muslims, or Christians. Similarly, Baba stated that neither the philosophy nor spiritual path of a specifi c country should be regarded as its monopoly: “Such truths really belong to the whole world” (SSB 1972: 14). The opposition between modernity and western civilization, or materialism, and Vedic and Indian culture, or spirituality articulated by Sathya Sai Baba in these 1972 discourses mimics the heuristic distinction made by Gandhi in Hind Swaraj (addressed to young India) between modern/Western civilization and ancient/true civilization. For Gandhi, the former is one that emphasizes bodily welfare as the object of life and is godless; the latter is one that celebrates the performance of duty, the observance of morality, and a belief in God. He defended Indian civilization as one being true in its foundation although it had become weak in recent years—it had to renew and liberate itself through the principles of swadeshi (of the homeland), swaraj (self-rule), and satyagraha (truth force) (Alter 2000; Hardiman 2003; Nandy 1987). The reform of education supported by Sathya Sai Baba has remark- able resonances with other global movements such as Soka Gakkai, which is also concerned with the relationship between education and citizenship and through its current leader has resulted in a number of Soka schools, kindergartens, as well as the Soka University of America

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(Seager 2006). The centrality given to the building of character among youth by Baba is embedded in a history of such efforts in the colonial and postcolonial milieu in India. The Ramakrishna schools inspired by Vivekananda, for instance, emphasize the moral uplift of youth in addition to the truths of Vedanta, the life and teachings of Ramak- rishna, and respect for all religions as valid paths to the divine. For the Arya Samaj, Theosophical Society, and other social service associations in the early twentieth century, education was an important means for molding the character of youth and inculcating the values of national service (see Watt 2005). Sri Aurobindo was concerned with developing a new framework for national education and left a legacy that would inspire the setting up of schools, academic studies, and an experimental township at Auroville in 1968 that is based, among other things, on the idea that there is within man a spark of the transcendent divine and the aim of human existence is to become conscious of this reality and unite with it. J. Krishnamurti felt that if the young could be awakened in an atmosphere of freedom and inquiry into their conditioning by religion, nationality and other forces, they would live lives of a different quality. His efforts led to the formation of several schools such as Rishi Valley in India and Brockwood Park in England.30 One can see these initiatives as casting an inﬂ uence over the Sai educational experiments; more generally, all of these sought to carve a space for youth as a transformative civic force.

The Eternal Doctrine

The bio-civic ethics underlying the programs of the Sathya Sai Baba movement addresses, on the one hand, the dilemmas of the human condition, makes meaning for different devotees, and guides their activities. On the other hand, it raises the question of whether (despite the emphasis on universal “human values”) the new civic order that Sathya Sai Baba is perceived to have inaugurated reﬂ ects a type of religious nationalism. The discourses given by Baba can be read in various ways: chronologically, to show that Baba’s message has been moving from a

30 There are a number of sources that explore these new sociologies of education in India. On the Krishnamurti schools, see Thapan (1991). On Sri Aurobindo’s writings on education, see Heehs (2005), Marshak (2002).

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particularistic to a more universal and global message; to argue that these discourses have a specifi c content since they were meant for an Indian, and largely Hindu audience; or that although Baba uses the word Indian rather than Hindu, “the two are coterminous realities” (Palmer 2005: 105). The last position implies that the universality of truths proclaimed by him incorporates difference within an all-absorbing Hindu tradition or Advaita. There may be some truth in these readings but I prefer instead a more nuanced one that depends on the articulation between Indian culture, India, other religions, and the concept of “Sanatana Dharma.” The transcendent unity of all religions and revelations or what one may call a perennial philosophy, theosophical unity, or eternal doctrine (a timeless wisdom or truth at the heart of diverse religions and traditions) is central to the spread of the movement and its institutions both within and without India. These ideas were espoused by a number of movements and individuals in contemporary times—Theosophy, Frit- hjof Schoun, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Marco Pallis, Rene Guenon, and others (Oldmeadow 2000; Prothero 1996). One can also argue that in the Indian context, Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi were exponents of a perennial philosophy (Forsthoefel 2005; Lipsey 1977, Vol. 2: 34–42). The Sarva Dharma pillar in Prashanti Nilayam contains the elements of this theosophical unity by emphasizing the convergence of world religions (see Chapter 5). This was modeled on the older “Lotus Circle” pillar that graced a small circular garden in front of Prashanti Nilayam. The Sai Organization, the Central Trust, and other institutions make use of this pillar in two kinds of emblems: one is an open lotus with the Lotus Circle pillar in the center. Its fi ve (or sometimes six) petals contain symbols representing the world’s major religions including Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Bud- dhism (and sometimes Judaism). Another emblem, chiefl y associated with the overseas Sai Organization, depicts the fi ve values of truth, right conduct, peace, love and non-violence on its petals; this contains the Sarva Dharma pillar in its center (see Figure 17). The movement, therefore, seeks to represent the unity of world religions, the universal human values of world religions, or the common goals of humanity. The nation is never central. The terms dharma and Sanatana Dharma (a term that suggests theosophical unity, perennial philosophy, or eternal doctrine in Baba’s discourses) are related in a specifi c way. Dharma is a term that Baba uses in several discourses to mean righteousness or conduct as well

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Fig. 17. Emblems of the Sai Organization (Source: http://www.sathyasai.org)

as restrictions and disciplines that favor spiritual and social progress. The combined forms and essence of all of these is Sanatana Dharma and different religions emphasize and describe that part of it that is appropriate to them: When we are able to bring and put together the ideas of everyone, the moral laws supported by all religions and the truth that is in all religions, we will have a picture of Sanathana dharma. (SSB 1973: 205) These ideas need to be contextualized. First, the term Sanatana Dharma was increasingly used to describe Hindu tradition, Hinduism, the perceived commonalities between different sectarian traditions, or something beyond sectarian and exclusive defi nitions from the late nineteenth century onwards by fi gures such as the Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott or Annie Besant but also by others such as Aurobindo, who was quite critical of Annie Besant. Second, the meanings brought to the term were not always the same, the audiences sometimes very different, and the signifi cance placed on texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, or what practices and ideas were core or eternal were not identical. Third, several other fi gures in contemporary times have also used the term in a way that identifi es it with “Hinduism” and makes it parallel in some way to other world religions.31

31 See Hawley (forthcoming) on Annie Besant and other ﬁ gures who used the term in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; see Heehs (2005) for a careful reading of Aurobindo’s use of the term and its relationship to Hinduism.

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It is my understanding here that while the idea of Sanatana Dharma deployed by Sathya Sai Baba comes closest to that of late Theosophy as well as Aurobindo, it is clear that the Sanatana Dharma communicated by him cannot be equated easily to any one religion, Hinduism or otherwise, and its eternality. It is universality (in a spatial mode) without collapsing differences that provides specifi c nuances to Sanatana Dharma. This spatiality encompasses other parts of the world, other peoples, cultures, or traditions, but also moves inward into the hearts and spirits of traditions and peoples. One is reminded here of Ananda Coomaraswamy’s refl ections on the experiments of Ramakrishna in the truths of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism. What could be the value of such a process for comparative religion, he asks? This value is not the elucidation of “a single universally acceptable syncretic faith” but the fact that “all religions spring from a common source” (Lipsey 1977, Vol. 2: 39–40). Further, it is “the clarifi cation that results when the formulae of one tradition are collated with those of another . . . [for] every tradition is necessarily a partial representation of the truth intended by tradition universally considered; in each tradition something is suppressed, or reserved, or obscure which in another may be found more extensively, more logically, or more brilliantly developed” (Lipsey 1977, Vol. 2: 40). I believe that it is in this sense of “collation” that Baba uses the idea of Sanatana Dharma, cast not in terms of an international religious syncretism, hybrid faith, or Hinduism, but in terms of universal values:32 Wherever sathya, dharma, shaanthi, and prema are emphasised, in whatever religion or language, by whichever teacher wherever he may be, there we have Sanaathana Dharma. (SSS, Vol. I: 45–46) Baba sees Indian culture as having a crucial role to play in the revival or reestablishment of this eternal code, and in many ways, his casting of Indian culture may seem an exercise in reverse Orientalism: Where there is a gold mine, there is the need for mining engineers and chemists who will extract it, separate it, purify it and distribute it to the various places where gold is in demand, is it not? So also, it is here in India that there is a mine of spiritual wisdom and spiritual treasure . . . This has to be distributed pure and unsullied, guaranteed in value and quality, to eager aspirants everywhere and so we have here a succession of sages and saints. (SSS, Vol. I: 37–38)

32 See also Warrier (2005) for a similar use of the term Sanatana Dharma by the female guru, Ammachi.

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The “science of spiritual culture and of the control of the mind” (SSS, Vol. I: 139) that has been practiced in India is seen to include various methods emphasized during different periods including mantra, yoga, and Tantra, through various traditions such as Buddhism or Vedic thought, and through various personages including the poet-saints Tyagaraja or Purandaradasa, teachers such as Ramalingaswami, or the reformer Shankara. In the early years, in Baba’s discourses to basically Indian audiences, the “treasure” to which he often referred consists of the various philosophical perspectives known as darshanas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, and the epics, what he calls collectively shastras (scriptures). These he sees as “ ‘bunds’ which regulate the fl ow of feelings, emotions and instincts along safe channels” (SSS, Vol. II: 68). However, they are also spoken of as “road maps” and “guide books” describing the path and giving directions, to be made secondary to the actual experience and goals of a spiritual journey: It is the actual journey that will reveal the hardships, the delays, the land- slips and the pot-holes, as well as the beauty of the scenery encountered and the magnifi cence of the fi nal goal. No second-hand account can equal the fi rst-hand experience (SSS, Vol. I: 120). . . . I have no confl ict with either the scholar who adheres to the texts or the devotee of reason. Both have their good points as well as their limitations. If you acquire prema, then you can dispense with the Shaasthras, for the purpose of all the Shaasthras is just that: to create the feeling of Sarvajana samaana prema (equal love for all); and to negate egoism which stands in the way. Reason too, if it comes in the way of this love, is to be discarded as “perverted.” (SSS, Vol. I: 120–21) Just as the actual experience of the spiritual journey or the acquisition of love is valued above the scriptures and reason, the rendering of Indian culture is constantly balanced and sometimes undercut by parabolic readings of texts and terms to create a universality of referents. This distances Baba from the Hindu Right. He states, for instance, that we should forget that the battle of the Mahabharata epic was fought between two armies and instead remind ourselves that the battle occurs within our bodies and our hearts, between our good qualities and our bad qualities (SSB 1972: 40–55). Again, the Vedas, which are the bases for Indian culture, have taught two main principles—to speak truth and to practice righteousness (SSB 1990: 7). The Ramayana is not a story but a spiritual path in every person’s life (SSS, Vol. II: 27–30). Further, “citizens of Bharat” (a term used to describe India) should not regard themselves as belonging to a country ruled by a king called Bharatha

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but Bharatha (as a sort of Everyman) is one who takes pleasure in the divine (SSB 1972: 46). Man wants the Truth, gets disgusted with falsehood; he wants Light, he gets defeated by darkness; he wants no Death, he gets torn by birth and death . . . This yearning has no connection with the land of your birth or the language spoken or the form of Divinity revered. It is the cry of humanity everywhere, at all times. (SSS, Vol. II: 32–33) The ability to move from a construction of Indian culture involving universal values to an inner and philological reading of scriptural traditions, from an emphasis on Vedic truths to pragmatic formulae, from an insistence on cultural roots to a theosophical universalism, embeds Baba’s philosophy within a speciﬁ c social, cultural and historic context, and simultaneously allows spatial mobility. The support of institutions and constructions of healing, service, and character rely on this interpretive and hermeneutical enterprise that is dialogic and embodied and creates new etymologies, performative practices, and novel readings of texts.

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THE IDEAL POLIS

A City Made Sacred

For thousands of devotees, Prashanti Nilayam is the heart of a city made sacred by the presence of the guru. Traveling to Prashanti Nilayam, Sathya Sai Baba’s hermitage at Puttaparthi, is a fairly comfortable affair: buses ply daily from Bangalore, Hyderabad, and other cities, there is an airport with seasonal ﬂ ights, and also regular rail service. By car or taxi, the trip from Bangalore, about 150 kilometers away, takes three and a half hours. You know you are entering “Baba territory” about an hour or so by road from Puttaparthi: restaurants carry pictures of Sathya Sai Baba, there are billboards advertising his eightieth birthday celebrations completed in 2005, and several roadside schools, a village, and institutions such as a Home for the Aged bear his name. More formal boundaries are indicated by an arch amidst a landscape of red earth and rocky hillocks near Pedaballi village that reads: “Welcome Sri Sathya Sai Taluk.” Coming into the Puttaparthi area, you pass a railway station on the left about eight kilometers from the hermitage; the pink and cream SSSIHMS on the right; the Sathya Sai airport, a memorial to Sathya Sai Baba’s younger brother and a tourism building (all on the right); and a mosque on your left. Several guesthouses and cottages also dot the landscape. The built environment suddenly gets quite dense on either side of the road about a kilometer from the hermitage after the road bears north. This is the educational complex, framed by two other arches, including several schools, a university, and a music college. Once you cross this area, a busy market and a bus stand lie between you and the formal entrance of the hermitage indicated by a gateway (gopuram) (see Figure 18). Puttaparthi-Prashanti Nilayam is the case study of this chapter since it contains the most developed complex and multiple examples of the vision of the city as a sacred center, which was then replicated, elaborated, translated or mapped onto places elsewhere. The chapter traces the development of the Puttaparthi area into an urban locus through the devotional and institutional regimes centered on Sathya Sai Baba.

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Fig. 18. Market area outside the hermitage (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

While it is concerned with Baba’s hermitage and its environs as a lived space, it also deals with the way in which architecture and the built environment in the area, a cumulative product of several phases, give expression to visions of an ideal polis and citizenship. It utilizes Sana- thana Sarathi (The Eternal Charioteer), the monthly newsletter of the movement, to locate representational shifts as the area’s infrastructure grew and the Sathya Sai Baba movement became more global. In many ways, changes in this newsletter mark or coincide with the phases of the spatial development of Puttaparthi into a small city. Before we consider Puttaparthi-Prashanti Nilayam as a sacred city, we need to take a short detour into the historical process of sacralizing a city or the urbanization of a holy site in South Asia since the late ﬁ rst millennium. In South India, in particular, a style of distributed urbanization featuring many small sites within “core” agricultural and commercial zones utilized central shrines surrounded often by quadri- lateral street patterns to organize social space. When such settlements became seats for political power and/or nodes of commercial importance, the expansions, embellishments, walls, and halls of shrines funded through the donations of kings, merchants, Brahmins, private donors, or agricultural groups created major temples within a single nested array of city streets (as in Madurai) or multi-centered sites organized around many temples (as in Kanchipuram). In special cases, the sacrality of a

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deity achieved regional renown and a shrine became a site of pilgrimage that supported concomitant commercial growth and population concentration (as in Tirupati or Pandharpur). The personal charisma of a master or saint has also contributed to the built environment of cities; the tombs of Sufi saints in the Chishti tradition, for example, have augmented the growth of places like Ajmer and Delhi, and Shirdi has more recently grown to be a small city. New religions have also been associated with sacred cities, as in the connection of Sikhism with the city of Amritsar (Heitzman 2008). More recently, the branches of the north Indian Radhasoami movement and its gurus have founded a site like Dayalbagh that includes factories, stores, educational institutions, and residences; small centers like Huzuri Bhavan; and a “spiritual kingdom,” Beas. As Juergensmeyer has noted, most of these sites “are to be found in suburban or rural locations and are constructed so as to suggest what an ideal Indian village should be; they are urban visions of rural life” ( Juergensmeyer 1991: 149). In the Deccan region of southern India where Puttaparthi lies, Vijay- anagara (the City of Victory), which became the seat of a fourteenth- century Telugu dynasty and then the capital of an empire spanning South India, provides a model of a sacred city that would later infl uence some of the styles at Puttaparthi (see Map 1).1 Situated next to the Tungabhadra River in a rocky, dry region, the city and its agricultural environs were watered by a large tank and a network of artifi cial canals connected to the river. Local rulers here were at fi rst associated with a goddess Pampa and her regional cult on the south bank of the river at the present-day village of Hampi. Another temple dedicated to a male deity Virupaksha appeared in the twelfth century. Pampa’s power was allied with that of Virupaksha through divine marriage and the male deity came to be identifi ed as Shiva. Virupaksha became the family deity of the Vijayanagara rulers in 1346 and was also given the status of a state deity in their new realm. The new capital city laid out in the 1350s extended south of the temples of Virupaksha and Pampa. Stories also connect Vijayanagara with a teacher called Vidyaranya and thus

1 There is a great deal of scholarship on the history of the Vijayanagara kingdom. This account is indebted to Eaton (2005: 78–104), Fritz et al. (1984), and Wagoner (1996a, 1996b, 2000, 2001, 2003). I am aware that the relative importance of “Hindu- ism” and “Islam” in Vijayanagara is a debated issue; see for example, Jackson (2005), whose interpretation differs from Eaton or Wagoner. My aim is not to add fuel to this ﬁ re but to make some general observations about models of sacred cities.

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the city was also known as Vidyanagara, the City of Knowledge. As Vijayanagara became an imperial center, a temple to Rama was built in the core of the royal complex in the fi fteenth century indicating a new public Vaishnava orientation and the association of the king with the epic hero. The divine monkey Hanuman or Anjaneya was also a popular deity in Vijayanagara as attested by hundreds of images associated with gates and coins (Lutgendorf 1994: 233, 237–8; Lutgendorf 2006; Sinopoli 1993: 627). The rulers also patronized Jain and Islamic institutions in addition to their old links with Pampa, and Shaiva and Vaishnava traditions, so that Vijayanagara became a “cosmopolitan capital” (Eaton 2005: 83). By the sixteenth century, “the secular culture of the Vijayanagara court had acquired a thick veneer of Islamicate elements, both practical and symbolic” (Wagoner 2000: 319).2 The culture of Vijayanagara has been described as one in which Hinduism and Islam were not separated from each other, whatever their relative value in the political legitimation of the state, and for many individuals in the Deccan, “cultural code switching and boundary crossing seem to have been familiar parts of everyday life” (Wagoner 2003: 32). After the Vijayanagara rulers were defeated in a major battle in 1565, the royal family moved to a new capital at Penukonda, about 40 kilometers away from Puttaparthi. Vijayanagara and the later capital, Penukonda, appear prominently in narratives about Sathya Sai Baba’s early life during the crucial year when he announced his identity with the faqir, Shirdi Sai Baba. In 1940, after his declaration, his family learned that a government offi cer in Penukonda was a devotee of this faqir. They brought Sathya to the offi cer, who declared that the boy was deranged. Sathya is reported to have taken handfuls of ash from nowhere and scattered it around saying: “Yes, it is mental derangement, but, whose? . . . you cannot recognise the very Sai whom you are worshipping!” (Kasturi 1962: 40). The same year, Sathya visited the Virupaksha temple near Hampi with his brother. The party went into the temple but Sathya stood outside. Inside the shrine, however, according to his offi cial biography, the party looked into sanctum and instead of the lingam, saw Sathya. The day after returning

2 By the adjective “Islamicate,” Wagoner refers to a social and cultural complex that can cut across religious boundaries; Islamicization is a process of becoming Islamicate, while Islamization is the process of becoming Islamic (Wagoner 1996a: 855).

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from Hampi, Sathya declared that his devotees were calling him and threw away his school books (Kasturi 1962: 40–44). One can see traces of the model that Vijayanagara provides in the religious imagination of the Deccan in the subsequent transformation of Puttaparthi-Prashanti Nilayam, where the royal fi gure becomes Sathya Sai Baba, who identifi es himself with male and female aspects of divinity as Shiva-Shakti and also with Shaiva and Vaishnava traditions. Centrally, of course, he identifi es himself with Shirdi Sai Baba, who clearly owed much to the Islamicate world of the Deccan. Sathya Sai Baba has moved his ministry from the village of his childhood southwards to a hermitage called Prashanti Nilayam and an associated educational complex called Vidyagiri, the Mountain of Knowledge. Overshadowing the entire Vidyagiri campus and seen from miles around is a giant image of Hanuman.

From the Village of Anthills to the Urban Master Plan

Puttaparthi, a rather typical settlement for this part of the rocky and hilly Deccan region, lies in the southwestern part of Andhra Pradesh in a rain shadow zone generally known as Rayalaseema, “the boundary of the lords” or “the king’s march.” The Chitravati River lies on the eastern boundaries of the village and falls into the Bukkapatnam reservoir—about fi ve kilometers away from Puttaparthi—named after the founder of the Vijayanagara Empire (Padmanaban 2000: 9). A fort nearby proclaims the association of Puttaparthi with the Palegaras, “protectors” or chieftains, who ruled this area after the end of the empire. Otherwise there is not much to distinguish this village, which passed from one political hand to another, from many others in the vicinity. As far back as 1955 if not earlier, Sathya Sai Baba affi rmed that his home village would become the center for his role and mission as an avatar: “This tree shall not be transplanted; it will grow where it fi rst rose from the earth” (SSS, Vol. 1: 16). At the time that Sathya Sai Baba declared his identity and mission, the village was a hamlet with only two lanes intersecting at right angles and some mud huts. Today, if you stand outside the main gate of Baba’s hermitage, you are on a busy main road lined with stores that leads north to the village sector of Puttaparthi (see Map 4). It contains many places connected with Sathya Sai Baba’s early life and is associated with his childhood

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miracles and sport or play (lila). The places in the village where miracles occurred have become hallowed in the devotional imaginary and achieve almost mythological status through the biography, Sathyam, Sivam, Sun- daram, written by N. Kasturi.3 The entrance to the village is marked by a shrine for Anjaneya (Hanuman), who stands as the village protector as well as the guardian of its main path. The image inside his shrine is hewn on the surface of a rock and shows the energetic divine monkey, tail waving in the air, in a pose similar to images found in the famous late Vijayanagara temple at Lepakshi (about an hour or so away from Puttaparthi) and also near the gates of the Penukonda fort. Close to the Anjaneya shrine is a Sathyabhama or Sathyamma temple originally raised by Kondama Raju, Sathya Sai Baba’s grandfather. Another nearby temple is dedicated to Venugopalaswamy or Gopalakrishna (alias Krishna), who is associated with Sathyabhama, his consort (see Figure 19). Legend has it that the deity installed inside is a stone used by a cowherd from the village to kill a cobra that was drinking milk from one of his cows. The dying cobra cursed the village (then known as Gollapalli) leading to the proliferation of anthills: the village then came to be called Puttaparthi, village of anthills. To pacify the cobra and help avert the curse this stone bearing the blood of the cobra came to be worshipped as Venugopalaswamy, the lord of cowherds. It appears that Baba directed people to wash the stone and smear sandal paste on one side: this revealed an outline of the deity playing his ﬂ ute (Kasturi 1962: 1–3; Padmanaban 2000: 7–12). On the occasion of Baba’s ﬁ ftieth birthday, many of these village temples were rebuilt.4 The road past these temples, heading west into the village center, leads to the childhood home of Sathya Sai Baba. The home was apparently simple, with stone walls and two rooms, one used for storing grains and the other as a living area (Padmanaban 2000: 12). The home is now a Shiva temple that was inaugurated by Sathya Sai Baba in 1979 and rituals are performed there daily. The road leading away from the home towards the center of the village is indicative of a still rustic quality (see Figure 20). Based on various textual accounts of his life and a fund of lore, one can certainly imagine Sathya Sai Baba as a boy walking

3 Padmanaban (2000) also provides an exhaustive documentation of this early period. 4 “Puttaparthi,” http://www.sssbpt.org/pages/Puttaparthi/important_places1.htm, accessed November 29, 2005.

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Map 4. Plan of hermitage and Puttaparthi area (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman; adapted from Prasanthi Nilayam Information Booklet 2000)

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Fig. 19. Venugopalaswamy temple (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

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Fig. 20. Village road (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

to school, leading a band of bhajan singers in the still dusty streets and square near his home, or being tended by Subbamma, the wife of the village accountant who lived a few doors away from his home. These legends of Baba’s youth are presented in pictures and tableaux and mythologized in Chaitanya Jyoti Museum behind the hermitage. The museum contains a diorama, for example, in which the divine monkey Anjaneya materializes himself to Baba. He pops up from under the ﬂ oor of the exhibit and presents himself to young Sathya with folded hands before popping down again. Southeast of the old village houses, on a hillock near the river, stands a tamarind tree. On any given day, devotees can be seen making the trek up to this “wish-fulﬁ lling tree” (Kalpatharu or Kalpavriksha) because Baba is said to have produced different fruits from its branches for devotees in his early years (Kasturi 1962: 50). You may look out over the river valley from this vantage point, recall descriptions of Baba racing up to the tree or leading devotees to it, or place garlands on it. Aitken (2004: 84) suggests that this tamarind tree, revered by Muslims, is one of the few obvious Islamic connections of Sathya Sai Baba. There are others, however, that were forged more recently: in 1978, Sathya Sai Baba constructed a mosque for the local Muslim population in the village because otherwise they would have to travel to Bukkapatnam for prayers.

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The lives of Sathya Sai Baba’s parents are memorialized by sites outside the village habitation area. The resting places (samadhi) of his father, Pedda Venkappa Raju (1885–1963), and his mother, Eas- waramma (1890–1972), stand on Samadhi Road that leads east towards the river. Easwaramma Day (May 6) is celebrated all over the world by devotees as Children’s Day. In her memory, a high school was named after her in Puttaparthi (a bust of Easwaramma stands in front of school) and Kasturi also published a book about her, Easwaramma: The Chosen Mother (1984). The memory of Sathya Sai Baba’s mother seems to overshadow that of his father and she is regarded as the inspiration of projects in medicine, water, and education carried out by the movement (The Mission of Sathya Sai 2005: 2). Leaving the village by the main road back to the hermitage, you pass a marriage hall called Pedda Venkappa Raju Kalyana Mandapam named after Baba’s father. This stands on the site of the Old Mandir, the building that came to accommodate Baba’s growing ministry. The Old Mandir was a simple building on the edge of the village, twenty feet by ten feet, inaugurated in the mid-1940s to accommodate about fi fty people in the main hall; Baba’s personal quarters consisted of a small room (Padmanaban 2000: 241–263). The building proved too small for the increasing number of people who sought Baba out and devotees felt that Baba was being forced to live in cramped quarters in the midst of noise and confusion. A more spacious building, named Prashanti Nilayam, was inaugurated in 1950 to the south of the village and the Old Mandir (Kasturi 1962: 76–78). This building stood in a compound 220 feet by 150 feet with a plinth area of about 750 square feet and was inaugurated during Baba’s twenty-fi fth birthday celebrations in 1950 (Padmanaban 2000: 539). From descriptions about a decade later (Kasturi 1962: 77–82), it appears that there were three gates leading into the building: the outer- most marking the compound bearing the name of Prashanti Nilayam; the middle gate leading into the garden around the “Lotus Circle,” a pillar bearing a lotus on top inside a series of concentric circles, which stood north of the main building; and the innermost gate, which was the building’s door. The building consisted of a central prayer hall with a shrine containing life-size portraits of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba, a silver image of Shirdi Sai Baba with a smaller picture of Sathya Sai Baba underneath, and walls covered with pictures of various teachers, deities, and traditions. Two rooms on the ground fl oor were used for interviews with Baba, while he lived on the upper fl oor. From

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Fig. 21. Old Prashanti Nilayam building (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry)

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the portico of the upper fl oor he gave darshan to the devotees gathered for festivals in the sandy area north of the building (see Figure 21). On a hill next to the old Prashanti Nilayam was a banyan tree that was planted by Baba in 1959 after placing a copper plate with inscrip- tions under the tree. The banyan tree still stands on a raised platform on the hill and devotees will meditate under it. Beyond the garden and the building in the old days were a number of single and double roomed tenements where devotees resided. Many occasional visitors, however, used the river area or trees nearby as their living quarters. There was also a cowshed where Baba spent many hours with the cows (Kasturi 1962: 77–97). The Prashanti Nilayam area today bears little resemble to the building that took two years to build under the active direction of Baba. The area of the hermitage is now packed densely with buildings from different periods and is still expanding towards the west. If we take a walk around the hermitage area making a tour of auxiliary buildings, the architectural increments become apparent (see Map 4). The informal entrance to the ashram is a gate located near a Ganesha temple known generally as Ganesha Gate. Towards its south is a Subrahmanya temple. The formal entrance, however, is the Gopuram Gate, the main pathway for cars and buses carrying devotees, close to the gateway inaugurated in 1975 and built in the South Indian architectural style.5 This gateway is the entrance used by Sathya Sai Baba when he leaves and enters the ashram. Once inside the Gopuram Gate, on your left is a religious tableau depicting the royal fi gures of Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita, and a devoted kneeling Hanuman. This stands between the Gopuram Gate and the inner entrance to the darshan area. Past the tableau on the main path is the “South Indian Canteen” on your right and offi ces such as the Accommodations Offi ce on your left where you enquire on your arrival into the availability of a room. You are heading west towards the main residential buildings and guest rooms in four blocks. The oldest of these are South and East Prashanti blocks, where pictures of Baba can be seen in rooms, passageways, and verandahs. Other residences and large sheds for pilgrims are located north and west. The western part of the hermitage also contains two other canteens (the “North Indian Canteen” and the “Western Canteen”), a shopping center, the offi ce

5 “Puttaparthi,” http://www.sssbpt.org/pages/Puttaparthi/important_places1.htm, accessed November 29, 2005.

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Fig. 22. Vishnu’s hand amidst residences (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

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of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization, the Seva Dal Block, the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust and bookshop, a telephone center, and sheds that accommodate visitors. Interspersed are small shrines such as the ﬁ ve-faced Gayatri temple (consecrated by Baba in 1998), a Lakshmi-Narayana temple under construction in 2005, as well as images that suggest an informal sacredness such as the hand of Vishnu with a discus next to a residential building (see Figure 22). On your way back to the heart of the hermitage, heading east towards the Ganesha Gate, you encounter Poornachandra auditorium (constructed in 1973) towards the west of the old Prashanti Nilayam building. Seating an estimated 15,000 people, it is a column-less structure with a central stage and murals depicting various world religions.6 It is used for various festivals and public events such as concerts, conferences, or Baba’s discourses. From about the mid-1990s up until 2006, Sathya Sai Baba resided in rooms above the auditorium. To the south of Poornachandra auditorium is the Sarva Dharma Stupa, a pillar that resembles closely the “Lotus Circle” of the earlier period. This is a pillar 50 feet high standing in a lush garden built on the occasion of Baba’s ﬁ ftieth birthday celebrations in 1975. Two new buildings were constructed in 2004 on either side of the pillar as residences for Baba; they are encircled by a wall with deities as gate keepers in several niches. Baba moved to one of these new buildings in early 2006. Past the auditorium and the pillar on the east is the old Prashanti Nilayam building: this building had continued in its original form with very few changes up until 1973–74, when it was expanded, given domes, and also covered with Vijayanagara-style architectural motifs in pink, cream, yellow, and blue.7 The sanctum, which is a focus for worship daily, is a hall where devotees can meditate or sing bhajans. The hall contains pictures of various deities and religious leaders on the wall; the main altar contains a picture of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba on either side of a cobra made of silver, with an image of Shirdi Sai Baba, Ganesha, and a picture of a lingam at its feet reinforcing the connection with both the Shirdi and the Shaiva tradition. It also contains a chair for Sathya Sai Baba to sit on. The hall still includes adjoining rooms where interviews with Baba may take place. This building, known

6 “Puttaparthi,” http://www.sssbpt.org/pages/Puttaparthi/important_places1.htm, accessed November 29, 2005. 7 “History of the Mandir,” http://www.sathyasai.org/ashrams/prasanthi/history. html, accessed March 22, 2007.

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Fig. 23. Darshan area and Mandir (Photograph courtesy of Sai Darshan ofﬁ ce)

informally as the Mandir (temple), is the center of darshan every morning as Baba moves among his devotees. The main darshan space north of the Mandir was expanded in the 1990s and is now enclosed by the Sai Kulwant Hall with elaborate pillars and chandeliers supporting a roof that provides translucent green shade to a seating capacity estimated at 20,000 (see Figure 23).8 The centrality of this complex—the Mandir, Sai Kulwant Hall, Poornachandra auditorium, the new residential buildings, and the Sarva Dharma Stupa (see Figure 24)—is emphasized by daily practices at the ashram. By about 3:00 AM in Sathya Sai Baba’s hermitage, a couple of hours before dawn, one can hear sounds of muted activity in the residential buildings, guest rooms, and dormitory sheds for pilgrims. Lights that have been turned off at 9:00 PM the previous night are switched on again, one hears the sounds of people bathing in rooms next door, smells incense offered at private altars and the hint of morning coffee. By 5:00 AM, when the chanting of “Om” 21 times begins in the Mandir enclosed by Sai Kulwant Hall where darshan takes place,

8 “Puttaparthi,” http://www.sssbpt.org/pages/Puttaparthi/important_places1.htm, accessed November 29, 2005.

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Fig. 24. Mandir, Kulwant Hall, Poornachandra auditorium, new residential buildings and Sarva Dharma Stupa (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

devotees from rooms inside the hermitage and apartments inside and outside the hermitage are already walking towards this area. The only sounds that ﬁ ll the air, apart from the hushed talk between devotees, quick footsteps and the rustle of clothes, are the sounds of excited birds. The chanting of “Om” is followed by a song that is meant to awaken the deity (suprabhatam)—in this case, Sathya Sai Baba. The monotone of Vedic chanting by a handful of trained men penetrates the early morning air. Soon afterwards, two separate groups of devotees, male and female, collectively sing devotional songs (sankirtan) as they chart a clockwise circumambulatory path around the “city” (nagar) that includes the Mandir, the darshan area, Poornachandra auditorium, the Sarva Dharma pillar, and the two new buildings on either side of the pillar. Morning darshan occurs around 6:30 AM or a little later. Once darshan and devotional singing are over by about 9:00 AM, devotees leave to carry out their everyday activities. Students from the schools and university campus go back to their classrooms or hostels outside the compound. Most visitors head for one of the three canteens in the hermitage for cheap but well-prepared food. All the work of processing, cleaning, cooking, serving, and selling coupons for meals in the various canteens is carried out by volunteers. Of the three canteens—the South Indian, North Indian, and Western—the South Indian canteen

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is the cheapest and most attractive to poorer devotees. The canteen fare is also supplemented by a bakery, and ice-cream, coffee and juice parlors within the hermitage where you can even get a pizza or a mocha milkshake. Quotidian activity such as crowd control, hermitage security, or canteen duty is carried out by Seva Dal workers from various states and countries. For permanent residents in the hermitage, not only is one up early preparing for darshan, but there are regular jobs besides attending to household tasks. Many permanent residents have charges such as stafﬁ ng the press, the canteens or the Accommodations Ofﬁ ce, overseeing arrangements for thousands at the daily darshan, teaching at the university, or working in the hospital. During the late morning or early afternoon, there may be just enough time for a quick nap or a visit outside the hermitage to the market. There are many items of daily use available inside the hermitage’s shopping center and supermarket but a full range of purchases are available in the busy market outside—vegetables, clothes, buckets, services of a carpenter, tailor or taxi-driver, bus tickets to Bangalore, photographs of Baba, books on religion and philosophy, and expensive Kashmiri carpets or south Indian bronzes. The many hotels and restaurants outside offer Indian, Chinese, Tibetan and even Italian food. If there is time, visitors may walk into Puttaparthi village to the north of the hermitage and visit Baba’s erstwhile home, head east towards the sands of the river where Baba used to take devotees in the old days, or to visit the planetarium within the university campus on the south side. While some visitors and devotional tourists will linger outside, most hurry back for afternoon darshan, the central activity of the afternoon. The routine is the same as the morning. Queues begin to form at 2:00 PM. By 5:30 PM, after darshan and devotional singing are over, devotees are milling about the hermitage, some at the shopping center or publications outlet, others sitting on the lawns or benches, preparing to eat at home or in one of the canteens again, heading out to catch a bus or make some last-minute purchases in the market. By 9:00 PM, most are fast asleep after what can be a very demanding daily routine, especially for the unaccustomed.9

9 See also Aitken (2004: 156–172) for a description of life in the hermitage.

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When you leave Prashanti Nilayam by the Ganesha or Gopuram Gate and travel south towards the airport and the SSSIHMS, you pass a road to your right which heads up to the banyan tree and the Sri Sathya Sai General Hospital. You are on a main road that leads eventually to a hermitage dairy called Gokulam about half a kilometer away towards the south. On the other side of the road from this area is the shed that housed Sathya Sai Baba’s pet elephant, Sai Gita, who used to play a major role in festivals and processions. Nearby is an Indoor Stadium (the Sri Sathya Sai International Center for Sports) that was constructed in Puttaparthi on the occasion of Sathya Sai Baba’s eighty-ﬁ rst birthday in November 2006. The President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, inaugurated the large complex and the Harlem Globetrotters, a well-known American sports franchise, exhibited their basketball talents in the stadium as ambassadors of goodwill and peace. The Indoor Stadium is the latest addition to Vidyagiri (the Mountain of Knowledge), the educational campus, with the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, the Sri Sathya Sai Higher Secondary School, a primary school, the Easwaramma High School, the planetarium, the Mirpuri College of Music, and several hostels. The centrality of the pedagogic project at Puttaparthi is visible architecturally. There are many stand-alone images such as a standing and garlanded Shirdi Sai Baba dressed in ochre. The facades of the buildings also present large frescos or painted images over their front entrances. As students and faculty walk in and out of the entrance to an Institute for Higher Learning building, they pass under an image of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, carrying a south Indian musical instrument and seated on a swan (see Figure 25). She is framed by a blue niche and pillars that support a clock under a lotus. The Sri Sathya Sai Higher Secondary School contains a large image of Ganesha, also associated with learning, in the front lawn. Behind him, over the main doorway is a vividly painted fresco of Dakshinamurti or Shiva as the great teacher seated on a tiger’s skin under a banyan tree with supplicating sages at his feet, a painting motif also found on the walls of the Lepakshi temple (see Figure 26). The planetarium, or the Sathya Sai Space Theater, is meant to seat two hundred people and has a vivid domed roof made up of triangles painted in bright colors. The overall effect is one of geometrical harmony, a Rubik’s cube in play (see Figure 27). The music college complex bears an arched facade supported by guitars, veenas, and trumpets, suggesting the harmony or fusion of Indian and Western music. Above the entrance way is an

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Fig. 25. An Institute of Higher Learning building (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

image of Ganesha under a small domed shrine. The roof is shaped like a cymbal and on either side of the entire domed building is a stair room shaped like a giant Indian drum (see Figure 28). The images and buildings’ facades are reminiscent of film sets from the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Many of these fi lms were constructing a new visuality of pan-Indian culture through sculpted forms, decorative supports, and mythological and historical narratives that intersected with chromolithographs, live theater, and photography of the colonial and early postcolonial period (see Dwyer and Patel 2002; Pinney 2004). The facades at Vidyagiri are designed to convey messages about the relationship between pedagogy, spirituality, and culture within a new sociology and anthropology of education in the Sai movement. Like the early fi lms, they invite the spectators to identify narratives embedded in the frozen image and may be perceived in a way reminiscent of darshan.10

10 See Dwyer and Patel (2002: 43–47) for a discussion of these ideas in the context of ﬁ lm based on work by Ravi Vasudevan, Geeta Kapur, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, and others.

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Fig. 26. Sri Sathya Sai Higher Secondary School entrance (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

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Fig. 27. Planetarium (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

Fig. 28. Music College facade (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

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The Hill View Stadium, or Vidyagiri Stadium, is located behind the secondary school on a nine-acre piece of land with seats for approximately 8,000 people. The covered podium on the southern end of the stadium is called Shanthi Vedika and from it Sathya Sai Baba addresses his devotees every year during his birthday. The sports and cultural meets of students are also held here annually on January 11. There is a volleyball court, a football ground, and a cricket pitch. A number of well-known cricketers such as Sunil Gavaskar, captain of the Indian team for many years, and Alvin Kallicharan from Sri Lanka are devotees of Baba. A one-time event held at the stadium was an international cricket match on 30 December 1997 for the Sri Sathya Sai Unity Cup. This is also the site for large gatherings of service workers of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization. The August 1984 issue of Sanathana Sarathi, for instance, mentions that a world Seva Dal conference would take place in November that year in Prashanti Nilayam. Darshan to all those gathered—an expected 11,000 to 15,000 seva workers—would take place in the newly constructed Hill View Stadium in Puttaparthi. Overlooking the stadium on a hilly outcrop to its west are giant images of Krishna, Shirdi Baba (dressed in uncolored clothing as a faqir), Shiva, Zarathustra, the Buddha, Christ, and a stupa. Rising far above them behind an artifi cial waterfall that fl ows behind the Shiva image, is an image of Hanuman 65 feet tall carrying the Drona mountain on his left palm, a mace held in his right, his left foot resting on a mountain, and his tail aloft (see Figure 29). Standing between earth and sky on an elevation of about 150 feet, his bluish body with red, yellow and deep blue clothing and a crown on his head, he is visible for miles around. This is an image of Hanuman as a warrior in service to Rama, his genitals bound by a loin cloth, bearing the sacred thread of the twice-born, associated with healing (for the mountain bears the herbs used to restore a fallen hero) and yogic powers (evidenced by his ability to assume gigantic proportions).11 Hanuman is a regal and divine fi gure, a monkey but hairless, both more and less than a man, as Lutgendorf (2003) shows. This Hanuman (completed in 1990), located on the southwestern edge of the campus, complements the village Anjaneya temple on the north near the boundary of the old village, the tableau-shrine with a devoted kneeling Hanuman inside the Gopuram Gate, and the museum diorama. Its position is apt, since Hanuman is

11 See Lutgendorf (1994, 2006) for a discussion of this Hanuman ﬁ gure and other giant ones in India.

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Fig. 29. Hanuman at the Hill View Stadium (Print from a Larsen and Toubro Ltd. brochure)

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not only a boundary deity marking gates and entrances but is also the presiding deity of indigenous wrestling traditions and sports (see Alter 1992; Srinivas 2001a). While all these images appear to be informed by chromolithographs, regional traditions of sculpture and painting embedded in Vijayanagara-period architecture, the imaginative skills of local artisans, and the expertise of engineers, they also remind one of pictorial characters from Amar Chitra Katha, the illustrated children’s series on Indian mythology, history, and folklore. Like the facades of the educational campus buildings, there is also a crossing of boundaries here between various genres, what Pinney (2004: 34–35) calls the “inter-ocularity” of visual ﬁ elds and their interaction. A road north of the stadium leads to Chaitanya Jyoti (Light of Consciousness) Museum on the sloping hillside, inaugurated in 2000 to commemorate Sathya Sai Baba’s seventy-ﬁ fth birthday (see Figure 30). This museum complements the older Eternal Heritage Museum (discussed in the Introduction) built in a “Shikara” style on a hill to the south of the hermitage past the banyan tree. While Chaitanya Jyoti memorializes and celebrates the life of Baba and the work of the Sai Organization, the Eternal Heritage Museum, which includes exhibits from Baba’s life, is meant to evoke a common spiritual journey among various traditions. Sanathana Sarathi describes Chaitanya Jyoti Museum in the following words: The architecture itself is a fusion between East and West. Although the roof appears like a Chinese pagoda, it has components of European architecture. Two domes of Moorish architecture have been constructed using a high technology material—titanium. The arches on both sides are Gothic, a style followed in the early Christian Era. The Koi pool in front is of Chinese origin, but very popular in Singapore and Malaysia. (SS, November 2000: 370) The entrance to the museum is marked by a 36 foot pillar based on the Sarva Dharma pillar but with a hand emanating from the center of the lotus bearing a globe, presumably the hand of the divine. The building is 75 feet in height, has eight levels, and occupies an area of 11,000 sq. feet. The architect Goh Say Tong worked with the engineers of a construction division of Larsen and Toubro Ltd., Col S.K. Bose (who supervised the construction), and devotees from Malaysia and Singapore to complete the building in less than two years. It houses exhibits depicting the life, mission, and message of Sathya Sai Baba within the context of previous avatars such as Rama, Krishna, Buddha, and others; prophecies of the Sai avatar culled from different scriptures;

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Fig. 30. Chaitanya Jyoti Museum (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

the childhood of Sathya Sai Baba; his teachings on individual transformation; practices such as namasmarana or seva; and activities carried out by the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization internationally. There are audio and visual components and about 90 exhibits. This complex crafts the devotional memory of the movement, translates events from Baba’s life into mythological formats (such as Hanuman revealing himself to Baba, an event not recorded in Kasturi’s biography), and leads devotees down particular pathways of recollection and orientation. It is a popular destination for visitors, both domestic and international: Radio Sai Listener’s Journal, a monthly e-journal, reported in February 2005 that 1.2 million people had visited it since its construction.12 Places in the village and current projects, past and present, are woven together into a vision that invites reﬂ ection in the guide map by the Sri Sathya Sai Urban Development Authority (SSSUDA) that greets you as you step off the bus at the Puttaparthi depot (see Figure 31). It projects an urban realm that is embedded within, and emerging from, its rural and rocky hinterland, a type of “city-region” (as the Scottish urbanist

12 “Chaitanya Jyoti-Testament to Living Divinity,” http://www.radiosai.org/Jour- nals/Vol_03/02FEB01/cjyothi.htm, accessed November 30, 2005.

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and biologist, Patrick Geddes [1854–1932], would defi ne it) in which the country and the town center are intertwined. Established in 1992 by the Andhra Pradesh government, the SSSUDA is meant to prepare a comprehensive master plan for Puttaparthi and its environs in light of the tremendous growth of the villages, the expansion of Prashanti Nilayam, and the spillover of these developments in the surrounding villages. SSSUDA covers an area of 71.26 square kilometers and six village settlements and their hamlets—Puttaparthi, Enumalapalli, Brahmanapalli, Beedupalli, Kappalabanda, and part of Locherla (see Map 5). A draft master plan was prepared in 2005 for a period up until 2025 by Aarvee Associates, Hyderabad, in collaboration with ORG INDIA, New Delhi, for the SSSUDA. It integrated an urban core, surrounding villages, and focal points including the Sathya Sai Railway Station, Sathya Sai Airport, and the SSSIHMS. The SSSUDA vision is based on the fact that in addition to Prashanti Nilayam Township, which is considered part of Puttaparthi, the various projects connected with the Sai movement traverse the boundaries of several villages and are framed by the Chitravati River to the east, Bukkapatnam Tank to the north, Locherla Tank to the west and several hillocks to the south (see Map 5). While the population of Puttaparthi (including Prashanti Nilayam Township) grew from about 3,471 persons in 1961 to 11, 340 persons in 2001, the urbanized and urbanizing population is a much larger fi gure. The population within SSSUDA limits grew from 7,182 persons in 1961 to 25,672 persons in 2001, a growth rate of 257% over the four decades (Draft Master Plan 2005: 9).13 Of these places within SSSUDA, Puttaparthi (with about 40% of the population) and Enumalapalli (with 29% of the population) were the sites of most of the built-up environment. The draft master plan projected a population of about 43,525 by 2025 (Draft Master Plan 2005: 9). It is no coincidence that the plan recommends that the strategy for urban development should be tourism and pilgrimage in the light of the area’s religious, historical and cultural signifi cance. What the plan does not discuss is the mode in which the built environment of the Sai movement encodes a specifi c vision of the city.

13 This ﬁ gure given by the plan excludes Locherla since only a part of Locherla is within SSSUDA limits.

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Fig. 31. Bus depot map by Sri Sathya Sai Urban Development Authority (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

From Pan-Indian Spaces to Global Mega-Projects

The central role of the built environment in the movement is made explicit by Sanathana Sarathi (The Eternal Charioteer), the monthly newsletter published by the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust in Prashanti Nilayam. Inaugurated in 1958, with N. Kasturi (the ofﬁ cial biographer of Sathya Sai Baba) as editor, the newsletter today contains transcriptions of speeches given by Baba, essays written by other devotees in the movement, announcements about events at Puttaparthi, or records of various activities of the Sai Organization. The magazine in English is larger now than the 6” by 4” version of the early years and more expensive (although still very affordable at 50 Indian rupees for 12 issues within India and US $11 for overseas subscriptions). The title of the newsletter suggests a reference to Krishna and his role as the charioteer of the hero Arjuna in the Mahabharata war, which was the occasion of the Bhagavad Gita (The Lord’s Song), a discourse given to Arjuna by Krishna. The title is also related to the relationship outlined by Sathya Sai Baba between the body/chariot and the self/charioteer. Sanathana Sarathi is at once an exemplary sign of this paradigm of embodiment

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Map 5. Sri Sathya Sai Urban Development Authority area (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman; adapted from the base map courtesy of Dr. Raghavendra of Aarvee Associates, Hyderabad)

as well as a visual and textual vehicle for the self-representation of the movement. The newsletter’s front covers offer an articulation of the visual and the textual, the movement and space—both the space of the movement as it grew nationally and globally and the local spaces of Prashanti Nilayam-Puttaparthi. The covers make use of spatial imagery and speciﬁ c sites in Puttaparthi-Prashanti Nilayam to index key shifts in the movement across the decades. From 1958 to 1963, true to its name, Sanathana Sarathi largely bore a cover featuring Krishna as the charioteer of Arjuna (see Figure 32). There were some years in which the cover went through shifts to include photographs of Sathya Sai Baba consecrating an image of Shirdi Sai Baba in Coimbatore or his association with the Shaiva tradition (see Figure 33), but it remained largely focused on the ﬁ gure of Krishna. It contained essays by Baba entitled the “stream of love” (Prema Vahini)

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Fig. 32. 1958 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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Fig. 33. 1961 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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or “the stream of eternal peace” (Prashanti Vahini) on spiritual themes, poems and articles by devotees, photographs, descriptions of Baba’s visits to various urban centers, talks at different forums, and notices of festivals. The newsletter was not only smaller in these early years but also bilingual and each issue was composed of two sections—one in English and the other in Telugu. It was featured as a monthly magazine devoted to religion and philosophy and invited short articles in these two languages based on authentic experience. From 1963 onwards, Sanathana Sarathi began to appear in separate language issues including English.14 In July 1963, Sathya Sai Baba made his famous declaration that he was an incarnation of Shiva-Shakti and the August 1963 English issue carried news about this important declaration. Its cover consisted of a photograph of a Krishna image depicted in the form of Venugopala fl anked on its left by a picture of Sathya Sai Baba and on its right by Shirdi Sai Baba, thus inserting Sathya Sai Baba directly within the Shirdi Sai Baba tradition; it also connects a youthful guru emerging from his village background with a playful Krishna as a cowherd youth in the rustic landscape of Brindavan. Signifi cantly, this cover is also a reference to a real place, the sanctum of the old Prashanti Nilayam building. The pan-Indian nature and incipient internationalization of the movement is indicated by a photograph inside of Sathya Sai Baba with the Home Minister of Maharashtra and the head of a Sai Group in Kampala, Uganda, taken in Brindavan, the site of Sathya Sai Baba’s hermitage in Bangalore. Subsequent covers began to mediate the space of the national and global: at the bottom of the November 1963 cover (see Figure 34), for instance, are buildings symbolizing different religious traditions; at the top is a holy personage under a banyan tree with a number of people before him—perhaps a reference to Shiva in his aspect of Dakshinamurti that later appeared as a fresco in the educational campus. In the center of the cover below a bilingual English and Telugu title is the pillar with a lotus at its peak that subsequently became part of the offi cial logo of the Sai Organization. This design is based on the early “Lotus Circle” standing in front of Prashanti Nilayam (see Figure 21).

14 All references to Sanathana Sarathi in this discussion from 1963 onwards come from the English version of the newsletter.

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Fig. 34. November 1963 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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While the movement garnered growing support amongst the Indian middle classes, the bureaucracy, and government offi cials, the covers of the period from the early 1960s to about the early 1970s were dominated by regional or pan-Indian associations portraying Krishna as charioteer, Venugopala, or Shirdi Sai Baba. The January 1970 cover, for instance, shows Venugopala again and inside there is a new seri- alization of Baba’s writings on the Bhagvata Purana called the Bhagvata Vahini. It also contains an account of the inauguration of a building at the Arts and Science College for women in Anantapur by G.S. Pathak, the Vice-President of India, details of Sai events in various parts of the country, as well as an announcement about a Sai Center in Los Angeles, the fi rst U.S. center having begun a year earlier in California. The issue notes that discourses and writings by Baba were available in book form in several languages including English, Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, and Bengali, testifying that he now had a large number of devotees in states speaking these languages in northern and southern India. The 1970s seem to be a transitional decade for the newsletter and Sanathana Sarathi featured several early covers including the Lotus Circle pillar and fl oral designs. It changed its form and design by 1972: it was larger, about ten inches by six inches, and continues to be about the same size today. Its cover also ceased using pan-Indian images or trying to meditate simultaneously several traditions and shifted to a stark and simple design (see Figure 35) shorn of images except the name of the magazine in English and the logo of the Sai Organization. The newsletter seemed poised to leave behind its national referents and ready to commit itself towards a universalistic message. In 1981, the cover of the newsletter assumed a design that would be maintained until 1995, even though editorship of the newsletter had changed hands from N. Kasturi to V.K. Narasimhan in 1987 following Kasturi’s death. The color shifted between brown, green, and saffron for a couple of years after which it remained orange up until 1995. The covers of these issues featured the shaded outlines of the Sarva Dharma Stupa (constructed on the occasion of Baba’s fi ftieth birthday celebrations in 1975) on the bottom left with the name of the magazine next to it, as the March 1981 cover shows (see Figure 36). The cross and the crescent that appear on the base of the pillar allude to Christianity and Islam; other world religions are occluded from view on the Stupa but are present on the logo of the Sai Organization on the top right hand side of the cover. While this pillar on the cover is

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Fig. 35. 1974 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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a reference to the existing architectural one in the hermitage, it seems to be posited as an abstract signifi er rather than a materially situated one. There are no markers to show what place it occupies in a real landscape and instead the newsletter seems to be trying to embrace universal referents and a theosophical unity. Behind its simple and abstract exterior, each issue of Sanathana Sarathi from 1981 to 1995 describes a concrete process of garnering social capital and material infrastructure. By the 1980s, not only had several buildings come up in the hermitage such as the Poornachandra auditorium or the Sarva Dharma pillar, but educational institutions and service activities were expanding. Even a random perusal of the issues over a decade and a half reveals glimpses into the fast pace of accretion. The March 1981 issue, for instance, reports the inauguration of an institute for training teachers in the Education in Human Values program in Bombay. In 1981, the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, a university, was inaugurated and the 1982 issues feature discourses by Sathya Sai Baba on educational themes. The October 1983 issue contains a report on the Education in Human Values program and a meeting of Bal Vikas teachers from India and overseas. The August 1984 issue mentions that a world Seva Dal conference would take place in Prashanti Nilayam in November that year with 11,000 to 15,000 seva workers expected. The March 1985 issue describes the service of the Sai Organization in organizing relief activities after the Bhopal gas disaster at a Union Carbide plant. The most striking aspect of Sanathana Sarathi during this period, alongside the growth of the movement’s middle-class constituency, is the voice of intellectuals, statesmen, and administrators and the presence of foreign devotees. The January 1986 issue mentions that the Governor of Karnataka welcomed Sathya Sai Baba into his offi cial residence, the Chief Justice of Karnataka presided over a Sai meeting at the Chowdiah Hall in Bangalore, and Spanish-speaking devotees in large numbers arrived for Sathya Sai Baba’s sixtieth birthday celebration. Many devotees write from places as far as Pasadena, California, and Sydney, Australia, as the 1987 issues show. Opening the March 1988 issue, one fi nds an article by Prof. V.N. Pandit, Professor of Eco- nomics at the University of Delhi, on the relationship between the curtailment of personal desires or wasteful activity and the diversion of economic resources towards the common people. The April 1989 issue reports that about 50,000 devotees gathered to sing devotional songs in Madras on March 20 to welcome Baba, who was visiting the

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Fig. 36. March 1981 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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city after a gap of three years. Among those present for his visit were offi cers of the administrative service, the police, and the army. The fi rst page of the January 1990 Sanathana Sarathi shows Sathya Sai Baba with the President of India, R. Venkataraman, during the latter’s visit to Prashanti Nilayam; it also contains a report on Christmas celebrations there and news of Sathya Sai Baba meeting with a small group of Muslim devotees. In the May 1991 issue, there are two articles by Muslim devotees about their experiences—one writing from the World Health Organization in Geneva and the other from the West Indies. The January 1992 issue contains Baba’s Christmas discourse in Poornachandra auditorium and descriptions of the large number of devotees who began to arrive for Christmas in mid-December, the majority from Australia, Italy, Argentina, and Germany. The overseas devotees sang both English carols and Indian-language bhajans and there was a candlelight procession on Christmas morning by devotees from 90 countries. The issue also features a book called Africa for Sai Baba by Dare Ogunkolati in its publications list with narratives by several African and Middle Eastern devotees about their experiences. In the January 1993 issue, there is an article on Human Values in the fi eld of management by an Indian devotee from Singapore as well as “a particle physicist’s perception of God” by a visiting professor from Carleton University in Ottawa at the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning. The September 1994 issue carries an address to devotees from Bangalore by Michael Goldstein, President of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization of America, an article by a devotee from Australia that mentions the forthcoming Sathya Sai Australia Conference in April that year, and testimonials from two girl students from Sichuan Teacher’s University in Chengdu, China, about the infl uence of Sathya Sai Baba on their lives. A clear affi rmation of the international character of the movement and its localization within the precincts of the hermitage appears suddenly in Sanathana Sarathi. From April 1995, for the fi rst time, all issues carried a photograph of the Sarva Dharma pillar in the hermitage on its front cover (see Figure 37), photo-realism replacing art design. Christianity and Islam are symbolized frontally and behind the pillar are a line of trees reaching into the blue sky. On top of the pillar are the logo of the Sai Organization with the fi ve world religions and the title of the newsletter. The pillar stands at the conjunction of devotees’ residences at the hermitage (now painted with the typical colors of the movement—pink, blue, and yellow or cream) and the Poornachandra

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auditorium where devotes gather to listen to Sathya Sai Baba’s speeches. If the pillar itself suggests a theosophical unity for devotees, this is staged against a backdrop that links the private, domestic space of the householder-devotee and the public, performative arena of the movement. The September 1994 issue the previous year had mentioned that there would be no Dassera festivities in the hermitage because of massive construction; Sanathana Sarathi covers in 1995 proclaim that the movement’s self-construction has also changed. The May 1995 issue carries several discourses by Baba that suggest the universalization of his message. For instance, in the fi rst discourse, Sathya Sai Baba says: If we desire to establish Rama Rajya [the rule of Rama, or as he translates it later, the reign of morality], there should be harmony in thought, word and deed. This applies not only to Bharat but the entire world. (SS, May 1995: 118) In the next discourse, he begins by saying: “When you rid the mind of impurities, humanness turns divine” (SS, May 1995: 122). He states later that there is no greater panacea for the ills of this age besides the chanting of the divine name. He reminds devotees in the third discourse that the body is “the primary requisite for the achievement of Dharma (Righteousness)” (SS, May 1995: 129) and that every moment is auspicious if it is dedicated to God. He states emphatically in the last discourse: “To make God approach you, you have to engage yourself in the service of others, in conferring joy on them, and in activities which will please God” (SS, May 1995: 139). Each of these discourses emphasizes the simplicity of the spiritual medium accompanying the universality of the message and the global audience addressed. After 1995, the globalization of the movement is evident to even a cursory reader of the newsletter, which notes its expansion into new areas. The September 1996 issue, for example, mentions Sai Centers opening in Eastern Europe and the erstwhile Soviet Union: there were 12 Centers and 45 Groups in Russia (the fi rst Center opening in St. Petersburg in 1992) and 30 books about Sathya Sai Baba translated into Russian with more than 150,000 copies printed. In Poland there were 30 Groups; in Lithuania there were two Sai Centers and several Groups; in Riga, Latvia there was one Group; and in Estonia fi ve Groups. Apart from reports on Christmas celebration in Prashanti Nilayam (devotees from 116 overseas countries attended), the January 1997 issue carries discourses by Baba about Jesus and articles and poems by devotees

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Fig. 37. May 1995 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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from Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The March 1997 issue mentions that the Chinese New Year was celebrated by 1,500 devotees from various Asian countries for the fi rst time in Prashanti Nilayam. The event included a lantern procession, bilingual Chinese and Sanskrit bhajans, a lion dance (a photograph in the March 1998 issue shows Baba with the lion dancers), and exhibitions about Chinese culture, religions, and traditions. One might recall that in about three years, the Chaitanya Jyoti Museum would be constructed with the support of devotees from Malaysia and Singapore and would bear a roof like a Chinese pagoda. The presentation of this globalized space of the movement in Sana- thana Sarathi (visible to anyone attending these festivals in the hermitage) takes the form in 1999 of putting on center stage the public face of the movement. From this year onwards, the birthday of Sathya Sai Baba becomes the occasion for any changes made to the cover design. The November 1999 issue (see Figure 38) marks his seventy-fourth birthday and contains articles by several members of the Sai Organization on the growth of the movement and its infrastructure. The issue is profusely illustrated with pictures of various buildings and sites and its cover is a luminous yellow. The Sarva Dharma pillar is still shown but is depicted from a different angle: it now shows the Zoroastrian sacred fi re and the Buddhist wheel of Dharma on its base. The background features the Poornachandra auditorium with a few trees interspersed; no residential buildings are visible. On the wall of the auditorium are the crescent and star associated with Islam and the Zoroastrian sacred fi re. This is a presentation of the public arena of the movement rather than a familial or individual realm of worship. The editorship of Sanathana Sarathi passed from V.K. Narasimhan to G.L. Anand in May 2000. The goals of Santhana Sarathi expanded later that year from the moral and spiritual uplift of humanity through truth, righteous conduct, peace, and love to include a new value, non-violence. The November 2000 issue marks the seventy-fi fth birthday of Sathya Sai Baba and the cover of this anniversary issue transforms again in consonance with new global goals (see Figure 39). The Sarva Dharma pillar, pushed into the foreground, shows the wheel of Dharma on its front and there are glimpses of the cross and the sacred fi re on either side. The entrance and building facade of Poornachandra auditorium show a large dancing Shiva, the syllable Om and the crescent and star, self-consciously completing the representations of all major world religions.

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Fig. 38. November 1999 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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Fig. 39. November 2000 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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Sanathana Sarathi seeks to project the creation of public realms of activity rather than individual devotional regimes. Two years after the construction of Chaitanya Jyoti Museum, this new building replaces the Sarva Dharma pillar on the front cover (see Figure 40) on the occasion of Sathya Sai Baba’s seventy-seventh birthday. The Museum is featured against the backdrop of green fi elds, rocky hills and a blue sky, suggesting a verdant valley as the site of the hermitage rather than a rocky dry terrain. For the fi rst time, Sanathana Sarathi has left the space of the hermitage, its sacred center, to include the larger sphere of activity. It now refl ects through architecture that the life, mission, and message of Baba reside also in mega-projects like the Museum extending sanctity to sites outside. The Sarva Dharma pillar has shifted to the back cover, showing the wheel of Dharma most clearly, alongside a quotation from Baba’s speeches. The editorial (p. 321) states that Prashanti Nilayam looks like a “mini world” and Sathya Sai Baba has “laid the foundation of the global Sai family,” which has grown since 1940 on the path of love and the concept of “Love all, Serve all.” Baba’s discourses during Dassera are featured in the issue (“Conquer the World with Love”) and it also contains a discourse by Baba on 20 October (celebrated in the movement as Avatar Day, the date on which he is said to have revealed his divinity in 1940). For the fi rst time, there is a notice (p. 347) that devotees can visit “the Abode of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba at www.srirathyasai.org.in,” the website creating a place for the Sai movement in cyberspace. This process of including mega projects has continued in more recent years. While the covers in 2003 also feature Chaitanya Jyoti, from November 2003 to 2004 Sanathana Sarathi covers feature the SSSIHMS in Puttaparthi with a stone slab in the foreground that carries the message by Baba: “God belongs to all, he is universal” (see Figure 12). In November 2004, Sanathana Sarathi covers leave the space of Puttaparthi- Prashanti Nilayam entirely. The SSSIHMS in Bangalore, a city home to another hermitage, is featured on the cover (see Figure 41), a design that holds until November 2005. The newsletter during the 2002–2005 years appears to be representing the movement in terms of institutional innovations that are for public seva—a public that is universal, urban, and even residing in cyberspace, rather than regional or national. In November 2005, however, marking the eightieth birthday celebrations of Sathya Sai Baba, the cover of the newsletter returns to the sacred center of the movement—the now richly embellished Mandir where Baba gives darshan daily to his devotees (see Figure 42).

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Fig. 40. November 2002 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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Fig. 41. November 2004 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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Fig. 42. November 2005 Sanathana Sarathi cover (Credit: Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust)

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The relationship of Sanathana Sarathi, as the voice and face of the movement, and the built environment is spatially rather than textually inscribed. Sanathana Sarathi covers use images and sites that send important messages to its readership, whether it is the image of Venugopala, the Sarva Dharma pillar, or Chaitanya Jyoti Museum. They also mark signiﬁ cant shifts within the movement over the years as it grew out of local, regional and national spaces to reach a global and even virtual audience.

Architecture as Rhetoric

While older periods of history and their religious architecture have been discussed extensively, the architecture and built environment of contemporary religious movements from India is a neglected fi eld of study in the social sciences. Much of the literature about architecture in the recent past has focused on issues such as colonial forms, the struggle for modernity through Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh or styles infl uenced by a Nehruvian vision, architects such as Charles Correa, or contemporary uses of ancient Indian architectural theory.15 The literature only occasionally mentions specifi c buildings that are associated with Aurobindo, the Baha’i religion, the Ramakrishna Mission, or Sathya Sai Baba. About the SSSIHMS at Puttaparthi, which was designed by the Brit- ish architect Keith Critchlow in collaboration with local architects and inaugurated in 1991, Lang, Desai and Desai (1997) write: It is highly Revivalist in spirit. The site plan is reminiscent of New Delhi with the domed central piece of the composition being a hospital containing facilities for four types of surgery . . . The complex consists of a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu elements in much the same way as the Indo-Saracenic work [an effort to merge British and Indian aspirations in architecture after 1858] of a century earlier. (Lang, Desai and Desai 1997: 264) By “revivalist,” they mean an architectural style that resurrects, through imitation, past practices. The means of invoking the past can include

15 An extensive review of these lines of interpretation is not the purpose here. But see Chakrabarti (1998); Correa (1996); Metcalf (1989); Prakash (2002); Sachdev and Tillotson (2002); and Tillotson (1989).

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a return to the Shilpa Shastras (treatises specifying the layout of everything from cities to windows), or arise within grassroots movements that attempt to preserve the uniqueness of local identities. For the authors, revivalism takes three forms: recreating the traditional ways of building with the master builder and craftsman, as in the Arts and Crafts movement in nineteenth-century Europe; borrowing modes of thought that established great architectures of the past though not as types to be copied; or borrowing stylistic devices from the past while acknowledging the utility of new technologies, i.e. the renewal/revival of an aesthetic. They classify the SSSIHMS alongside a number of other buildings in the country constructed in the 1980s and 1990s that present a lay symbolism received poorly by the architectural connoisseur (Lang, Desai and Desai 1997: 16–17, 264–266). My approach is that revivalism may be useful as a category for studying specifi c buildings, but a study of the material environment within the Sathya Sai Baba movement as embodied in various sites discussed in this chapter requires another framework. If the renewal of an aesthetic or the borrowing modes of thought from the past may apply to the hospital built in 1991, an examination of a range of buildings and sites connected with the Sathya Sai Baba movement indicates that this is not always the case. In fact, there are many styles of architecture visible in Puttaparthi. Larsen and Toubro Ltd., who were instrumental in carrying out many of the projects that have come to be associated with Sathya Sai Baba, state that he often asks architects or fi rms to draw up designs but also gives indications of how he would like them modifi ed. For instance, he has commented that a fl at-roof structure (shared by Modernist designs) is “like a headless man” and introduced either “a dome or some feature including sthapati [a traditional architect, builder, or contractor] work and ornamentation work to make the building come alive,” but “he has never insisted on vaastu shastra (a treatise on architecture) even though he has commended it as appropriate for the time for which it was conceived” but gives importance to “functionality, simplicity, and the use of modern sciences” (A Temple of Healing no date: 16). My argument here is that architecture and the built landscape in the hermitage and other sites are not rooted in a revivalist project but have a rhetorical function, i.e. they give effective expression to ideas central to the Sai Baba movement. Here I am informed by Coomaraswamy, who argues that art, rather than involving feelings, or aesthetics, is a

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kind of knowledge and, therefore, rhetoric, “a theory of art as the effective expression of theses” (Lipsey, 1977, Vol. 1: 14). According to Coomaraswamy, regardless of the materials used—stone, music, clay, or the body—authors like Plato were convinced of the fundamental identity of all arts. While the necessities served by art may appear to be different, for Plato, art “must serve both the body and the soul if it is to be admitted in the ideal City” (Lipsey 1977, Vol. 1: 17). In a parallel way, I suggest that the built environment of the Sathya Sai Baba movement, particularly in the complex of Puttaparthi, Prashanti Nilayam, and Vidyagiri, is meant to express and give effect to a vision of the ideal polis. Sathya Sai Baba’s pronouncements about architecture, the village, and the city are based on an analogy with the body. In many speeches given by him, the body, a vessel, the temple, the house, the chariot, the village, country, or world are compared to each other. Each of these has a paired term that reﬂ ects the relationship between the body and its resident or spirit: the temple and its deity, the house and its owner, the chariot and the charioteer, or country and its ruler. The body is God’s temple and temples in stone are “reminders of the existence of God” (SSS, Vol. XVI: 48). The architectural place of worship has three parts—the outer temple, the inner temple and the sanctum sanctorum. These three represent the gross, the subtle, and the causal body of man and “when you go to a temple, you should remember this symbolism” (SSS, Vol. IV: 104). If the value of the body lies in its use for realizing the divine, the temple is “valuable only when you are able to realise the God that dwells therein” (SSS, Vol. XI: 321). The body can also be likened to a temporary home, a rental home whose “tenant” needs to pay the “owner” on time and maintain it with care (SSS, Vol. XIV: 250). The owner is the spirit or God, who is also “the driver of your car” and “the engineer who built your house” (SSS, Vol. XIV: 100). Urging villagers to build their village as an example of unity, mutual cooperation and integrity, Sathya Sai Baba states, “If the village is considered as a body, all the households in it are different limbs of the body” (SSS, Vol. XVI: 52). Sathya Sai Baba also speaks about his mission and its growth in terms of architectural motifs. Addressing devotees in 1961, he stated: It is My sankalpa (resolve) that you progress in spiritual development. I have collected all of you and I shall lay the concrete foundation and build the walls and erect the roof and complete the mansion. (SSS, Vol. II: 78)

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Likening himself to a builder, he said that he had begun the work for which he had come: “I have collected the metal, the steel, the stones, the bricks. I have dug the foundation trenches—and the superstructure will rise soon” (SSS, Vol. II: 91). Baba often contrasts the decrepit situation in cities today with the organic unity and better life of the village. Cities today have “taken a turn towards confusion and conﬂ ict; they have no peace, no security, no calmness;” it is only in some villages that “a modicum of quiet- ness, fellow-feeling, tolerance, and truth can be found” although “the pollution of character that is spreading in cities is fast invading the villages also” (SSS, Vol. XIII: 22). However, unlike Gandhi or the Sri Lankan Sarvodaya movement, this is not a blanket condemnation of the city or a celebration of the village. Some cities are present in his discourses as a metaphor or paradigm for the ideal polis. Referring to the meaning of the Ramayana epic, he states that Ayodhya is not some city in North India, but “a city that is unconquerable . . . an impreg- nable fortress” and represents “the heart where the Lord resides” that is proof against temptations, passions, emotions, impulse and instinct (SSS, Vol. XI: 112).16 Rama represents dharma or righteousness and correct conduct. Without Rama/dharma, the city becomes a “jungle;” the jungle where Rama/dharma dwells becomes Ayodhya (SSS, Vol. XI: 115). The heart of man, like the heart of the ideal polis, is where right conduct exists. Although the hermitage and its connected buildings are located in what was once purely a rural location, this is not a bucolic development paradigm or model of rural self-sufﬁ ciency but a vision of the perfect settlement of town and country bound together. This vision is not restricted to the hermitage area of Prashanti Nilayam but includes learning, the arts, music, sport, medicine, temples, residences, public spaces, shops, other settlements, and above all, sites associated with the life and message of Sathya Sai Baba, whether in the village of his childhood, Chaitanya Jyoti Museum or Vidyagiri. The relationship between Sathya Sai Baba and these sites is homologous to the relationship between the residing spirit and the body, or Rama and Ayodhya. If Ayodhya is a metaphor for the ideal polis, then Rama or righteous conduct is a metaphor for the perfect citizen.

16 See also Lutgendorf (1997b) and Ramanujam (1999) on Ayodhya as an ideal city.

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A discourse called “Sports and Spirituality” elaborates how this polis and its citizens are conceptualized. Baba states that although there may be differences between nations, the spirit of harmony, unity, and comradeship are exemplifi ed in non-commercialized sports and games, which help players improve their health and experience joy. However, the subtle body and mind should also be purifi ed and body, mind and spirit should be in harmony: “The enthusiasm and effort which you display in sports should also be manifested in the spheres of morality and spirituality.” He suggests that teachers should encourage sports and the qualities of good citizenship and students, who need to grow to be ideal citizens of Bharat, must understand that its culture is a composite of ideals such as “purity, divinity, sublimity and beauty” that is to be found refl ected in sports and games (SSS, Vol. XXIII: 2). In another place, extending the parallel to individual life, he says, “Life is a Game, Play it” (SSS, Vol. XI: 324). I do not allude idly to the relationship that Sathya Sai Baba articu- lates between citizens, sports, and culture. One might remember that the Hill View Stadium is not only the location for the annual sports and culture meet of students from various Sai educational institutions, but it is also the site for the celebration of the biggest event in Put- taparthi—Sathya Sai Baba’s birthday (see Figure 43). On his eightieth birthday celebration in 2005, the Deccan Herald newspaper reported that the audience at the stadium included chief ministers and governors from neighboring states, the musicians L. Subramaniam and Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, and several sportsmen: . . . There was Olympics silver medallist Lt. Col. Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, who also hoisted the global peace and harmony insignia at the event. Members of the Indian cricket team with Sachin Tendulkar leading the pack. He, along with V.V.S. Laxman, Yuvraj Singh, Murli Karthik, J.P. Yadav, R.P. Singh, Suresh Raina and S Sreesanth, sat around Baba through the discourse. (“Sachin among glitterati at Baba’s birthday fete,” Deccan Herald, November 24, 2005) In his autobiography on cricket and politics in the West Indies entitled Beyond a Boundary, the Caribbean intellectual, C.L.R. James (1901–1989), notes that the fi rst Olympic Games in 776 BCE were a form of worship to Zeus. Greek city-states sent their athletes to the Games and their victory was a testament not simply to individual prowess but to the quality of their citizens politically, intellectually, and artistically. The Games became a focus for the cities’ intellectual life, the arts, and sacred architecture, and only the democratic revolutions of the fi fth

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Fig. 43. Aerial view of Hill View Stadium (Photograph courtesy of Garuda Aerosport, Mysore)

century BCE inaugurated Athenian drama in the Acropolis as a new means of civic expression. The cricket Test match today, he writes, is a corresponding genre of performance and dramatic spectacle for bourgeois society ( James 1993: 156–158). In a slightly different vein, it can be shown that the urbanist-biologist, Patrick Geddes, was also concerned with the city as a metaphysical center and arena for “civics” (as he called the good life of citizens in the city) and he created many plans during his career for embodying these ideas—the Baha’i temple in Allahabad, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, or botanical gardens in cities as varied as Edinburgh, Dundee, or Patiala. His vision of the ideal city included art and drama, thought and action, religion and science, temple, cathedral, university, theater, cloister, or acropolis and town, in a theory that was inﬂ uenced by Greek ideas of the polis as a spiritual, performative, and civic sphere for creating good citizens (see Welter 2002). An extended discussion of the history and meaning of the Greek polis (see Hansen 2000) or sports and their relationships to class, colonialism, or postcolonialism is not the objective here, but one must note in passing that Sathya Sai Baba has supported gymnastics, cricket, and other

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games for students and devotees as well as music, drama, and other arts—a support that seems anomalous if we do not locate it within his defi nitions of the individual as a harmonious balance of body, mind, and spirit. This support extends to performative arenas where new citizens can be created. Indeed, this emphasis on the creation of citizens through practices of the body is to be found elsewhere in India in the twentieth century in sites as diverse as Auroville and its practice of crafts, Gandhi’s Key to Health (where he speaks about the benefi ts of walking, breathing exercises, and so on), the revival of yoga in early twentieth-century India as a symbol of home rule and Indian culture, and the experiments in using surya namaskar (a yoga posture) by the ruler of Aundh in the same period as a democratic exercise that was concerned with “the microphysics and biopolitics of self-rule” (Alter 2000: 94). Julius Nyerere’s advocacy of ujaama or self-reliance for the newly sovereign state of Tanzania through practices of gardening, marching, and walking (see Joseph 1999), or the signifi cance of National Games and body or mental discipline in China as a means for constructing a socialist civilization (see Brownell 1995) also emphasize the micro- techniques of civility. While many of these exercises are embedded in an anti-colonial somatic politics, a search for postcolonial self-reform, or the creation of socialist citizens, within the Sathya Sai Baba movement the nation does not seem to be the main point of reference for the creation of citizen-subjects. Instead, the staged or prop-like qualities of the structures in the hermitage and related sites that resemble sets of mythological and historical fi lms remind us that Sathya Sai Baba is fond of devotional fi lms such as Bhakta Prahlada and Meera that were made and remade by several regional directors but also that within this performative arena, a drama is meant to unfold in which practices of the self such as namasmarana, darshan, or seva orient one towards righteous conduct and the devotional life. Architecture and the built environment are part of the practice of somatic orientation and remembering: buildings, temples, and other sites are meant to be read as signposts for the recollection of life’s goals. If the body is valuable only in its use in realizing God, then the tower of a temple is like “the raised hand of God calling on the weary pilgrim to halt and take rest, and proceed faster to the Goal he is seeking” (SSS, Vol. XI: 321). Just as temporary pictures are an aid to learning permanent letters for a child learning words, so too “brick and mortar structures where God is taken to be” can be removed “once the presence of God is experienced” (SSS, Vol. XI: 192). In this sense, architecture

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functions as rhetoric, as a mode of persuasion about ideas, whether in the form of the space of daily darshan and nagarsankirtan (traversing the city collectively singing devotional songs), the Music College, facades bearing Shiva or Saraswati, images of Buddha and others in the Hill View Stadium, or the medical institute in Bangalore. There is one other issue that needs to be addressed: the relationship between this rhetorical function of the built environment and religion. If Puttaparthi-Prashanti Nilayam-Vidyagiri is a vision of an ideal polis, a city made sacred by the presence of Sathya Sai Baba, to what kind of sacredness or religious tradition does it refer? This chapter has shown that as far as the Sathya Sai Baba movement is concerned, within the medium of the built environment, multiplicity rather than singularity is the message. Lutgendorf has argued persuasively that in the case of Hanuman and his growing appeal, the link between the divine monkey and a militant Hinduism is only a partial explanation. Because of Hanuman’s complex iconographic and textual history (including Shaiva, Vaishnava and Shakti traditions, healing, yogic powers, alliance with a god-man, devotion and self-empowerment), he is a “hyper-signifi er for inbetween-ness” (Lutgendorf 1997a: 323); this creates a special link between Hanuman, a go-between, and India’s middle class, urbanization, the availability of consumer goods, the desire for upward mobility, and the precariousness of this class (Lutgendorf 1994, 2006). In a parallel way, I argue that in the case of Puttaparthi’s urbanization, its iconographic and architectural references are embedded in many histories: There is clearly a Deccan imaginary at work in which Vijay- anagara plays an important role but also Shirdi Sai Baba, an Islamicate culture, and local architectural centers of infl uence closer home such as the Lepakshi temple or Penukonda. The built environment also opens outward to a global or transregional imaginary including fi gures such as the Buddha, Krishna, Zarathustra, or Christ, enshrined along with a giant Hanuman near Hill View Stadium. The Sarva Dharma pillar projects a theosophical universalism and even the iconicity of Shirdi Sai Baba or Hanuman is complex because there are many Shirdi Sai Babas or Hanumans within the vision of the ideal polis. This is a city mediating religious traditions, regional and global, for a highly visible, vocal, and central constituency—the pan-Indian and global middle class.

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PRODUCING SPACE IN BANGALORE

Spaces for Sai1

No urban site in India is devoid of an insistent infringement of space by unexpected and sometimes unregulated sacredness: the appearance of shrines, deities, or holy persons in markets, bus-stands, junctions, and streets. Newspapers regularly feature struggles between authorities, citizens, and corporate institutions over violations of property and zon- ing laws by the building of a shrine somewhere in the city. New deities emerge constantly in urban interstices—witness the shrines to Saturn or Hanuman that have arisen in major Indian metropolises since the late 1980s. Bulldozers sent to raze these growths, which often block trafﬁ c or private and government construction, can confront disgruntled citizens. Like planning models of the state or urban dreams of corporations, the religious imaginations and practices of citizens create narratives, nodes, paths or landmarks in the city, sometimes overturning old meanings and sometimes adding to its mnemonic layers. While attention is often drawn to the ways in which urban space is produced by the state, the workings of capital, or the media, these productions are never total.2 Other actors and communities also appropriate urban space, transform it or create it, or as Ghannam writes in the context of Cairo, “articulate the discourses and policies of the state and various global forces with their daily needs and cultural dispositions” (Ghannam 2002: 16). We need to address how contemporary urban space is produced by men and women who bring to the city a range of religious imaginations, languages, and practices. Not all result

1 An earlier version of this substantially revised chapter was published as Srinivas (2002). 2 The production of urban space has generated a great deal of scholarship from various ﬁ elds including social theory, geography, anthropology, and so on. Seminal works dealing with this theme include the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Cas- tells, David Harvey, Michel de Certeau, and others; an exhaustive bibliography is not possible here.

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in discourses of violence, riots, or communalism, as I have suggested elsewhere (Srinivas 2001a). In her multi-sited and historically deep study of temples in several world regions, Waghorne (2004) also notes that the urban middle classes are constructing aspects of religion that have received less attention than the study of fundamentalism. We can study the religious sensibilities of this class by “the deities they choose for worship, by the spaces they construct to house them, by the rituals they perform, and by the organizations they develop” (Waghorne 2004: 21). This is the ﬁ rst of three chapters that examine the relationship between the Sai Baba movement and three cities—Bangalore, Nairobi, and Atlanta—and the imaginations, sensory formations, languages, and practices that are embedded in or produced by this intersection. We will see that the city and its peripheries—whether we call it the suburban, the peri-urban or the exurban—have become important arenas for the recruitment of devotees, the creation of institutions and locales, the performance of ritual activity, service, or citizenship and forms of subjectivity. Routes created in the contemporary city such as roads, beltways, or electronic highways have also become pathways for its enchantment. The expansion of the urban into new terrain thus coexists with the expansion of new ritual forms, shrines, or religious movements, which signal attempts by citizens to produce the city whose boundaries and interiors never cease being remade. This chapter deals with the ways in which urban space is produced in Bangalore. In several settlements and shrines we encounter the transmission of the charisma of Shirdi Sai Baba, a ﬁ gure displaced from a rural and colonial background onto the metropolitan arena. On several main arteries of the city, in public places, and in intimate personal recollections, we also see more contemporary religious leaders and citizen-devotees who mediate the production of private and public locales through architectural forms, service activities, worship and sensory formations. By tracing and telling their lives and grounding them in place, we connect the past with the present, spatiality with religiosity. The production of urban space is thus articulated with the biographies and lives of gurus, holy men and women, householders, and devotees as well as several spatialities and temporalities requiring us to move in and out of place. Many of these lives and the stories they tell about the city are connected with other regions of the Dec- can or with global networks. In other words, the production of urban

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space is also a trans-regional enterprise.3 Further, for many of these fi gures, the sense of space and other spaces employs, or is embedded in, languages of a spiritual quest. These languages do not separate the sacred from the civic, the political, or the affective, and, therefore, redefi ne the urban in their image. Four sites in Bangalore, lying southeast and east of the city, presenting distinct styles of urban religiosity, leadership, and devotion to Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba are the focus of the next few sections (see Map 6). While these sites form a part of the Sai Baba tradition rather than strictly the Sathya Sai Baba movement, urban devotees within the Sai movement often circulate between these sites as part of a common spatial-imaginative terrain. The fi rst site is Rupena Agrahara, an old village settlement that today lies on Hosur Road (National Highway 7), a site for the remembrance of a female renouncer, Shivamma Thayee (Tayi), who was a devotee of Shirdi Sai Baba. The second site is Someshvarapura (more generally known as Cambridge Layout), a former suburban housing colony east of the Cantonment but now lying within the Bangalore City Corporation area, established in the 1950s for personnel from the defense and public sector. Connected with the history of Someshvarapura’s Shirdi Sai Baba temple is B.V. Narasimha Swami, who was also responsible for the construction of Shirdi Sai Baba temples elsewhere in urban India. The third site is Whitefi eld, a peri-urban settlement on the eastern edge of the city, famous both locally and internationally as the site of Sathya Sai Baba’s second most important hermitage called Brindavan. Each year, Sathya Sai Baba spends some portion of his time at Brindavan, which also includes a college campus for male students. The fourth site is Indiranagar (with its adjacent areas such as HAL 2nd and 3rd Stage), a planned suburban housing colony between the Old Madras Road (National Highway 4) and Airport Road that became a middle-class neighborhood of Ban- galore in the 1970s. Indiranagar is the site of one of the fi rst large temples for Sathya Sai Baba in Bangalore, a site that he visits almost every year. The highways lying near all these sites are components of a radial system that, up until the late 1990s, led away from the central city to others like Madras or Hyderabad. Today, new beltways or Ring Roads being constructed around the city are connecting these roads as

3 My thinking on this theme has been enriched considerably by Richard Eaton (2005), who uses eight Indian lives to write a social history of the Deccan.

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Map 6. Bangalore Metropolitan Region, 2005 (Credit: Map produced by James Heitzman)

well as the sites of the Sai Baba tradition, the materiality of the city keeping pace with its religious networks.

Models of Space in Bangalore City4

Bangalore originated with the activities of a local warlord, Kempe Gowda, who established an oval-shaped mud-brick fort protecting a

4 This description of Bangalore is drawn from my previous work, Srinivas (2001a). Other sources for the city’s history and contemporary developments include Hasan (1970); Heitzman (2004); Nair (2005); Sundara Rao (1985).

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series of bazaars and habitation areas in 1537. The choice of the location for the commercial center and fort rested on the availability of water through an array of artifi cial lakes or tanks that Kempe Gowda constructed and augmented. Outside the fort were smaller settlements, forests, gardens, shrines and fi elds, linked to the fort and bazaars through a variety of economic and cultural transactions. The pre-colonial urban model in this region included all these elements—fort, bazaars, settlements, tanks, shrines and green spaces. Urban gardeners called Tigalas, who cultivated land in this area, embodied the sense of urban space in Bangalore: they used water from the tanks to feed horticultural land, applied waste from the settlement as manure, and sold their products in the bazaars. Their Karaga festival, dedicated to a goddess whose shrine stood at the edge of the Old City, ritually invoked all of these elements, its procession and players annually winding their way between various tanks, gardens, the fort, temples, markets and the settlement. By the seventeenth century, Bangalore was part of the expanding kingdom of the Wodeyar (or Odeyar) kings from Mysore, later falling under the authority of General Haider Ali in 1766. He embellished the city by creating the Persian-style Lal Bagh (Red Garden) and rebuilt the fort in stone. His military adventures, and those of his son Tippu Sultan, led to the formation of an opposing coalition by the expansive British East India Company, which eventually overran Bangalore in 1799. The East India Company reinstalled the Wodeyar kings and made an agreement with them that allowed the British to maintain a military cantonment northeast of the Old City, thus establishing the familiar dual pattern of urbanization under colonialism. The period of the fi rst Sole Commissioner of Bangalore, Sir Mark Cubbon, from 1834 to 1861, is associated with the opening of Bangalore’s fi rst railway line, the telegraph, and a large number of roads. A newly formed Cubbon Park came to separate the Old City and the Cantonment. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a number of “extensions” based on a grid-plan were laid out, in response to the growth of the population, the problems of water and sanitation in the Old City, and the plague epidemic. At the turn of the twentieth century, Bangalore was represented as a garden city because of its numerous horticultural gardens, the eighteenth-century Lal Bagh, the nineteenth-century Cubbon Park, and hundreds of lakes girding the city. The model of the modern city based on engineering, scientifi c research, and development soon overshadowed this model. By the mid-twentieth century, Bangalore was the site of the Indian Institute of

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Science, the aeronautics industry, and many engineering, medical, and scientifi c institutions. In part, this was because an industrial base was established early as Bangalore was the fi rst city in India to be electrifi ed and because of the enlightened policies of the Diwans (minister- administrators under the Mysore kings) epitomized by the “industrialize or perish” slogan of the Diwan M. Visveswaraya, who visualized a nationalist utopia of a technopolis. The modern city was augmented by a factory system: the economy of the city relied heavily on the textile industry including state-owned plants, private concerns, thousands of smaller looms owned by individuals, and an entire range of occupations associated with different stages of production and marketing. Under the aegis of the new nation-state, the model of the modern city was transformed into the developmental city. The rise and dominance of the public sector (1950–80) through the establishment of engineering works and, later, electronic goods, set the tone of development for nearly three decades when a number of public sector units came into existence. This period also saw intensifi cation of employment in government bureaucracy and the administrations of state-run enterprises. These processes not only caused the city to expand through new industrial estates but also created some of the largest in-migrations in its history, drawing workers and their families from neighboring regions and resulting in several suburban housing extensions as well as “slums.” In 1901, the population of the metropolitan area was 228,000; in 1951, the fi gure had risen to 991,000; and in 1981, the population comprised 2,913,000 persons (Bangalore Development Authority 1995: 16). The developmental city put pressure on the garden city, as its green, hydraulic basis was engorged by city bus stations, state-run enterprises, and industrial effl uents, even while bureaucratic classes retired to suburban housing extensions and what they perceived as a pensioner’s paradise. While, by the mid-1980s, the stage was set for global linkages because of the pool of technical, scientifi c, and professional strata, it was also set for the establishment and development of local microelectronics, information-based, and software industries in Bangalore. By the end of the twentieth century, with the liberalization of the Indian economy and the removal of restrictions on imports and licensing, Bangalore became “India’s Silicon Valley” as the high-technology private sector provided software outsourcing for multinational companies. By the 1990s, Bangalore seemed to be poised to fulfi ll its promise as the city

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of the future with a projected population of 5,800,000 persons by 2001 (Bangalore Development Authority 1995: 16). The population of the metropolitan area today is about 6.5 million.5 It is projected as the information city of India (although there are other rivals such as Hyderabad) and has several emerging “technoburbs” (Fishman 1987)—an uneven patchwork of industrial and technology parks, shopping complexes, housing, schools, and even agricultural land—along highway growth corridors. The Export Promotion Indus- trial Park (EPIP) in the east and Electronic City in the south are the hubs of what may be a new decentralized city with an “informational corridor” stretching along the Ring Roads advertised simultaneously by high-technology boosters as well as bureaucrats. Several of these models can be used to understand the sites treated in the sections below: Rupena Agrahara evokes the most resonance with the old gardeners’ and garden-city model but is now on the main route to a nascent technoburb—Electronic City. Formerly suburban Someshvarapura is associated with a constituency tied to the modern and the developmental city. The suburb of Indiranagar bears the signs simultaneously of the developmental and the information city, still primarily connected to the city’s core areas but also developing linkages to the high-tech corridor. While Whiteﬁ eld is a site associated with the dual urbanization pattern of Bangalore in the nineteenth century, being an exurbia for Anglo-Indians and others, today it is quickly becoming part of Bangalore’s high-technology proﬁ le and another emerging technoburb centered on the EPIP. These models and categories, however, are by themselves incomplete. What is required is to insert within the familiar story of the city’s growth other narratives and practices of producing space. This chapter, like the two which follow, explores non- centralized urban spaces, suburbanization processes, and the creation of new urban peripheries from the second half of twentieth century onwards and the nature of urban religiosity produced in them, what I call the “sacrality of urban sprawl” (see Srinivas 2001a).

5 “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision,” http://www.esa.un.org/unup, accessed July 13, 2006.

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Encrypted Spaces and Multiple Bodies

The road to Rupena Agrahara, where Shivamma Thayee lived, is reached via the intermediate Ring Road and the Hosur Road, which leads eventually to Electronic City, a tech-node in the image of Ban- galore as India’s high-tech city. The road is very wide and busy and traveling on it, one passes a Hyundai car dealer, a computer company, and a mosque. Once you take the turnoff to Rupena Agrahara, the road becomes bumpy, the straight lines break down, and the area rapidly takes on the character of a village swallowed by the metropolis. One fi nally reaches an enclosed area where trees and graves abound: the name (agrahara) suggests that this used to be a Brahmin settlement at one point but it now includes a non-Brahmin cemetery. Numerous graves marked by lingam stand like megaliths inside. Within the compound one encounters a school named after Sai Baba, several Sai Baba temples and rented houses. The person who performs the rituals at the Sai Baba temples is a Tamil-speaker, Mr. Muthuswamy. When I met him in December 2000, he was going for lunch but agreed to open the temples and show us around. Who was Shivamma Thayee, I asked? Her story is recorded in a book by a professor, replied Muthuswamy. This record is largely written as fi rst-person reminiscence and begins: “I am Shivamma Thayee. This name was given to me by my Guru Sri Shirdi Sai Baba himself at Shirdi during his lifetime. My earlier name was Rajamma” (Ruhela 1992: 1).6 According to the account, Shivamma Thayee was born in 1891 to an agriculturist family of Gounders in Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu (see Map 2). The eldest of four children, she was married in 1904 at age thirteen to Subramaniam Gounder, who later worked as a supervisor in a mill in Coimbatore, and a son was born after a year of marriage. Her fi rst meeting with Shirdi Sai Baba is said to have occurred in 1906 when he visited a village close to Coimbatore town with Shivamma Thayee’s uncle, who had become a renouncer. While it is widely believed that Shirdi Sai Baba never left the environs of Shirdi after he came to reside there, Shivamma Thayee claims that

6 In 1992, S.P. Ruhela, Professor of Education at Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi, interviewed Shivamma Thayee for a number of hours via an interpreter, K.S. Jaya Raman, a stores ofﬁ cer at Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. in Bangalore. After the interview, Ruhela asked her if he might publish the record of her life and experiences with Sai Baba, to which she agreed (Ruhela 1992).

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he stayed in that village for two days. He also initiated her with the Gayatri mantra and predicted that she would be a great soul.7 In time, Shivamma Thayee came to be convinced that Shirdi Sai Baba was her real guru and decided to visit Shirdi. Her entire family arrived in Shirdi in 1908, her husband somewhat reluctantly, and visited Shirdi Sai Baba in his mosque. She describes Shirdi Sai Baba as about six feet tall, with long hands, fair in color, possessing a sharp nose, and deep blue eyes that shone penetratingly. He spoke to her in Tamil, she states, “and even now in His Spirit Form He comes to me and talks to me in Tamil” (Ruhela 1992: 5). After her fi rst visit, which lasted about fi ve or six days, she would travel alone to Shirdi about three or four times a year and testifi es to witnessing many of Baba’s yogic practices and miracles that are described by the Shri Sai Satcharita. Shivamma Thayee’s continued absorption in her guru, whom she regarded as an incarnation of Shiva and Dattatreya, fi nally led to her husband abandoning her. She returned to her natal family from Bangalore where she and her husband had been living. Her son grew up to join the police department but on one unfortunate day he and his wife were both killed in a motor accident. Shivamma Thayee felt that Baba had fi nally freed her from all family attachments. One day in 1917, Baba gave her the name by which she is known today and ordered her to go to Bangalore and found a hermitage in his name. She returned to Bangalore and lived for several years in a remote corner of the city begging for alms. About 1944 a certain Narayana Reddy donated some spare land to her in Rupena Agrahara, then an isolated tract, where she did penance for about twelve years. An anthill covered her entire body and a cobra would come and sit on the matted locks of hair on her head. Eventually she was persuaded by devotees to end her strenous penance. Shivamma Thayee then turned her attention to the hermitage, starting a primary school in its premises, founding temples dedicated to Shirdi Sai Baba, and extending her blessings to the many who began to gather around her for the worship of Shirdi Sai Baba. Toward the end of her life, she stated: “I am now 102 years old . . . For these last eighty-six years (since I fi rst saw Baba as a fi fteen-year-old girl in 1906) I have been attached to Baba heart and

7 The interviewer, Ruhela, states that this was a miraculous instance of Shirdi Sai Baba manifesting himself in another body in a distant place and a proof that he even knew other languages besides Marathi, Urdu, or Arabic.

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soul . . . He is the sole boatman of the boat of my life” (Ruhela 1992: 16). Shivamma Thayee died in 1994. Muthuswamy, in charge of carrying out the rituals at the temples she built, takes us to the ﬁ rst site, which is Shivamma Thayee’s house (see Figure 44). On otherwise bare walls is a photograph taken in 1963 showing her sitting under a tree in white clothing looking very much the renouncer. There is also a foot-high silver image of a seated Shirdi Sai Baba that was installed recently. There is nothing else to see and Muthuswamy takes us to the next building, a temple built about 1970, about 30 feet on one side and surrounded by coconut trees, the focus of local festivals every year. In the main altar space, ﬂ anked by green and white pillars, is a black stone image of a seated Shirdi Sai Baba (see Figure 45). This has large white painted eyes and looks like a village deity. On either side of it are images of the deity Shiva’s sons and behind it pictures of Shivamma Thayee as well as a sign that asks: “Why fear when I am here?” Muthuswamy takes us downstairs to the subterranean tomb of Shivamma Thayee, who got the site constructed in preparation for her passing away. This is a black cube on which stands a Shiva lingam. The space around is limited and dark with only a lamp hanging from the ceiling, which is about six feet up. Shivamma Thayee states in her reminiscence: “Once Baba appeared to me in a dream a few years back and told me, Shivamma, all My statues in your temples and elsewhere are in My standing or sitting postures, but there is no Statue of Mine showing me as I really was, as a simple Faqir of Shirdi with my favourite tin pot on my daily round of collecting bhiksha (food) from the villagers of Shirdi” (Ruhela 1992: 17). She thus constructed a third temple, a sunny room about twelve feet on one side with a white marble image of Shirdi Sai Baba, about two feet high, depicting Baba as a mendicant. On the way back to the main road we meet a descendant of Narayana Reddy, Mr. N. Gopal Reddy, a city councilor and a member of the Congress Party. He is a well-fed man wearing white clothes and lots of gold jewelry. He does not seem to be particularly devoted to Shivamma Thayee; instead of building more temples, he wants to evict the rent- ers and use the land for various social causes such as an old people’s home. He speaks enthusiastically, however, about the Shirdi Sai Baba School where 600 children are fed daily. Fragments of other memories of this area emerge in the course of our conversation: the land where Shivamma Thayee came to live was gifted by one of his ancestors about 140 years ago to be a refuge for renouncers. He tells us that the

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Fig. 44. Shivamma Thayee’s house (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

Fig. 45. Shirdi Sai Baba temple and images (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

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area was mainly under paddy cultivation and a tank nearby watered about 640 acres of land: the Wodeyar rulers of Mysore constructed this tank in the late eighteenth century in the name of Venkoji Rao and his brother, Baoji Rao, who were their cooks. Now this tank has fallen into disrepair and the government has sanctioned funding for its restoration. The paddy has also disappeared. The hermitage of Shivamma Thayee presents a space both encrypted and abundant. It presents multiple personas of Sai Baba, encapsulat- ing several charismatic strains and traditions that are not to be found at Shirdi where Sai Baba is presented both as a faqir and a guru. The image of Shirdi Sai Baba at the main temple absorbs into its sacral fi eld the worship of dark village deities and boundary goddesses—like the goddess of Bangalore’s Karaga festival—who are propitiated for a variety of affl ictions, their festivals celebrated throughout the night even today in many rural and urban settlements. These practices within Bangalore are associated with the model of the gardeners’ city whose ritual links to the old central fort and market are sustained by the worship of female deities whose shrines lie in the vicinity of tanks (see Srinivas 2001a). Even though the tank in Rupena Agrahara has disappeared today, the gardeners’ city is still invoked by the presence of this ritual center. In addition, Shaiva ritual practices, the burial of dead persons from non-Brahmin castes, and the bodies of mendicants and renouncers are intertwined with the worship of Sai Baba in ways that are rather distinct from the practices at Shirdi. The transformation of Rupena Agrahara from a semi-distant settlement to a village engulfed by the metropolis and Electronic City is mediated by the fi gure of Shivamma Thayee. Her spiritual quest and its institutional ramifi cations are inserted into the space of Rupena Agrahara, proliferating the presence of Sai’s body.

The Creation of an Ethereal Body8

Between 1918 and 1950, small gatherings of devotees who had visited Shirdi, usually through their connections with Maharashtra as businessmen or through their employment in the army or bureaucracy, occurred in many urban centers in south India. After 1950 some of

8 Parts of this section were published in another article, Srinivas (1999a).

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these groups, usually devotional song and prayer communities meeting in people’s homes, constructed temples. A typical case is Bangalore, where there are at least four temples dedicated to Shirdi Sai Baba affi liated to the All-India Sai Samaj (in Narasimharaja Colony, in Malleswaram, in Jayprakash Nagar, and in Someshvarapura). All these areas are residential neighborhoods of Bangalore owing their greatest growth to post-independence developments. Most of these middle-class areas were inhabited by families whose livelihoods were linked to the expanding metropolis in the postcolonial period in administrative, industrial, professional, and business sectors. In the temples constructed by these groups, Shirdi Sai Baba is treated in the manner of a guru and as a royal and divine image. How is it that the mendicant with his multiple heritages has come to be imagined in a way that resembles a guru, even a Hindu deity, with alternative elements being pushed underground in these cities? To understand this trajectory, we must fi rst examine the efforts of B.V. Narasimha Iyer (later known as Narasimha Swami). Narasimha Iyer (1874–1956) was born at Bhavani in Coimbatore district (see Map 2).9 His father, Venkatagiri Iyer, moved with his wife, Angachiammal, and his family to Salem in Narasimha’s boyhood to take up a job as a second grade pleader. After passing his B.A. Exami- nation at Madras Christian College, Narasimha earned his law degree from Madras Law College. He joined the Bar and began to practice as a civil lawyer in Salem in 1895. He was apparently quite active in public life: he served the Salem Municipality and the Salem Cooperative Bank as its Chairman. In politics, he was an admirer of Bal Gangadhar Tilak. His activities in public life elected him to the Madras Legislative Council in 1912, a position he occupied till 1920. He was apparently the fi rst Indian member to address the Council in a regional language for which he apparently ran into a confrontation with the Governor; he appears to have implied in Tilak-like fashion that the language was his birthright. He was also involved with the Home Rule movement of Annie Besant and was one of the three-member team sent to Britain in 1917 to place before the British people India’s case for Home Rule. The mission was, however, detained at Gibraltar on the orders of the British War Cabinet and sent back after 15 days. Although he was

9 This biographical account is largely based on the material of Varadaraja Iyer (1974).

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re-elected in 1920 to the Legislative Council, he refused, as he had joined the Non-Cooperation movement by this time. In 1921, a terrible tragedy struck Narasimha. He lost two of his children, who died by falling into a well, and he decided to give up his career and look for a true teacher (sadguru). The logical step for him, as a Smartha Brahmin, was to seek out the Shankaracharya of Sringeri. The pontiff, however, directed him to Ramana Maharshi at Tiruvannamalai. There, Narasimha is said to have meditated in a cave and benefi ted somewhat from the intellectual discipline that Ramana suggested. He even wrote the fi rst authoritative biography of the Maharshi in 1931 entitled Self-Realisation. But the practices of Ramana did not satisfy him fully and he left to wander in a spiritual wilderness, from one holy site to another, one saint to another, including Narayan Maharaj, Upasni Maharaj (whose biography he also wrote, see Chapter 1) and Meher Baba. The devotional network already created by these fi gures directed him to Shirdi in 1936, where he is said to have had a vision of Shirdi Baba. Utterly transformed by this contact with his true teacher, he decided to take the message of Sai far beyond the bounds of Shirdi. Now called Narasimha Swami, he acquired all the marks of a modern sage—a long fl owing beard, a simple dress, and a cloth bag with packets of sacred ash and pictures of Baba in card size that he distributed to devotees (see Figure 46). From 1936 to 1938, he occupied himself by meeting devotees of Shirdi Baba who knew him when he was still alive and publishing articles on Baba in the Sunday Times. In 1939 he returned to Madras and opened the All-India Sai Samaj. It appears that in 1940 he was mysteriously gifted a sum of money by a Chettiar merchant from Bangalore and when he put the question to Shirdi Baba, through a practice of drawing lots, as to what should be done with the money he was directed to engage in propaganda ( prachar). Sai prachar means Sai getting known . . . If Sai is a Great Soul, if he has done good to hundreds and thousands of people in certain parts of the country, why should not that be known to a larger number of people in a larger number of places? If that is proper, prachar is the means. It is not only proper but desirable, nay it may even be a duty, at least in the case of those who are fi tted to do prachar and to whom prachar has become a sadhana [spiritual practice] by Baba’s grace. (NS 1994, Vol. III: 241–243) Narasimha Swami cast himself into the role of an educator on Sai Baba through methods of mass contact. His style seems to have been

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Fig. 46. Shirdi Sai Baba (left) and Narasimha Swami (right) (Print distributed by All-India Sai Samaj)

to incessantly tour the country, lecture and speak about Baba wherever he was called—in schools, devotional groups, parks, houses, even political gatherings such as Indian National Congress platforms. He started a journal, Sai Sudha, in 1940 and a number of pictures, lockets, rings, and calendars were produced for distribution. He even built up a band of volunteers who were offered traveling concessions for their work and in many places lantern lectures were organized at temples. Narasimha Swami goes so far as to say that where the propaganda of Baba is concerned, it is Baba who carries on the work himself. He cites two cases—one from a village near Vellore and another at Kaki- nada—where having offered ash and lamps or light in Baba’s name a child was cured of ﬁ ts and a woman of hysteria (NS 1994, Vol. III: 246). He says that people ask him why he preaches about dead gurus and not living ones and cites other appearances of Baba (for example as a serpent in Coimbatore) which are proof that Sai is living and responds to prayer (NS 1994, Vol. III: 247–248). C. Rajagopalachari, one of the premier members of the Indian National Congress in Tamil Nadu and a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, is said to have once remarked at a speech in Salem:

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Sri Narasimha Swami and I are boyhood friends. When we grew up we both of us took up the legal profession. Strangely enough when we both of us bade goodbye to Salem, each of us left Salem in response to a different set of circumstances and each of us took a different path. While I went to what might be called the political Ashram at Tiruchengodu, Sri Narasimha Swamiji went to the spiritual Ashram of Bhagwan Ramana at Tiruvanamalai [Tiruvannamalai]. (Saipadananda, no date: 41) Although the parallelism between their lives was noticed by Rajago- palachari, this separation between the political and the spiritual ashram appears to be a simplifi cation. Both men were concerned with defi ning the framework of a new social order for India that did not make a separation between the civic and the spiritual. Rajagopalachari combined two different discourses—national progress and individual duty (dharma)—where a citizen’s moral actions were linked to the progress of the state. He saw in Gandhi a spiritual messenger for the new state (Waghorne 1978, 1985). Similarly, Narasimha Swami saw in Baba a universal guru. At the level of civic discourse, Narasimha Swami points out that although Baba never discussed politics, and Shirdi was far away from any political arena, he was the living emblem of Hindu-Muslim unity. This mission of unifi cation was intrinsically related to the attempt to purify Hinduism itself of its divisive tendencies and the separation between different communities of worshippers. According to Narasimha Swami, Baba did this in four ways—in his body, in his life, in his mosque, and lastly, in his teachings. Baba showed himself to be a spiritual guide to all, providing them with material and spiritual benefi ts; whether they used the name saint (avalia) or personal god (ishta devata) did not matter. The most important aspect of Sai worship, states Narasimha Swami, was guru worship: he was an adept of all the paths (marga), “though his chief marga was Bhakti marga, the special form of it that is described as Guru marga in the Guru Gita” (NS 1994, Vol. 1: 75). This ideal was embodied in Baba’s own devotion to the guru, the idea that the guru or faqir was Love, the universal religion. Narasimha Swami also makes a transition from the individual to the social: for Baba, he states, the common principle was that all religions are true and that each person should follow a guru’s tradition or lineage (sampradaya), the exoteric worship leading esoterically to the unifi cation of various religions and sects. The Sai Baba temple in Mylapore, Madras, the fi rst such temple associated with Narsimha Swami’s All-India Sai Samaj, is located on

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Venkatesa Agraharam Street near the Buckingham Canal next to a Dalit settlement rather than the older Brahmin enclave. The temple was established in 1952–53; at fi rst there was only a hall where, on Gurupurnima day, a picture of Shirdi Sai Baba was worshipped. In 1953, ritual consecration of the temple occurred and in the 1970s, an image of Shirdi Sai Baba was installed within. Brahmin priests conduct the rituals today but anyone may go and touch the image. Both Vaishnava and Shaiva practices obtain. In a niche at the right-hand side of the image is a fi re lit by a log brought from the fi re that Shirdi Sai Baba kept burning at Shirdi. Facing this hangs a painting showing Shirdi Sai Baba in conversation with Tajuddin Baba. Around the main shrine are Baba’s sayings etched on the walls of the temple and within are paintings which mainly depict events from his life. One picture shows the gift of money to Narasimha Swami by the Chettiar merchant for the purposes of spreading the faith of Baba. There is also a room in which Narasimha Swami lived, which contains pictures and iconography from every major religion. At the temple’s rear portion is “the guru’s place” ( gurustan) with trees around which people tie little cradles or other objects for fulfi llment of prayers. This resembles the practice at many dargahs of Muslim saints and is a common feature at many temples. Every Thursday, the Quran is read and preachers from other traditions, for instance, the evangelist Brother Dinakaran, are invited to speak occasionally in the Samaj. The Samaj performs public-service activities such as feeding the poor and running a dispensary and a school. While the Samaj committee has had Brahmin, Chettiar, Dalit and Muslim members, Hindu devotees from the fi rst two groups form the largest constituency in the temple. The other Shirdi Sai Baba temples that came up in India after 1950 were nearly all situated in urban areas. Sai Dasan, an associate of Narasimha Swami in the 1950s and later actively involved with the Mylapore Samaj, stated that in 1995 there were 1,003 Shirdi Sai Baba institutions all over India.10 In Madras, as in Bangalore, these institutions are patronized mostly by middle-class Hindus engaged mostly in governmental occupations and in trade. A double-layered construction of Shirdi Sai Baba as guru occurs in these temples. At the primary level are Baba’s life circumstances and practices at Shirdi such as the production of ash in a fi re. At the

10 Interview with Sai Dasan, May 15, 1995.

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secondary level is a regimen of joint worship for different communities. This is cast in scriptural terms by Narasimha Swami with frequent references being made to the Bhagavad Gita, Adi Shankara, the Vedas, and the Great Tradition of Hinduism (see, for example, NS 1965a). In practice, then, while there is joint worship by Vaishnava and Shaiva believers in the urban temples in South India, non-Hindu devotees at the temple are an exception and the construction of religious belief is pan-Hindu. Writing on the signifi cance of Baba’s passing away on Vijayadashami day Narasimha Swami alludes to the effect of spatial and temporal displacement for a new body of worship: The Mahasamadhi is an event of unique importance. While it took away the physical body so well known and dear to the thousands that had fl ocked to His Feet, it was the means of refi ning and sublimating their love to Him, and at the same time starting a new era in Sai Bhakthi and providing a special ethereal entity or Body that the entire people of India if not the world can be drawn to. When He was in the fl esh, some were repelled by the limitations and peculiarities of His physical body and surroundings. But now happily, there is no physical body. Its place being taken by an ethereal body or better still, a perfect spiritual phenomenon that may be treated as a body or not a body according to the ideology, convenience and pleasure of the devotee, it has furnished a basis for a highly refi ned religious or spiritual group to gather and work under His Name. (NS 1965b: 21, my emphasis). Narasimha Swami thus performs an operation that allows Shirdi Sai Baba to be freed from locality and his physical body, one that Sathya Sai Baba later performed on himself through the concept of the avatar. Locality is stripped of its specifi cities allowing a new body to appear. The “ethereal body” of Baba after his passing away is conceptualised as partaking of a larger body of Hinduism and given authority by reference to certain canons, chiefl y the Vedic corpus and the Bhagavad Gita, which have become a source of collective identity. Baba’s Sufi heritage has passed into a zone of cultural amnesia in the suburban landscape of believers and disappeared into the temple basement in cities like Bangalore.

Divided Spaces and the Body of the Guru

Having examined the transformation effected by Narasimha Swami, we can now turn our attention to our second site in Bangalore, which I

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researched in the mid-1990s. The Shirdi Sai Baba temple in Somesh- varapura evolved from the efforts of a group of six persons, most of them Tamil-speakers, all from the Defense Accounts head offi ce in Pune city in Maharashtra. After their retirement, they settled in Bangalore and held a prayer session every Thursday in Ibrahim Street in the Cantonment area. Although they were offered a site in Narasimharaja Colony, primarily a settlement of Kannada-speakers, the group declined the site and much later in 1968 purchased a plot in Someshvarapura. At this time, the shrine consisted of only one room and a picture of Baba. In 1980, they joined forces with a group of three businessmen including a Tamil-speaker, a Sindi and a Marwari, who had vowed to build a temple after visiting Shirdi in the 1970s. Their joint efforts led to the construction of a temple in 1985. The temple (see Figure 47) has two levels. Almost basement-like, below the level of the road, lies the portion of the temple that has some historical continuity with Shirdi. At the far end of a largely empty room is a niche in the wall, resembling the prayer niche of a mosque, holding a picture of Shirdi Sai Baba in white clothes with a pipe. At the time that the lower portion of the temple was being constructed, a devotee, Mrs. Vimala Rai, made a pilgrimage to Shirdi where the priest told her that he had been instructed in a dream to give the picture to the Bangalore temple. A small fl ame burns there in imitation of Baba’s fi re at Shirdi. The Sufi or mendicant-like connotation of the picture is, however, combined with some “Hindu” aspects: for instance, betel leaves and coconuts stand in front of him, he wears a garland of fl owers, and various ritual spots on his body are marked with vermilion. The level of the temple that most people typically visit fi rst lies a fl oor above the road and has a life-sized, white marble image of Shirdi Sai Baba (see Figure 48) that priests daily decorate with clothes and garlands. The image sits on a silver throne with lions on either side (acquired in 1995) depicting the mendicant as king; silver feet are kept in front of the image for devotees to touch. The rituals include Shaiva elements (for example, a statue of Ganesha and Shiva lingam) and Vaishnava elements (for instance, recitation of the thousand names of Vishnu). The thousand names (sahasranama) of Shirdi Sai Baba are also recited, the fi rst line of which states that he is the form of Shiva, Rama, Maruti and Krishna. Thursday is considered particularly sacred and hundreds of devotees can be seen visiting the temple, touching the silver feet, and taking consecrated foods. There are no particular rules of purity or pollution and devotees touch the image freely nor

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Fig. 47. Someshvarapura temple (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

are there any particular rules of precedence with regard to any hon- ors. Four important festivals are celebrated: Shivaratri, Rama Navami, Gurupurnima and Vijayadashami. Of these, Gurupurnima (when all gurus from Vyasa to Shirdi Baba are revered) and Vijayadashami (the day of Baba’s passing) are central to the temple. The celebration of Rama Navami has become increasingly elaborate in recent years and the temple managers see it as the “birthday” of Shirdi Sai Baba. The temple is actively engaged in social outreach such as running a charitable dispensary, Sanskrit verse recitation classes for children, feeding the poor on Sundays, and a library containing literature on Baba in several languages including Tamil, Kannada and English. A hospital providing free medical care was inaugurated in 1995, when the trust of the temple had 400–450 life members and about 600 ordinary members. The number of devotees at any point in time is certainly far greater than this number; on Thursdays, for instance, over 6,000 Indian rupees (about US $130) worth of ﬂ owers are purchased outside the temple from pavement ﬂ ower-sellers. The popularity of Shirdi Sai Baba can also be seen among non-middle class devotees although they rarely visit the temple. Most visible in this group are auto-rickshaw driv- ers, who carry in their vehicles small pictures of Baba. Some of them

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Fig. 48. Marble image of Shirdi Sai Baba (Photograph courtesy of Someshvarapura temple)

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remarked to me that their devotion is a result of their association with passengers whom they transported to the temple rather than due to a pilgrimage to Shirdi. Four distinguishing features of Bangalore, and particularly its eastern suburbs, are the presence of a high percentage of migrants in the population (about one-third); a linguistically diverse population; many scientifi c and large-scale industrial establishments (both public and private sector) and computer/software companies; and a mixed-community residential pattern replacing the largely caste-based wards of the Old City. The neighborhood of the temple, thus, contains a heterogeneous population in terms of language or regional and sectarian origin but does not include a signifi cant number of Muslims, lower-caste Hindus, or Dalits. Most of the households in Someshvarapura are engaged in occupations in the government, in industry, or in private enterprise. The devotees who visit from other neighborhoods also share a mid-level managerial, professional, commercial, and bureaucratic background with these households. They are mostly Tamil-speakers or businessmen from the regions of Gujarat and Sind. The men in the former group are mainly employed in public sector establishments such as Hindu- stan Aeronautics Ltd., Bharat Earth Movers Ltd., Indian Telephone Industries, the army, or the Public Works Department. The latter group has close links with Shirdi and with family members in Maharashtra, Sind, and Gujarat. A large number of devotees conceive of Baba as a guru or God and propitiate him in addition to household gods.11 A Tamil woman of 45 (her husband works in the Telegraphs Department), resident in the area, said: “We think of Baba as God; although he was a sanyasi . . . He is a part of Shiva.” Another, a Kannada Brahmin woman whose husband worked for a private company, said: “Some think that Baba is a Muslim. But we believe that he is a Brahmin who was given to a Muslim . . . Baba is God incarnated. We come here and pray to him to make our wishes possible, and for those who have faith, it happens.” A Tamil man working for the National Dairy Research Institute whose family deity is Subrahmanya stated: “I worship all my Hindu gods and I see in him (Baba) all my gods, so there is no confusion.” For many who come here, Baba is believed to have cured bodily affl ictions of various

11 These statements are based on informal interviews carried out at the temple between 1994 and 1995.

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sorts from a bad leg to psychosis. More ordinarily, his intervention is sought to get children married, help in school admissions, procure a house, or ensure success in work. While some have visited Shirdi, it does not seem to be the norm, nor have many read the Shri Sai Satcharita. The devotee who visits the temple periodically is not a pilgrim whose journey has removed him or her, at least briefl y, from the coordinates of a mundane urban world: both the site and the devotee’s world are contained within the larger structure of the metropolis. The temple codes allow different suburban Hindu communities to come together in common worship through an adoption of both Shaiva and Vaishnava rituals. Differentials—of language, sect, occupation, residential area or regional origin—that cannot be collapsed spatially or culturally within the city achieve ritual and devotional resolution in the fi gure of the guru. Devotees believe that the time and space of city life and their own existential immersion in it mask another kind of time and space in which they are guided and protected by the concealed fi gure of Shirdi Sai Baba: When the construction of the temple was going on, I used to go to the architect, to the bank and to collect cement for building purposes. One day, when I was going on my two-wheeler to the Cement Controller’s offi ce, my vision became blurred and I fell down from my vehicle. I do not remember what happened. As I lay unconscious on the road, someone picked me up and carried me to a doctor’s clinic nearby where I recovered consciousness. The doctor said that my blood sugar content had fallen; I am a diabetic. I asked: “Who brought me here?” “Some old gentleman brought you,” said the doctor. What do you say to that? Who was that old man? I feel it was Baba. (Interview with Mr. Srinivasan, President of the Cambridge Temple Trust, December 10, 1994) The worship that has developed in this temple differs from that in Shirdi. Much like the architecture of the Someshvarapura temple, hexagonal in design with smooth geometric surfaces, the worship is located within an architectonic paradigm. Rather than the presence of sacra that act as a mnemonic of Sai Baba’s life and need active involvement on the part of the pilgrim, the object of contemplation is a giant white marble image in styled repose. The persona of Sai Baba himself is split into a number of facets of which the aspect of Sai Baba as guru-God is the most signifi cant. Unlike the frontal and direct gaze of the image above the road, the picture of Sai Baba below the road shows him sitting on the fl oor in the mosque and resting at an angle against a wall. This split- ting of Baba’s identity was prefi gured in the tradition of transmission

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in which Narasimha Swami participated—Upasni Maharaj’s Vedic ashram at Sakori and Meher Baba’s representation of Baba’s Sufi aspects. But it also acquired a particular force within the biography of Narasimha Swami: while his imaginative world was largely speciﬁ c to colonial Tamil Nadu, this world achieved its objective form in the All-India Sai Samaj after the 1950s. The shift from the paradigm of the faqir to the guru in the case of the south Indian Shirdi Sai Baba temples in Bangalore and elsewhere thus accompanied the creation of a national society. The isomorphs of the national community in the urban arena lie in organizations like the All-India Sai Samaj, a society that acts as the locus of numerous domains and differentials, but is based on an abstract collective identity stressing devotion, regular forms of worship, and service to society. With the stripping away of the concrete Baba’s qualities, a bourgeois incarnation of Baba appears unlimited by historical facts and becomes available as guru-God to a largely Hindu, metropolitan middle class.

Utopian Spaces, Global Bodies

After Shivamma Thayee’s return to Bangalore in 1917 and Nara- simha Swami’s epiphany at Shirdi in 1936, Sathya Sai Baba declared his identity with Shirdi Sai Baba and inaugurated his mission. While Chapter 2 dealt with his early life, principal landmarks, and phases in his career, this section takes up his life in a different context—in Bangalore. On any fl ight to Bangalore from Paris, Frankfurt, or Singapore, one is likely to meet devotees who are traveling to India to see him. They might go on to Puttaparthi or, if they are fortunate, they will be able to have darshan of Sathya Sai Baba in Whitefi eld. This former exurb for Anglo-Indian families with spacious bungalows, gardens, and nurseries lies between the road leading eastwards away from the airport and the Old Madras Road that links Bangalore with Madras (see Map 6). A railway line goes through Whitefi eld and there is a small station there. By the 1960s, when the Sathya Sai Baba movement was beginning to garner devotees globally, this area included a few chemical industries and the Joy ice-cream factory but the most important of the new institutions coming up there was the hermitage of Sathya Sai Baba named Brindavan.

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Before the site was acquired for Brindavan, it was part of a largely agricultural and horticultural region.12 The piece of land that later became the site for Baba’s college also contained a bungalow owned by a family from Nellore (in Andhra Pradesh), who were connected with mica mines. From 1964 onwards, this bungalow became the principal residence of Sathya Sai Baba when he visited Bangalore; he used to reside previously in a place near the Joy ice-cream factory. The central axis of the area for darshan, when Baba walked out of his bungalow, was a large pipal tree with a circular tin-roofed shed called the Sairam Shed built around it (see Figure 49). Under it on a platform stood an image of Krishna playing his fl ute accompanied by a cow. Baba would usually sit for a while on a chair under the tree’s shade and bhajan singers would gather about him in the sandy area. The verdant atmosphere was emphasized by the deer maintained by Baba near his bungalow along with some other animals like rabbits. When the Brindavan college campus was fi rst started in 1969, students utilized an old converted garage as their hostel near Baba’s bungalow. Their dining hall was in one of the rooms of his house. They, like other devotees, had easy access to Baba as he walked around and talked with many of them in Brindavan. Later, around 1976, a large hostel for the students was built in the area of a tank that lay near the bungalow. In front of the hostel area was a life-size image of Saraswati, symbolizing the confl uence of the arts, book-learning and spiritual knowledge. In 1983, the old bungalow that had been Baba’s residence for two decades or so was demolished and “Trayee Brindavan,” was built for Baba to reside in and also conduct meetings and interviews with devotees and offi ce-bearers. The old circular simplicity of the darshan area was gradually replaced by a permanent building called “Sai Ramesh Krishnan Hall” inaugurated in 1992. This is an open-area ritual theater for darshan with a green roof that can hold about 6,000 people at any one time. The devotees’ lines of vision are now principally directed towards the platform on which Sathya Sai Baba sits. The old image of Krishna has been replaced by one in bronze that stands on the platform

12 These details about the growth of Whiteﬁ eld are based on informal notes from an interview (December 23, 2002) with Colonel S.B. Jogarao, a close devotee of Sathya Sai Baba and one of the principal members of the Central Trust. Ninety-three years old at the time of our conversation, he told me that he became a devotee of Baba around 1970. He was associated with many of the building projects of the Central Trust in Whiteﬁ eld and Puttaparthi. For descriptions of Brindavan by students, see also the souvenir issue called Trayee Saptamayee (no date).

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Fig. 49. Old Brindavan (Photograph courtesy of Kekie Mistry)

alongside four giant photographs of Sathya Sai Baba (see Figure 50). The hall is joined to the compound wall of Trayee Brindavan on one side and Baba passes through a gate or door into Sai Ramesh Krishnan Hall for darshan. It faces the students’ hostel and a marriage hall that was inaugurated in 1999 on another side. Today, the entire area of Brindavan, including a bookstore, a small hostel for visitors, and other small buildings, is surrounded by a high wall and protected from the main highway and the railway line immediately outside it. One of the main themes expressed by devotees about Baba’s relationship to Whitefi eld and Brindavan is that “Puttaparthi is his offi ce and Whitefi eld is his home” or “Puttaparthi is his offi ce and Brindavan is his rest-house.” Indeed, when Baba arrived in Whitefi eld in January 2006 to stay for several days, many devotees remarked that this would be “restful” for Baba since he was recovering from a hip injury. Also, he could move around outside his house and get some fresh air and privacy, which was impossible at Prashanti Nilayam. It is certainly true that in spite of metal detectors handled by Seva Dal workers, who guard the entrances to Sai Ramesh Krishnan Hall, and the thousands of devotees at Brindavan when Baba is there, a feeling of informality pervades Brindavan and it has the sense of being a rural idyll. Baba is seen by devotees as a global avatar, but here in Brindavan he seems to be represented best by the image of playful Krishna in a bucolic

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Fig. 50. New Brindavan (Photograph courtesy of Sai Darshan ofﬁ ce)

landscape. Several devotional songs sung during darshan time by the college boys convey this image: Bada Chittachora, Brindavana Sanchara [ The big stealer of hearts, he who moves around Brindavan] Gopala, Gopala, Hey Murali Gopala [the cowherd (2), O fl ute-bearing cowherd] Govardhanodhara Gopala Bala [the cowherd lad who lifted Govardhan hill] Gopi Manohara Radhe Gopala [the beloved of the cowherd girls, Radha’s cowherd] The fact that this is no rural retreat, at least not any longer, becomes obvious as one walks out of the gates of Brindavan. Across the street are restaurants, hawkers, and numerous stalls selling devotional memorabilia or offering currency exchange. A little distance away is the campus of the men’s college in Whitefi eld begun by Baba. The highway that runs by Brindavan and the college is busy with trucks and automobile traffi c. Driving from Indiranagar to Brindavan, one passes a range of dwellings—newly constructed high-rise apartment blocks for those who cannot afford to live in the city that look like Le Corbusier’s Plan Voison, gated communities with expensive stand-alone “villas,” sustainable and eco-friendly habitats, and village houses. This

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highway is now a key artery of the city because between Indiranagar and the Brindavan ashram lies the Export Promotion Industrial Park (EPIP). This region, known previously as the village settlement of Pat- tandur Agrahara, is fast dominating the eastern edge of the city and its International Technology Park, with high-rise buildings featuring opaque and shiny glass windows, might be found in Singapore, Atlanta, or Silicon Valley. While Brindavan is the key devotional site in Bangalore for devotees of Sathya Sai Baba from around the world, the spatial proximity of Whitefi eld to the EPIP has resulted in its insertion into a transnational set of fl ows and the vision of Bangalore as a technopole. This proximity and Baba’s global role have also achieved recognition in architectural form: Next to the high-rise International Technology Park stands the SSSIHMS (described in Chapter 4) inaugurated on January 19, 2001 by the Indian Prime Minister after only fi fteen months of planning and execution.13 The growth of Bangalore as the premier information city of South Asia is thus matched by this new project of Sathya Sai Baba which occupies a space that is both global and utopian matching the purpose of export promotion with the language of healing and chan- neling tertiary health care through a fi lter of spirituality. The fact that this project is a key one for the Sathya Sai Baba movement is revealed by the fact that in January 2006, as in most other years, Baba visited the SSSIHMS on its anniversary driving down from Whitefi eld to meet with doctors, patients, and others. Today, Sai devotees visiting Bangalore from afar will visit or drive by the SSSIHMS while traveling to Brindavan, the two now inextricably bound together in their religious imagination. For city-dwellers, including non-devotees, other gurus are a familiar part of Bangalore’s urban landscape such as Sri Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (whose main campus is in southern Bangalore) or the late Tiruchi Swamigal in the western edge of the metropolis, but the eastern boundaries of the metropolitan area today are inevitably associated with high-technology, Whitefi eld, and Sathya Sai Baba.

13 While the construction division of Larsen and Toubro Ltd. carried out the building of the institute, the main architects and planners were Ravi Associates (Bangalore), Sai Architects (New Delhi) and A. Srivathsan (a medical consultant from Bangalore).

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Locality and the Ever-present Guru

The global character of Brindavan as a destination for devotees and tourists and its articulation with the SSSIHMS and EPIP in Bangalore is paralleled by another sense of space in the Sathya Sai Baba movement: the local Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization or samiti. Karnataka state, where Bangalore is located, had 143 samitis and bhajan mandalis in 1988 and 482 in 2002, one of the highest rates of change (237 percent) for that period in the country (see Table 1). It is one of the states with the largest number of members in the country in 2002—it had 170 samitis with 5,900 members and 312 bhajan mandalis with 5,200 members. Some districts in Karnataka have a stronger presence than others—for instance, Bangalore, South Kanara, North Kanara, Dharwar and Shimoga—even though all districts show some representation. Of the 482 samitis and bhajan mandalis in 2002, the Bangalore Metropolitan Region alone had 71 centers (14.7 percent of the total number in the state). Many of the other centers are also located in urban areas giving the Karnataka Sai Organization a clearly urban bias. The oldest samiti in Bangalore is probably the Malleswaram samiti that began its existence about 1960 although there were other bhajan groups in the city by that time. Many of these groups were founded by those who had been drawn to Sathya Sai Baba during the early years of his mission and many knew him personally, had traveled with him, or had fairly regular meetings with him.14 The Indiranagar samiti (known after 1988 more formally as the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization, Indiranagar Unit) is one of the larger ones in the city and part of the East Zone of the Sai Organization in the city.15 It stands in an upper-class neighborhood that emerged as a planned suburb in eastern Bangalore in the 1960s and 1970s and adjoins Someshvarapura. The samiti had its beginnings in 1973, meeting at ﬁ rst in the houses of devotees in the neighborhood. By 1981 there were about 45 people in the samiti, most of them associated with the public sector, defense, the police, and administrative services although

14 These details were provided by Mr. Nagesh Dhakappa, President of the Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organisation, Karnataka (interview, November 28, 2002). 15 The samitis in Bangalore are grouped into four zones named after the directions of the compass; these then form part of a district organization and are further grouped into a state structure with a president. If some of these have properties, funds, and other physical assets, they are controlled by the Karnataka State Trust of which the State President is an ex-ofﬁ cio member.

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there were also some business people and families who had returned to settle in Bangalore from places like East Africa. While the activities of the Indiranagar samiti are common to those carried out by other samiti in the city, it is unusual in that it also has a temple associated with it today that belongs to the State Trust called “Sai Darshan” (“vision of Sai”) inaugurated by Sathya Sai Baba in 1988 (see Figure 51). The temple is double-storied, painted bright blue with pink pillars and interspersed with yellow or cream. Over the entrance is an image of Ganesha fl anked by two Sarva Dharma pillars. It is the fi rst temple of its kind in Bangalore where regular rituals are performed for Sathya Sai Baba.16 Men and women participate in bhajans, but the morning rituals are carried out exclusively by female devotees. The main altar area is on the ground fl oor and contains a large photograph of Sathya Sai Baba with an empty chair alongside on which Baba sits when he visits the temple (see Figure 52). On the right hand side of the photograph is an image of Shirdi Sai Baba made of white marble in the

Fig. 51. Sai Darshan exterior (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

16 While it is the ﬁ rst in Bangalore to have such a temple, another called “Sai Gitan- jali” was opened in Jayaprakash Nagar, a suburb on the south side of Bangalore.

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classic seated pose with his hand raised in blessing; in front of Sathya Sai Baba’s picture is an image of Ganesha. Below the elevated altar is another framed picture of Baba, an imprint of his feet ( paduka) and the emblem of the Sai Organization. Dividing the prayer area is a red carpet that separates the space of women from men during the performance of rituals. The ﬂ oor above is used for a variety of purposes: as an area for free tuition for poor children from the neighborhood, for the homeopathic clinic, for putting up dramas, and meetings. Oversee- ing these activities are two life-sized pictures of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba. The construction of Sai Darshan began in 1986 and by 1988 the main hall was completed, based partly on voluntary devotee contributions in cash and kind and some money given by Sathya Sai Baba, the driving force behind it being a devotee called Mr. U.B. Kushalappa. Its design was based on that of early buildings at Brindavan looking more like South Indian temple architecture rather than the more “global” designs that emerged from the Sai movement during the 1990s. Sathya Sai Baba took a personal interest in it and also advised on the design of the altar and other details. The facade, including the image of Ganesha, was done by a traditional sculptor from Andhra Pradesh and another

Fig. 52. Sai Darshan interior (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

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artist from Ramnagaram near Bangalore. The picture, Ganesha image, and chair in the main altar were established by 1988 at the time of the inauguration. The upper hall was completed in 1991–1992. One year later, fulfi lling a dream of a devotee, a couch (in the form of a serpent on which the deity Vishnu lies) was put in Sathya Sai Baba’s room on the upper fl oor of the building. The Shirdi Sai Baba image was gifted by another devotee in 1994; while it is placed in the altar area, it is not consecrated due to the explicit instructions of Sathya Sai Baba, who did not want this to become a temple to Shirdi Sai Baba where regular rituals would then have to be performed. Interestingly, Sai Darshan, although in all senses a temple to Sathya Sai Baba, is listed in the Bangalore Development Authority records as a community hall.17 The Indiranagar samiti has a convener selected by other members and chooses three coordinators to oversee the educational, spiritual, and service wings. The activities of the educational wing involve a child development program (Bal Vikas) on Mondays. The spiritual wing activities include morning rituals performed by women devotees in batches everyday by rotation and evening bhajans. On Mondays, bhajans are conducted in people’s homes by turns. Study circles for devotees that focus on Sai literature and other scriptures also take place on Saturdays in addition to Veda chanting classes on Thursdays and Fridays. There are regular lectures given by speakers on spiritual subjects about once a month. The service wing conducts a weekly medical camp on Sundays offering both allopathic and homeopathic treatments to 80 to 100 patients; periodic vision and dental camps also take place for the benefi t of the economically disadvantaged. The devotees have also sponsored a number of eye, heart, and other surgeries. There is a monthly meal scheme called the Narayana Seva where about 350–400 poor people are given the gift of lunch as a service to the divine. Food is cooked at Sai Darshan’s kitchens chiefl y by female devotees and a full meal (rice, curry, vegetables, yoghurt rice, a sweet dish) is served by male and female volunteers on banana-leaf plates to those seated in the courtyard. The poor are treated like honored guests at a wedding or some other festive occasion. The service wing also undertakes outreach activities to an old age home, a school for the visually impaired, the

17 The details in this paragraph are based on an interview with Dr. V.A. Sastry on November 26, 2002. He was associated with the construction activities at Sai Darshan as a consequence of his involvement in the Sai movement from 1981 onwards.

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Spastics Society School, a hospice, an orphanage, and an adopted slum in other parts of the city. Sometimes special service needs are met: in 1999, for instance, Sai Darshan members contributed truckloads of clothing, blankets and footwear for the victims of the Orissa cyclone in 1999.18 Multiple truckloads of materials also left from Sai Darshan for relief efforts after the December 2004 tsunami. One signiﬁ cant recent service activity is carried out by the youth wing of Sai Darshan at Bovi Palya village about 35 miles away from Bangalore: they have worked to renovate the village temple, organized medical help, found jobs for young men, and introduced a Bal Vikas program for children. Perhaps the central service activity in this samiti is a daily evening tuition program (begun in 1988) with about 35 volunteers for 175–180 school children (mostly from government-run schools) coming from economically disadvantaged families. Apart from classes, yoga, dance lessons, theater activities, and computer classes are also made available to them and scholarships and books are distributed to meritorious students. These children have performed numerous annual plays drawn from mythological themes based on stories from the life of Krishna, the Kannada poet Purandaradasa, and the great devotee, Dhruva, some of them being performed before Sathya Sai Baba either at Brindavan or at Sai Darshan. Sewing classes are also provided for their mothers and other working women. Volunteers (known as active workers), over a hundred people, carry out most of the educational and service activities in the Indiranagar samiti, although the number of devotees is a much larger ﬁ gure. Most of the active workers are distributed fairly equally among the four linguistic groups in South India and also include a large number of Punjabi- speakers. They come from a range of castes, although there seem to be no Scheduled Castes, Muslims, or Christians among them. Most of the workers are housewives, men and women formerly or currently employed in the army, police, or public sector companies, as chartered accountants, scientists, doctors, engineers, computer scientists, teachers, private company employees, and bank employees. In this, the samiti is fairly representative of the neighborhood in which it stands. As professionals and public-sector employees, these persons are tied to the models of the developmental city and the information city in

18 These details are taken from a report on Sai Darshan activities written by Dr. Meena Kaushik (Sai Kusumanjali 2002: 20–22).

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Bangalore. As devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, their urban-spatial imagination is one in which new pathways can emerge, literally and symbolically, through the power of the guru. Thus, even the fact that the road on which Sai Darshan stands has been renamed “road of the vision of Sai” (Sri Sai Darshan Marg) is of signifi cance for some. The building embodies a complex set of values for others: To me, “Sai Darshan” embodies a multitude of manifestations. This temple of my dear living God offers me a sense of Prashanthi and the serenity of Brindavan. This looks to be my “bodhi” tree where I try to see inward and realize who I am rather than to show others what I am. This temple of healing mends my mind and keeps me fi t through different service activities . . . It is also another large family, a home away from home, infusing in me a sense of security. (“Veda Chanting” by C. Manimeghalai, Sai Kusumanjali 2002: 52) Several accounts and testimonies collected in a souvenir volume called Sai Kusumanjali prepared by Sai Darshan members contribute an understanding of the sensibility of an extremely transnational and cosmopolitan group of devotees, many of whom have lived previously in cities like Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, San Jose, Tokyo, Bombay, Kampala, and Dubai. Each feels tied in some personal way to the fi gure of the guru who is ever-present to them: What is truly amazing is that every one of Baba’s devotees… is touched in some special way by Swami. Talk to anyone in Brindavan or Parthi or in any gathering of devotees—and he or she will have a Sai story to tell. There are thousands who may not have had the opportunity of talking to Swami or spending some time in His presence. There are thousands elsewhere in this country or abroad who have not been to Parthi or Brindavan at all but all of them have been touched and infl uenced in some inexplicable way by Swami . . . He is always with you. (“Lessons from a personal diary” by S.N.S. Murthy, Sai Kusumanjali 2002: 60–61) Recalling that her family was caught in the midst of an earthquake in Tokyo in 1980, a female devotee writes of a mysterious stranger suddenly appearing to help: Our children aged 4 and 7 were fast asleep. It was pouring outside. One could hear rumbling noises and shrill whistling sounds. I was ter- rifi ed and started crying . . . My husband very calmly suggested, “Why don’t you call out to your Sai Ram.” Trembling with fear, I did so. The doorbell rang immediately. A small dark curly haired guard . . . told me not to worry although everyone had left the building and that he would take care of us. A few minutes passed. Another announcement. It said

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that the danger was now over. The guard…left. The next morning when I went to the security department to thank them for sending help, they gasped with surprise, particularly at my description of the man and his uniform. He had on a navy blue one and theirs was a grey-blue. It had to be Swami, of course! (“A spiritual awakening” by Maya Kalyanpur, Sai Kusumanjali 2002: 2) A male devotee writing of a medical crisis says: In 1996, I was fi nding diffi culty in passing urine and Dr. Joseph Anthony diagnosed the problem as connected with the prostate gland. Since all the tests conducted indicated malignancy, the doctor advised immediate operation and if the biopsy proved positive, we would have to go in for a further operation . . . On Sunday, following the mass prayer by all the devotees of “Sai Darshan,” prasadam [consecrated foods] was sent to me. On Monday afternoon, the result of the biopsy became available and the verdict was: Benign! . . . I was convinced that I was saved from a potential fatal fate only by Bhagawan’s grace. (“A personal testimony” by R.S. Mani, Sai Kusumanjali 2002: 45–46) A central feature in many accounts is the annihilation of space and time. Writing about his mother-in-law’s visit to Bahrain where he lived before settling in Bangalore, a devotee reminisces about one evening in 1983 when they were all invited to dinner in another devotee’s house. His mother-in-law was reluctant to come and stayed back at home. At about 9:30 PM, someone knocked on the door of the fl at where she was staying alone. She was hesitant to open the door but when the knocking persisted, she did: To her utter shock and amazement, she found Swami standing in His physical form with an apple in His hand. She was about to shut the door on his face . . . Swami stopped her and said in Tamil: “I brought this apple for Dwarakanadh, take it.” But my mother-in-law was too shocked to react and did not take the apple. Then Swami materialized Vibhuthi [ash], applied it on her forehead and walked a few feet and disappeared! (“Swami’s miracle” by N.R. Dwarakanadh, Sai Kusumanjali 2002: 5) At fi rst, when the family returned, they concluded she had been dreaming. She then showed them the ash on her forehead: as a non-believer in Sathya Sai Baba and devout Vaishnava, she would not have applied it there. Thereafter, ash began appearing on photographs of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba in the family’s house. The ash on Shirdi Sai Baba’s photograph was coarse and brown with hardly any fragrance and resembled that from the log fi re in Shirdi, while the ash on Sathya Sai Baba’s picture was soft and smelled like the ash that he often produces, writes the devotee.

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These narratives contribute to the vision of a virtual urban space that is, in the devotees’ lives, compatible with the information city envisaged by planners and corporate players.19 In this virtual space, the miraculous and magical inﬁ ltrate daily life and synchronicities abound, upsetting mechanical ideas of cause and effect. This is a networked world of devotees bound to each other by invisible threads of connectivity and service. Within each locale and in each devotee’s story stands Sathya Sai Baba as an accessible magus and ever-present ﬁ gure.

The Sacrality of Urban Sprawl

Cities like Bangalore have developed within a spatialized chronology including models of the gardeners’ or garden city, the modern city, the developmental city, and the information city, each manifested in speciﬁ c features of the built environment and still commanding the loyalty of diverse constituencies. In the course of these developments, new suburbs, technoburbs, or exurbs have emerged with different relationships to the central city and the new decentered spatiality. Obviously, this process of creating suburbs and settlements socially and spatially separate from the center city, the urban core, or the old city is not conﬁ ned to America or Europe but is to be found in many parts of the world present and past. Modern suburbanization is a result of complex forces—global capital, urban deconcentration, state policy, nuclear families, and so on—and some suburbs of Bangalore can look like parts of Atlanta or Nairobi. Anthony King (2004: 103) calls these supraurbs or globurbs, “forms and settlements on the outskirts of the city, the origins of which—economic, social, cultural, architectural—are generated less by developments inside the city, or even inside the country, and more by external forces beyond its boundaries.” Whatever terms we use to describe these forms, spaces, and processes, their similarities and differences, it is important to recognize that they are also sites for new forms of religious experience. The goal of this chapter, and the cases described in it, is to emphasize that models of the city are by

19 This virtual reality in Bangalore that incorporates both Sathya Sai Baba and software companies like Infosys has been remarked upon: see “Meanwhile: Old mantras and new software side by side,” by Shashi Tharoor, The International Herald Tribune, December 3, 2002.

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themselves incomplete unless other cultures of space are brought into a meaningful relationship with the fabric of the urban. This chapter, like the two which follow, explores the sacrality of urban sprawl—the creation of new sacred spaces and religious subjectivities within non- centralized urban places and suburbanization processes. The Sai Baba tradition’s intersection with Bangalore’s suburbs, the expansion of the boundaries of the city eastwards and southwards, and the creation of peri-urban zones has produced various styles of devotion and practice. Here, memories of other spaces and regional or global affi liations are recollected, transposed, and displaced onto forms of worship, architecture, festival celebrations, and so on, providing key symbolic markers and idioms of spatial practice. The careers of Shivamma Thayee, Narasimha Swami, Sathya Sai Baba, and their devotees and the fashioning of ideational links to Shirdi Sai Baba—as renouncer or village deity, universal guru, or avatar of Sai—have led to the emergence of new manifestos about urban space. Shivamma Thayee’s ashram recreates Shirdi Sai Baba in the memory of older village deities and as part of a Shaiva history, while affi rming his role (and hers) as renouncer rather than as priest. The ashram also brings monastic seclusion into the city, an almost extra-urban refuge within the driving expansion toward the Electronic City. The temple associated with Narasimha Swami is architecturally split, as is Shirdi Sai Baba’s body in it, and tends to be a barrier for non-Hindu devotees while uniting several sectarian groups. The suburban constituencies of the modern and developmental city, who appear at the Shirdi Sai temple, seem to exhibit a quiet discomfort with Shirdi Sai Baba’s Sufi aspects while forging links to a pan-Indian construction of Hindu tradition. The fate of Brindavan, once a colonial exurb and a peri-urban retreat, now lies intertwined with the technoburb of the EPIP and Bangalore’s high technology profi le. The SSSIHMS located there produces anomalous meanings for ideas of export, technology, and globalism. The virtual devotional space created by the Sai Organization in planned extensions like Indiranagar renders incomplete the hegemonic claims of the information city while returning Sai Baba in the form simultaneously of an avatar and familiar magus. Even if they exist partly within the shadows of the developmental state or its software inheritors, spaces within the cityscape such as temples or highways and the pathways between and beyond them created through these fi gures allow other stories to be written, sensed,

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and practiced. They draw attention to social and discursive lacunae in models of the city, staging possibilities for the understanding of the urban and the civic tied to the inner, affective, cultural, and spiritual worlds of the subjects of the metropolis.

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SOMATIC REGIMES OF CITIZENSHIP IN NAIROBI

In the Tracks of Baba

While I was idly watching a documentary one night on the “Out of Africa” thesis about the dispersion of homo erectus and homo sapiens on the public television channel in my apartment in Atlanta, my attention was caught when an interviewee spoke passionately about the history of the “Africoid” people throughout the world. Images of this population fl ashed across the screen: Australian aborigines, some citizens in the Middle East, and so on, and then suddenly and without explanation, an image of Sathya Sai Baba. I was struck by how obvious this connection seemed to the interviewee and also about the media tracks made by Sathya Sai Baba’s images that resulted in him being connected to Africa. It is doubtful that the interviewee knew much about Baba and was making claims based on his perception of Baba’s appearance such as his hair. He may not have known that Sathya Sai Baba had once traveled to East Africa in the early post-Independence years. This visit coincided with the growth of a devotion to him there and the formation of Sai Centers in other parts of urban Africa. The interviewee’s comments did signal the reciprocal links between Africa and South Asia, whether or not we accept the “Africoid” heritage of Sai Baba. There is now considerable scholarship about South Asians in Africa, the roles played by mercantile communities and capitalists, the philanthropic contributions of Asians, the labor fl ows that coincided with the colonial presence in South Asia and Africa, and Asian-African literature. There is also greater acknowledgement about the experience and presence of Africans in India, the slave trade to the sub-continent, and communities of Sidis in Gujarat, Karnataka, or Andhra Pradesh, who trace their roots to Africa.1 This historical, fi ctional, and ethnographic work serves to contextualize the tracks that have been forged in the Indian Ocean world including that of Sai Baba devotion.

1 A literature review of the former is impossible here but for Africans in India see, for example, Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Alpers (2004), Sadiq Ali (1996).

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A study by Markovits (2000) of the circulation of merchants and commercial workers between South Asia and other world regions before and after colonial rule is particularly relevant for this chapter. He makes three main arguments against a unitary notion of the South Asian diaspora. First, since the start of the nineteenth century most South Asians in the “diaspora” were not permanent but temporary workers, many of whom returned and left again. He suggests that these movements “belong to the sphere of ‘circulation’ more than to the sphere of ‘migration’ ” (p. 5). His approach does not privilege the arrival points of migrants but also examines points of departure. Second, region and locality were more important features of migrants’ identities than religion or ethnicity. Thus, migrants from a particular village or region in India maintained links of sociality with each other (regardless of other differentials) in the new places where they found themselves. Third, there were differences in occupation and class among migrant South Asians. Before 1950, most were unskilled laborers, skilled and semi-skilled workers, and commercial groups. Later, middle-class professionals became more important. Today, migrants and immigrants in business, academia, and the professions, who are very mobile geographically and socially and yet maintain links to points of origin, comprise an “international bourgeoisie” with “great diversity in terms of regional origins and historical trajectories” (ibid. p. 282). As we will see, these aspects are borne out in the case of the South Asian devotees of Sai Baba, who are less of a unitary ethnic diaspora than a networked global bourgeoisie with many points of origin, departure, and historical connection to Africa. The formation of Sai Centers and the activities supported by them have to be contextualized within the growth of voluntary associations in African cities, where the increase in urban population has accelerated in the last ﬁ ve decades. The population of the urban agglomeration of Nairobi, for instance, grew from about 137,000 persons in 1950 to 2.7 million in 2005.2 African cities today are experiencing a crisis of services, infrastructure, and democratic participation: about 75 percent of urban services and needs lie in the “informal” sector. While voluntary associations played a role in earlier decades, the urban crisis has highlighted their role in cities as service providers and their inﬂ uence in the developmental process, governance, and civil society (Tostensen

2 “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision,” http://www.esa.un.org/unup, accessed July 13, 2006.

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et al. 2001). In particular, faith-based organizations in urban Africa have adapted to generate infrastructure and hope in the midst of fragmented, mobile, and transitional communities—places where the state or international organizations are not always effective (Winkler 2006). Many of the activities of Sai Centers in Africa cater to the needs of such groups including refugees, migrants to the city, shantytown dwellers, children, and orphans. In the era of economic liberalization, new forms of informality have arisen in Africa. For example, people may hold formal and informal jobs and large numbers of the middle class or lower middle class live in shantytowns and squatter settlements, often negatively referred to as slums. These “shadow cities” house immense numbers of people: for example, more than half the city of Nairobi lives in shantytowns and 300 new inhabitants arrive each day, many forced to seek homes in them (Neuwirth 2005). Shantytowns and squatter settlements in Nairobi are an outcome of its colonial history and segregation policies followed by the British. Founded in 1899 as a stop on the Mombasa-Uganda railway, Nairobi became the headquarters of the East Africa Protectorate in 1907 and when Kenya became a colony in 1920, its capital. The growth of the city was an integral part of the reorientation of urbanization from Mombasa and the coast to the hinterland. Nairobi bore all the marks of a segregated city with European, Indian, and African areas and the colonial regime displaying a general reluctance to deal with the housing and service needs of Africans, a problem that was aggravated as rural- urban migration increased (Aseka 1990; Lee-Smith and Lamba 2000). Colonial settlement legacies continued into the postcolonial period (formal independence came in 1963) and while efforts were made to address the needs of the growing population, these were mostly inef- fective and a “self-help” city emerged with large numbers of people engaged in micro-enterprise and the informal sector (Hake 1977; King 1996; Lee-Smith and Lamba 2000). The city is still divided in many ways: metal-roofed shacks and posh gated communities, informal markets and pricey hotels, illicit work and United Nations programs. The structural adjustment policies of the Kenyan government initiated in 1986 and the withdrawal of the state from services and subsidies led to the further proliferation of shantytowns. Infrastructure distribution was dependent more on income levels rather than population density and it was calculated that by the early 1990s, informal settlements occupied less than 6% of the residential land of the city but had 55%

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of the city’s people. An estimated 60% lived in informal settlements by the end of the decade. Today, somewhere between 1.5–1.8 million people live in Nairobi’s shantytowns.3 Most shantytowns are located on state-owned land with temporary or illegal leases. Kibera, one of Nairobi’s nearly 200 shantytowns, is said to be Africa’s largest with about 700,000 to 1,000,000 people.4 While Kibera is an old settlement with mud homes, the newer ones such as Mukuru and Sinai are made of corrugated steel, lying east and south “for miles along the edge of the city’s industrial area, through abandoned quarries, past the massive garbage dump and stretching on towards the international airport” (Neuwirth 2005: 72). People may work in these shantytowns, there are markets and hotels here, self-help groups among women, and many middle-class families alongside the poor. Employment by shanty dwellers ranges from part-time casual labor in the formal sector to petty trade, small manufacturing activities and illicit work; unemployment is common. There is a gendered division of labor: Nelson (1997: 165–166) states that in Mathare Valley, men carry out most of the activities that require skill in the industrialized sector or capital investment while women are in activities related to the domestic realm such as the provision of beer, food, child care or sexual companionship. Owners of homes rake in great profi ts, because people are essentially tenants and tenure is often insecure. Confl icts over rent can be very long-drawn. Violence, informal economies, tribal disputes, drugs and guns thrive as gangs and brokers fi ght over resources and markets. It is generally agreed that even today there is a lack of a coherent policy to guide urban development. Community-based organizations, faith-based organizations and religious groups have tried to fi ll in the vacuum of services. Efforts by non-governmental organizations such as the Nairobi Youth Network for Peace founded in 2002, Operation

3 See “Divided City: Information Poverty in Nairobi’s Slums” by Rasna Warah, http://www.portalcommunicacio.com/dialeg/paper/pdf/220_warah.pdf, accessed March 29, 2005; “The effect of economic crisis on youth precariousness in Nairobi” by Alfred O. Agwanda, Philippe Bocquier, Anna Khasakhala and Samuel Owuor (2004), http://www.dial.prd.fr/dial_publications/PDF/Doc_travail/2004–04.pdf, accessed March 29, 2005; “Report on the Nairobi Urban Integration Project,” http://www. infra-nairobi.not/now/nurip%20full%20report.pdf, accessed March 29, 2005; “Slums are the Heartbeat of Cities” by Rasna Warah, http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ develop/2003/1006slums.htm, accessed March 28, 2005; Bryson (2002). 4 “Divided City: Information Poverty in Nairobi’s Slums” by Rasna Warah, http:// www.portalcommunicacio.com/dialeg/paper/pdf/220_warah.pdf, accessed March 29, 2005.

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Firimbi, and others have responded to this crisis. There are hundreds of churches in Nairobi’s informal settlements.5 This chapter examines the practical spirituality of Sai Centers in the context of voluntary associations in urban Africa, the infrastructural crisis, informality, and shantytowns. It begins by recounting the journey made by Sathya Sai Baba to East Africa in 1968 and its signiﬁ cance for South Asian devotees in the newly emergent post-independence states. It then focuses attention on the relationship of Sai devotion to the African city, and in particular, to Nairobi, in the new millennium. It emphasizes the somatic and material modes—architecture, food, dreams, or singing—through which devotees make their home in the city. These present creative ways of being citizens and being located in space. While spatial and material inequalities produce one kind of mapping of Nairobi’s landscape, separations are never absolute and circulations, not all of which are visible, occur across urban space. There are many other ways in which the city can be experienced, produced, and sensed—through rumors, bus travel, or visual cultures.6 Simone (2005a: 3) writes that in African cities “a new urban infrastructure is being built with the very bodies and life stories of city residents” and the crisis of sociality faced in these cities (vulnerability of social connections, publics, or livelihoods) is also one of possibility: “This is the possibility for the creation of new urban sensibilities and collaborations that is increasingly being expressed through more transversal ways of experiencing, navigating and conceptualizing everyday life in the city” (Simone 2005b: 517).7 Roberts and Roberts (2003: 21) emphasize that Mouride sacred images and visual culture in Dakar, Senegal, centered on the life and teachings of a saint, Sheikh Amadou Bamba, appear in homes, junkyards, vehicles, or on clothes to become part of an arena for “people to address the misfortunes, contestations and transitions of

5 “Guns in the Borderlands, Reducing the Demand for Small Arms” by Taya Weiss, http://www.iss.co.za/pubs/Monographs/No95/Chap3.htm, accessed March 28, 2005; “Grappling with the burden of expanding slums in Nairobi,” http://www.warmafrica. com/index/geo/8/cat/1/a/a/artid/541, accessed March 28, 2005; “Servant Partners,” http://www.servantpartners.org/neighborhoods/nairobi/daybreak2.shtml, accessed April 2, 2005; Bryson (2002); Lee-Smith and Lamba (2000). 6 See also Granqvist (2004), who argues that various vehicles such as the Nairobi mini-bus (matatu), novels, or theater offer a medium for other articulations and maps; and Myers (2003), who shows that the effects of enframing strategies in African colonial cities on postcolonial inheritors are different from those originally intended. 7 See also Simone (2004).

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everyday life.” The complexity of the formal and informal, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, temporal and spatial, and forms and spheres of circulation require new conceptual categories for studying urban life. Such categories must reﬂ ect the importance of somatic economies that create contemporary urban contexts. Somatic regimes also structure novel forms of citizenship that are not equivalent to liberal ideas of citizenship in a nation-state. Holston (1999) and van der Veer (2002), for instance, show that cities today may be producing new sites for ideas and practices of the self and citizenship that go beyond legal, national, and bourgeois notions. Joseph (1999: 3) writes that citizenship is not merely a legal category, or about passports, but a cultural performance: “. . . citizenship is not organic but must be acquired through public and psychic participation.” While the nation-state has developed elaborate modes for its citizens to acquire citizenship through performative forms (Independence Day parades, museums, state-run television programs, or memorials), there are also other body cultures for members of the polis that are not rooted in nationalist paradigms.8 These cultures are located in the recognition that there are other sovereignties that claim allegiance—including the sover- eignty of devotion—that produce their own temporalities, spatialities, circulations, and sensory formations. This chapter explores the somatic and performative regimes of devotional citizenship in Nairobi.

East Africa and Sai Baba

The fi rst mention of devotees from East Africa is on the occasion of the World Conference of Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organizations in 1968: Dr. C.G. Patel from Kampala, Uganda, seems to have played a major role in inviting Baba to come to East Africa to meet devotees in the newly independent nations of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania (Kasturi 1972: 6–7). To 1,700 delegates at the conference on May 17, Sathya Sai Baba affi rmed that his message was meant for all nations and that he intended to visit East Africa. About fi fty days later, on June 30, Sathya Sai Baba left by plane from Santa Cruz airport in Bombay for Embaksi airport in Nairobi (Kasturi 1972: 10–22; 1998: 1–2).

8 See also Hancock (2002) on somatic citizenship.

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On reaching Nairobi on June 30, following a welcome at the airport by devotees, Dr. Patel drove Baba to Kampala, stopping at Nakuru where devotees had gathered, and passing through Eldoret where a crowd stood to meet him.9 On the border Sathya Sai Baba was provided a pilot car by the Ugandan state and reached Kampala in the early hours of the morning on July 1. Outside Dr. Patel’s bungalow, 2,000 people were singing bhajans while waiting to greet Baba. In the morning and also the next day, there was darshan for all those gathered, including devotees of South Asian origin but also many Africans. Baba invited many into the bungalow for interviews, making gifts of holy ash, talismans, lockets, pictures of Christ or himself, and is reported to have healed many. He also visited the Sanatana Dharma Samaj temple and the Baha’i House of Worship in Kampala. On July 3, following a visit to Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania, Baba arrived in Nairobi where he addressed his fi rst public meeting to a very large gathering in the city stressing the divinity of each human being. On July 5, his party visited Nairobi National Park and Nanyuki where they stayed at Secret Valley. The next morning they were on their way back to Nairobi to fl y once again to Kampala. There Baba was visited at Dr. Patel’s residence by the Indian High Commissioner, K.P.R. Singh, as well as several African leaders, including General Idi Amin Dada. He addressed gatherings of doctors, businessmen, Rotar- ians and Lions, students from Makarere University, and devotees. On July 7, his fi rst public meeting in Kampala on the grounds of the Patidar building, his message again emphasized the single principle of divinity in all beings. Other meetings followed over the next few days: it is clear from Kasturi’s account that Baba met people of African and South Asian descent, devotees and members of the public, offi cials, industrialists, and villagers; the crowds at the public meetings numbered thousands. On July 9, Baba met delegations from Nairobi, Jinja, Mbale, Tororo, Nakuru, Eldoret and other towns in Uganda and Kenya who wished to establish institutions based on his message. He decided that Sai Centers in East Africa would function under the general guidance of the headquarters in Kampala. He also gave guidelines for performing service including free medical care and legal aid. Gurupurnima day,

9 The details of the rest of this account of Baba’s visit to East Africa are from Kasturi (1972: 22–44) and Kasturi (1998).

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July 10, was celebrated outside Dr. Patel’s house in Kampala: bhajans were sung and ash was distributed by Baba personally. Baba also had longer interactions with speciﬁ c people gathered; there were reports that he even spoke Swahili to some. On July 12, Baba’s party visited Murchison Falls National Park and then traveled to Kikonda village near Masindi where a bhajan center in “Afro-architectural style” built by devotees was to be inaugurated (Kasturi 1972: 39). The gathering included South Asians and Africans and Baba once again spent some time there with the group. Back at Kampala on July 13, Baba was met by devotees from Mwaza, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, and Eldoret, who were trying to persuade him to visit them before his trip drew to an end. The next day, members of Sai Centers and bhajan groups from other parts of Uganda arrived at Dr. Patel’s bungalow to bid farewell to Baba. He left by air for Nairobi and then proceeded to Bombay, reaching there on July 15. An unpublished account by Amritlal Shah from Nairobi provides more intimate details of the development of Sai devotion in the region.10 In 1965, Shah (who owned a textile business in Ngara in Nairobi) was following Jainism while his wife attended the Shiva temple in Ronald Ngala Street. About this time, he began reading books about Sai Baba and shortly thereafter joined a group of devotees that had begun to meet to sing bhajans at the home of Ramniklal Vithlani in the South C area of Nairobi. They learned that Sai Groups had already begun in Kampala about one or two years earlier at Ravibai Sompura’s house. They began to travel to Kampala for bhajans or would be visited by the Kampala Group, who began to instruct them on how to conduct bhajans. Dr. Patel and his wife, Madhuben, were already known to be part of that circle in Kampala. Other activities occurred: a function in Kampala drew 200–300 persons, a two-day seminar on Baba’s teachings in Nairobi was attended by 35 people, and bhajans were held in different homes. Publications such as Sathya Sai Speaks produced in India became available to devotees in Kampala and Nairobi. In 1967, news came through Madhuben Patel that Baba had promised to visit Africa; this was conﬁ rmed by Amritlal Shah’s wife, Savita, who visited Baba in India the same year and had a meeting with him

10 A copy of his unpublished written account (“When the Lord Stepped Foot in Kenya: The Visit to Kenya of Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba”) was given to me by Amritlal Shah in Nairobi on December 23, 2001.

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in Ootacamund. In June 1968, the dates for his visit were given by Dr. Patel and preparations began immediately: Amritlal Shah was part of the reception committee and persuaded the airport authorities to permit a car to drive up to the aircraft to greet Baba when he arrived. Twelve families in Nairobi seemed to play important roles in making arrangements for Baba’s visit that included preparing circulars about Baba and distributing them to the public, arranging for fl owers from Sai Nurseries in Westlands, erecting a stage, and inviting the 65 registered organizations in Kenya to attend the meeting. The venue chosen for the public meeting in Nairobi was the Visa Oshwal Mahajan Wadi, a Jain center on Limuru Road in northern Nairobi. Finally, on June 30, Amritlal Shah writes that the devotees received Baba in Nairobi. The newspaper, Daily Nation, separately reported: About 2,000 devotees of His Holiness Bhagwan Shri Satya Sai Baba congregated at Nairobi Airport yesterday to welcome their spiritual leader on his arrival from India . . . He was garlanded profusely and devotees rushed to touch his feet, have darshan (pay respects) and sang religious songs in his praise. One of the captions below a picture read: The holy leader was reputed to have said he “knew” seven sick people in the welcoming crowd. He blessed them and promised to return to Nairobi on Wednesday. In India, the sadhu [saint, religious mendicant] is reputed to have affected many “cures” of sick people. (Daily Nation, July 1, 1968) In Nairobi, during his fi rst public meeting there, an estimated 25,000 people were gathered at Limuru Road. Baba gave a talk in Telugu, walked amidst the crowd and received letters, gave blessings, and spoke in Hindi to Asians and Swahili and Kikuyu to Kenyan Africans. The twelve devotee families of Nairobi were later given specifi c instructions by Baba on starting and registering a Sai Center. After Baba’s visit they formed a Center in Nairobi’s South C Park Road where they held bhajans every Thursday and Saturday and a study circle every Wednesday. The Center was registered offi cially in 1968.

The Asian Presence in the Space of East Africa

Since Sathya Sai Baba’s visit to East Africa in the late 1960s was the only time he traveled out of India, this event was particularly signiﬁ cant

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for South Asian devotees in the newly emergent African nation-states and we have to contextualize his journey within colonial/postcolonial history and the urban experience. I am concerned here with the politics of identity and difference, for this politics “established under colonialism and negotiated through a range of postcolonial formations is not only ‘practiced’ in particular settings. . . . but also activated through ‘real’ space” ( Jacobs 1996: 4–5). We can begin by dividing the Asian (or South Asian and Indian) and Arab presence in East Africa during the last century and a half into four discernible phases, while keeping in mind that this presence was not that of a unitary diaspora and there was a great deal of circulation with many people arriving to depart later: (1) the colonial phase from the late nineteenth century to the emerging nationalisms of the early to mid-twentieth century; (2) the phase of the newly independent nation-states, Africanization programs, and the crisis of citizenship of the mid-1960s; (3) the phase of exodus and exile from about the mid- 1960s to the mid-1970s; and (4) the post-nationalist global phase from the 1980s to 2000 that coincides with structural adjustment processes and the urban crisis. Until the nineteenth century, Asians were mainly conﬁ ned to coastal areas and in mercantile activities.11 The South Asian presence was strengthened under European colonialism, both in German and Brit- ish East Africa, as labor demand activated a substantial movement of peoples. First under the indenture system, and later through the free immigration of traders, artisans, bankers, lawyers, contractors, clerks, and other professionals, thousands arrived in East Africa (Forster et al. 2000; Gregory 1993). The British encouraged workers—mostly from Punjab and Sind—to work on the construction of a railway line from the coast of Kenya to the interior in Uganda. Between 1896 (when the ﬁ rst coolies arrived in Mombasa) and 1901 (when the Uganda Railway was completed), about 32,000 Indian workers arrived in East Africa of which 16,312 indentured workers returned to India and 6,724 stayed on (Don Nanjira 1976: 5; Gregory 1993: 10–12). Many moved into new occupations as traders, in manual and clerical work, construction and administration; owning agricultural land was discouraged (Forster

11 There were exceptions to this: some Asians, for instance, from the Aga Khan community of Khoja Ismailis established themselves in the mainland early in the nineteenth century (Himbara 1997: 7).

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et al. 2000: 83). A majority of the new workers—almost 80 percent of all Asians—came from Gujarat. Approximately three-quarters were Hindus and the rest Muslim, mainly Ismaili (Williams 2001: 202–204). While the business communities shared economically and culturally with each other, many looked to India for their marriage partners in the fi rst generation (Oonk 2004: 9–10). Between the end of World War I and independence, the number of Asians in East Africa grew dramatically: in Kenya, their numbers increased from 25,253 persons in 1921 to 176,613 in 1962; in Uganda, from 5,200 persons in 1921 to 77,400 in 1962; and in Tanganyika, from 10, 209 persons in 1921 to 92,000 in 1962 (Gregory 1993: 13; Don Nanjira 1976: 11). In the early twentieth century, many merchants such as Allidina Visram and Esmailjee Jivanjee became synonymous with trade and the money economy in the region. After World War II, a large number of merchant families such as the Chandarias, the Madhvanis, and Mehtas moved their capital into industrial enterprises (Gregory 1993; Himbara 1997: 8–10). Other Asians owned urban property or worked in skilled professions.12 The colonial system’s racial compartmentalization led to the establishment of schools, cultural associations, and other facilities for various communities. Philanthropic activities in East Africa by Asian migrants fl ourished in the fi rst half of the twentieth century; these efforts were initially directed into ethnic and communal schools, hospitals, or libraries and later cut across racial, religious, and caste lines (Gregory 1992). The connections between Indians in East Africa and the sub-continent continued to be the basis for cultural identity even though many could speak English and Swahili (Williams 2001: 208–209). The pioneers born between 1880 and 1920 had settled with their families in East Africa and those born between 1920 and 1960 had made East Africa their home. Many of them developed a preference for partners born in East Africa (Oonk 2004: 9, 16). In the early 1960s, there were about 360,000 people of Indian origin in East Africa, most of them urban.13 It is estimated that between 1958 and 1962, Hin-

12 By 1939, for instance, the South Asians in Tanganyika owned 90 percent of urban property and 80 percent of the cotton and sisal industry (Forster et al. 2000: 84). Accord- ing to Williams (2001: 203, citing Bhatt 1976: 67), census reports in 1948 show that 92 percent of all carpenters, masons, and builders in Kenya were of Indian origin. 13 “Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora,” 2002: xviii, http://indiandiaspora.nic.in, accessed May 3, 2003.

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dus and Jains in East Africa were about 52.5 percent, Muslims 30.8 percent, Sikhs 8.4 percent, and Christians 7.4 percent (Gregory 1993: 26). When African nationalism became a dominant force, the Asian minority had to consider how they were going to relate to it: unlike Fiji and Guyana, for instance, the Asians were not numerous enough to gain political control (Forster et al. 2000: 86–87). Some had been politically active, however, and worked to bring Asians and Africans into a joint nationalist struggle.14 When Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda became independent between 1962 and 1964, the tripartite race policies and the roles played by the Asian mercantile and business communities as well as their mid-level civil service and professional positions became a source of tension since they personifi ed the legacy of colonial and spatial separation: Whenever they felt a twinge of offi cial disapproval, or heard political leaders talking about Africanisation, a rush of alarm moved swiftly through the community. For the fi rst time people started to understand what had happened to them historically and were forced to confront the consequences of never having developed a political base or even sense. (Alibhai-Brown 1995: 110) The issue of citizenship became particularly important as decolonizing societies wrestled with the relationship of ethnicity, nationality, and the state. East African Asians comprised of four groups: those who were East African nationals by virtue of East African citizenship; those who were nationals of Britain by virtue of their possession of British passports; citizens of countries of the Indian sub-continent; and stateless people or those whose status was unclear (Don Nanjira 1976: 171–172). The constitutions of Kenya and Tanzania allowed citizenship to those who had resided in the nation before independence; registration was to take place within two years. Those with British passports could stay under temporary work permits while those born after independence were automatically citizens. Many Asians and Europeans in East Africa did not embrace citizenship: in Kenya, for instance, 82,000 Indians

14 Around 1900, for instance, the Mombasa Indian Association was formed and similar associations came up in other parts of East Africa, primarily in urban centers. In 1914, the East African Indian National Congress was established in Mombasa with branches in Uganda and Tanzania and several Asian radical activists participated with African leaders in efforts to secure equality and independence through newspapers, trade unions, and other venues.

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obtained British passports while less than 50,000 became citizens.15 The Kenyan Immigration Act of 1967 prioritized citizens in matters of employment: existing resident permits were withdrawn, non-citizens had to apply for new work permits, and many were driven out of work. When they elected to stay as citizens, Asians did enjoy some beneﬁ ts since they were allowed to buy farms previously owned by Europeans (Forster et al. 2000: 88). Hostility against South Asian private enterprise and the Africanization of the civil services led 150,000 resident Indians, most of them families with technical and professional expertise in the private and public sectors, to leave East Africa between 1968 and 1969 (Himbara 1997: 4). This trend continued over the next ten years. In 1962, just prior to independence, the Asian population in Kenya included 176,613 persons but in 1979, only 78,600 persons, a 55.5% decline (Maxon 1995: 113). Many of the British passport-holders of Asian origin went to Britain initially but the British Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968 restrict- ing entry to those who had substantial connections with Britain led to a panic and substantial increase before the law was to come into effect; the Immigration Act of 1971 resulted in further controls. In Tanzania, the policies of nationalization implemented between 1971 and 1973 led to a major exodus. In Uganda, General Idi Amin ousted Milton Obote after a military coup and forced the expulsion of about 50,000 South Asians in 1972.16 In the summer and fall of 1972, about 27,000 Asians arrived in Britain from Uganda (Don Nanjira 1976: 168). Sai Baba’s visit thus occurred during a turbulent period for South Asians. Kasturi’s account provides hints of devotees’ anxiety: for instance, in the insistence that Baba’s message was the strongest and surest basis for racial and regional harmony or the naming of members of the Ugandan government and the Indian High Commissioner who met Baba during his tour. Amritlal Shah also remembers that while in Kampala, Baba indicated that the Indians should leave Uganda and many followed his counsel. Bowen (1988) recounts that the president of the Bradford Sai Center in the United Kingdom, a Mr. Patel, and his wife encountered Sai Baba in Uganda; they had come to believe in his powers even if they did not regard themselves as devotees. A series

15 “Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora,” 2002: 98, http://indiandiaspora.nic.in, accessed May 3, 2003. 16 “Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora,” 2002: 98–100, http://indiandiaspora.nic.in, accessed May 3, 2003; Williams (2001: 211–212).

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of miraculous events occurred prior to their departure from Uganda for England in 1967. Only a couple of days before their leaving, Mr. Patel, who needed money to leave the country, obtained 5,000 shillings suddenly from a stranger in Kampala, who provided him the money without asking him to sign any document. These and other events led to the growth of their commitment to Sathya Sai Baba. They began holding bhajans in their house after they had settled in Bradford (Bowen 1988: 267–274). The expulsion or exodus had more general effects on religious movements and their fate in new homelands such as Canada or Britain. Approximately 50,000 Hindus who had been born in East Africa, including many Gujarati-speakers, settled in Britain (Bowen 1988: 17; Knott 1987).17 Many Gujaratis followed “patterns of chain-migration, coming from the same Indian village, settling in the same African town and living in nearby streets in Leeds” (Knott 1986: 40). Their presence in England led to a sudden spurt in temple-building activities (Coward et al. 2000). David Bowen (1987, 1988) discusses the Sathya Sai Baba movement in Bradford, England, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s as a Hindu religious fellowship (satsangh).18 The congregation included a variety of Gujaratis, but also some families of Punjabi origin; about half of the families had once resided in East African territories.19 Devo- tion to Sathya Sai Baba and belief in his paranormal abilities traveled with the exiles from urban East Africa to other cities. Since the 1980s, in the post-nationalist global phase, there has been a movement of people of South Asian origin back to East Africa

17 Burghart (1987: 7–8) writes that as a result of the Africanization programs in East Africa, and particularly in Uganda, most of the refugees who arrived in Britain were Gujarati-speaking, altering the ethnic composition of South Asians in Britain. About 70 percent of the Hindus living in Britain were Gujarati in origin and 15 percent were Punjabi, reversing the situation after World War II when most of the migrants were Punjabis. 18 The Bradford Sai devotion can be traced back to 1970 when a weekly devotional meeting commenced in the house of the Patels, who had come to the UK from Uganda. This was one of many Hindu and Gujarati organizations that developed in the city during that time. By 1982, there were at least 34 Sai Centers and bhajan Groups in the UK according to Bowen (1988). 19 Taylor (1987a: 119, 124) estimates about 100,000 Sathya Sai Baba devotees in Britain—a number that must owe some of its size to the East African diaspora. He states that the movement began in 1966 in London due to the efforts of a South Indian Brahmin couple who settled in Britain after spending many years in Burma. By the mid-1980’s there were about 50 Sai Centers in the country (Taylor 1987a: 124; 1987b: 85).

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following a change in government policies or because of new economic opportunities and global investment. This has augmented the numbers of Asians who stayed and diversiﬁ ed from the commercial arena to roles in manufacturing because this proved to be more difﬁ cult to Africanize (Himbara 1994). Idi Amin was ousted in 1979 and later in 1991, the President of Uganda encouraged Asians to return to the country to attract investment and also gain international approval. In Tanzania, the liberalization of the economy from the mid-1980s meant an improvement in the status of private entrepreneurs, both South Asian and African (Forster et al. 2000: 89). In Kenya, following Jomo Kenyatta’s death, Daniel arap Moi became President in 1978 and in spite of a coup against him in 1982 Kenya was largely seen as an economic success and an example of political stability in the 1980s. This attracted foreign aid and tourists as well as Asian entrepreneurship. In all three countries, the rise of an African bourgeoisie to replace Asians completely has not materialized, and Asian businesses are sometimes seen as having struck deals of protection with oppressive or corrupt state regimes (Himbara 1994, 1997).20 “For some the return of a few Asians is seen as reconciliation and a chance to move on. Others are afraid that the same old inequalities will emerge and their dusty capital will be reclaimed again” writes Alibhai-Brown (1995: 195–196) in the context of Uganda in the mid-1990s. The Asian population has grown in East Africa: one estimate of Indians today is that there are 100,000 in Kenya (more than half of what it was in 1962), 90,000 in Tanzania (slightly more than it was around independence), and 7,500 in Uganda (which is double what it was in 1948).21 Asian-African Anglophone writing often refracts these phases and socio-spatial shifts, especially in urban space. M.G. Vassanji’s novel, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2004), provides a poignant vision of Asians in urban Kenya during these phases of colonial and postcolonial history.22 The story of three generations of the Lall family

20 See also “Asian African business—the national perspective” by Pheroze Nowrojee, http://www.ifra-nairobi.org/articles-issues/No20/bocquier.htm, accessed December 31, 2001. 21 “Report of the High level Committee on the Indian Diaspora,” 2002: xviii, http://indiandiaspora.nic.in, accessed May 3, 2003. 22 The attention to the city paid by Vassanji, a Kenyan-born writer raised in Tan- zania and now living in Canada, is not unusual. Images of Nairobi are central to the novelistic genre after 1963 as Anglophone novelists wrestled with the social reality of

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is told by Vikram, a Kenyan businessman of Indian descent. During the colonial phase, his grandfather, along with thousands of other indentured laborers, came to work on the Uganda railway built by the British from Mombasa to Kampala and stayed on in the new country. As Vikram grows into adulthood, his family moves to Nairobi, the British leave Kenya, and the nation becomes an independent nation under the presidency of Jomo Kenyatta in 1963. We follow Vikram to university in Dar es Salaam and then back to Nairobi where he enters civil service. The political optimism of the 1960s gives way to corruption, kickbacks, contracts, and opportunism. By the 1990s, the post- nationalist global phase, Vikram has been driven out of the country by the anti-corruption brigade. As a young boy, he saw himself standing in between his English friends, Bill and Anne, and his African friend, Njoroge. As an adult, in the corrupt world of the new nation, Vikram continues to be a liminal fi gure and a middleman between black elites and the Indian community. There are vivid descriptions of Nairobi in Vassanji’s novel during the end of the fi rst phase. His father owns a store in Nakuru during the years of the Mau Mau rebellion against the British in the fi fties. As a child, Vikram visits Nairobi on a vacation a few years before independence when the city is a colonial outpost: “Nairobi is a wonderful place, our relatives assured us, it is halfway to London” (Vassanji 2004: 106). The city is racially compartmentalized with the rich and spacious areas of the European population in the north and west, the Africans in the east and the Asians in between. We see similar paragraphs in Parita Mukta’s Shards of Memory (2002), which depicts the life of her grandmother who arrived after World War I to join her husband in Nairobi.23 She writes that her grandparents lived in a communal compound on Milner Road, named after Lord Alfred Milner, who approved racial segregation of properties in 1920. Most Asians lived in Eastleigh, Pangani and Race Course Road while English families lived in Ngong, Parklands, and Muthaiga. The African poor set up homes outside the city in settlements such as Pumwani (Mukta 2002: 14).

postcolonial Kenya and the processes of rapid urbanization (Kurtz 1998). See also Granqvist (2004) for a discussion of Nairobi in ﬁ ction. 23 Mukta’s account, a beautiful weaving together of history and memory, traces the lives of four generations of her family, the movement of her grandparents in the 1920s from Gujarat to Kenya, the forging of lives in Nairobi and then, from the 1970s, in London, Ahmedabad, or Toronto.

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By 1965, Vikram’s family is living in Nairobi where his father has a proﬁ table real estate business: The country’s freedom had come as a personal boon to him as it had done to many others. European settlers and civil servants were departing, leaving for easy pickings their homes in the posher areas of the city. Indian civil servants were abandoning to the unfriendly market their properties in modest Eastleigh, which African cooperatives were quickly buying up. International visitors arrived in droves. (Vassanji 2004: 142) In Uhuru Park, there is a meeting of Mau Mau with the Minister for Land Settlement asking for compensation and meetings of university students at the Ismailia Tea Room discussing politics—Kenyatta’s presidency, the East African Federation, the socialistic model, India, China: “This was beautiful Nairobi, it was an African city now” (Vassanji 2004: 155). It is obvious that the city is divided—the author mentions African working class areas of Pumwani as well as brawls by former Mau Mau in the Industrial Area. The most important feature of postcolonial Nairobi is its rapid rate of growth after restrictions on settlements and migrations are lifted. Mukta similarly writes: As poverty in the post-independence era bit deep, with the country becoming enmeshed in an export economy, and rural migrants joining the large and sprawling informal sector in the city, children as young as seven and eight haunted the main post ofﬁ ce area, running away in fear at the sight of an oncoming policeman. (Mukta 2002: 89) Troubled times soon follow and many leave the city, which was always “an alien city, uneasy home to its inhabitants” (Vassanji 2004: 181). In Asian areas such as River Road, businesses are either abandoned or sold to Africans and many Asians hurriedly sell their homes as well: There had descended a sort of numbness upon the city we knew, the Little London of old. So many friends and acquaintances left; families were torn apart; stores which had been landmarks for decades vanished . . . Property values in Asian Eastleigh, the Punjabi haven, had plummeted. (Vassanji 2004: 236) Those Asians who stay through the crisis diversify from petty business and trade into industry and various professional sectors. Some live in rich estates in the north and west and their old neighborhoods are abandoned to new populations. Vassanji describes the markets in Eastleigh, once the main Indian quarter, thus:

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Sidewalk stalls add a dizzy brilliance of colour, selling everything from televisions to perfumes and toiletries, clothes and jewelry, furniture and mattresses;. . . . qat and bhang and Kalashnikovs too, says the lore, have sellers at this market clamouring with chatter, car horns, and music . . . This is a different country now, an alien planet, and the ﬁ rst language is not Punjabi but Somali. (Vassanji 2004: 362)

Marking Presence in Nairobi

As the city entered the new millennium, Nairobi wore signs of an Asian presence that was signiﬁ cantly different from that of the previous four phases. In the fractured landscape of neo-liberalism, Asians were mapping the city through somatic, material and performative practices that suggested new ways of being citizens and negotiating their relationship to Africans. The National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, for instance, hosted an exhibition of Asian African Heritage that opened in February 2000 focusing on the contributions of Asian Africans to Kenya. It gave space for expressions of a history of about two centuries of people of Asian descent including visuals and narratives, material artifacts like dhows that brought workers to Kenya, interiors of homes, family portraits, accounts of the participation of several Asians in the nationalistic struggle and the civil rights movements, and their current role in the civic, economic, and political cultures of Kenya. The exhibition was a public statement by a community of Africans of Asian descent in a variety of performative media about its identity. The exhibition’s theme song Asia to Africa by two young Kenyan artistes, Sachin and Avni Dave, captures this experience in a line from its chorus: “Just call me Asian African, Asian African.” The optimism of the exhibition was matched by the political excitement that was in the air as I arrived in Nairobi at the end of 2001. Elections were expected in Kenya the next year and it seemed possible that what had been a one-party rule of the Kenyan African National Union (KANU) since independence (despite a 1991 constitutional amendment ending legal monopoly of power) was coming to a close. Citizens were seeing moves towards democracy and open criticism of those in power (in theater, music, and popular culture, by lawyers, clergy, intellectuals, and opposition parties) as positive and enduring changes. Despite heavy-handed treatment by the government in the 1980s and 1990s, the press remained relatively free. Support for reform also came

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from religious, community-based, non-governmental and residents’ organizations (Haugerud 1995: 22–32; 43, 53; Lee-Smith and Lamba 2000). In coffee-houses, university halls, homes, and on the streets, most people I talked to were upbeat that Kenya’s fortunes were changing and that transparency in economic and political processes, greater freedoms, and declining corruption were real possibilities. Within this new dispensation, the exhibition was an afﬁ rmation by Asians in Kenya that Kenya was their home and they were working to inhabit that space alongside others, regardless of color. It was also an acceptance of this position by the state. The Asian population today, about 120,000 in number, is reduced in comparison to the pre-1960s numbers but seems stable. About 85 percent of them live in urban areas.24 Kenyan Asians play a leading role in industrialization and various professional sectors and dominate formal enterprises while almost all informal ﬁ rms are run by Africans (Bigsten, et al. 2004; King 1996). Others from India come to work in multinational companies, as accountants, to conduct import-export ventures, as doctors, and as skilled workers. While there are changes in composition, they mark their presence in Nairobi through architecture and building activity and other forms of cultural and religious habitation in the city. Nairobi is witnessing a boom in religious centers, including those embedded in South Asian traditions. The variety and architectural gigantism of temples in Nairobi is astonishing. The oldest temple in East Africa may be the Swaminarayan temple in Nairobi built as early as 1945 (Williams 2001: 2006). While over half of the Swaminarayan followers who were active in 1970 had left by the early 1980s, by the 1990s the number of Indians in Kenya stabilized and several new Swam- inarayan temples were dedicated in 1999 (Williams 2001: 213–214) (see Figure 53). These temples have a mostly Gujarati constituency.

24 One estimate suggests that in 1989, inhabitants of Asian origin in Kenya were about 89,000, i.e. 0.42 percent of the total population (0.25 percent were Kenyan Asians, 0.15 percent were South Asians, and 0.02 percent were other Asians). A projected estimate for 2001 is 120,000. 85 percent of them lived in an urban district such as Nairobi or Mombasa (“Asians in Kenya: an urban minority,” by Philippe Bocquier, paper presented in a seminar jointly held by the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Institut français de recherché en Afrique, May 2nd, 2001, http://www. ifra-nairobi.org/articles-issues/No20/bocquier.htm, accessed December 12, 2001). Another estimate calculates that the Indian diaspora numbers about 200,000, with 100,000 in Kenya, 90,000 in Tanzania, and 7,500 in Uganda (“Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora,” 2002: xviii, http://indiandiaspora.nic.in, accessed May 3, 2003).

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Fig. 53. Swaminarayan temple in Nairobi (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

Others in Nairobi with regional congregations include the Jain Visa Oshwal Mahajan Wadi (the site of Sathya Sai Baba’s ﬁ rst public meeting in Nairobi), a Hare Krishna temple (dominated by Gujaratis), a Sanatana Dharma temple (with a mainly Punjabi constituency), and Balaji and Ayyappan temples being constructed by South Indians. These temples contribute to the “hybrid urbanism” (AlSayyad 2001) of Nairobi today, a marker of the interaction between different subcultures in the city, colonial heritages, and postcolonial practices. Many South Asians circulate easily among these sites. These construction of religious ediﬁ ces and the huge investments that have gone into these buildings signal material optimism about Asians’ economic and political future in neo-liberal Kenya. While Nairobi has a reputation for stability in eastern Africa, leading to its being a center for entry into the regional market and the headquarters for international and non-governmental organizations, its stark inequalities underlie incidents of pickpocketing, car theft and robberies. It is also becoming a hub for international drug trade operating out of Asia.25 Newspapers regularly mention “Nairobbery”—violent crime, ranging from carjackings to highway robberies, bank heists, and sexual

25 “Urban Crime—Policies for Prevention,” http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/ crime/dpi1646e.htm, accessed March 27, 2005.

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assault. It is evident from media reports on crime in Nairobi that violence is not necessarily directed against Asians. Nonetheless, the South Asian community’s presence remains girded by urban spatial segregation and a growing number of gated communities or houses are protected by security guards. The city remains sharply divided in income and Asians regularly remark on the threat of violence by Africans and lack of safety in the city. Most Asians will not travel by “matatus” (taxi vans) in the city or walk in particular neighborhoods after dark. In December 2001, my husband and I visited a travel agent in the market area of the city close to the bus-station, traveling there by a matatu. It was evening and the bar next to the agency was fi lling up with men and women having drinks after offi ce hours. The scene was swinging, music played loudly, and beer and snacks were eagerly consumed. We stayed to have a drink, the only non-African people in the room, but no one paid much attention to us. Stepping outside into the somewhat deserted and darkening market, we walked down the streets to see if we could catch a matatu to take us back to west Nairobi where we were staying. We were stopped by an Asian gentleman who ran a business on a side street. He said urgently to me: “This area is not safe, you should not be here.” The fact that we had been traveling in matatus was disturbing to several Asian (Indian) families we met at dinners and parties held every evening while we were in Nairobi. Apart from the construction of temples and religious centers in the city, and in spite of the perceived threat of public violence, Asians also mark presence and community in ways that give the taste of India a new meaning. A dinner party held at the home of one Asian family seems to become the occasion for almost every other person in a social network being invited. These occasions are packed with children, women, and older people, many of whom might feel they cannot move safely through parts of the city. Dinner is often a potluck with each family bring some special dish made at home, often through a great deal of labor—chicken curry, naans, aviyal, dosas, biryani, chutney, fried fi sh, dal—an astonishing cornucopia of many regional foods by Tamil- speakers, Gujarati-speakers, and Punjabi-speakers. Regionalism plays its part but disappears on the plate and palate as aromas, tastes, sights, and textures mingle to conjure a home that is both far and near. Sto- ries are told, news exchanged, troubles and dreams of futures shared. Discussions focus on children’s Indian dance lessons and saris. In the wake of these aromas and tastes come memories of South Asia, some

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more recent, some distant, some nostalgic. Families seem to eat up these occasions for within a few days one is invited to someone else’s house and one is likely to meet the same people again. The fact that we were outsiders and guests was marked by the fact that we did not bring a dish, having no kitchen of our own. In many ways, the Asian presence in Nairobi differs signiﬁ cantly from the older labor migrations during colonial times. Formerly, the migratory chain from South Asia to Kenya had one point of origin and one destination, with relatively stable notions of home, national community, or common origin for a small share of migrants. While there was a great deal of circulation between geographical sites by migrants, the Africanization policies of the 1960s and 1970s in East Africa radically accelerated the numbers and the process to create what Joseph (1999) calls “nomadic citizenship.” In the second half of the twentieth century, migrating several times during a lifetime has become a common experience for most individuals and communities, whether as immigrants, refugees, students, marriage partners, or guest workers: As a persistent, transnational condition, this tenuous existence sunders the relationship between passport and citizen and challenges any tidy division between citizens and non-citizen. The political, legal, economic, and cultural nomad has been forced to perform citizenship across as well as within national boundaries, a practice referred to here as nomadic citizenship. ( Joseph 1999: 17) Since the 1980s, there has been a steady movement of people from India, and especially South India, to Kenya for work in local enterprises as well as multinational corporations. This movement followed a change in policies of the government and new economic opportunities. Not all stay, of course. Kenya, and particularly Nairobi, is a transfer point for people of South Asian descent who work for a few years and then move on to Australia, England, and the United States. Many who remain in the country send their children for higher education to these countries or South Africa, some of them never to return to Kenya. This circulation has contributed to an ambivalent proﬁ le of the South Asians in Kenya. On the one hand, while some of the older families have left Kenya, those who remain have a greater investment there. On the other hand, an increasing number of South Asians are pursuing economic success in Kenya, with no cultural memory of older historical connections. Both groups may harbor racial fears, partly a consequence of the coup against President Moi in 1982 that led to the targeting of South Asians.

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The trajectories of South Asians to and from Kenya crisscross the globe, creating networks of bi-directional or multi-directional ﬂ ows of information, people, and devotional regimes. This is a networked community that spans many countries and cities, rather than an ethnic diaspora.26 Old and new families move from Kenya to England or India and back again every year. Others sell their businesses in Kenya and move to the US to run motels, acquire other jobs through C-1 visas, or wistfully contemplate such a transition. New devotees come from India carrying their devotion with them. While some see themselves as being Africans of Asian descent, not all subscribe to this identity. Both groups participate, however, in modalities of making a home in Nairobi, of creating civic cultures that do not necessarily coincide with legal or liberal notions of the citizen. Nomadic citizenship is performed within and across national boundaries as well as within and across urban spaces. Place-based forms of civic participation are produced alongside transnational linkages.27 Temple building, heritage exhibitions, or the sharing of food are one part of new geographies and somatic practices of inhabiting the city. The Sai Baba movement in urban Kenya also signals these new regimes of citizenship.

Performing Seva, Performing Citizenship

By 2001 there were four offi cial Sai Centers in Kenya: Nairobi had two and Mombasa and Eldoret had one each; a number of Groups gathered informally for bhajans. The Sai Baba movement coalescing around these communities is a locus of crisscrossing pathways and timelines generated by South Asian devotees. The fi gure of Sai Baba forms a still center within these trajectories and a point of reference for understanding their location in Kenya. One interviewee, an Indian devotee from Gujarat, told me that he fi rst moved to Kenya in the late 1980s to work as an accountant; other

26 Similar arguments have been made about Muslim communities in Europe. Allievi (2003), for instance, suggests that they are transnational rather than bi-national, they are characterized by multi-directional ﬂ ows rather than a classic migratory chain, and are produced by various networks and media with feedback effects both for countries of origin, other parts of the Islamic world, and Europe. 27 Scholars of contemporary Islam in Europe also emphasize the space of the global city for generation of critical discourses about Islam, and point out that new forms of participation are emerging that are tied to the wider communities in which they live (see Mandaville 2003).

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family members in Nairobi had told him that prospects were good in the country. Today, part of his family has Kenyan citizenship while the others hold Indian passports. His children studied in Kenya and speak Swahili but they will go abroad for higher education. Although he was originally a Swaminarayan devotee, and continues to be one, he was introduced to Sathya Sai Baba through his wife’s family from South India. By the mid-1990s, he and his family had become actively involved in Sai devotion in Nairobi. Another devotee from a third generation Punjabi family in Kenya became a devotee through a series of coincidences in the late 1990s that included reading a book about Sathya Sai Baba given to him by a friend in Kampala; a few months later, he was on his way to India to see Baba. In spite of having some extended family in India, or having acquired a metropolitan education in England, he states that Kenya is his home. In December 2001, 21 devotees from Nairobi traveled to Puttaparthi to see Sathya Sai Baba. He called them in for an interview, materialized several objects for the delegation including vibhuti, and gave some families gowns that he had worn. Baba expressed happiness with their projects in the Nairobi region and gave a message to Kenyan Asians: Do not worry about Kenya, the economy will improve, do not leave. In the summer of 2001, a new building for the Sai Center was completed on Musa Gitau Road, off Waiyaki Way, in west Nairobi (see Figure 54). This was inaugurated on the occasion of Sathya Sai Baba’s birthday in November 2001. Email correspondence between the Chairman of the Sai Center in Nairobi and local devotees in Bangalore allowed the former to obtain large, mounted pictures of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba for the new prayer hall in the building. In December of that year, the building and prayer hall were complete with these pictures arriving from Sai Towers (a publishing house in Bangalore) and Kekie Mistry, a devotee in Bangalore (originally from East Africa) and an ofﬁ cial photographer of Sathya Sai Baba for many years. The arrangement within the prayer hall consisted of stained glass panes depicting texts or religious ﬁ gures from several traditions— Krishna, Guru Nanak, the Quran, Jesus, Zarathustra, and the Buddha (see Figure 55). In front of the building stood a Sarva Dharma pillar similar to the one in Prashanti Nilayam symbolizing the convergence of various world religions. The empty chair signifying Sathya Sai Baba’s presence and the pictures of Shirdi and Sathya Sai Baba in the prayer hall evoked continuities with Sai Centers in India; the pillar and the glass panes, however, signaled the larger world of transnational worship. Active members here numbered about 200 people although for major

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Fig. 54. Exterior of Sai Center, Nairobi (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

Fig. 55. Prayer Hall in Sai Center, Nairobi (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

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bhajans and celebrations held on occasions such as Baba’s birthday, a thousand devotees might gather. Nairobi’s new Sai Center was intended to house all the major activities of the Sai Organization in Nairobi, including bhajans, study circle activities, and seva. The other older Sai Center in Nairobi—Dwara- kamayi—is named after the mosque that Shirdi Sai Baba inhabited during his lifetime. It is housed in a small outhouse adjoining the home of two devotees, Chris and Margarita Hawley, near the arboretum in central Nairobi. The altar area there included a picture of Sathya Sai Baba, Shirdi Sai Baba, Christ, and a chair, while one wall of the building was covered with pictures of practically every religious fi gure from Swaminarayan to Mahavira. While the Waiyaki Way Center was dominated heavily by people of South Asian descent, the Dwarakamayi Center was more diverse racially; it had about 80 members of whom 30 were very active. The Hawleys came to Kenya about 1971 when Chris was working for Coca-Cola. He later quit his job in the company and started a tourism business in Lamu. Inspired by a dream that suggested he should work with destitute children, he then worked for a non-governmental organization in Nairobi for a few years. In 1997, the Hawleys helped found the Sai Spirit of Love Children’s Home Trust with the aim of helping needy children in Kenya. It is part of the Family Care Foundation, a global relief and development network that works in 50 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America, whose project managers (like Chris and Margarita) have extensive grassroots experience and are fl uent in the language, local culture, and history. The Trust’s main project, funded largely by sponsorships, was a home for destitute children started by a Kenyan African teacher in 1995 in Uthiru on the western side of the city, past large shantytowns, with a view of the Ngong Hills. Neat though humble, in 2004 the home had about fi fty resident children from 7 to 18 years of age who received formal education in various schools. The Spirit of Love primary school also offered education to the younger children as well as 150 others from the neighborhood. Their seva was inspired by the fact that Nairobi has some of the highest number of street children in any African city, an estimated 90,000. The AIDS epidemic compounds their precarious existence, with many children’s parents dying through AIDS and many orphans being infected. The school and home were seen as an “alternative life-path” for these children to move beyond drugs, crime, poverty, disease, ethnic clashes, and sexual and psychological abuse.

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Run almost completely by volunteers, it used the Kenyan academic curriculum and the Education in Human Values (EHV) program of Sathya Sai Baba. Within the EHV program, attention was paid to the complete development of character. The program theoretically rested on “universal human values” of truth, right conduct, peace, love and non-violence, designed to teach the resident children moral values and citizenship and provide a family life for them.28 The performance of other acts of seva by devotees also addressed the humanitarian crisis and demands of citizenship in Nairobi. Several members from the Dwarakamayi Center and the Waiyaki Way Center visited the Jomo Kenyatta Hospital in southern Nairobi every Satur- day. They were familiar faces to many of the doctors and nurses. The patients visited by the devotees came from other places in Kenya or were poor and did not have relatives who could visit them: the care provided by the public hospital was supplemented by the efforts of Sai devotees in speciﬁ c wards. One Saturday, my husband and I joined about ten Sai devotees at the hospital carrying supplies for the patients. We wheeled carts around and distributed food, towels, or soap, prayed for the patients, and spent time with them in the wards. The patients seemed pleased to see us; some were smiling; others were in tears. The volunteers were already planning gifts, cards, and other items for Christmas that year. At the Waiyaki Way Center, devotees conducted Narayana Seva, the service of feeding the poor, twice a month on Sundays (see Figure 56). This service assumes signiﬁ cance in the context of widespread food insecurity for the poor in Nairobi.29 From about 8:00 AM onwards, between 200 and 400 homeless, orphaned or poor children, women and older men from shantytowns around Waiyaki Way and towards the west appeared in the compound of the Sai Center. People sat patiently in rows (mostly separated by gender) on short benches while a dozen devotees pushed carts between them. The devotees bent down to distribute bread, bananas, milk, biscuits, and sweets to outstretched hands. Not much conversation was exchanged between volunteer and

28 “Sathya Sai School and Home, Kenya” http://www.familycare.org/network/f21. htm, accessed April 28, 2004. 29 One strategy for meeting this challenge has been urban food production within the city on roadsides and in neighborhoods. This, however, is threatened by urban growth and harassment by city ofﬁ cials (Lee-Smith and Lamba 2000: 266). Women are mostly involved in urban crop production, as food-hawkers, and in small-scale trade connected with food (Robertson 1997).

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Fig. 56. Narayana Seva in Nairobi (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

recipient and the food was quietly put away in bags or amidst clothing. Most of the food was not consumed here but taken home to be shared with others in the family. These foods were bought in the market and assembled in the Waiyaki Way Center. They were cold rather than hot or spicy, portable and palatable to most people, rooted in a regime of consumption and taste that is not Asian but can pass some invisible gustatory line.30 The practices of giving and receiving were structured in local, culturally nuanced, frameworks. In all cases, however, as in the seva at the Jomo Kenyatta Hospital, this gift of food was not conceptualized as “charity” but as service to Baba—feeding the divine in the body of the poor.

30 The example of Narayana Seva elsewhere—as in Hong Kong, in which I participated in the summer of 2004—affords an interesting contrast. In the Sai Center in Kowloon, Indian and Chinese devotees gathered with bags of dry provisions such rice, beans, sugar, or ﬂ our in a community hall that was not the Sai Center. Seated on chairs in rows were older couples or poor families, all of them Chinese, who had been pre-selected for this distribution. Their names were called from a table in front of the hall by one devotee while each volunteer undertook to hand over the bag of provisions by turn. Ritual bows with folded palms were exchanged. Like the food in Nairobi, this was portable, cold and dry rather than the freshly cooked, hot foods offered in Bangalore’s Sai Darshan Center.

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Some additional projects are supported by specifi c trusts or through the assistance of devotees. The Sathya Sai School in Kisaju village, about 75 kilometers from Nairobi in Maasai area, was under the juris- diction of the Sathya Sai Education Trust and was registered in Kenya in 2001.31 This was one of six offi cially recognized Sathya Sai Schools in Africa, the others located in Mauritius (1), Zambia (1), and South Africa (3).32 The school works through sponsorships for the children. It follows the local board curriculum but is supplemented by the EHV program. The all-boys’ school is built on a 50-acre plot: construction was begun in May 2000 and the fi rst phase was completed in time to admit 32 children from the local community in 2001. In the next phase, it was hoped that other underprivileged children with no opportunity to attend a state school would be admitted. I drove down with an Asian devotee from the Nairobi Sai Center on a Sunday in December 2001 carrying books and other supplies for the school. Half an hour out of Nairobi, the landscape fl attened and became grassy with scattered thorn bushes. Soon even the isolated farmhouses became less frequent and we saw Maasai with their cattle. Cars and other vehicles were rare. On the way, the devotee told me that the school was part of Baba’s divine plan to serve the Maasai (“Ma Sai,” he punned). For instance, when they started digging for water in 1999, they struck water that was so pure that it did not need to be treated—a miracle. The principal of the school in 2001, C.V.K. Sastry, was a graduate from one of Sathya Sai Baba’s educational institutions in India. He came to Kenya from Andhra Pradesh about six years earlier with his wife and son to teach in a Nairobi school. When he came to learn about the activities of the Sai devotees in Nairobi and this project, he decided to associate himself with it. Sastry explained that there were two methods for imparting EHV—direct (through meditation or prayer) and indirect (where academic subjects are taught from the point of view of EHV). He believed that Baba wants each world region to develop its own materials for the latter, a process already begun by Victor Kanu at his institute in Ndola, Zambia, where there was a Sathya Sai School. Sastry stated that direct EHV had to be taught in Kenya in a way suitable to the country: thus, instead of light meditation, they practiced silent sitting in the school.

31 See “Sri Sathya Sai School, Kisaju, Kenya,” http://www.sathyasaicentrekenya. com/SATHYA%20SAI%20SCHOOL.htm, accessed November 23, 2005. 32 See “Sathya Sai Educare,” http://www.saieducare.org/html/school_loc.html, accessed May 16, 2004.

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He saw his role as helping the school to be self-suffi cient and to be run by Africans themselves. The three teachers were all Kenyan, one was Maasai, and housed in simple quarters attached to the school. These adjoined a large garden where vegetables were grown—part of the program of self-suffi ciency. “Sainet” is a project of the Sathya Sai National Trust-Kenya inaugurated in conjunction with Sathya Sai Baba’s eightieth birthday celebrations in 2005. Kenyan devotees resolved to distribute free of cost over 50,000 mosquito nets to poor families in malaria-endemic areas (about 8.2 million cases are reported annually in Kenya and about 34,000 children under fi ve die every year of the disease). Implementa- tion of this project would involve visits by devotees’ groups to villages in malaria-endemic areas, meetings with community women’s groups, distributions in schools, reaching out to at-risk groups through public health facilities, and coordination with the Ministry of Health-Republic of Kenya and the national effort, Roll Back Malaria.33 The schools, volunteer work in the hospital, and feeding of the poor are rooted in the history of Asian philanthropic efforts in East Africa. As Gregory (1992) carefully documents, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, and Christian communities who settled in this region from the late nineteenth century onwards brought with them traditions of gift-giving and communal service. In the East African context, they were also forced to rely mostly on their own resources for social amenities and economic welfare. Monetary accumulation by a few helped support self- help activities but even those with modest incomes put their energies into such efforts as religious edifi ces, hospitals, dispensaries, educational institutions and clubs. Social Service Leagues, Lions and Rotary Clubs, and Indian Women’s Associations fl ourished in several cities. Schools run by the Bohras, Ismailis, Arya Samaj, and Visa Oshwal communities were well-known as were hospitals such as the M.P Shah Hospital and the Pandya Clinic. This work expanded from an initial preoccupation with one’s own community to the needs of other Asians and Africans. With the departure of many Asians from East Africa, this work moved elsewhere to Britain and Canada, declined, or was terminated. Gregory (1992: 213) writes that only in Kenya has this Asian philanthropy continued. The practical spirituality of Sai devotees also intersects with the

33 See “Sainet Online,” http://www.sainetkenya.org/sai.htm, accessed November 23, 2005.

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political economy of contemporary East Africa, the effects of the civil war in Sudan, the fl ow of Somali refugees, migration to cities from the countryside, and the work of transnational development agencies. The efforts respond to imperatives that are very local and urban, such as informality, unemployment, poverty, and lack of social welfare. The result is a complex understanding of what citizenship entails, and the psychic and somatic economies girding seva form a dense web of plural ontologies that converge on the fi gure of Sathya Sai Baba. Citizenship becomes a zone to refl ect on several temporalities and spatialities, past and present, India and Kenya, global and local. A Kenyan Asian volunteer at the home and at the hospital, whose family had been in Kenya for several generations, said that she was very committed to the social transformation of Kenya. She had African friends, spoke Swahili, and did not think of herself as Indian, Jain or Gujarati. She saw Baba not as a Hindu holy teacher but one who led her on a spiritual path, whose values were universal and trans-religious and could help Kenyan society. Another Kenyan Asian of Punjabi descent engaged regularly in a wide range of seva activities spoke cogently about the relationship between race and class and their intersection with the Sai movement. He agreed that there was a signifi cant difference between new South Asian and old Kenyan devotees in terms of their commitment to the country. The recent economic and political shifts, however, were going to cause a turnover of the uncommitted, whether their families had been here for several generations or were new. This would leave behind a more permanent cadre in the Sai Center. For this devotee, unrest and violence were the result of unemployment, lack of infrastructure, and economic inequalities, and did not target Asians only but also Africans; it was a class issue rather than a race issue. He, however, held the South Asians responsible for distrust felt by Kenyan Africans; for a long time, the Asians remained in a state of emotional and national transit and did nothing for the social strata who worked for them in factories, homes, and businesses. Now they had to look disease, poverty, and crime in the face.

The Body of Citizenship

While urban theory has often spoken in a universalizing voice based on largely Euro-American models, postcolonial theoretical perspectives have tended, for the most part, to ignore lived spaces such as cities,

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concentrating instead on texts or master narratives of colonialism or nationalism and their imaginaries.34 But cities are obviously central to the ways in which colonialism and postcolonialism work, and formal independence or decolonization does not necessarily indicate an emancipatory postcolonialism at work. Thus, in the context of Senegal, Roberts and Roberts (2003: 37) suggest (following Françoise Lionnet) that the term “transcolonial” may be more useful than “postcolonial” under such confl icted contexts since it moves us beyond a purely temporal perspective, emphasizes a spatial and relational approach, and mobility of persons and groups. The inclusion of cities can open up a critical space for the understanding of transcolonialism as a site or a set of formations (including, but not limited to, texts) for the inter- rogation and negotiation of the structures of power, morphologies of colonialism, and their relationship to the post-independence period. This critical space must be understood in all its materiality and sensoriality instead of as a purely abstract category. Thus, while examining the social movements led by urban youth in Senegal in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Diouf (1999: 44) writes that in urban sociology of modern Africa, the city has usually been regarded as the site of “detribalization, rural exodus, and loss of authentically African traits and values” while the rural peasantry have been defi ned as authentic Africans. However, youth movements reveal that a new generation has arrived that feels excluded from “postcolonial munifi cence and its sites of sociability” (p. 46) and seeks new idioms and practices of citizenship beyond nationalist ideologies in and through urban spaces such as streets and neighborhoods, through music, murals, and violence. This chapter suggests that in many African cities such as Nairobi, while the legacy of colonial and postcolonial racial politics and concerns about security, violence, and ethnic boundaries continue to mark this space, there is also a reworking of the sense of citizenship that reaches beyond the politics of race and nation or the “revitalization” of religious identity in the neo-liberal or transcolonial present.35 Sathya Sai Baba’s

34 See Bishop et al. (2003), Jacobs (1996), and Kusno (2000) for a critique of postcolonial studies of cities. 35 Morton Klass (1991), for instance, who studied the role of the Sai Baba movement in Trinidad largely in the 1980s, focuses on its role as a revitalization movement among urban and suburban Indian (and Hindu) Trinidadians who form the overwhelming majority of Sai devotees. Alexandra Kent (1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2004a, 2004b), writing about the Sathya Sai Baba movement in Malaysia, also largely follows Klass in describing it as a revitalization movement.

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visit to East Africa in 1968 during the early years of independence was situated amid attempts of African states to relate citizens to non-citizens, Asians to Africans, colonial policies to postcolonial visions. Devotees in Uganda were forced to leave for new homes. Many in Kenya and Tanzania departed as well. For those who stayed on and for the many newcomers since the 1980s, the issue of citizenship continues to be a zone of refl ection, sensory mediation, and performance, especially through the enactment of seva in various sites. Devotion to the guru today becomes a pathway for devotees to express their relationship to the public realm, the city, and their position as citizens, tied to a community of faith and unpredictable trajectories of the spirit rather than the (un)certainties of national belonging. Nairobi is produced through sensory and somatic regimes such as cooking, feeding, or singing that create new maps for traversing the city. At the same time, these sensory-somatic regimes are not similar to those at “home” or the lines that separate home and not-home but function in a corporeal zone between inside and outside, almost like speaking in a contact language or tasting an unfamiliar food. This negotiation of citizenship through the performance of seva and other modalities is not merely a South Asian preoccupation, for other Kenyans—European and African—also bring a range of meanings, senses, and histories into the space of seva. On December 15, 2001, I attended bhajans at the Spirit of Love home, having driven out there with two devotees, a couple who were third-generation Kenyan Asians. The altar contained a picture of Sathya Sai Baba but also Christ, Krishna, and other religious fi gures near an empty chair for Baba. The children sang several fast-paced bhajans recognizable by any devotee in Bangalore or Puttaparthi (only one was in English) accompanied by drums and a portable electric keyboard. Afterwards, I asked the teachers what it felt like singing bhajans in a language that one does not understand instead of bhajans in Swahili or English. One of the Kenyan African teachers said they sang Swahili or English bhajans as well but he personally felt drawn to Sanskrit, especially after his visit to Puttaparthi, and whole bhajans would come to him even if he had only heard them briefl y. He also bought some cassettes to learn and teach bhajans. Another Kenyan African EHV teacher argued articulately that regardless of whether we understood the words or not, religious songs are composed of mystical syllables that have the power to elevate us when we sing them. Later, outside the home, he invoked C.W. Leadbeater, associated with the Theosophical movement, on the

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power of sound and religious music, and suggested that the effect of songs lasts for three days and spreads power a kilometer around by purifying that space. He also said that it was the choice of the children themselves: when they felt troubled, they would ask to sing bhajans. A third Kenyan European teacher said that they had a diffi cult job on their hands in the absence of psychiatric help or medical insurance, but the children had been healed by bhajans and vibhuti, another miracle. Many children felt that Baba’s philosophy and their faith in him was a way to connect them with their roots. After all, the word for “father” in Kikuyu and Swahili was “Baba.” I met Amos and Wycliff (pseudonyms) during Narayana Seva at the Waiyaki Way Center one Sunday. Later, they talked to me about their experiences of Sathya Sai Baba for over an hour as we walked back together from the Dwarakamayi Center to a home in Westlands where we had been invited for dinner. Amos described his diffi cult years in Nairobi working as a street hawker. One day, he saw a white woman feeding poor children in the city and something drew him to her. At fi rst, he thought she was a Christian missionary but later discovered she was a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba. He was disturbed at fi rst about the things he heard about Baba because he had been raised a Christian. However, he had a dream of Baba, who told him not to worry about giving up his religion; all that mattered was serving children. After some years, when he was working in a rehabilitation center in Dagoretti, his brother came and persuaded him to look for work elsewhere since there was no money to be made in that job. So he began to drive for a matatu company, a very dangerous job. He crashed his vehicle and was chased by the police, who beat him and threw him into prison. When he came out, he had another dream where Baba appeared as a woman indicating to him that he should go back to serving children. Amos’ account invokes the fragile world of the underclass in the city—urban informality, the threat of the police, the uncertainties of income, and the central role of matatus in Nairobi’s transportation system. It also highlights the anxieties involved in devotion to a fi gure who does not come from a previously inherited tradition and the bridge that is created through dreams. Wycliff works at the same rehabilitation center at Dagoretti as Amos. His story, however, leans in another direction. He came from a poor family in the eastern provinces and had been working in Nairobi for about six years. When he fi rst arrived, he worked for an Indian

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businessman, who introduced him to Sai Baba. Holding an “O” level certifi cate, he able to read a few books about Baba. At this time, he developed a serious liver condition and had to be admitted to the Jomo Kenyatta Hospital. The doctors ran tests but found he did not need an operation; many were very kind to him and gave him treatment and medicines free of cost. “This was the fi rst miracle,” Wycliff said. He felt he was being helped by Baba and wanted to go and see him. He then had a dream where he saw Baba in a big house. He tried to climb into the window but Baba came out and said he would come to him. Wycliff began to attend the bhajans at Dwarakamayi, met other devotees in the city, and learned to sing bhajans. A few years later, a party of devotees planned to go to Puttaparthi, Wycliff among them. He found a sponsor to fund his travel but had no birth certifi cate, no passport, or other documentation that would allow him to travel abroad. Through a series of coincidences, however, he obtained a passport and visa in a record eight days and found himself with the group at the airport—“the second miracle.” At Puttaparthi, Wycliff’s group went regularly for darshan. One day, Baba stood in front of Wycliff and took letters from those around him. Wycliff took the opportunity of touching his gown. The other devotees eventually left the hermitage to return to Kenya but Wycliff stayed on. He had recorded some bhajans in Swahili and wanted to gift them to Baba. During darshan one day, Baba spoke to him and said in Swahili: “Lete lete hiyo (Bring that thing near you quickly to me).” Wycliff looked around wondering who Baba was talking to but there was no one else who would have known Swahili. So he offered him the cassette and some letters. Baba took the letters but said about the cassette: “Weka hii (Keep this).”36 His last day at the ashram came. He was seated for darshan in the sixth row. Baba came up to him and said: “You from Kenya go [inside]!” In the interview room, Baba materialized a ring for him that was an exact fi t for his fi nger. He spoke to him in detail about Wycliff’s life, gave him vibhuti for his health, and directed him to teach children. He said, “Be a good boy, Wycliff.” And Wycliff replied, “I promise, Swami.”

36 My thanks to Richard McElreath and Bettina Ngweno for the translation of the Swahili.

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Wycliff said that he thought Baba was a spiritual leader, a prophet. In the old days, his tribe had people like Swami who were “witch doctors” or men who could prophesize. His grandfather, who was not converted to Christianity like him, asked him once how he knew that Baba was a prophet. Wycliff answered: look at all the things in Puttaparthi—the university, the water project, the hospital. Do you think an ordinary man would be able to do all this? About bhajans, he said: when Africans were converted to Christianity, they sang hymns in English. There are so many languages in Africa that another language for religious songs is not a problem. Even if Swahili were used, it is mainly a language of communication and not a mother-tongue for most people. So whether bhajans are in Hindi or Swahili, what did it matter? It is the same with religion. Africans had been Christians for many years; looking towards a faith from the East would be a change. While the African teachers at the Spirit of Love home draw from several traditions including Theosophy, Amos’ account seeks to situate Baba in a zone that does not contradict a familiar Christianity, and Wycliff’s narration is sensitive to the role of pre-colonial and colonial heritages for Africans in the present. Wycliff’s account combines biographical details, dreams, and a retrospective vision of his Nairobi life in terms of miracles and coincidences, a pattern noticeable in other devotees’ stories as well. What is striking about it is the belief that Baba would speak to him in Swahili, a contact language, as well as the conﬂ ation of Baba with an old tribal prophet reaching into a time before the arrival or dominance of Christianity. This desire to associate Sathya Sai Baba with an African history and culture, destabilize aspects of the colonial past and neo-liberal present, and invoke a usable future is common to the accounts of other devotees. It also draws attention to the signiﬁ cance of individual and social practices of memory work in the African postcolony (Werbner 1998). The roles of songs, miracles, healing, witch-doctors, and dreams in the accounts of these devotees suggest that the processes responsible for some Kenyan Africans becoming devotees of Sathya Sai Baba might overlap with those that have led to the success of Pentecostal, evangelical, or charismatic movements in Kenya and elsewhere. Droz (2001) points out that these movements, which claim to heal or contain millenarian expectations, are not so much calls to a “true” faith or subscription to Christian doctrine, but are rooted in conversion experiences. Conversion depended historically upon the ability of Christi- anity or evangelists to manage occult forces, health, wealth, and cure

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misfortunes: the vibrancy of Pentecostalism in central Kenya is due to its connections with pre-colonial religious practices.37 Curley (1992) also notes the centrality of dreams and their narration in conversion experiences and the acquisition of membership in a Camerounian evangelical church. Hackett (2004) argues that the younger generation is particularly drawn to new religious movements in Africa, local and international prophets, as part of “spiritual adjustment” attempts “to counter the negative effects of structural adjustment programs, political misrule, and moral confusion.”38 As customary forms of social life and support become unstable and precarious, individuals seek forms of transnational belonging that allow them to “imagine themselves as part of a larger ‘community of sentiment’ without location or boundaries . . . the sense of the local is attained through a concrete practice shared with others, who are people both near and far” (Simone 2004: 219). I suggest that there is a convergence in language, practice, sense, and sentiment in the accounts of the African teachers, Wycliff, and Amos about Sathya Sai Baba’s charisma and those about other charismatic leaders and preachers in Kenya and other parts of Africa. This chapter has tried to show that the transcolonial spiritual body creates its own sensual geography and temporality as it traverses urban and transnational sites and the inner landscape of devotion.39 On the one hand, the journey of Sathya Sai Baba to East Africa made it a hallowed ground in many devotees’ eyes because it was the only “foreign” place to which he had physically traveled. On the other hand, the movements of his devotees out of Africa to the United Kingdom, the United States, or India and back map out a devotional cartogra- phy of citizenship that encodes many other spaces and times.40 Spaces

37 “The local roots of the Kenyan Pentecostal revival: conversion, healing, social and political mobility” by Yvan Droz, paper presented in a seminar jointly held by the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Institut français de recherche en Afrique, May 2, 2001 (http://www.ifra-nairobi.org/articles-issues/No20/bocquier.htm, accessed December 31, 2001). 38 “Prophets, ‘False Prophets,’ and the African State: Emergent Issues of Religious Freedom and Conﬂ ict,” Nova Religio, posted online on June 14, 2004, caliber.ucpress. net/doi/abs/10.1525/nr.2001.4.2.187, accessed May 17, 2006. 39 The relationship between the senses, place, the city, or the body has been opened up in recent years by radical geographers (Nast and Pile 1998; Pile and Thrift 1995; Pile and Keith 1997; Rodaway 1994). They do not, however, deal with the spiritual body. 40 Bowen (1988) observes that although pilgrimage to Puttaparthi to see Baba is important, a new sacred geography has also emerged at the Bradford Center, UK. Devotees’ travel to other centers for special events and the appearance of nectar and ash

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can be transposed onto others: the naming of one of the Centers in Nairobi, Dwarakamayi, after Shirdi Baba’s mosque or the creation of a Sarva Dharma pillar in the Waiyaki Way Center brings Shirdi and Puttaparthi into the city. Further, space (city, home, exile, pilgrimage, return) is unstable, fragile, and the mapping of links and disconnec- tions for a devotee often occurs through practices and narratives that are connected to the sense of searching for the divine in the world, a search that has its unique, non-homogeneous temporality. Even if one does not travel “elsewhere,” this search transforms the way the body inhabits space and time. Sometimes they seem empty, as one’s sense of the sacred is just out of reach; at other times, they are illuminated and spiritual energy, dreams, and memories of Baba ﬂ ow into them and into encounters with others and material objects. While the city and somatic regimes of its devotee-citizens co-produce each other, the sense of space and the spiritual body are related to each other not so much as distinct sites but as ﬂ ows, energies, networks, and temporal alignments.

in various places in the UK have signaled the participation of Bradford in the sacred space of Bharat as well as the extension of the idea of Bharat to include the UK.

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SITES OF SOCIALITY IN ATLANTA

Baba in the Land of Gospel and Blues

The Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization is not listed in phonebooks in the United States but it is not diffi cult to fi nd signs of Sathya Sai Baba’s presence in various institutional niches and public arenas in American cities. Walking into the Hard Rock Café in Atlanta or the House of Blues in Orange County, California, one might be faced with a picture of Baba and sometimes a quotation (“Love All, Serve All”) that is attributed to him. My favorite New Age bookshop in Atlanta, Crystal Blue, routinely carries books by Sathya Sai Baba and his devotees; most New Age bookshops do. A friend writing from Los Angeles sends me a brochure for a private Gay and Lesbian Sai Baba Center in West Hollywood. As soon as some Sai devotees in Atlanta learned that I was moving to California in 2002, they insisted that I visit a shrine at the home of the Mangru family in Colusa (a small town in northern California, population 5,000) where ash and ambrosia form on pictures of Sai Baba, Christ, and others. In Colusa, not only is the spontaneous presence of ash and nectar a sign of Sathya Sai Baba’s grace, but one of the new objects of worship when I visited the shrine in the early part of 2003 was a robe worn by Sathya Sai Baba that rested on the chair meant for him in the shrine. Apparently, a devotee who had met Baba recently had been given this robe for “Colusa Nilayam,” as the shrine is sometimes known. Devotees travel from all over the region to visit, even though this is not an offi cial Sai Center. More recently, on a trip in August 2006 to New Mexico’s Mesa Verde, I listened to a white female park ranger talk eloquently about Native American cosmology, remembering and forgetting, and the nature of the body as a garment while seated with other visitors in the thousand-year-old Cliff Palace. I thanked her as I was leaving. She asked me if I was from India and knew of the guru Sathya Sai Baba. The offi cial US Sai Organization is divided into ten regions comprising several states with their Centers (see Table 4) coordinated by the Sathya Sai Baba Council of America established in 1975. Its fi rst

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President was Dr. John Hislop, who visited Baba in 1968. Like Howard Murphet, an Australian Theosophist devotee drawn to Baba in the 1960s, Hislop’s engagement with Baba emerged after his association with other teachers and traditions including Theosophy, J. Krishnamurti, and Buddhism.1 The Council has established a national information center located at the Sathya Sai Baba Book Center of America at Tustin, California. This provides information to the public and devotees about Baba, Sai Centers in the US, and the Central Council, while distributing books on Sai Baba, videos, cassettes, journals and newsletters such as the Sanathana Sarathi (published in Prashanti Nilayam), the Sathya Sai Newsletter, USA (published in Tustin), Sai World: A Newsletter for Children and Youth (from San Diego), and Sathya Sai Service Opportunities (from Brooklyn). Like Sai Centers elsewhere, each Center has a president, vice-president, and coordinators for devotional, service, and educational activities that are meant to support the spiritual life of devotees. Activities include weekly meetings that focus on the singing of bhajans, meditation, and the study of Sai teachings and literature. Educational activities are geared towards spiritual education for children from ages six to sixteen. Each Sai Center conducts a range of service activities in its neighborhood: food for the homeless and indigent, blood donation camps, work in shelters, with juveniles, and in prisons. Centers are recognized as philanthropic institutions in several regions. As Table 4 reveals, the total number of offi cial Sai Centers in 2006 was 192. The Mid-Atlantic (32), Northeast (26) and Pacifi c South (25) regions have the largest number of Sai Centers followed closely by the North-Central region (23) and Northern California and Nevada region (20). The number of Sai Centers is largest in the states of California (40), New York (17), Florida (11), New Jersey (11), Connecticut (9), and Oregon (7), suggesting that the movement is largely coastal in its base. However, it does have a fairly signifi cant mid-Western presence in states like Illinois (7) and Ohio (5) and in the southwest in Arizona (7). These are a little more than half the total number of Sai Centers in the country. North and South Dakota, Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming, and West Virginia have none at all (nor does Washington D.C. but the two Sai Centers in Maryland serve the capital). The US Organization is

1 Sai Baba: Man of Miracles (1971) written by Howard Murphet, an Australian Theosophist drawn to Baba in the 1960s, must stand as one of the classics drawing non-Indian devotees to Baba.

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Table 4: Sai Centers in the US, 2006 (Source: http://www.sathyasai.org/organise/z1reg01/contents.html) Region States Number of Region Centers To t a l Region 1: the Connecticut 9 26 Northeast Maine 1 Massachusetts 5 New Hampshire 2 New York 7 Rhode Island 1 Vermont 1 Region 2: the Delaware 1 32 Mid-Atlantic Maryland 2 New Jersey 11 New York City and Long 10 island Pennsylvania 5 Virginia 3 Washington D.C. West Virginia Region 3: the Alabama 1 20 Southeast Florida 11 Georgia 1 North Carolina 5 South Carolina 2 Region 4: the Kansas 1 11 Mid-Central Kentucky 2 Mississippi 1 Missouri 4 Tennesee 2 Belleville (Illinois) 1 Region 5: the Illinois (except Belleville) 6 23 North-Central Indiana 4 Iowa 2 Michigan 3 Minnesota 1 Nebraska 1 North Dakota Ohio 5

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Table 4 (cont.) Region States Number of Region Centers To t a l South Dakota Wisconsin 1 Region 6: the Alaska 13 Paciﬁ c North Idaho Montana 1 Oregon 7 Washington 5 Wyoming Region 7: Northern California 19 20 N.California & Nevada (except Las Vegas) 1 Nevada Region 8: the Southern California 21 25 Paciﬁ c South Las Vegas 1 Hawaii 3 Region 9: the Arizona 7 14 Southwest Colorado 4 New Mexico 2 Utah 1 Region 10: the Arkansas 1 8 South-Central Louisiana 2 Oklahoma Texas 5 Total US Centers 192 192

also overwhelmingly urban and suburban. Georgia, for instance, has only one Sai Center located in Atlanta, its capital, but this lies close to the beltway in its northern suburbs rather than in downtown Atlanta. There are three phases of growth of the Sai Baba movement in the US that overlap with other South Asian religious movements’ presence in North America: (1) The ﬁ rst phase stretches from the late nineteenth century to the end of the 1950s. During this time, we see not only Swami Vivekananda’s appearance at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 but also the presence of teachers

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such as Paramahamsa Yogananda (1893–1952) or J. Krishnamurti (1895–1986). Transcendentalist and Unitarian connections with South Asia, of course, have an older history, but during this fi rst phase, there was a slowly growing hospitable climate for Asian traditions in the US through many routes including Theosophy (Prothero 1996; Seager 1993; Tweed and Prothero 1999). Towards the end of this period some white Americans were becoming aware of Sathya Sai Baba and there were South Asians in the United States who were devoted to this guru. (2) The second phase covers the 1960s and 1970s, when the Beatles, the hippie generation, or antiwar movements were openly embracing alternative traditions, new religions and Asian gurus (Needleman 1984 [1970]). There is literary evidence that several white Americans had visited Baba or become devotees, including John Hislop (the fi rst Presi- dent of the Sathya Sai Baba Council of America) or Arnold Schulman (cited in Chapter 3). Several Sai Centers were established during this time period including what is cited as the fi rst one in Tustin in 1969. This period also coincided with the increased immigration of South Asians to the country after the shift in immigration laws in 1965.2 (3) The third phase stretches from the 1980s to the present. This period has seen the maturing of many guru traditions in America (Forsthoefel and Humes 2005) and some of the greatest growth of South Asians in the US, especially professionals, computer scientists, engineers, and others with H-1B visas as well as students. The number of Sai Centers has also increased rapidly with many members being of South Asian origin but also comprising Hispanic, African-American, East Asian, and other devotees. The understanding of South Asian religion in the US can be pursued conceptually and ethnographically at a number of levels. The proliferation of temple-building in the American urban landscape in the last few decades has been one of the distinctive features of Hinduism in America. It has been shown that South Asians in the United States construct temples as a largely suburban phenomenon located close to freeways rather than within an “ethnic” part of the city (Waghorne 1999, 2006). Unlike the temple in India, where one god or goddess or a

2 See Williams (1988) for an overview of South Asian religions and movements following the 1965 change in immigration laws. See Coward et al. (2000) for discussions of the South Asian religious diasporas in the United States, Canada and Britain.

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sectarian tradition usually predominates, in the US several deities may live in harmony under one roof, in a manner that parallels the multiple religious affi liations of their suburban devotees and compromises created by them (Eck 2000). Even in temples such as the Shrivaishnava temple at Penn Hills near Pittsburgh, where the mode of worship is sectarian, programs and publications reinterpret Hinduism in ways that differ from sectarian ideas, adopt a syncretic approach to rituals and deities, and create connections between religion, psychology, and the management of stress (Narayanan 1996). Studies identify strategies adopted by religious organizations in the process of carving out new identities for immigrants and diasporas. Williams (1988), for instance, describes as “ecumenical” those religions that try to transcend national and ethnic boundaries by appealing to universalist formulations such as an American Muslim community. He also cites “sectarian” groups that may create an allegiance to a specifi c religious hierarchy and leaders like Sathya Sai Baba. In this chapter, I investigate the sites of sociality and the fabric of devotional community in Sai Centers in American metropolitan sites. The case study is Atlanta, now home to thousands of immigrants and workers from South Asia and elsewhere. Atlanta, of course, is also a home of Gospel music, the Blues, and a substantial African-American population. It is one of the most important sites of the Civil Rights movement and famous for its association with Martin Luther King Jr., who was infl uenced by Gandhi and had visited India in 1959. The significance of this connection was made public in 2001 when a statue of Gandhi was unveiled by the Indian American business community in Atlanta at the downtown Martin Luther King Historical Site. The practices at the Atlanta Sai Center provide insights into the relationship between a South Asian religious movement, African-American heritage, and American musical and religious traditions. The Atlanta Sai Center differs considerably from ethnically or nationally based religious communities in the city such as the Riverdale Hindu temple or the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Because of its multi- racial congregations, it resembles more closely congregations like the Unitarian Universalists or the Unity Church with whom it has forged links. Through regular bhajan sessions where congregational singing occurs, devotees create a ground for new forms of ethnically and socially diverse community. Social, linguistic, or philosophical codes are blended or contextually switched in order to communicate within

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and across different social groups. These processes are located in local, trans-local, and electronic realms and in the restructuring of the global and urban economy. I begin by exploring the spatial context of Atlanta’s religious organizations and the epistemological and theological connections forged between the Sai Center and other groups in the city. I then argue, through a detailed study of the devotional song handbook of the Atlanta Sai Center, that these epistemological intersections are grounded in sensory and ritual practices such as singing and music. Much of my analysis relies on sociolinguistic theory and “the ethnography of communication” (Gumperz and Hymes 1986[1972]), which can provide support for ethnomusicological investigations as well as the study of religion.3 Finally, I explore the density of electronic mailings, the effer- vescence of regional conferences, and the magicality of technological instruments as part of the ethnography of communication.

Epistemological Intersections in Atlanta

Emerging out of Jewish and Christian traditions, Unitarian Universalism traces its roots to the post-Reformation world. The term “unitarian” is used to designate the oneness of God rather than the traditional Chris- tian trinitarian formulation; “universalist” is a term used to emphasize that salvation exists for the whole human family rather than merely the elect few. The Universalist Church of America was formed in 1793, the American Unitarian Association was organized in 1825, and the Unitarian Universalist Association was born in 1961 when these two groups merged ofﬁ cially. Today there are over a thousand congregations continentally. Famous individuals routinely cited in their literature include Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Margaret Fuller, Florence Nightingale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Thoreau, and Joseph Priestly.4 The relationship between the Unitarians and reform movements in India is at least two hundred years old. The Unitarians

3 See Slobin (1993: 85–97), for instance, who uses the insights of sociolinguistics for ethnomusicology. 4 See “Unitarian Universalist Origins,” http://www.uua.org/info/origins.html, accessed March 27, 2007.

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were active in their patronage of the Brahmo Samaj and fi gures like Keshab Chander Sen in the early nineteenth century and through Uni- tarian preachers the Transcendentalists in New England were introduced to ideas from the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, and other texts (Chandler 1996). The Unitarian Universalist (UU) ideology of affi rming the wisdom of all world religions, earth-centered traditions, prophetic men and women, and religious pluralism has created a hospitable climate for Asian traditions in Atlanta, as in other parts of the United States. UU congregations in Atlanta trace their roots to the late nineteenth century and historically offered an alternative to fundamentalist and evangelical orthodoxy in the South (Schneider 1996). During the 1970s and 1980s, several new suburban congregations were established, including the Northwest UU congregation. Today there are at least twelve UU congregations in the Atlanta metro area. Their offi cial symbol of a fl ame inside a chalice has a resonance with the logo of the Sai Organization in which the fl ame of inner illumination stands in the center of the lotus. The Northwest UU Church in Atlanta describes itself as a community of religious liberals and has about 200 members. The church is located in a shady grove on Mt. Vernon Highway NW just within the beltway (Interstate 285) in northwest Atlanta, one of the growth areas of the metropolitan region. The area around the church is wooded and quiet with few residences and its neighborhood contains a number of other religious organizations. The main building is a single-storied wooden structure and behind it, adjacent to the parking lot, is an annex called the Chalice House (see Figure 57). Devotional services of the Sai Cen- ter occur here every Saturday at 6:50 PM. As one Atlanta Sai Center member remarked to me in 1998: “They allow us to use this place and have not bothered us at all. They are not like other fundamentalist organizations. Their values are like us, universalist.” The fi ve-petal emblem of the Sai Organization is the fi rst sight that one beholds on the door of the Chalice House. The Atlanta Sai Center acquired this site as a stable arena for worship in 1997. Before that time, devotees would meet in homes on a weekly basis. Fenton (1988: 133) mentions that eight to ten north Indian families were meeting in Atlanta since 1980 in a Sai Group. However, old devotees in Atlanta claim that in the decade of the 1970s a majority of devotees were white Americans. The Sathya Sai Baba Center of Atlanta had about 150 members in 2002. 60 to 70 percent of the members today

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Figure 57. Unitarian Universalist congregation’s Chalice House in Atlanta (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

are of South Asian descent; the rest include white Americans and about three percent African-Americans. This “South Asianization” was also taking place in other religious organizations in Atlanta established around the same time, e.g. the Hare Krishna temple on Ponce de Leon Avenue (Bhatia and Bhatia 1996). The demographic shift within the Sai movement in Atlanta is related to the larger structural and spatial transformation of the metropolitan area. From the city’s inception in the 1830s as a railroad terminus like Nairobi up until the 1960s, Atlanta’s religious history was dominated by Protestant congregations (Evangelical Baptists, Methodists, Presby- terians), both African-American and white, with small communities of Catholics and Jews. By the early 1970s, the religious groups in Atlanta were growing more diverse due to the economic growth of the city that attracted transnational and transregional migration and also because of political crises in other countries that brought refugee populations to the South (Laderman 1996; Norman and Armentrout 2005) The city began to carve for itself a new identity by seeking international investment, creating new air and road transportation networks, cultivating an entertainment industry, and encouraging construction activity, all of which culminated in the 1996 Olympic Games that signaled its arrival as a world city (Rutheiser 1996). As Atlanta built on its claim of being

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a global location instead of a purely southern city, it attracted professionals including computer scientists, doctors, and engineers as well as those in the service sector and low-skilled workers and suburbanization of business and professional services occurred. The urban agglomeration grew from about 2.2 million persons in 1990 to approximately 4.3 million persons in 2005, making it one of the fastest growing U.S. metropolitan areas.5 While downtown and midtown have evolved into a high-rise urban center and there is an African-American core, metropolitan Atlanta includes dispersed suburbs, exurbs, or edge cities stretching in all directions, but most extensively in the north including Doraville, Norcross, Alpharetta, Marietta, and Roswell. The centripetal and centrifugal tendencies and postmodern geography that Edward Soja (1989) describes in the context of Los Angeles also characterize Atlanta: gentriﬁ cation in Little Five Points east of “Sweet Auburn” Avenue, technoburbs in the north, downtown Georgia State University near the Capitol, and the beltway with its large Perimeter Mall. As a global city Atlanta may resemble Los Angeles, but it also resembles Bangalore and Hyderabad, and South Asian technical personnel and professionals move easily between these cities. Atlanta has been experiencing huge increases in its Asian immigrant and refugee populations since 1980, including Chinese, Korean, South Asian, and Southeast Asian groups. In 1990, as White (1995) points out, Atlanta had the highest percentage increase in its Asian population in the top 20 American metropolitan areas (over 330 percent since 1980) and added about 40,000 Asians. By 2000, approximately 46,132 Asian Indians settled in Georgia and Atlanta had about 10,000 Buddhists, 12,000 Hindus, and 30,000 Muslims (Tweed 2005: 143). The primary area for growth in metro Atlanta is DeKalb County lying north of Interstate-85 and encompassing the cities of Doraville and Chamblee (which lie near the Sai Center), with hundreds of immigrant businesses in the commercial district along Buford Highway, the place to go for authentic Chinese food or to catch an Indian movie. As Vásquez and Marquardt (2003: 166) point out, many immigrants live in a “transnational social ﬁ eld” that includes previous homelands and new sites of migration in complex and dialogical relationships.

5 “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision,” http://www.esa.un.org/unup, accessed July 13, 2006.

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Asian religious centers in the city have mushroomed in several areas of metro Atlanta. They include the Hindu Temple in the southern periphery; the ISKCON center in Little Five Points; the Eckankar and Vedanta centers in the northeast; the Baha’i Unity Center and the Sukyo Mahikari in the east; and the Vietnamese Buddhist Association of Georgia in the southeast. The Atlanta region also boasts the largest range of Indian temples and organizations in the South, including the Indian Cultural and Religious Center in Smyrna, a Sikh Gurdwara in Stone Mountain, the Greater Atlanta Vedic Temple in northeast Atlanta, the Swaminarayan temple in the east, and the Shakti Mandir in the southeast (Ramey 2005). Even a walk close to the Martin Luther King Historic District on Auburn Avenue, which remains predominantly African-American, reveals other institutions such as the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and Sevananda, an organic grocery store started in the 1970s by several individuals infl uenced by Anand Marg, in addition to numerous yoga centers. Sai Center activities in metropolitan centers like Atlanta reveal that in its global urban form the movement is protean and encodes multiple axiologies. The language used by devotees during their regular interactions incorporates a range of concepts drawn from the writings of Sathya Sai Baba but it also intersects with concepts of a universal godhead, ideas from New Age movements about energies, auras or the power of prayer, millenarian values from James Redfi eld’s Celestine Prophecy, and healing systems like Reiki, yoga, and Christian Science. Within this milieu, the Sathya Sai Baba movement has created signifi - cant epistemological intersections that cannot be routinely subsumed under the category of Hinduism or neo-Hinduism.6 Conceptual variety allows the Atlanta Sai Center to be housed in the UU congregation premises and accommodates guest speakers such as a female minister from the Unity School of Christianity, who is a Sai devotee.7 In the iconic realm of the altar put together painstakingly by Sai devotees every Saturday (see Figure 58), this conceptual variety is

6 On Hinduism and the American Sai Baba movement, see Palmer (2005) on the Sai Center of Stockton, California. He argues that the stress on universality and tolerance in the Sai movement makes it possible to revitalize Indian culture and religion and also express appreciation for all religious truths. 7 The Unity Church, founded in 1889 by Charles Fillmore in Kansas City, Mis- souri, considers itself to be Christian-based and is part of the New Thought family of denominations that seek to blend psychology, medicine, science, and religion (Brelsford 1996: 323–324).

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Figure 58. Altar at Sai Center, Atlanta (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

matched by sacred minimalism. Placed before the seated men and women is a large framed photograph of Sathya Sai Baba on a chair with his right hand raised in blessing. In front of the photograph are a number of lit candles and elaborate ﬂ ower arrangements that are changed each Saturday. The colors framing the altar area shift every week and range from pink and purple to gold. On the right hand side of the photograph is an empty chair with an orange robe that Sathya Sai Baba wears draped over it and a table with a glass of water. This arrangement resembles those in many Sai Centers across the world, for instance, in Bangalore’s Sai Darshan. In the American landscape, however, we do not see iconic references to Hindu deities like Rama, Krishna, Shiva, Ganesha, or the Devi that are quite popular in Indian samiti.8 The Guidelines for American Sathya Sai Baba Centers (1998: 14) state that “only the Sarva Dharma symbol, photographs of Sathya Sai Baba and possibly Shirdi Sai Baba, quotations from Sathya Sai Baba and universally accepted quotations from the world’s major religions [are to] be posted in a Center.”

8 This has also been noticed elsewhere, for instance, in Britain (Taylor 1987b).

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Singing of Sai

Sparse visual arrangement and iconic minimalism are matched by a mnemonic plenitude that operates within the register of devotional singing. In other words, epistemological multiplicity can be seen in the language of devotion that mirrors cultural difference and exchange. In this section, we shall take a brief detour through a typical bhajan session and a collection of bhajans in Indian Sai samiti before discussing the Atlanta collection and the modes through which difference is negotiated. All bhajan sessions—the centerpiece of the devotional activities in Atlanta, Nairobi or Bangalore—follow a standard order including the 108 names of Sathya Sai Baba; devotional songs addressed to Ganesha and then the guru followed by a dozen others; and the closing sequence (described in Chapter 3). The variety of bhajans on any given day is combined with a well-known ritualized order, making participation in a Sai Center remarkably easy and fl uent for devotees circulating between metropolitan regions. Many of the bhajans are familiar to most devotees, arousing a range of emotions depending on the intensity of the moment or the singers’ skill. Singing and hearing bhajans and clapping along with their beat are sensory experiences involving mouths, ears, and hands. Even for someone like me, who is rather tone deaf and musically unsophisticated, the collective experience can produce tears or leave the body and skin vibrating with unseen energy. Bhajans become sensory modes of creating a community of feeling for devotees participating regularly in these sessions. There are a number of bhajan collections in circulation, some of them published, and in many regional languages. In collections published by the Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust in India, such as Sai Bhajana Mala (2000) that has 1,008 bhajans, there are no English language songs, refl ecting the practices of most Indian samiti. Indian-language compositions fall into six classes in terms of their principal referents: the guru; Ganesha; Rama, Krishna or other incarnations of Vishnu; Shiva; Devi or Shakti; and Sarva Dharma (Universal Religion). We may also classify bhajans based on an analysis of their vocabulary, syntax, concepts, or references to sacred sites, cult fi gures, and regional traditions. Most bhajans sung by devotees, such as the one below, are typically a string of names, attributes, or descriptions of the divine from different traditions (Hari, Shankara, Shiva, Narayana, Keshava, Madhava,

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Antaryami, Paramatma), with the sacred syllable “Om” and the name “Sai” inserted in the lines: Hari Hari Om Shiva Shankara Om, Narayana Hari Om, Sai Narayana Hari Om Keshava Hey Shiva Madhava Hey, Narayana Hari Om, Sai Narayana Hari Om Paramatma Antaryami, Paramatma Antaryami, Narayana Hari Om Narayana Hari Om, Sai Narayana Hari Om Other songs, while also including names or attributes of the divine, bear the marks of devotional movements in India from the sixth century onwards, religions like Sikhism (with terms like “Vahe Guru” or “Sathya Nam”), some Hindustani/Hindi verbs or adverbs (for example, bolo or “say,” japiye or “chant,” nitya or “daily”), pronouns (tere or “yours”), and a vocabulary for the divine recognizable by speakers of different Indian languages (Govinda, Gopala, Krishna, Ram, Hari): Vahe Guru, Vahe Guru, Vahe Guru Ji Bolo Sathya Nam, Sathya Nam, Sathya Nam Ji Bolo Nitya Nitya Japiye Tere Nam Ji Bolo Sathya Nam, Sathya Nam, Sathya Nam Ji Bolo Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ji Bolo Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ram Ji Bolo Sathya Nam, Sathya Nam, Sathya Nam Ji Bolo Krishna Krishna Krishna Krishna Krishna Krishna Ji Bolo Nitya Nitya Japiye Krishna Nam Ji Bolo Hari Hari Hari Hari Hari Hari Ji Bolo Sathya Nam, Sathya Nam, Sathya Nam Ji Bolo Govinda Jai Jai Gopala Jai Jai Radha Ramana Hari Govinda Jai Jai Certain bhajans are well known as compositions of Sathya Sai Baba. For instance, the one below was apparently the ﬁ rst bhajan taught by him in 1940 when he declared his mission: Manasa Bhajare Guru Charanam Dustara Bhavasagara Taranam Guru Maharaj Guru Jai Jai Sai Natha Sadguru Jai Jai Om Namah Shivaya, Om Namah Shivaya, Om Namah Shivaya, Shivaya Namah Om Arunachala Shiva, Arunachala Shiva, Arunachala Shiva Aruna Shiv Om Omkaram Baba, Omkaram Baba, Omkaram Baba Om Namo Baba

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The fi rst two lines were translated by N. Kasturi as “meditate in thy mind on the feet of the guru, that can take you across the diffi cult sea of samsara [existence, world]” (Kasturi 1962: 44). The next two lines celebrate the guru as a great king (maharaj ) or true teacher (sadguru), while the next three invoke Shiva and Sathya Sai Baba. The bhajan is signifi cant because it inaugurates the emphasis on the remembrance of the name (namasmarana) in the Sai movement, and indicates links to Bhakti movements with their emphasis on the guru, the name of God, and maritime metaphors such as crossing the sea. It also encodes references to the Nath and Shaiva traditions, linkages that have been noticed by other scholars of the Sai movement (Swallow 1982; White 1972). Unmistakable, particularly to a South Indian audience, is the reference in line six to the sacred mountain of Arunachala identifi ed with the guru Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950). Several songs, such as the Sarva Dharma ones that celebrate all religions, indicate a Hindustani language background by the use of verbs or pronouns (e.g. tu or “you”), and invoke Rama, Krishna, Shiva, Jesus (Yesu), Allah, the Master (Prabhu), God (Ishvar) and Shirdi Sai Baba: Rama Krishna Prabhu Tu Jaya Ram Jaya Ram Sai Krishna Prabhu Tu Sai Ram Sai Ram Yesu Pita Prabhu Tu Hey Ram Hey Ram Allah Ishvara Tu Allah Ho Akbar Shirdi Sai Prabhu Tu Sai Ram Sai Ram A number of bhajans refer to medieval poet-saints such as Mirabai or North Indian devotional centers like Mathura and Brindavan that are important for Krishna devotees in his aspect of a cowherd (Gopala) boy (bala), the adopted son of Nanda (Nandalala), playing with maidens like Radha, or bearing a fl ute (murali): Gopala Radha Lola, Murali Lola Nandalala Gopala Radha Lola Keshava Madhava Janardhana Vanamala Brindavana Bala Murali Lola Nandalala Finally, other bhajans bear the marks of South Indian languages such as Malayalam and Tamil and recall regional cult traditions, such as this one about the pilgrimage site of Sabarimalai with its lord (Swami), Ayyappan, and taking refuge (sharanam) in him:

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Swami Sharanam Ayyan Sharanam Ayyappa Sharanam Sharanam Pon Ayyappa Shabari Girisha Sadguru Natha Swamiye Sharanam Sharanam Pon Ayyappa Mohini Suthane Mohana Rupa Swamiye Sharanam Sharanam Pon Ayyappa Partipurisha Prashanti Nilaya Swamiye Sharanam Sharanam Pon Ayyappa In the Indian context, the vocabulary of names is usually derived from Sanskrit or Hindustani (and recognizable by any number of linguistic groups) and there need not be a speciﬁ c grammatical structure. They support the idea held by devotees that the language, sounds, or even syllables are themselves powerful even without the devotee’s conscious understanding as well as the opposite idea that overall meaning of the verse, sentence or line expressed with devotion has power and coherence. In both cases, the ideas point to the signiﬁ cance of “sonic theology” (Beck 1993) in South Asian religion in addition to visual forms of knowing. This means that in a global context, or as a South Asian religious tradition becomes transnational, forms of oral and acoustic knowledge are important vehicles and mediums for theological dialogue and exchange.

Code-Switching and Code-Blending in the Atlanta Hymnal

In this section, dealing more explicitly with performances in the Atlanta Sai Center, I develop the observations made by several authors that Sai bhajans outside India are sometimes sung in different non-Indian languages. Ackerman and Lee point out that “hymns” of Sai sessions in Malaysia can be in Tamil, Sanskrit, English, Mandarin, Hokkein and Cantonese (Ackerman and Lee 1988: 106). Similarly, Bowen (1988: 7) states that since 1981 several English-language bhajans have been sung at the Bradford Sai Center, reﬂ ecting the multiethnic environment in Britain as well as the bilingualism of the younger devotees. He also discusses the birthday celebrations of Sathya Sai Baba at Wellingbor- ough and the English-language bhajans sung by the youth: the tunes were similar to western pop music and blended Christian and Hindu concepts (Bowen 1988: 106, 229). I rely on the insights of sociolinguistic literature on multilingualism, bilingualism, code-switching, and code-mixing to reﬂ ect on the

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performance of bhajans, their language, and vocabulary.9 My approach provides support for ethnomusicological methods that others might use to study devotional songs and religious music. I follow a model developed by Uberoi and Uberoi (1976) and elaborated in Srinivas (1989) for thinking about religious or linguistic pluralism and social “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 1981), or the variety and struggle in language, society, and the individual between centripetal and centrifugal forces. First, a few defi nitions: Multilingualism or bilingualism commonly implies alternation or the ability to use two or more languages with different degrees of profi ciency and in various contexts. Broadly speaking, code-switching refers to “the juxtaposition of elements from two (or more) languages or dialects” (McCormick 2001: 447) or “the use of more than one language in the course of a single communicative episode” (Heller 1988: 1), a form of language contact useful for maintaining or leveling social boundaries. Not all multilingual societies display code-switching, not everyone code-switches, and nor does code- switching occur in all social situations (Heller 1988: 9). Code-switching occurs when speakers change from one language or code to another depending on the context or situation, roles, interlocutors, topic, or activity (Blom and Gumperz 1972; Fishman 1965). This can also occur within a conversation, speech exchange, or sentence (Gumperz 1982). The separation between code-switching and code-mixing is possible if we use code-switching to refer to breaks between clauses or sentences that are relatively discernible, while code-mixing refers to “blurred, constant switching back and forth within clauses” (Mesthrie 2001: 443). I follow here the simple defi nition that code-switching is “the alternate use of two or more languages in the same utterance or conversation” (Grosjean 1982: 145) and do not separate it from code-mixing. Much of the literature on code-switching refers to the verbal strategies of bilingual people, conversational frames, or patterns in various social contexts and among community members. I believe, however, that some

9 Speech variety and the presence of multilingualism in cultures have been familiar to students of linguistics since the mid-1950s since the studies of Charles Ferguson, William Labov, and others. However, it was after sociolinguistics came into its own with the work of John Gumperz and Dell Hymes (1986 [1972]), that a focus on the “ethnography of communication” began to permeate anthropology and studies of performance.

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of these ideas can also be applied fruitfully to performative forms such as bhajans or other religious music, particularly in situations of cultural exchange and fl ows of religious traditions.10 Besides code-switching I also use the term code-blending. Apart from the language or code of the bhajan, there are tune and rhythm since the composition is customarily accompanied by a harmonium, drums, and hand cymbals. In most cases, tune and rhythm are fairly simple but may derive from classical scales and beats. I use the term code- blending to note occasions when the tune of one composition is paired with the words of a different, clearly recognizable composition, when Indian melodies are paired with English-language utterances, or when Euro-American tunes are paired with Indian-language utterances.11 There are a number of unpublished compilations of devotional songs in the Atlanta Sai Center that one may pick up outside the door leading to the bhajan area. The 1997 Atlanta hymnal has 685 devotional songs, 115 of them in English or in a mixture of English and Indian languages (16.8 percent of the total number) and none in Spanish. The hymnal in use during my fi eldwork period (2000–2002) contained 531 songs (including several presented above in the previous section). There were 96 songs in English or in a mixture of English and Indian languages and 4 in Spanish (together 18.8 percent of the total number). The percentage of these mixed bhajans was, therefore, slowly increasing over the years, their hybridity refl ected in the sessions featuring the customary harmonium and drums accompanied by guitar. Among the devotional songs in English or mixed verse, we may identify six types:

1. The ﬁ rst type includes English hymns like “Amazing Grace” that are also sung in Christian churches or congregations:

10 As Hymes (1972: 53–54) points out, speech is “a surrogate for all forms of language, including writing, song and speech-derived whistling, drumming, horn calling and the like.” 11 Slobin (1993: 87), for instance, deﬁ nes “code-layering” as the ability to “pull together not just text and tune, but timbre, rhythm, and instrumentation for several performers simultaneously in a stratiﬁ ed system . . .” Obviously any number of these variables can be changed.

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Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, That saved a soul like me I once was lost, but now I’m found, Was blind, but now I see. Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear And grace my fears relieved, How precious did that Grace appear The hour I fi rst believed. When we’ve been through ten thousand years Bright shining as the sun, We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise Than when we fi rst begun. Through many trials, toils and snares I have already come, Twas Grace that led me through thus far And Grace will lead me on. Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, That saved a soul like me I once was lost, but now I’m found, Was blind, but now I see. The original words of this hymn were composed by John Newton (1725–1807), a slave trader who later became an English clergyman. Now known as “Amazing Grace,” it appeared in the Olney Hymns published in 1779 under another title. It made its way across the Atlantic Ocean to America and in the early nineteenth century was used in “camp meetings” and “singings” of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. It was sung to other melodies but settled fi rmly into an American folk melody called “New Bri tain,” believed to be Scottish in origin, by the early twentieth century. It could, thus, be seen as an example of code-blending. Urban evangelists, Black churches, and the gospel music industry made it widely popular by the mid-twentieth century, but it also became part of pop music and the folk revival with recordings made by Elvis Presley, Judy Collins, Johnny Cash, and Joan Baez. “Amazing Grace” is a favorite of many Christian denominations today but also widely known outside these circles, adapting easily to other traditions including yoga, pagan beliefs and drug-induced insights. It is particularly appropriate in the Atlanta context since it was popular among those who opposed slavery and was sung during the Civil Rights movement (Turner 2002).12

12 See also “The Cyber Hymnal,” http://www.cyberhymnal.org, accessed May 5,

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“Kumbaya,” a spiritual recorded as early as the 1920s and published in the 1930s, is believed to be an African-American folk song from the South. It seems to suggest the idea of a personal and familiar God who is part of everyday life. This spiritual may have originated in the nineteenth century among the descendants of slaves who lived on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Later it was taken to Africa by American missionaries. The song enjoyed new-found popularity during the 1950s and 1960s as a campﬁ re song and part of the folk revival.13 One might see a sort of minimal code-switching between English and African-American English through the word, “Kumbaya” (“come by here”). Here is a modiﬁ ed version of “Kum- baya” from the Atlanta hymnal: Kumbaya my Lord, Kumbaya (3 times) O Lord, Kumbaya Someone’s crying Lord, Kumbaya (3 times) O Lord, Kumbaya Someone’s singing Lord, Kumbaya (3 times) O Lord, Kumbaya Someone’s praying Lord, Kumbaya (3 times) O Lord, Kumbaya Kumbaya my Lord, Kumbaya (3 times) O Lord, Kumbaya

2. The second type of song presents concepts that could refer to several religious traditions or even New Age beliefs. These seem to be relatively new compositions by devotees or other individuals. There is no code- switching here and the melody is Euro-American: Spirit of the Living God fall afresh on me Spirit of the Living God fall afresh on me Melt me, mold me, ﬁ ll me and use me Spirit of the Living God fall afresh on me

3. The third type is explicitly bilingual in its vocabulary or syntax and is an example of code-switching across utterances. Its Western melody

2006; “Amazing Grace” by Al Rogers, http://www.anointedlinks.com/amazing_grace. html, accessed July 31, 2006. 13 “The Origins of Kumbaya,” http://www.musick8.com/html, accessed July 31, 2006; “The Cyber Hymnal,” http://www.cyberhymnal.org, accessed May 5, 2006.

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is blended with Indian-language utterances in lines 3 to 6, an example of code-blending: I surrender to you, Baba, I surrender to you With each passing day I love you more, I surrender to you Sri Ram Jaya Ram Bolo Sai Baba, Jai Jai Jai Jai Ram Sri Sai Baba Vittala, Sharanam Baba O Sai Avatara Bhagavan, Sharanam Baba Sri Ram Jaya Ram Bolo Sai Baba, Jai Jai Jai Ram

4. The fourth type includes new compositions in English syntax addressed to Sathya Sai Baba alongside some borrowed words or concepts from a South Asian religious universe such as avatar, dharma (right conduct), or prema (love). There is a minimal code-switching here and it is similar to the example above except that it is sung to the tune of a clearly recognizable melody, the choral ﬁ nale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, an example of code-blending: Baba, hear the rising chorus as we sing all praise to Thee. Fill our hearts with Thy Love for us, Glory of Eternity! Sai Savior, Reincarnation of every Avatar before, Spreading joy through all creation, bring us bliss forevermore. Sathya, Prema, Shanti, Dharma and Ahimsa are the keys To unlock the chains of karma binding us, Thy devotees. Help us gain liberation from all concern of worldly pain. Bhagavan, our adoration echoes in a sweet refrain.

5. The ﬁ fth type includes songs that are in English syntax, but the concepts of divinity, creation, and so forth seem to come from South Asian traditions. These are translations into English of Sanskrit or Hindustani terms (Cause of all Creation, Preserver and Destroyer) as well as borrowed terms (Satchitananda Sai Baba) exhibiting code- switching. The melody is South Asian in inspiration, another example code-blending: You are Lord of the Universe, Lord of the Universe, reside in my heart Sai Baba Sai Baba, Sai Baba, reside in my heart Sai Baba Cause of all Creation, Preserver and Destroyer, Satchitananda Sai Baba Sai Baba, Sai Baba, Sai Baba, reside in my heart Sai Baba Mother of the Universe, Father of the Universe, Light of Mankind Sai Baba Sai Baba, Sai Baba, reside in my heart Sai Baba

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6. A sixth type of composition is completely in English but sung to the tune of an Indian bhajan although it does not directly translate words. The example below is sung to the melody of “Swami Shara- nam Ayyan Sharanam” (see the previous section above), an example of code-blending: Swami take my hand, Jesus take my hand, Dear Lord take my hand, take my hand and lead the way I’ll never forget You, You’ll always be with me Dear Lord take my hand, take my hand and lead the way You’re Guide and Protector, Mother and Father Dear Lord take my hand, take my hand and lead the way Teach me loving service, peace and contentment Dear Lord take my hand, take my hand and lead the way

A Transnational Guru Language

In the Atlanta Sai Center, the linguistic, musical, and conceptual dexterity of Sai bhajans is a support for recollection among diverse constituencies and migrants, making Sai faith very mobile. We hear a religiously bilingual community moving from one kind of code to the other or even blending two codes in a transnational or global “guru language.” The mixed verse exhibited in Sai bhajans in Atlanta is not a completely new sociolinguistic phenomena without historical precedent. Linguistic and conceptual cross-fertilization, discussed in a range of studies, reﬂ ects the religious repertoire or codes of a community or an individual who converts or comes to embrace new traditions. In South Asia, Srilata Raman (2006) shows that Shrivaishnava religious literature from the mid-twelfth century onwards was indebted to both Sanskrit and Tamil and this linguistic blurring acquired a new dimension as it came to be embodied in the manipravala language used to compose the literature. While this is, strictly speaking, a dialect of Tamil, the lexicon includes a lesser or greater degree of Sanskrit. Raman suggests that these texts were mediums for new ideas that emerged from the alchemy of Tamil and Sanskrit Shrivaishnavism. Medieval sectarian formation and differentiation were premised on the sharing of common languages (Tamil and Sanskrit), a common canon or saint. The songs of the Bauls or Eknath’s compositions in

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the medieval period also mediate various cultural and religious milieus by using several languages and terms.14 In Braj Bhasa, a language used by the North Indian poet-saint Sur Das, the boundaries of literary dialects were not as well defi ned in the sixteenth century as they later became and there is “a fair amount of overlap between the language of poems attributed to Sur and that of poems appearing under the signature of Nanak or even Kabir” (Hawley and Juergensmeyer 1988: 98). It has been argued that the language of the Adi Granth, the sacred scripture of Sikhism that was edited, collated and reduced to writing in the vernacular in 1604, is not one language. At a basic level, there is a linguistic core alongside several peripheral styles. Even the core, however, has a signifi cant amount of variability for expressing basic grammatical categories, where the morphological variation exhibited overlaps with other texts of about the same time period (Shapiro 1987). An example from southern India might be Dakani, the vernacular of Deccani Muslims that became a vehicle for literary production from the fi fteenth century onwards through courts, saints and poets, with its links to Persian, north India, and the Deccan context (see Eaton 2005: 141–145). Prothero (1996: 9), in his study of Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832– 1907), founder of the Theosophical Society, an American who converted to Buddhism, and an eminent fi gure in the Sinhalese Buddhist Revival, suggests that Olcott’s “creole faith” combined Protestantism and Buddhism in a specifi c way: “While the lexicon of his faith was almost entirely Buddhist, its grammar was largely Protestant.” Thus, Olcott and Theosophy contributed to America’s religious pluralism but did so by Prostestantizing Asian religions. The musical manifestations of Indian Christian theology, that acquired widespread infl uence from the colonial period onwards, shows evidence of code-switching and blending: Sherinian (2002) states that Tamil Protestant Christian music can be divided into three main categories: Western hymns sung in European languages, translations of Western hymns into Sanskritized Tamil, and indigenous traditions such as Dalit theology voiced in folk music. In her study of a South Asian diaspora, Myers shows that East Indi- ans in Felicity, Trinidad, have tended to use Indian models for religious

14 See Zelliot (1987: 97) for a reference to the mixed language verses of sixteenth century Eknath. See Dimock (1987) for a discussion of the Bauls and their use of Persian and Arabic terms in their songs.

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contexts, while Afro-Western ones (calypso, soca, disco) are used for entertainment. Indian music means chutney and ﬁ lm songs for the younger generation, folk songs for the older generation, and temple songs for most people. While Hindi and Bhojpuri are especially valued, Bhojpuri is not spoken much by younger people. However, an Indian repertory has been maintained by different strategies across time: learning Hindi ﬁ lm songs and tunes from cinema, radio or records (which arrived in Trinidad from the 1930s onwards); using short, simple, nonstrophic Hindi Sai Baba bhajans (introduced in the 1970s) instead of complex strophic devotional songs; singing chutney songs (which enjoyed a revival in the 1980s and 1990s) where the knowledge of Hindi is minimum; or turning to instrumental music (see Myers 1998: 398–403). Music thus negotiates the relationship between East Indians, India, and the Afro-Caribbean landscape. In the North American context, a precedent of such code-switching and code-blending in devotional music is the case of Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian teacher who began his mission in North America in 1920 and established the Self-Realization Fellowship’s international headquarters in Los Angeles in 1925.15 He spent a major part of his life in North America teaching yoga and meditation, emphasizing the harmony and oneness of Christ’s and Krishna’s teachings, service to mankind, and self-realization or God-realization through personal effort (Yogananda 1982[1975]). His collection of music, Cosmic Chants, contains several examples of code-switching and code-blending. As the book’s introduction states, amid his compositions are several translations of Sanskrit, Hindi or Bengali songs adapted for Western musical notation (Yogananda 1987[1938]: xviii–xix). “No Birth, No Death,” for instance, is a translation into English of a chant in Sanskrit by Shankaracharya without borrowed words or code-switching. The English words and music of “Thou Art My Life” were written by the Bengali poet and writer, Rabindranath Tagore. “Spirit and Nature,” a song composed by the saint Chaitanya, switches between English and Hindi/Hindustani in Yogananda’s translation (Yogananda 1987[1938]: 3). There are also examples of code-blending: A Bengali song chanted by Yogananda’s guru Yukteswarji called “Wake, Yet Wake, O My Saint” is performed on electric piano and synthesizer by lay members and monks of the

15 My thanks to Bruce Cook for introducing me to these compositions by Parama- hansa Yogananda.

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Self-Realization Fellowship in their 2003 CD, Where Golden Dreams Dwell. The instrumental arrangement makes it sound like a Christian hymn rather than an Indian chant. In the case of Yogananda’s chants, religious bilinguality rests on the explicit parallelism or similarity drawn between Christ and Krishna as avatars or on the idea that “Jesus incarnated on earth to give the world a new expression of Sanatan Dharma [eternal religion]” (Yogananda 1982[1975]: 285). This has its parallel in sound: “Vibrations resulting from devotional singing lead to attunement with the Cosmic Vibration [Om] or the Word” (Yogananda 1987[1938]: xi). I wish to emphasize here that code-switching and code-blending in bhajans in the Atlanta Sai Center are a matter of both performance and comprehension. In this context, we may turn to Frankenberg (2004: 35–36, 54, 73–76), who argues that encounters with the divine are made possible by the placing of practitioners within a specifi c religious frame that provides or constrains the language of experience. There are, therefore, “protocols of comprehension” of Godtalk. The material effi cacy of the divine within and across time and space and practitioners’ familiarity with specifi c traditions make the divine knowable. As in the case of Yogananda, the discourses of Sathya Sai Baba include the idea that Jesus is one of many prophets and avatars and that the “unity of the Spirit is proclaimed . . . in the teachings of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam” as in the Vedas (SSS, Vol. 24: 321). This makes Baba a “theological bridge-builder” (Hawley and Juergensmeyer 1988: 151), like the Bhakti saint Tulsidas from an earlier period or more recently Yogananda, a fact that has sonic resonances. There is another epistemological and social conjuncture of signifi cance that infl uences the protocols of performance and comprehension—the period of the 1950s and 1960s that predated the growing presence of South Asians in the Sai Baba movement in Atlanta. During this period, songs like “Kumbaya” migrated out of the African-American context to others and gained public acceptance through a number of initiatives in American Protestant Christianity and Roman Catholicism for inter- denominational communication. This made it possible, for instance, for post-Vatican Council II Roman Catholic churches to incorporate drums and guitar during Mass, folk music, as well as African-American spirituals (Oppenheimer 2001). Hymns like “Amazing Grace,” which enjoyed multi-congregational currency, also gained popularity during the folk music revival of the 1960s. Many spirituals and gospel songs migrated out of older ritual contexts to become an integral part of

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the Civil Rights movement (Harvey 2001). These were communal, oral, and sensory forms speaking of hope, suffering, freedom, sustenance, and the spirit. On urban streets throughout the US, one was likely to encounter folk singers strumming guitars and singing these songs as well as groups of dancing devotees singing, “Hare Rama, Hare Krishna.” These songs became fl agships of inter-denominational and inter-racial fertilization, faith, healing and community rather than being rooted in a single ethno-history or culture. Because many of them omit reference to Jesus and use a language that emphasizes an unmediated and interpersonal relationship between humans and the divine, they were available for universal(ist) adaptation. In the most recent phase of the Sai Baba movement (1980s to the present), as the Atlanta hymnal testifi es, hymns and spirituals such as these have been further transposed onto an originally Asian religious tradition. Many spirituals have a call-response structure that allows others to participate, “a strong marker of the pervasiveness of African cultural memory in the lived experience of New World slaves” (Burnim 2006: 55). Such a structure is also common to bhajans, where the leader’s call is followed by that of the devotees’ chorus. We may note also that many postcolonial South Asians would have already encountered such hymns through Christian schools and choirs or police bands playing “Amazing Grace” accompanied by bagpipes. These epistemological, historical, sensory, and social conjunctures, build on a common family of devotion and the “sharing in God that bhakti implies creates networks of human beings that cut across divisions” (Hawley and Juergensmeyer 1988: 11) whether of language, religious tradition, or music. That this Sai bhakti family has a long history is indicated by the greeting used by members when they meet each other: “Sai Ram.” This devotional tradition or guru language is, however, not confi ned to the South Asian social landscape but can be embedded in other communicative arenas.

Reaching Out

The ethnographic milieu of guru language includes bhajan sessions as well as other channels of communication and practice speciﬁ c to the American urban and suburban landscape. These may be oral, printed, somatic, or technological in nature and create sites of sociality for the Sai movement in the US.

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The Sathya Sai Newsletter, USA, published under the auspices of the Sathya Sai Baba Central Council of America, is a national archive of Sathya Sai Baba’s speeches, devotees’ experiences, events at Puttaparthi, refl ections on Sathya Sai Baba’s teachings, stories for children, and announcements about meetings and US Center activities. For example, the Winter 1999–2000 issue of the Sathya Sai Newsletter, USA describes a seminar on Sai parenting, the celebration of Christmas at Prashanti Nilayam that included an annual play by children in the style of an American musical, and a choir that sang African-American spirituals, French and Spanish songs, and an African song besides other bhajans. Each newsletter contains an insert called Sathya Sai Service Opportunities that encourages service (seva) in the US and India with the motto, “Hands that serve are holier than lips that pray.” The same Winter 1999–2000 issue includes an account of visits by the San Francisco Center members to the Sunrise Convalescent Home in Hayward and the activities of volunteers from the North-Central Region at a medical camp in Baba’s hermitage in India. It also includes as a regular feature tips on saving energy within the home related to the “Ceiling on Desires program.” The Winter 2000–2001 issue discusses the New York Sai Center’s computer-training classes for inner-city and immigrant youth who come from Covenant House, a shelter for homeless and drug-dependent youth, and two local high schools. We discover that the success of the New York Center’s activities led to the adoption of the program by Centers in Columbus, Cleveland, Detroit, Miami, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Typical service activities include soup kitchens in homeless shelters, “meals on wheels” programs, working with cor- rectional institutions and nursing homes, teaching computer skills, blood donation camps, toys for children in protective agencies, and clothes for the homeless. Most of the activities are directed toward the urban poor and dispossessed, those who are homeless, or in shelters. They exemplify the “invisible caring hand” (Cnaan 2002) offered by many religious congregations in the United States in addition to group worship. They also display the “institutional isomorphism” of religious life in the American context—forms revealed in outreach activities that over a third of the communities of faith have been shown to perform (Ammerman 2005). The service activities of local Sai Centers, such as the Atlanta one, depend on discussions that take place among the members identifying specifi c needs within the city. In Fall 2001, the activities at the Atlanta Center included: (1) sandwich seva on the fi rst, third and fourth Satur-

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days of the month at 10:30 AM where food is distributed to the homeless at different locations in downtown and metro Atlanta; (2) Wesley Woods Senior Center seva on the second Saturday of each month at 9:30 AM that consists of serving food to the residents of the nursing home; (3) breakfast seva at the Women’s Shelter in midtown Atlanta on Saturdays at 8:45 AM; (4) breakfast for teenagers and little children at Another Chance in Marietta on Saturdays at 8:30 AM; (5) knitting seva by people producing blankets and other items for Grady Hospital in downtown Atlanta, children in shelters, or homeless people; (6) North Fulton County Shelter seva that includes support in the form of food items and other materials such as diapers; and (7) computer lessons for inner-city and poor teenagers at an organization called the Turning Point. During sandwich seva that I attended a few times in Atlanta, devotees would gather at someone’s home to put together vegetarian sandwiches, cool drinks, tea, coffee, fruits, and biscuits into cartons. After a brief session of bhajans, about eight or ten of us would drive down to a park where homeless people were known to gather. There we distributed the foods out of the back of our trunks, mostly to African-Americans and some poor white people. In November 2001, I visited the Afrocentric Cultural Center in an African-American neighborhood with a few other members for a new project, the painting of a rehabilitation center for men and women. Fitted out with brushes, tins of paint, jeans, smocks, and sneakers, we spent all morning trying to complete the painting of a room in a rather dark and airless house. As Giri (2002) reminds us in the case of Habitat for Humanity, homeownership is a precondition of ideal citizenship and personhood in the US. In recent decades, a home to own or rent has become a more difﬁ cult goal to attain and a signiﬁ - cant number are homeless or in shelters. Habitat for Humanity’s “No More Shacks” slogan, its practice of voluntary labor to build homes, and the economics of Jesus addresses itself to this crisis of housing and a late capitalistic economy. Similarly, one of the South Asian members at the Afrocentric Cultural Center that winter morning suggested that in the United States, “service in the inner-city is like grama seva (village service).” For many members who live in suburban locations, this sort of corporeal outreach activity embraces African-Americans, the homeless or working class of the city, even if it is only for a day or two a week. In this sense, their activities resemble those of many groups in Atlanta and elsewhere who are struggling with what it means to be both embedded in a local urban context as well as the community of faith in a larger historical sense.

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The total number of people from the Atlanta Center engaged in service activities is smaller than the number engaged in bhajans; about a third of the members participate regularly in some seva. However, devotees are also drawn together in other circuits of sociality such as the Shivaratri bhajans held in Indiana in February 2001, the Southeast Regional Sai Conference held in Miami in October 2001, or the Akhand Bhajans (continuous non-stop bhajan singing for 24 hours) at Little Rock, Arkansas, in November 2001, to which devotees travel together. Other occasions occur at devotees’ homes in the Atlanta metropolitan region, marking events such as birthdays, moving into a new home, a wedding, or simply gathering to sing and chant “Om Sri Sai Ram.” Virtual channels of communication by mail, email, and phone calls also create sites of sociality. There might be requests to pray for a member who is ill or for a family member who has passed away. In early 2001, there were reminders that the Young Adult members (ages 16–35) of the Southeast Region had been asked to spend 15 minutes every Sunday chanting the divine name (Om Sri Sai Ram) wherever they might be to build unity within the group and send collective positive energy to the communities around. Another request over a listserv in March 2001 came from the Sai youth community in Macedonia, who had started a peace project including daily prayer at a speciﬁ c time, inviting others to participate transnationally. Daily messages via email included a quotation from Sathya Sai Baba’s writings or speeches. The largest trafﬁ c on email lists included postings about events at Baba’s ashram in Puttaparthi, the text of his discourses, or miraculous happen- ings at people’s homes and Centers. My favorite posting on a listserv, dated February 9, 2001, reads: On November 17th, 1999, when plans for a Sathya Sai School in Toronto, Canada were presented to Him, Swami said in the interview: The school is My project.” That the school is INDEED His project is undoubtedly apparent by two miracles that have occurred at the school so far. On November 22nd–23rd, 2000, a garland that was placed on His picture located in the front foyer of the school grew by 75 inches, an inch for each year of His Birth! The children who lamented that He was not there to cut His birthday cake were treated to His presence in this most wondrous way. On New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2001, the Trustees of the school organized a bhajan in front of the same picture to mark the beginning of the New Year. The bhajan started at 10:00 AM and the same wondrous event was noticed soon after. The garland that was placed around His picture for the occasion began growing in length. At about 11.00 PM on January 1st, the garland grew to touch the table. The accompanying pictures show the garland as it was before this. At the time of writing

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( January 2nd, 11.50 AM), the garland is on the table in wave-like formation indicating that it is continuing to grow. These two miraculous events are surely tokens of His Love and AMAZING GRACE. The Internet is not the only electronic medium that acts as a carrier for sociality or grace. Other mundane technologies such as copy machines can also distribute magic: In October 2001, a stack of free photographs had been kept on a table at the Atlanta Sai Center that depicted Sathya Sai Baba as Krishna, playing a ﬂ ute, with a blue face and arms (see Figure 59). On the back of the photo was a pasted note that said: A lady from Australia asked Swami if she could take his picture. Swami said ‘Yes.’ When she had the picture developed this is how it turned out. In August 2001, a devotee took an original for copying to Wal-Mart. He asked for 500 copies. When the devotee went to pick up the pictures, the Wal-Mart attendant said that the machine did not stop until it produced

Figure 59. Wal-Mart copy of print of Sathya Sai Baba as Krishna (Courtesy of a devotee at the Atlanta Sai Center)

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2,500 copies. He did everything to stop the machine. Perhaps this is Swami’s way of blessing us with his LOVE. Please take one per family. OM SAI RAM. While the Internet and copy machines multiply spaces of sociality or ascribe devotion on to other mediums, certain events can also become unexpected sites of connectivity and grace. In 2001, a copy of a letter from Dr. Michael Goldstein, one of the US Central Council Coordina- tors, was circulated widely at local Centers and via email, in the wake of the events of 9/11. It read: Recently, Americans have been overwhelmed with the terrible tragedy in New York and Washington D.C. A communication was sent to our Beloved Swami with a report on the situation and status of the New York Sai Centers. All of the Sai Centers in the New York area have reported to their regional president that all of their members are safe and unharmed . . . Included in the communication sent to Swami was a letter written to Him by the ofﬁ cers of the New York and Washington D.C. Region that expressed their gratitude to Him for His Divine Pro- tection and their desire to be of service to the less fortunate victims of this cataclysmic disaster. The density of virtual interaction intensiﬁ es bonds that are built up locally through various somatic practices. Corporeal exchanges are not replaced but print, the Internet, or other technologies create the possibility of crossing borders and also the sense of a new geography through the evolving experience of Baba’s charisma and his mission. An email on a devotees’ listserv, for example, stated that in a 1976 discourse Sathya Sai Baba materialized a map of India with 18 diamonds studded on it showing 18 Sai Centers. He is said to have stated: These 18 centers will be called Dharmashalas [free public lodgings] with each of them having one Stupa in it. I shall hand pick people who will run these centers. Do not think that those near me will be picked up. I am watching those who are far away. The same message, indicating the multiplicity of his presence and the sacred landscape being inaugurated, continued with words ascribed to Baba: Many events are going to take place very soon. Many mega projects are going to come up. The time is not far when different people will see me at different places at the same time. I may be traveling in a car at the same time I shall be giving darshans at Sai Kulwant Hall and at the same time I shall be speaking at Hill View Stadium . . . There will be Sai, Sai, Sai, Sai everywhere.

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Even a “stranger” could be Sathya Sai Baba. One devotee writes: When Baba fi rst appeared to me, I didn’t know who he was; he looked like an unusually well-dressed Texas highway patrolman in a uniform straight from Gucci, odd for that stretch of highway between Houston and Texas City. (Sathya Sai Newsletter, USA, Spring 1998, Vol. 22, No. 3: 9) The narrative goes on to describe how this patrolman appeared suddenly on the highway to help her during an accident, how she traveled to Puttaparthi, and had a dream confi rming that the highway patrolman was Baba. The social arenas of different cities and the conduits connecting them, thus, become porous and fragile as Baba’s voice, fi gure and intention penetrate daily events. Even the archetypal urban fi gure of the stranger becomes imbued with luminous properties.

From Devotion to Transformation

The sense of a new geography is also enhanced during the annual retreats that take place during the conferences of various regions in the US, often coinciding with major national holidays. The Southeast Region’s annual retreat in 2002 took place over the Labor Day weekend (August 30–September 1) at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Atlanta. Dur- ing one of the biggest family holidays in the United States, about 425 adult devotees from 20 Sai Centers across Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida chose instead to spend their weekend at the retreat. Some devotees from Toronto, New York, and California also arrived to join them.16 On Friday evening, I drove up to the hotel hosting the event located on an exit off the beltway north of Atlanta. Other cars and vans began pulling up with individual families, but some contained devotees who had decided to pool their resources and drive down together—singles, couples, and children. Volunteers waiting in the reception area gave to attendees name-cards and vouchers for special vegetarian buffets that had been prepared by the hotel at the Chattahoochee Grill. While there were some like me who had never attended such a retreat, several devotees were regulars who seemed to know people from other state Centers. Most of the

16 Eck (2000: 233) suggests that the Americanization of the South Asian festival calendar has also involved the addition of American holidays.

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out-of-city devotees were staying at the hotel, taking advantage of special conference rates. The venue was a large ballroom that had been prepared for the retreat’s activities. Nearby was a book sales counter with devotional literature and a room for removing one’s footwear. Dominating the ballroom was the altar arranged with a photograph of Sathya Sai Baba from the Atlanta Center (see Figure 60). Women were seated on the left-hand side of the photograph and men on the right. Devotees of South Asian descent composed about half the people gathered in the room but there were a substantial number of persons of Hispanic descent from the Florida Centers besides white devotees. While many men wore white shirts and trousers as they would at the hermitage in India, women were arrayed in both Indian clothes and American clothes regardless of ethnicity. Towards the left-hand side of the photograph was a chair for Sathya Sai Baba with his robe folded carefully in a glass case. A small table with a glass of water stood nearby. On the right- hand side of the photograph was a large screen used to project words of bhajans to be sung over the weekend, videos, overhead transparencies, and PowerPoint presentations. As soon as one entered the room for the day’s events, one was greeted with a video of Sathya Sai Baba giving darshan at his hermitage and soft music playing in the background.

Figure 60. Regional conference at Crowne Hotel ballroom (Photograph credit: Smriti Srinivas)

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The conference began with this invocation: “Swami, knowing that we are immersed in your Divine Presence, we place at your lotus feet this invocation to come forth through each heart during this time we have together and everyday hereafter.” A tape followed playing Sathya Sai Baba singing a Sanskrit verse. Outside the main venue were several public sub-venues of devotional performance: On two evenings a lady sat near the Chattahoochee Grill distributing ambrosia (amrita) from a bottle brought all the way from a Sai Baba shrine at Srirangapattana near Mysore in India. We queued up to receive spoonfuls of the sticky and sweet ﬂ uid, which oozes from two small disks bearing images of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba at the Indian shrine, while she related to newcomers the story of Halagappa, who runs the shrine. Some of us turned up with small containers to take samples home to relatives and friends. Several strangers, who were drinking and smoking at the bar, also watched these activities curiously. Finally, one of them, a pretty, young, glamorously dressed woman, came up and began to ask questions about Sai Baba. This prompted a small discussion with people chipping in with information and opinions. Outside the Grill was also a lovely young African woman from Gambia, a hotel employee, collecting our vouchers as we headed to the lunch buffet. Several devotees exclaimed when they read her name tag: her name was Sai. They asked: “How did you ever get that name in Gambia? What a coincidence!” Sai eventually wandered over the book sales section to read about Sai Baba. On my way to the elevator one evening, a man dressed in a suit getting in with me asked, “Was this a good seminar?” Before I could answer, he turned to another devotee in the elevator (she was an older white woman wearing a badge like me) and, looking puzzled, said: “You were there too? But you are not Indian or a Hindu.” She explained patiently: “Most of us are American. This is not a meeting of a village in India, but of devotees of a World Teacher who lives in India.” During meal times, other kinds of exchanges emerged. One afternoon, I sat at lunch with a young woman (originally from Trinidad who now lives in Miami) and asked her about Sai Baba devotion in Trinidad (having recently re-read Singing with Sai Baba by Morton Klass). We talked about why the retreat was important. It provided a sense of community, she said, and reinforced values and teachings of Sai Baba. This was afﬁ rmed by a Peruvian couple from Florida, who made visits almost every year to Puttaparthi. They said, “These people are family. We have known them for over 20 years.” An Indian student from

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South Carolina said softly that the retreat helped to be close to Swami in the midst of everyday life. The theme of the conference was “From Devotion to Transforma- tion” organized chiefl y around three sets of activities: regular devotional singing of bhajans; speeches by keynote speakers, who were well-known devotees of Sathya Sai Baba or offi ce-bearers in the Sai Organization; and presentations by Young Adults and children of various Centers. The speakers focused on different aspects of the conference theme. Dr. Choudhary Voleti, a cardiac surgeon originally from Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh now settled in the US, spoke about his experiences with Sathya Sai Baba from 1993 onwards. His talk focussed on how we might move from devotion to transformation through several steps. One step might be asking ourselves a few central questions about actions we take: Is it meant to put us in an unduly advantageous position? Is it good for everyone involved in the equation? Is it good for society? He noted that while the complete absence of desire is only for an enlightened few, for most devotees, “Ceiling on Desires” is the path that can be reasonably followed. He stressed the power of prayer and the role of namasmarana in daily life. Voleti recounted anecdotes about his contact with Baba delivered in a humorous style and on experiences and sights familiar to devotees visiting the hermitage. Many of these suggested the extraordinary powers of Baba: He related, for instance, that Sathya Sai Baba had maintained his weight of 108 pounds since he was 14 years old and he consumed a humanly impossible diet of 300 calories. Voleti asked him how he could do so? Baba replied, “It is easy. You spend energy, I create energy.” His portrayal of Sathya Sai Baba was largely as an intimate friend, one who has a pact with the devotee; on one occasion, he referred to Baba’s words at a discourse given to US Seva Conference delegates at Prashanti Nilayam on July 22, 2002: “All I have is love; you are all shareholders in my love.” His talk left many with tears in their eyes. Jack and Louise Hawley are devotees of Sathya Sai Baba since the 1970s and today spend half the year in Puttaparthi and the other half in the US. They based their talk on materials from two books authored by Jack (1993, 2001). He has a doctoral degree in organizational behavior and spent ten years as an executive in high-technology and service industries before becoming the president of his own management consulting fi rm and a founder of a consulting consortium. The talk, given over two days, was supplemented by graphic representations on several themes, personal experiences, and dashes of humor. While he

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made references to Ivan Illich, Kabir, Chaitanya, the Prophet, and other fi gures, Hawley based his philosophy on his learning experiences with Sathya Sai Baba over several decades and his reading of the Bhagavad Gita, which he described as the heart of the yoga of devotion. On the fi rst day, the talk was divided into two sections dealing with two central questions: “What is love? How do we achieve it?” Beginning his fi rst book on management, which suggests that successful leaders and managers are those who are motivated by a spiritual vision that liberates the best in persons and organizations, he realized that he had to write about love. There was, however, a “universal shyness” about this subject from managers and academics, a condition that resembled some Japanese movies: whoever falls in love ends up dead! It was through prayer to Swami that he devised a language that would be palatable to business managers. He described love as comprising of six landscapes, a journey from the lowest to the highest, from desire to spirit. We achieve it by loving, by asking him (Swami/God) to help, by loving him since it is the nature of love that we become that which we love, and by practicing it. The second day’s talk revolved around two additional questions: “What is sadhana [spiritual practice]? How do we do it?” Sadhana was described as comprising of 70 percent self- inquiry, a gradual reprogramming and transformation of the mind from worldli- ness to godliness, from pain and agitation to bliss and equanimity. One cultivates divine qualities and drops bad habits step by step. Above all, practice has to be anchored in love. The speaker distributed two worksheets to the audience to help fi x in one’s mind and check against daily action the qualities of a perfect devotee. Dr. Jose Gomez, the service coordinator for the Southeast Region, addressed the practice of service in different neighborhoods and countries. The main theme of his talk was the International Seva Confer- ence held in Puttaparthi from July 21–23, 2002, where the motto was S-A-I or Service-Adoration-Illumination. He suggested that these three terms contain, involve, and explain the secret of spiritual development and that the fi rst leads to the other two. The Seva Conference, held after a number of years, assembled 1,544 delegates from 71 countries excluding India. Twenty-three speakers from different regions, one of them Dr. Gomez, gave talks on how their Centers and zones were doing in terms of service activities. This was followed by an interactive workshop in which each of the fi ve world zones separately discussed three main issues: What do we understand as the role of service within an individual context and an organizational context? What are the

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practical issues? What are the projects that are really working to help develop divinity and help mankind? With respect to the fi rst issue, the main emphasis was that members of the Sai Organization should embark upon service to further their own spiritual transformation and for the benefi t of mankind. Thus, Dr. Gomez clarifi ed, there is no need even to talk about Sai Baba while engaged in service because the Sai Organization does not seek to proselytize or convert: “No one comes to Swami unless he wants,” and therefore there can be no recruitment of others through service. There needs to be an evaluation of resources, including money, materials, energy, and manpower; and there needs to be a group of committed volunteers, who are prepared to work together as long as it takes to complete an activity that has been planned. An effort should be made to engage in projects that will endure and grow in scope, resulting in the transformation of the community. Dr. Gomez illustrated his talk with two instances of seva that demonstrated these ideas: one, a drinking water project in a rural community in El Salvador, and the other, an urban alcohol and drug abuse program in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Both of them signal the complex space of subjectivity for devotees in the Sai Organization—the separation of the Sai community from the state as well as the power and grace of Baba—as this transcript of Dr. Gomez’s account (August 31, 2002) illustrates: I would like at this point to read you a portion of a letter that was read there at the conference. . . . This is about a water project that was developed in one of the Central American countries, specifi cally El Salvador, in a small rural community called T. close to Guatemala. In that small community there was no water. They had to go all the time, children especially, to a natural spring four to fi ve kilometers away from the community . . . So quite often children were not going to school because they were carrying water back and forth from the spring. This was a long-standing problem. So the Sathya Sai Organization decided to do something about it and they did. This is a portion of the letter that the Principal of the school along with the President of the World Community of T. wrote to the Sathya Sai Organization . . .: “During the past twenty years we have received promises from different governments to bring us a supply of water. But all they did was just talk. Finally, they said that this could not be accomplished because of the high cost of the project. When you people came . . . after the earthquake . . . with food and clothing and asked us how you could help us we said, ‘please help us get water.’ . . . When you said there was a possibility of installing community faucets or taps and also to have water even in the school, we did not

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believe you. However, you showed us how to work together and everybody helped to collect and bury the water pipes. We covered fi ve kilometers in one day. Then you brought the water-pump and electricity was turned on while we were building the reservoir tank. Currently we have 21 public taps that have been working very well for the past fi ve months. There was another unexpected benefi t. Now all the children can come to school since they do not have to go to the spring anymore to carry water. You people did in a few short months what the different governments could not do in 20 years and at a fraction of the cost. Only God can repay you for this service.” Of course, they did not know it was God himself who was behind this! [Laughter from the devotees]. The Young Adults program concluded the fi rst night of the conference with groups from six Centers in the Southeast Region performing. They connected the Ceiling on Desires program to resource conservation in daily lives; enacted a play based on one that Sathya Sai Baba had created as a young boy in which the role of Sathya was played by a girl; and made a musical presentation that included some standard bhajans, a song using Kabir’s couplets, and an adaptation of “We are the World” (written by Michael Jackson and produced by Quincy Jones in 1985 that brought attention to the famine in Africa)—“We are the World, We are Sai’s Children.” The well-trained voices of the youth alongside a video of Sathya Sai Baba had many people crying. The musical program on the second day was led by T.V. Hariharan from Bangalore, formerly a student in Sathya Sai Baba’s university, who now gives bhajan tours and composes songs in praise of Sai Baba. This was followed by a regular program of devotional singing—this time led by devotees from Florida including several Spanish bhajans. At the end of the program, we were urged to adopt at least one of Baba’s teachings as the lesson of the retreat. Most people had stayed till the very end of the program and as people quietly rose to leave the main room while others were meditating, the air seemed quite emotional. Several people had tears in their eyes; others were beaming. An African- American woman (a soul cleanser from North Carolina) and I hugged each other and exchanged addresses.

Creating a Sacred Landscape

The study of religion in the American city was not a focus for several decades of the twentieth century in part because cities were seen as outcomes of secularization. Orsi, however, argues for the analysis of

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religious creativity in the city: “ ‘Urban religion’ is what comes from the dynamic engagement of religious traditions . . . with specifi c features of the industrial and post-industrial cityscapes and with the social conditions of city life” (Orsi 1999: 43). The nature of the postmodern or post-Fordist city is now infl ected by discussions about immigration, new diasporas, or transnationals; the boundaries between the inner-city and the suburbs; vocabularies such as edge city, technoburb, or exurb; the transformation of spatiality through a service economy, freeways, and malls; or the end of public space. What is the relationship between Sai religiosity and these recent discussions about the American urban landscape? Globalization and economic restructuring, combined with massive shifts of population, have reconfi gured place-based religious identities in cities across America. For example, near Atlanta, in the small town of Dacula in Gwinnet County (the fastest growing county in the United States in the 1980s), urban de-concentration and the mushrooming of industrial and corporate jobs around transportation networks dramatically altered the institutional dynamics of Christian congregations (Eiesland 2000). Until the early 1980s, 11 out of 24 churches still traced their origins to the time before the town’s founding; fi ve were founded subsequently. Within a period of 13 years, however, eight new congregations were established, almost “as if locals had placed a sign on Highway 316 designating the area ‘Church Growth Parkway’ ” (Eiesland 2000: 48). Similarly, temple building by the South Asian diaspora in the US or the development of Sai Centers near beltways also occurs under the conditions of urban de-concentration and the development of highway infrastructure. In Atlanta, like many other US cities, negotiating cultural and social difference under the conditions of globalization or urban restructuring plays an important role in several congregational contexts. The epistemological intersections created by the Atlanta Sai Center with congregations like the UU or the Unity Church, the code-switching and code-blending in the Atlanta hymnal, and other sites of sociality suggest an image of the urban that goes far beyond multiculturalism or the revitalization of an ethnic identity. Instead, we see “dialogism” (Bakhtin 1981) as a mode of religious and linguistic practice that emerges out of tensions between centripetal and centrifugal forces in urban society. In religious discourse, all kinds of voices including the guru, other

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gurus, the deity, the preacher, the devotee, and the folk-singer may speak the Word or the Name. In the process, other meanings and utterances are encountered and against the self-equivalent stability of the signal is posited the novelty of the sign. The signal reconciles polysemanticity of the word with its unity by isolating it and giving it a fi xed meaning out of context; the sign combines unity and multiplicity in dialogue (Volosinov 1973). In the Atlanta case, we notice that a signifi cant number of bhajans in the hymnal are dialogized through code-blending and code-switching forging historical and cultural allusions to the folk revival, spirituals, the Civil Rights movement, or other gurus and movements. This makes a bhajan “double-voiced” so that it “serves two speakers at the same time and expresses two different intentions” (Bakhtin 1981: 324). The hymnal draws attention to theological and cultural overlaps and discursive symmetries in the context of metropolitan Atlanta. Other channels of communication also emphasize social conjunctions, the ability to cross borders, or social porosity as members of the Sai Center make sense of local, urban, and historical milieus as well as the larger community of faith and belonging. What is signifi cant is the sensibility of feeling and being in emerging worlds, geographies, and novel forms of spiritual community. The contemporary urban landscape characterized by de-concentration, suburbanization, a service economy, immigration, or homelessness with its struggles, contradictions, hopes, and suffering, is fi ltered through a language that spiritualizes public and private realms. In this experience of the spirit as a transformative force, for the men and women who refuse to live and enact separations between the sacred and the secular, the ways in which bodies are “inhabited, worked with, and . . . through” (Frankenberg 2004: 79) the spirit is signifi cant. Several frameworks for thinking about the body have been provided by scholars—the body social, the body politic, or the body as a symbolic system; Frankenberg writes that all these bodies are “in communication—and at times utterly disrupted—by yet a fourth body . . . the body spiritual” (ibid. pp. 79–80). For many Sai devotees, rupturing, dislocating, or transforming the understanding of time, space, public and private, is part of an embodied spirituality. Even technological instruments (the copier at Wal-Mart, the Internet and email), like bhajans, can become imbued with a plenitude of messages so that one experiences a “cyborg” ontology (Haraway 1991) or a post-humanist reality but also a cosmology in which not just humans and machines but humans, machines, and spirits are opened

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to each other. Thus, what occurs is not the simple overlay of voices, things, mediums, or messages but the transubstantiation of the everyday world, language, and the self so that they overﬂ ow with meanings. The qualities of the avatar—multilocality, distance-healing, or communicating through dreams—make urban life alchemical. Behind and within the vast spaces of the city, the routes between them, the surfaces of the virtual, and the civic communities created by devotees, one senses a constant presence. A garland falls in the altar room, ash develops on photograph, and words invoke the presence. At the same time, the very bodies of devotees are also porous to the possibility of presence. Not only can encounters with strangers in the city become encounters with Baba, but through dreams in which the guru speaks, the language of bhajans, or the material magic of tools and technology, one is reminded of several conjoined presences or the ineluctably unﬁ nished nature of one’s body and the body of worship.

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In many ways, this is the best of times and the worst of times to write about the experience of sacred presence in the lives of devotees and believers. On the one hand, the idea that we are moving towards a secularized, disenchanted world is no longer convincing and the sheer vitality of contemporary religious movements has generated thoughtful writing exploring the relationship of these cultures to modernity. On the other hand, modernist assumptions persist stubbornly in public culture and the acceptance of the presence and intermingling of gurus, the divine, or spiritual beings in believers’ lives can arouse a range of reactions: fear, distaste, a live-and-let-live tolerance, the need to “unmask” miracles or the experience of the sacred, look for psychological explanations for the attachment of people to such ﬁ gures, or make distinctions between “true religion” and “false cults.” During the course of this study I have encountered charges that Sathya Sai Baba is a magician, exposés claiming that the Sai Baba movement is a “cult” that has misled and brainwashed devotees, or criticisms based on textual inconsistencies in the literature on and by Baba. Concern has also been voiced that through gurus such as Sai Baba, “Hinduism” displays an anti-Christian potential since Sai Baba sets himself up as a substitute Christ and attracts Western devotees. Others complain that the movement is not “true Hinduism.” Nega- tive reportage is not new, although the kinds of accusations and their emphases have tended to differ in various decades, and seem to have been visible in print since the 1970s, most often in English media rather than Indian languages. More frequent criticism has appeared since the late 1990s, particularly on the Internet.1 When it became publicly known that I was writing this book, I received emails from anti-Baba activists or ex-devotees offering me evidence of his fraudulence. A

1 See, for example, www.sathyasaivictims.com, http://home.no.net/anir/Sai, or www. exbaba.com; Dr. Reinhart Hummel, “Guru, Miracle Worker, Religious Founder: Sathya Sai Baba,” http://www/theonet.dk/update/update-v9–i3–85/Sathya_Sai_Baba.html, accessed September 15, 2004; for an exhaustive list of critical writings on Sathya Sai Baba compiled by Brian Steel, an ex-devotee, see http://bdsteel.tripod.com/More/ sbresearchbib2.htm, accessed June 19, 2005.

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few weeks after receiving a National Endowment for the Humani- ties (NEH) fellowship in 2005 and speaking with a reporter from the California Aggie (the student newspaper at the University of California, Davis), I found myself the subject of an Internet blog that accused me of being a “guruphiliac” and claimed the NEH was paying me off to “whitewash” Baba. At conferences, I was often asked whether I was going to deal with these criticisms or if I “really” believed that Baba had “real” powers. Devotees of Sathya Sai Baba are aware of criticisms of their guru. Some think these are disinformation campaigns against their teacher by the religious Right, diatribes by angry ex-devotees who have been disappointed in their (unreasonable) material and spiritual expectations, misunderstandings based on different cultural deployments of the divine- human relationship, or simply the kind of calumny that accompanies any great soul. A few devotees have suggested that many of these recent accusations, especially on the Internet, emerge from countries where “anti-cult” groups have a strong presence. Very few thought that I should respond to these charges in my book and all were unfailingly generous and open in sharing their experiences and understandings with me. At the same time, while some devotees may recognize events, data, or themselves in this book, others may be uncomfortable with my attention to historical and cultural details, expecting a more hagiographical account of Sathya Sai Baba. They may be startled by the comparisons made between this movement and others. They may feel that one can make Baba the subject of faith but not academic knowledge. As a scholar writing about a vibrant, expanding religious movement, I necessarily confront the assumptions of public culture in media or academia as well as the ethics of studying a community of living believers, an issue that some other scholars have treated with sensi- tivity—for instance, Orsi (2005) writing about Catholic America or Beckerlegge (2000) about the Indian saint Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Beckerlegge points out that assumptions of early Ramakrishna scholars like Max Müller and Romain Rolland about the comparative study of religion “as akin to a spiritual discipline” had much in common with the self-understanding of the Ramakrishna movement, while recent scholars have focused on disentangling the “Ramakrishna of history” from the “Paramahamsa of faith,” or explored the relationship between Ramakrishna’s sexuality and spirituality. The newer approach has driven a wedge between outsiders and those within a movement that is still relatively new, with many members who can remember Ramakrishna’s

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direct disciples. My project has attempted to tread the line between a phenomenology of divine presence and a sociology-anthropology of a contemporary movement, hopefully without perpetuating old and new (unhelpful) dichotomies. I recognize that my words may have existential consequences for adherents of Sathya Sai Baba and that this has set some limits on what I have been able to write about. My study is located within the community of devotion rather than among ex-devotees or non-believers and engages in the “anthropology of credibility” (Babb 1983) rather than a hermeneutics of suspicion. The larger issue for me has not been whether I believe that Sathya Sai Baba is real or fraudu- lent (because this book is not about who he really is) or whether I can unveil the true motivations of his devotees (I prefer to let them speak for themselves), but whether the study of this movement says anything about the dilemmas of modernity’s categories and the constraints of disciplinary rubrics. As I was nearing completion of this manuscript in late 2005 and early 2006, a controversy about the revision of sixth-grade social studies textbooks raged at the California Board of Education, in the media (in South Asian desi magazines in Silicon Valley as well as progressive ones like Frontline in India), and in the academic community in India and the United States.2 The issue concerned sections on ancient India and Hinduism and pitted an alliance of professional scholars of South Asia, left intellectuals, feminists, Asian American and Dalit scholars against the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation. The latter groups propounded a “Hindutva” (Hindu-ness) agenda that attempted to translate the South Asian religious experience into a chieﬂ y Vaishnava, upper-caste, and north Indian understanding of “Hinduism.” The identity politics of Hindu nationalism in South Asia intersected with the politics of race and ethnicity in the United States to produce a Hinduism that could mirror Judeo-Christian traditions. At the same time, the slow proliferation of “Hindu Studies” positions in United States universities and the publication of “Hinduism” series in well-known presses, however well-intentioned, is a reminder of how the rationality of modern identity marks the disciplinary terrain of religious knowledge. As I followed the textbook controversy and discussed it with

2 For the press coverage of this controversy, see the Friends of South Asia website, http://www.friendsofsouthasia.org/textbook/PressCoverage.html, accessed August 7, 2006.

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scholars and journalists, I also became aware that for many arrayed against Hindutva, a religious movement such as the Sai Baba movement is unproblematically “Hindu” (and automatically conservative) even if it is not considered overtly fundamentalist. The tendency to describe the Sai Baba movement as Hindu and to evaluate it within scholarly debates on Hinduism appears quite frequently. For example, Morton Klass suggests that Baba devotees from other parts of the world and from other religious backgrounds are “in fact Hindus in all respects but that of self-identiﬁ cation” (Klass 2001: 210). The construct of Hinduism, however, is contentious and contested. As Malik (2001: 10–31) notes, there are a wide variety of approaches. The Vedas and the Sanskrit textual tradition may be seen as providing a universal point of reference, although proponents of a regional perspective (e.g. in Tamil Nadu) may strenuously object. Some view Hinduism or its institutions as composed of several interacting components such as tribal religion, folk religion, asceticism, Bhakti, and the work of Brahmins, or argue that Hinduism is not a single religion (in the manner of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism or Islam) but a plurality of religions. Others may hold that family resemblances lend coherence to Hinduism or may emphasize the historical differences between a non-linear, non-essential, pre-modern “Hinduism” and fundamentalist constructions of it in modern times. We may succumb to the category of “neo-Hinduism,” a term most often deployed by Indologists and some scholars of South Asian religion to distinguish the emergence of new nineteenth- and twentieth- century religious movements from their traditionalist or pre-colonial counterparts. Halbfass (1988: 217–246; 334–348), for example, applies the category of neo-Hinduism (which invokes tradition as a way of responding to the West but returns to tradition as a result of rupture) to examine a number of religious and intellectual movements and ﬁ gures including the Brahmo Samaj, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, the Arya Samaj, Aurobindo, Radhakrishnan, and others. But Hinduism or neo-Hinduism is “an integral part of a transcultural project . . . [in which] approaches to Hinduism [and neo-Hinduism] are bracketed within a framework of cultural, cognitive, and ideological encounters between the ‘West’ and India” (Malik 2001: 12).3 This approach attempts to

3 See also van der Veer (2001), who describes how religion and secularity (in relation to gender, race, language, and science) were critical in the imagining of a modern nation in Britain and India.

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historicize its object while in fact placing an undue emphasis on the colonial encounter/the West. From one perspective, it is clear that novelty, innovation, cosmopolitan exchange and rupture marked traditions before the colonial encounter and that there are signifi cant continuities between contemporary religious movements and older traditions. From another perspective, the strengthening of yet another duality in order to defi ne the research object seems a modern project with a post-Ori- entalist patina. This book has tried to show that imposing the singularity of a religious tradition, the unitary nature of a South Asian diaspora, the defi ning moment of colonial encounter or the language of the nation occludes the novelty and uniqueness of the Sathya Sai Baba movement as well as its similarities to others that are not “Hindu” or that belong to a different historical period or region.4 For instance, the emphasis on service, remembrance of the divine name, the centrality of the guru, and the emphasis on the status of the householder in the Sathya Sai Baba movement are also reminiscent of religions like Sikhism. In fact, just as the Radhasoami movement in North India seems to refract some Sikh and Sant motifs into a wider non-Sikh and global milieu ( Juergensmeyer 1987, 1991, 1996), the Sathya Sai Baba movement centered in South India also appears to do the same thing.5 Scholars and believers of the other global traditions—the Baha’i, Habitat for Humanity, or some Sufi movements—will also recognize parallels with the Sai Baba movement. Soka Gakkai, for example, which originated within the hyper-urbanization of mid-twentieth century Japan, has been most successful at crossing national boundaries and becoming a global organization. Despite the continued embedding of ritual within a Japanese Buddhist format, its global organization and strategies after the 1980s are reminiscent of the Sathya Sai Baba movement: the simplicity and unity of its practice, the feeling it cultivates of being part of an extended family, the ties it creates with local communities as well as global initiatives in education, culture, and non-violence and its attraction for members from a variety of cultural and national backgrounds while being heavily urban-based (Metraux 1996, 2002; Seager 2006; Waterhouse 2002).

4 See Aravamudan (2006), who argues through a deft reading of literary texts and gurus in the last two hundred years that “Guru English,” or the Anglophone discourse of South Asian religion, has generated novel religious meanings and displayed a cosmopolitanism that is increasingly in circulation in the global arena. 5 I am indebted to Catherine Clementin-Ojha for this comment.

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Reference to Soka Gakkai brings up a possible alternative to the discourse on Hinduism or neo-Hinduism: we may have recourse to the language of New Religious Movements (NRMs). This term migrated into the lexicon of religious studies largely from Japan, where it came to designate the range of novel devotional and institutional forms that sprang up after 1945 such as Soka Gakkai. In the United States, commentators have used NRMs to describe the faiths of Asian groups that arrived after the 1965 change in immigration laws, the simultaneous generation of new Christian groups and denominations, and a revival of Western esoteric traditions (Coney 2000; Melton 2004). Some scholars such as Clarke (2006) use NRMs to examine religious change and innovation globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In general, a family of related terms (including new religions) has come to refer to Asian or non-Christian traditions, minority religions, or Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish groups in various countries that rework older historical traditions within novel conceptual and ritual frameworks (Barker 2004; Beckford 1986; Braswell 1986; Galanter 1989; Lewis 2003). NRMs have often been the object of media scrutiny (Lucas and Robbins 2004). The Internet revolution has also worked as a tool for proselytizing and generating publicity for these movements, as a venue for anti-cult criticism (Beckford 2004; Introvigne 2004), and as a forum for “information terrorism” (Introvigne 2005). Closely related to the NRM is the body of discourse surrounding the New Age, which often refers to the contemporary interest in self-spirituality as opposed to organized religion. While New Age teachings may not be historically new (because New-Agers may draw from a range of traditions such as Zen, Western esotericism, Goddess traditions, and so on), by the 1960s there an upsurge in practices and ideas of sacralization of the self which has continued in later decades. According to Heelas (1996), the New Age seeks to move beyond, heal, handle, or magically transform modernity and its crises (e.g. consumerism or de-traditional- ization) but also manifests modern aspects such as the autonomy of the self, the internalization of religion, or humanistic expression. His thesis about the spatial boundaries of the term is worth considering since a number of Sai Baba devotees (in South Asia and elsewhere) may hold New Age beliefs and may embed Sai Baba’s teachings, his biographies, and other materials within a New Age circuit. Heelas argues: Upper-class Indians going to the Theosophical Society, middle-class Indi- ans visiting Sai Baba’s ashrams, or Indian hippies sitting on the rocks of Mahabalipuram, are best not thought of as ‘New Age’. But westerners,

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New Age in California, surely continue to be New Age when they visit the same sites. Again, Bhagwan [Rajneesh], catering for Indians during the earlier 1970s, is best regarded as just another Indian Guru. But Bhagwan in Oregon, with his predominantly western sannyasins, is clearly best regarded as New Age. (Heelas 1996: 122–123) The projection yet again of a division between the indigenous South Asian and the transnational cosmopolitanism of the New Age perhaps creates more problems than it solves. The inclusion of Sathya Sai Baba, Aurobindo, Rajneesh, yoga, crystal therapy, or Reiki in Indian magazines such as Life Positive suggests that there may be an Indian New Age, creative and alternative rather than purely derivative—and transnational in its own right. The division becomes unviable if one tries to understand the Sathya Sai Baba movement both in its Indian context and transnationally. My view is that positing oppositions between organized religion and self-spirituality, fundamentalism and secularism, (false) cults and (true) religion, India and the West, or knowledge and faith, is symptomatic of a particular vision of modernity and its (dis)contents. These ideas share a terrain with early modernization theory suggesting that religion would/should be peripheral to public life and with theories of modernity in the social sciences that generate similar dichotomies. Three positions that I support challenge these ideas. First, many religious movements may reject the terms of a liberal modernity or fundamentalism (Mah- mood 2004; Werbner 2003). Second, a religious movement may invert the terms of a modernity that the nation-state has produced (or failed to produce), even if it shares members with the state and uses its language and performances (Holston 2000). Third, modernity, originating as “a Eurocentric vision of universal teleology,” contains its own contradictions manifested in part within religious environments: the more rationalistic and disenchanted the terms in which it is presented to ‘others,’ the more magical . . . seem its signs, commodities and practices. It is in this ﬁ ssure between assertive rationalities and perceived magicali- ties that malcontent gathers giving rise to ritual efforts . . . to recapture the forces suspected of redirecting the ﬂ ow of power in the world. (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxx) The Comaroffs (2001) note that millennial capitalism and the contemporary neo-liberal regime generate global “occult economies,” attempts to create wealth through practices such as witchcraft or fortune-telling, with parallels in NRMs with their emphasis on prosperity, fortune, and other responses to desires produced by capitalism.

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Most accounts of modernity operate from ethnocentric and Euro- centric assumptions of a single trajectory (including reason, scientifi c consciousness, secularism, urbanization, industrialization, and so on) theorized in early social theory by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, or Karl Marx. One attempt in recent years to disrupt these accounts has posited “alternative modernities:” . . . to admit that modernity is inescapable and to desist from speculations about the end of modernity . . . it continues to ‘arrive and emerge,’ as always in opportunistic fragments accompanied by utopic rhetorics, but no longer from the West alone, although the West remains the major clearinghouse of global modernity. (Gaonkar 2001: 1) My book moves in a different direction. Rather than assuming that the “West” is somehow central to and the origin of the modern, it is based on the idea that there are multiple, contemporaneous, and competing visions of modernity. The assumption of multiplicity can imply, as some scholars have shown, that modernity’s purifying project is accompanied by the proliferation of hybrids (Latour 1993), a post-modern/post- human politics and ontology is possible (Haraway 1991), or perhaps there is a “transmodernity” that liberates and moves us beyond the truth claims of Eurocentric modernity (Dussel 1995, 2000, 2002). In the South Asian landscape, J.P.S. Uberoi (1996: 111) demonstrates that Sikhism attempted to create an Indian modernity out of medievalism, a non-dualist project of “self-rule, self-sacrifi ce and self-reform,” and he explores the “other mind of Europe” to suggest an alternative modernity lay implicit within the theory/practice of science and knowledge symbolized by fi gures like Paracelsus or Goethe (Uberoi 1978, 1984, 2002). Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization can be read as part of his construction of an alternative to the instrumental, non-sacramental concept of nature, the technicism, technocracy, and masculinity of a hyper-adult modernity that has played a role in scientifi c discourse as well as colonial encounters (Nandy 1987: 127–162). Alter writes that the concern with nationalism and colonialism has “meant that Indian visions of what is possible in the fi eld of human experience have not been recognized for what they are—alternative global modernities and not just alternative modernities for and of India.” Or to put it in a different way, “it is not so much that Yoga is postcolonial, as that it is post-Western” (Alter 2004: 74–75, 77). This book aligns itself with these critiques and suggests that the Sathya Sai Baba movement traverses the terrain of “multiple modernities.”

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The Sathya Sai Baba movement, in my view, is an experiment in “Eutopian modernity,” to redeploy Patrick Geddes’s terminology. As he writes in Cities in Evolution in 1915, Eutopia lies in the city around us and “it must be planned and realised, here or nowhere, by us as its citizens—each a citizen of both the actual and the ideal city seen increasingly as one” (Stalley 1972: 112). For Geddes, Eutopia is a place perfected through constructive citizenship, “a place of effective health and well-being, even of glorious and in its way unprecedented beauty, renewing and rivalling the best achievements of the past, and all this beginning here, there, and everywhere” (ibid. p. 148). Geddes’s approach is appropriate here because he tried to transcend the disciplinary/spatial limitations of modernity. He spent a considerable time in India holding the Chair of Sociology and Civics at the University of Bombay and also creating an astonishing number of original plans for South Asian cities (Tyrwhitt 1947), but he was simultaneously a comparative urbanist of cities in Asia, Europe and North America (Boardman 1978). “Civics,” for him, was a “social science of cities” aimed at a “reunion” of all disciplines (Stalley 1972: 231) and he spoke as botanist, sociologist, educator, town planner, and artist. The true city, for Geddes, united the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and practical essentials of its citizens (“for life, not living,” to use a phrase of Sathya Sai Baba) as it did disciplines and he was to create many plans for civic renewal, temples of life and knowledge, and temple-like structures in cities (Welter 2002). The Eutopian modernity of the Sathya Sai Baba movement contains within it an imperative to transgress or transcend the categories of modernity, engage in a transcultural project of knowledge production but also deploy the techniques of self-reform and self-transcendence. This means that the movement attempts to move beyond the terms of a Eurocentric or hegemonic modernity, majoritarian nationalism, or the simple promise of multiculturalism. At the same time, it is concerned with self-rule and self-recall as the condition for transforming the civic-social. It engages with capitalist modernity but projects alterna- tives, spiritualizes or domesticates it, creates practices and subjectivities that thrive on alterity, and posits a discourse of playful possibility about humans and the divine, things and bodies, or the magical and the everyday. The character of its active devotees and students, who labor in economic niches that are tied to a capitalist global economy while being millenarian in their devotional economy, and the nature of Sathya Sai Baba as an avatar with multiple presences constantly

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interrupts or disrupts the narrative of modernity. Memories of usable pasts are mapped onto a hopeful future and local hermeneutics are tapped while locating global convergences, overlaps, and transnational circuits of meaning. Central to this project is a construction of selfhood that is premised on ideas of forgetting and remembering. A sentiment often found in Baba’s speeches and writings is that we have forgotten our true selves and need to recall who we truly are (immortal, divine, or the spirit). Remembering is also a process of recognition: to recollect who we are is to see the divine in the world.6 Remembering and forgetting, however, are social and spatial processes. Halbwachs’ arguments (1992: 193–235) in “The Legendary Topography of the Gospels” suggest that stories about Galilee do not require localization or at least seem to be independent of the drama of Christ’s Passion, while the stories about Jerusalem repeatedly dwell on the geography of his fi nal days. For Halbwachs, Christianity seemed to acquire a topography focused on the holy city of Jerusalem as its spread beyond its site of origin, shedding the character of a local belief system, attracting a range of social classes, and casting its past in a universal form. It also took over those places that were commemorated in Jewish history so that the New Testament is prefi gured in the Old, providing an alternative perspective of history and urban geography. In this sense, a religious tradition becomes a “chain of memory” through the reinterpretation of space: ”an ideological, practical and symbolic system through which consciousness, both individual and collective, of belonging to a particular chain of belief is constituted, maintained, developed and controlled” (Hervieu-Léger 2000: 82). The idea of a “Sai Baba tradition” discussed in this book and the modalities through which chains of memory about Shirdi Sai Baba are created explores a larger terrain of connectivity in South Asia and globally through the fi gures of Meher Baba, Upasni Maharaj, Narasimha Swami, Shivamma Thayee, and Sathya Sai Baba as well as countless devotees. It would be a mistake to read Shirdi Sai Baba’s story as simply one of “Hinduization” or discuss only his appropriation by the “Hindu” middle class. While that is one strand of the narrative, what I have tried to show is that there are several pathways of memory that

6 This is true of the cosmologies of some other religious movements such as the Brahmakumaris (Babb 1986a). See also Coney (2003).

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extend into the contemporary world from Shirdi Sai Baba’s time to ours. Similarly, to read Sathya Sai Baba as essentially Hindu, Shaiva or Vaishnava ignores the ways in which multiple visual, textual, sensorial, and performative regimes, institutions and histories interpenetrate as they constitute a global space for the body of devotion. New localizations are constantly introduced while older sites impinge on the present and the material reality of religious life. Thus, the development of Puttaparthi-Prashanti Nilayam from a small village into an urban center brings into the religious experience other spaces besides Shirdi, Sakori or Meherabad through a constantly evolving architectural fabric. At the same time, this Deccan imaginary by the twenty-fi rst century has also relocated to other places—Atlanta, Nairobi, and Banga- lore—through the travels of devotees, Sathya Sai Baba’s own journeys, and a range of media from posters and books to the Internet. In this encounter, other traditions and epistemologies—including charismatic Christianity, Unitarianism, witch-doctors, prophets, gospel music and spirituals—are drawn into the semantic fi eld of the movement. The diverse relocations and trajectories of the middle class (Indian, Kenyan, or American), the migratory magic of gurus such as Yogananda, or the erratic fl ows of technology reveal how old and new global networks, regional economies and post/transcolonial imaginations, electronic pathways and older mediums are folded into each other. In the Sathya Sai Baba movement, to remember who I am is a somatic project. It involves coming to my senses, or moving from sensory incoherence to coherence, disease to health. The body and the senses mediate encounters between the avatar and the devotee and the sense of the presence is enriched by the layering of social, mnemonic, performative, and historical registers within the movement. Devotional meaning-making encloses many spaces, cities, citizens and their bodies who are connected to a common center—the body of the avatar—whose presence proliferates. Devotion is also enacted, renewed, sustained and transmitted through body practices and the creation of habits of dress, seeing, eating, singing, healing or service and the production of habitations such as museums, hospitals, colleges, temples, or web-sites. The care and cure of the body-vehicle, its rehabilitation and re-habitation, or constructions of healing and character, are simultaneously individual and social processes. This bio-civic ethics strives to reorient contemporary regimes of desire, medical knowledge, education, food, and consumption towards the techniques of self-rule, self-reform, and self-transcendence (rather than simply self-help). The program of

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bodily reform aims at retraining or re-focusing the civic sphere and the individual based on “universal values” and is crucial to the creation of new cultural subjects, citizens, institutions, and spatial production. In sites like the hermitage, activities take place among architectural facades and habitations that remind devotees of novel dispositions of the body and self. In other places like Atlanta, Bangalore or Nairobi, new ways of inhabiting and mapping space, creating a language and practice for transcultural civility or sociality, occur through somatic regimes of citizenship. Throughout much of the recent scholarship on religious movements, the city appears mainly as a site for recruitment since much of the relationship between movements and the city is under-analyzed and appears in passing. My book emphasizes instead that the Sai Baba movement’s experiment in pluralizing modernity is also a project of multiplying and perfecting the meanings of urban modernity, of creating a Eutopia. I am, therefore, in agreement with Robinson’s recent call for a post-colonial urban theory that dispossesses “the West of its privileged relation to an originary modernity” (Robinson 2006: 64), disentangles urban modernity from its location and association with a few cities, and for an urban theory that is as cosmopolitan as the cities that urbanists study whether Kuala Lumpur, Durban, or London. My arguments in this book engage primarily with one of the central modernist assumptions of much of urban theory—that religious sensibilities, external to the creation of urban modernity (except perhaps in the form of violence, pathology, atavistic longings, or fundamentalism), have no real role in urban policy or the discussion of urban futures. While I show that fruit- ful future directions for urban studies of religion are non-centralized spaces, suburbs, technoburbs or exurbs and the mutating relationships between the central city and a decentered spatiality, I insist that for many individuals, neighborhoods and communities, urban life includes locating and grounding modernity, the sacred, and faith in space. An anthropology/sociology of the urban-modern is, therefore, similarly an act of faith in the possibility of futures, a new semantics to sense it, and a language to unearth other pasts. It is no coincidence that the urbanist Lewis Mumford, who was inﬂ u- enced by Patrick Geddes, wrote Faith for Living in 1940 at the height of World War II (the same year that Sathya Sai Baba is said to have declared his mission). In this critique of contemporary civilization, Mumford argues that what is required is an economy and politics of sacriﬁ ce rather than comfort. In a society divided against itself, where

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the spiritual and the practical, the inner and the outer, the personal and the social are segregated from each other, . . . the sweetness and decorum of modern society rests on a gentleman’s agreement to forget death . . . The slaughter-house, the prison, the hospital, the slum, the asylum, the battlefi eld, the sewer and the garbage pile and the potter’s fi eld all exist and fl ourish behind this agreement. This is particularly true of modern urban communities. (Mumford 1940: 85) The author may be speaking of many urban religious communities today when he writes that real citizenship involves service and collective work, “bread-work, earth-work, man-work” (ibid. p. 275) or that the task of religion and the arts is to socialize this “private inner world, to unite it with its heritage of durable values, and fi nally to bring it into the open and project it in new forms quick with meaning for other men” (ibid. p. 297). The cultural subjects involved in Sai Baba devotion are located spatially: they translate their emotional, spiritual and social worlds into the material fabric of urban reality (buildings, networks of communication, or digital archives), create new places for the self- body to inhabit in a global world, and participate in the mnemonics of other modernities.

srinivas_f11_333-345.indd 345 1/2/2008 1:53:13 PM srinivas_f12_346-351.indd 346 12/20/2007 4:37:20 PM APPENDIX

OVERSEAS SAI CENTERS AND GROUPS

Table A 1: Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 1 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000)

Geographic Region Centers Groups Oﬃcial Number of Date of members Organization

Zone 1

Region 1 and 2: Eastern 192 1975 6,500 USA and Western USA

Region 3: Southern Europe 101 52 Croatia 18 12 Spain 12 6 Slovenia 1 Switzerland 8 7 Portugal 1 Macedonia 2 1 Bosnia-Herzegovina 2 3 Romania 1 Italy 40 10 2,500 France 9 8 Yugoslavia 4 1 Greece 3 4

Region 4: Canada 33 41 1970 10,000

Region 5: West Indies 92 Trinidad and Tobago 60 Suriname 4 Barbados 5 Guyana 14 Jamaica 9 Total number of Centers and Groups in Zone 1: 511

srinivas_f12_346-351.indd 347 12/20/2007 4:37:22 PM 348 appendix

Table A 2: Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 2 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000)

Geographic Region Centers Groups Oﬃcial Number of Date of members Organization

Zone 2 Region 6: Central America, 41 38 Puerto Rico Costa Rica 3 Dominican Republic 4 4 1988 200–300 El Salvador 7 8 1985 200 Guatemala 2 2 Haiti 1 1996 Honduras 1 3 Mexico 24 8 Nicaragua 2 Panama 2 4 58 Puerto Rico 1 3

Region 7: South America 88 121 and Guyana Argentina 21 55 Bolivia 7 1 Brazil 10 23 Chile 5 1 Colombia 11 6 Ecuador 8 6 Paraguay 1 1 Peru 6 1 Uruguay 1 5 Venezuela 18 22

Total number of Centers and Groups in Zone 2: 288

srinivas_f12_346-351.indd 348 12/20/2007 4:37:22 PM overseas sai centers and groups 349

Table A 3: Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 3 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000)

Geographic Region Centers Groups Oﬃcial Number of Date of members Organization

Zone 3 Region 8: Australia and Papua New Guinea Australia 127* 1968 Region 9: New Zealand, 32 45 Fiji and Paciﬁc Is. New Zealand 18 23 Fiji 14 22 Region 10: Far East (South) 113 58 Malaysia 34 26 Singapore 13 5 Indonesia 60 23 Philippines 4 2 Brunei 2 2

Region 11: Far East (Middle) 43 26 Thailand 10 1983 Nepal 33 26 about 1984 Region 12: Far East (North) 15 19 Japan 9 11 South Korea 1 People’s Republic of China 2 Hong Kong 1 5 Taiwan 2 3

Region 13: Sri Lanka 120*

Total number of Centers and Groups in Zone 3: 598

* Includes Centers and Groups

srinivas_f12_346-351.indd 349 12/20/2007 4:37:22 PM 350 appendix

Table A 4: Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 4 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000)

Geographic Region Centers Groups Oﬃcial Number of Date of members Organization

Zone 4 Region 14: Western 46 103 Europe Germany 15 42 1977 Denmark 10 6 1981 Netherlands 16 35 Austria 1 9 1987 Norway 3 1983 Sweden 2 3 1981 Belgium 2 3 1979 40 Luxemburg 1 1989 Finland 1 7

Region 15: Eastern Europe 16 21 Estonia 3 1 1992 Latvia 2 3 1988/1996 95 Lithuania 2 2 Hungary 1 1 21+ Poland 7 12 200 Slovakia 1 1998 Czech Republic 1 1 1995

Region 16: Russian- speaking countries 54* 1992 1,500 Total number of Centers and Groups in Zone 4: 240

* Includes Centers and Groups

srinivas_f12_346-351.indd 350 12/20/2007 4:37:22 PM overseas sai centers and groups 351

Table A 5: Sai Centers and Groups in Zone 5 (Source: Collated from Sathya Sai Seva Organizations 2000)

Geographic Region Centers Groups Oﬃcial Number of Date of members Organization

Zone 5 Region 17: United Kingdom 170

Region 18: Ireland 6 50

Region 19: Southern Africa 96 51 South Africa 93 51 8,406 Botswana 2 120 Tanzania 1 300

Region 20: Northern Africa, Zambia and Mauritius 34 101 Zambia 7 1 Mauritius 27 100 3,000–3,500

Region 21: Middle East and Gulf except Israel 21 6 U.A.E. 3 4 Bahrain 3 2 Qatar 1 Iran 3 Kuwait 1 Saudi Arabia 3 Oman 5 Turkey 2 Total number of Centers and Groups in Zone 5: 485

srinivas_f12_346-351.indd 351 12/20/2007 4:37:22 PM srinivas_f13_352-371.indd 352 12/21/2007 1:28:13 PM BIBLIOGRAPHY

Serial Publications and Souvenir Volumes

A Temple of Healing: Super-Speciality Hospital at Whiteﬁ eld, Bangalore Mano Hriday: The Newsletter of the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences Sai Kusumanjali Sanathana Sarathi Sathya Sai Newsletter, USA Sathya Sai Speaks Smruti ’83 Summer Showers in Brindavan Super Speciality Hospital Project Trayee Saptamayee

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AIDS, 279 Africanization, 263, 265–6, 268, 275 Aarvee Associates, 187 African-American, 296–7, 300–302, Abdul (Abdulla) Baba, 8–9, 29, 35, 39 310, 316, 318–9, 329 Abdul Kalam, Dr. A.P.J., 1, 179 AfriStar, 105 Accra, 84 Afrocentric Cultural Center, 319 Accommodations Ofﬁ ce, 173, 178 Afro-Caribbean, 315 Ackerman, S.E., 307 Afro-Western, 315 Acropolis, 213 Agnihotris, 38 Adi Granth, 314, See also Granth Sahib. Ahmednagar, 43 Adi Shakti, 70 Ahmednagar District, 29, 37 Adi Shankara, 233 Ahmednagar District Court, 39 Advaita, 157 Airport Road, 218 Africa/African Aitken, Bill, 170 authentic, 285 Ajmer, 164 bourgeoisie, 268 Akhand Bhajan, 54, 320 cities and citizenship, 285 Akkalkot, 8–9 clerk, 103 Alabama, 323 community portrayed in Vassanji’s Alaska, 293 novel, 269–70 Alcott, Louisa May, 298 cultural memory, 317 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, 268 devotees, 198, 260–1 Allah, 29, 33, 35, 37, 89, 306 faith-based organizations, 256 Allah Malik, 33 famine, 329 Allahabad, 59, 143, 213 hymns, 311 All-India Conference of Sri Sathya Sai languages for religious songs, 289 Seva Organizations, 139–41 largest shantytown, 257 All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, links with South Asia, 254 119 loss of authentic traits and values, All-India President, 141 285 All-India President of Prasanthi nation-states, 263 Council, 141 negotiation of citizenship through All-India Sai Samaj, 228–9, 231–2, 239 seva, 286 Alpharetta, 301 postcolony, 289 Alter, Joseph S., 21, 124–6, 340 radio broadcasts, 105 Amadou Bamba, Sheikh, 258 region and Sai Centers, 136–7, 256 Amar Akbar Anthony 23, 24 relief network, 279 Amar Chitra Katha, 23, 185 Sathya Sai Schools, 282 “Amazing Grace,” 309–10, 316–7 segregated areas in Nairobi, 256 Ambedkar, B.R., 67 song, 318 ambrosia/nectar, 78, 93, 109, 118, traditional religions, 85 92–93, 292, 325 visit of Meher Baba, 43 America/American visit of Sathya Sai Baba, 62, 72, Catholic, 334 259–62, 285–6 city, 329 urban crisis, 255–6 clothes, 324 urban infrastructure, 258 devotees attending Southeast Regional woman employed in Atlanta hotel, Conference, 325 325 following of Meher Baba, 44 Africa for Sai Baba, 198 hymns, 310

srinivas_index_372-403.indd 373 1/2/2008 4:19:59 PM 374 index

institutional isomorphism of religious Apollo Hospital, 119 life, 318 Aquarian Age 72 landscape, 303 Arab/Arabs, 263 members of Atlanta Sai Center, 300 Arabic, 42 middle class, 343 architecture missionaries, 311 as abstract signiﬁ er in Sanathana Sarathi musical, 318 196 process of creating suburbs, 251 as rhetoric, 208–15 Protestant Christianity, 316 evolving fabric, 343 sports franchise, 179 of East African bhajan center, 261 Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization, of Prashanti Nilayam and 140, 198 Puttaparthi, 56, 171–87 urban landscape, 296, 317, 330 of Sai Center in Nairobi, 277–8 American Unitarian Association, 298 of Sai Darshan, 246–7 Ammachi, 70, 77, 88, 143 of SSSIHMS, 115, 118 Amos, 287–90 of temples in Nairobi, 272–4 Amraoti/Amravati, 38, 40 paradigm and worship at Amritanandamayi, Mata, 3 Someshvarapura, 238–9, 252 Amritsar, 164 Argentina, 137–8, 198 Anand, G.L., 201 Ariyaratne, A.T., 112 Anand Marg, 302 Arizona, 293 Anandamayi Ma, 68, 70 Arjuna, 107, 188–9 Anantapur, 113, 148–51, 194 Arkansas, 320 Anantapur district, 63–4 Armenia, 137 Andhra Pradesh Arsoji Rao, 56 bhajan, 139 Arts and Crafts movement, 209 birthplace of Sathya Sai Baba, 48, 51 Arts and Sciences College for women, communities of Sidis, 254 194 establishment of SSUDA, 187 Arunachala, 306 home of family who owned land that Arusha, 140 became Brindavan, 240 Arya Samaj, 21, 125, 143, 156, 283, home of pilgrims, 54 336 home of speaker at Southeast Asad, Talal, 13 Regional Conference, 326 ash (vibhuti/udi ) home of teacher in Sathya Sai school and Reiki, 126 in Kenya, 282 and Sai Sanjeevini, 127 home of traditional sculptor working and sensorium, 78 on Sai Darshan, 246 appearing on photographs, 92–3, 250, pilgrimage site at Tirupati, 57 292, 332 samitis, 131–4 baths, 124 site among the triple births of Sai, 74 distributed at bhajan, 90, 109 site of hermitage of Sathya Sai Baba, distributed at Kampala, 261 1, 132, 166 distributed by Shirdi Sai Baba, 35, 71 Sri Sathya Sai Arts and Science healing power in Nairobi, 287 College for Women, 113 in healing system of Dr. Partha water projects, 63 Sarathi, 127–8 Angachiammal, 228 of Sathya Sai Baba, 54, 57, 65, 81, Anglo-Indians, 222, 239 84, 91–3, 110, 114, 122, 165, 272, Anjaneya, 165, 167 288 Andhra Pradesh, Government of, 64 of Shiva, 92 Another Chance, 319 ashram (hermitage) Anoyika, Anthony Chukwudun, 102–3 daily routine at Prashanti Nilayam, Antaryami, 305 176–7 Anthony, Joseph, 250 extending the presence of the guru, 77 Apasthamba, 52 of Meher Baba, 43–4

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of Sathya Sai Baba, 55–7, 74, 84, Atlanta Sai Center 139, 320 altar, 302–3 of Shivamma Thayee, 252 as case study, 20, 64, 297 of Upasni Maharaj, 239 bhajans, 307–13, 316–7, 319–20, 330–1 service tasks, 132 conceptual variety, 302 Asia/Asians epistemological intersections, 330 cities’ comparative urbanist, 341 ethnicity, 297, 300 devotees, 201, 282 miracle, 321–22 groups immigrating to United States ofﬁ cial name, 299 338 photograph of Sathya Sai Baba, 324 philanthropic efforts in East Africa producing cassette, 104 254, 283 service activities, 318–20 presence in East Africa, 262–71 Atlanta Soto Zen Center, 302 reached by Radio Sai Global Atlantic Ocean, 310 Harmony, 105 Auburn Avenue, 302. See also “Sweet relief network, 279 Auburn” Avenue. religions Protestantized, 314 Augé, Marc, 14 religious tradition, 317, 338 Aundh, 214 Sai centers, 137 Aurangabad, 32, 39 traditions in Atlanta, 299 Aurobindo, Sri, 21, 68, 70, 156, 158–9, traditions in the United States, 296, 208, 336, 339 299 Auroville, 156, 214 AsiaStar, 105 Australia, 44, 136–8, 196, 198–9, 254, Asia to Africa, 271 275, 293, 321 Asian African Heritage, 271 Austronesia, 137 Asian American, 335 avatar Asian-African Anglophone writing, 268 ideational links to Shirdi Sai Baba, 252 Assam, 131 Meher Baba, 43–5, 47, 67, 70 Athens, 213 qualities, 332 Atlanta Sathya Sai Baba, 49–51, 58–9, 61–2, as global city, 300–1 67–72, 341 author’s apartment, 254 Avatar Day, 204 bhajan sessions, 304 Ayodhya, 59, 211 case study, 10, 78, 217, 297–8 Ayurveda, 40, 118, 124–6 devotees moving through, 145 Ayyappan, 131, 273, 306 downtown and metro, 318 Azerbaijan, 137 Hard Rock Café, 292 high-rise buildings, 243 Babb, Lawrence, 5, 10, 16, 50, 58 immigrants, 301 Baden-Powell, Robert 125, 143–4 inhabiting and mapping space in, 344 Badrinath 59 metropolitan region, 320 Baez, Joan, 310 negotiating cultural and social Baha’i, 3, 74, 118, 208, 213, 260, 337 difference, 330 Baha’i Unity Center, 302 population, suburbs, and postmodern Bahrain, 93, 137, 250 geography, 301 Bal Vihar Program, 146 religious groups, 300 Bal Vikas Program, 129, 140, 142, 146, relocation of Deccan imaginary, 343 196, 247–8 resemblance to Bangalore, 251, 301 Balaji temple, 272 resemblance to Hyderabad, 301 Bali (in Indonesia), 138 site of Sai Center, 295 Bali, S.C., Brigadier, 120–1 site of Southeast Regional conference Bamba, Sheikh Amadou, 13 323 Banaras, 44, 59 suburbs, 330 Bangalore Unitarian Universalist congregations, and Nagamani Purnaiya, 81 299 and Narasimha Swami, 229, 233

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and Shivamma Thayee, 224, 239 Beckerlegge, Gwilym, 106, 334 address to devotees, 198 Beedupalli, 187 bhajan sessions, 304 Beethoven, 312 buses to and from Puttaparthi, 162, Beijing, 10 178 Bengal 24, 38, 41 case study, 9, 10–11, 78 Bengali, 194, 315 23, 39, 45, 217 Benin, 103 devotees moving through, 145 Berenstein, Marcelo, 1 early connections with Sathya Sai Berlin, 136 Baba, 54, 56–7, 129, 240–1 Besant, Annie, 158, 228 educational institutions, 113 Beteille, Andre, 12 Export Promotion Industrial Park, 151 Beyond a Boundary, 212 familiarity of African bhajans, 286 Bhagavad Gita, 35, 66, 70, 155, 158, 188, four distinct features, 237 233, 299, 327 healers, 127–8 Bhagavata Purana, 66, 87, 194 high-tech city, 223 Bhagavata Vahini, 66, 194 high technology proﬁ le, 252 bhajan (devotional singing) history, 219–22 at Atlanta 297–8, 304–13, 316–7, home of T.V. Hariharan, 329 319–20 hospitals, 62–3, 113–22, 215 at Bradford, 267 information city, 243, 249 at Brindavan, 240, 242 inhabiting and mapping space in, 344 at Kampala, 260–1 models of the city, 251 at Nairobi, 261–2, 278–9, 286–8 ofﬁ ce of WorldSpace, 105 at Puttaparthi, 94, 175 relocation of Deccan imaginary, 343 at Sai Darshan, 245, 247 resemblance to Atlanta, 251, 301 at Southeast Regional Conference, resemblance to Hyderabad, 301 326, 329 resemblance to Nairobi, 251 attendance mandated in principles of Sai Center correspondence with Sai Organization, 140 Nairobi Sai Center, 277 center in Afro-architectural style, 261 Sai meeting at Chowdiah Hall, 196 code-blending and code-switching, site of Brindavan ashram, 74, 148, 192 307–17 site of samiti, 64, 244–51, 303 concentration, 142 Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization devotees attending, 135 volunteers in hospitals, 118 history in India, 88 science city, 74 in Indian languages, 198 state capitol, 118 in Trinidad, 315 suburbs’ intersection with Sai Baba instrument of devotional memory, 21 tradition, 252 on Internet, 106 temples for Shirdi Sai Baba, 228, 232, plenitude of messages, 331–2 239 remembrance of the name, 76 Bangalore City Corporation, 218 role in Sai movement, 5, 87, 89–91, Bangalore Development Authority, 247 131 Bangalore International Airport, 127 singing in early life of Sathya Sai Bangalore Metropolitan Region, 244 Baba, 167–8 Bania, 38 systemization, 139 Bannemian, 39 under the sky, 59. See also Akhand Bapu Nature Cure Hospital and Bhajan. Yogashram, 125–6 bhajan mandali, 131, 139, 244 Bapusaheb Booty, 35, 39 Bhakta Prahalada, 152, 214 Bapusaheb Jog, 41 Bhakti, 306, 316, 336 Bauls, 313 Bhaktivedanta, 68 Bay Area (of California), 93 Bharadvaja, 52, 60–1 Beas, 164 Bharat. See India. Beatles, 296 Bharat Earth Movers, Ltd., 237

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Bharat Mata, 96 enclave, 232 Bharatha, 160–1 members of Sai Samaj committee, Bhat Raju, 52 232 Bhavani, 228 parentage of Shirdi Sai Baba, 28, 30, Bhave, Vinoba, 90 71, 81 Bhishma, K.G., 36 parentage of Upasni Maharaj, 40 Bhojpuri, 315 priest appointed for fi rst Bhopal, 196 congregational worship of Shirdi Bible, 102 Sai Baba, 36 Bihar, 131–4 settlement, 223 Bijapur, 32 work of, 336 Bikaner, 38 woman housing young Sathya Sai bio-civic ethics, 19, 111–3, 125, 156, Baba, 54 343 Brahmo Samaj, 299, 336 Black History, 1 Braj Bhasa, 314 Blues, the, 297 Brazil, 136, 199 body and sensory reform, 19, 122–28, Brindavan 233, 332, 343 building designs as model for Sai Bohras, 283 Darshan, 246 Bombay educational institutions, 113, 148–50, activity space of devotional 152 community, 38 fate intertwined with high technology, and Sathya Sai Baba’s African visit, 252 259, 261 hermitage of Sathya Sai Baba, 57, city transformation during time of 192, 218, 239–43 Shirdi Sai Baba, 37 home of Krishna, 192 inauguration of Dharmakshetra, 139 North Indian devotional center, 59, inauguration of institute for training 74, 306 teachers, 196 properties managed by Sri Sathya Sai popularity of Shirdi Sai Baba, 23 Central Trust, 140 previous residence of Sai Darshan Summer Courses, 131 devotees, 249 Britain/British, 208, 228, 256, 263, residence of Sathya Sai Baba, 57 265–7, 269, 283, 307 site of fi rst World Conference, 61 British Commonwealth Immigrants Act, Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organizations, 266 129, 135, 140 British East Africa, 263 visited by Upasni Maharaj, 42 British East India Company, 220 Bombay Presidency, 34 British Raj, 38 Booty, see Bapusaheb Booty British War Cabinet, 228 Bose, S.K., 185 Brockwood Park school, 156 Bovi Palya, 248 Brooklyn, 293 Bowen, David, 266–7 Bruce, Rita, 83, 85 Boy Scout movement, 125 Buckingham Canal, 232 Bradford Sai Center, 266, 307 Buddha Brahma, 46 as avatar, 45, 185 Brahma Sutras, 66 as fi gure in global or transregional Brahmakumaris, 135 imaginary, 215 Brahmanapalli, 187 as spiritual leader and thinker, 1 Brahmanic practices, 69 at Sai Center in Nairobi, 277 Brahmin/Brahmins, caste of birthday festival, 57 C. Rajagopalachari, 67 iconography, 50 devotee of shrine at Someshvarapura, image overlooking Hill View Stadium, 237 183, 215 devotees visiting Shirdi, 38 in bhajan, 89 donations to sacred centers, 163 in photographs in vodun markets, 103

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The Buddha and the Dhamma, 67 Central America, 137, 328 Buddhism/Buddhist Central Coordinator, 137 architectural elements, 208 Central Council, 136 as a single religion, 336 Central Council Coordinator, 322 as world religion, 3, 62 Central India, 131 combined with Protestantism, 314 Central Trust. See Sri Sathya Sai Central divine bisexual polarity/unity, 71 Trust. format in Japan, 337 Central Valley (of California), 93 groups reworking older historical Ceylon, 139. See also Sri Lanka. traditions, 338 Chair of Sociology and Civics, 341 in Atlanta, 301 Chairman, Overseas Organization, 141 in Sikkim, 132 Chaitanya, 315, 327 inspiration for Sarvodaya, 112, 143 Chaitanya Jyoti Museum, 63, 170, Mahayana, 109 185–6, 201, 204, 208, 211 portrayed in Eternal Heritage Chalice House, 299 Museum, 8 Chamblee, 301 prayers in Sathya Sai school, 147 Chand Patil, 33 reinterpreted by Ambedkar, 67 Chandarias, 264 represented on Sarva Dharma Pillar, Chandigarh, 131, 208 157, 201 Chandorkar, Narayan Govind, 34 Sai devotees’ interest in, 83, 293 Chandrabai, 45 Tibetan, 70 character, 153–6 traditions, 160 Charlton, Hilda, 139 unity of the Spirit, 316 Chattahoochee Grill, 323, 325 Vajrayana, 109 Chengdu, 198 virtual communities, 108 Chennai. See Madras. Buddhist Humanism, 112 Chhattisgarh, 132–4 Buddhist movements, 22 Chettiar, 229, 232 Buford Highway, 301 Chicago, 295 Bukkapatnam 52, 166, 170 Children’s Day, 171 Bukkapatnam Tank, 187 China/Chinese, 10, 43, 178, 185, 198, Byelorussia, 137 201, 214, 270, 301 Chinese New Year, 201 Cairo, 216 Chincholi, 8–9, 10, 55 Calcutta, 118 Chinmayananda, 68, 88 California, 83–4, 92, 110, 136, 194, Chinna Venkappa Raju, 52 196, 292–3, 323, 339 Chishti, 32, 164 California Aggie, 334 Chittoor, 326 California Board of Education, 335 Chitravati River, 54, 59, 82, 166, 187 Cambridge Layout. See Someshvarapura. Chowdiah Hall, 196 Cameroun, 290 Christ Canada, 137, 267, 283, 320 appearing in pictures, 92, 98, 260, Cantonese, 307 279, 286, 292 Capitol, Atlanta, 301 harmony and oneness of teachings, Caribbean, 137, 212 315–6 Carleton University, 198 image overlooking Hill View Stadium, Casablanca, 139 183, 215 Catholic/Catholicism, 92, 300, 316, 334 Passion of, 342 Ceiling on Desires Program, 124, 318, substitute, 333 326, 328 Christian Era, 185 Census of India, 37 Christian/Christians Cantonment, 218, 220, 234 brother in Amar Akbar Anthony, 23 Cash, Johnny, 310 concepts in bhajans, 307 Celestine Prophecy, 302 congregations, 330 Cement Controller, 238 groups and denominations, 338

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groups reworking older historical Connerton, Paul, 21 traditions, 338 Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish, hymns, 309–10, 316 14–15, 77, 91, 157, 159, 210 in East Africa, 265, 283 Coordinating Committee, 136 in Gandhi’s thought, 155 Correa, Charles, 208 music, 314 Cosmic Chants, 315 nomenclature of the sacred in Covenant House, 318 Nairobi, 287 Critchlow, Keith, 208 not represented at Sai Darshan, 248 Crowne Plaza Hotel, 323 schools and choirs, 317 Crystal Blue, 292 teacher and energy healer, 101 Cubbon, Sir Mark, 220 traditions contributing to Unitarian Cubbon Park, 220 Universalism, 298 Curley, Richard, 290 understandings among Indo-Trinidadian devotees, 92 Dabholkar, G.R., 25 Christian Science/Scientist, 83, 302 Dacula, 330 Christianity Dadu, 69 acquiring topography, 341 Dagoretti, 287 American Protestant, 316 Daily Nation, 262 and Coomaraswamy, 159 Daisaku Ikeda, 112 and situation of Sathya Sai Baba in Dakani, 314 Nairobi, 289 Dakar, 258 as a single religion, 336 Dakshinamurti, 179, 192 as world religion, 3, 62 Dalai Lama, 1 charismatic, 343 Dalit, 67, 232, 237, 314, 335 portrayed in Eternal Heritage Dar es Salaam, 261, 269 Museum, 8 darshan (seeing) represented on Sarva Dharma Pillar, at Puttaparthi, 150, 175–8, 183, 157, 194, 198 204 site of devotion, 85 daily, 215 unity of the Spirit, 316 examination by Lawrence Babb, 5 Christmas, 57, 198–9, 280, 318 experience and meaning for cultural Church Growth Parkway, 330 subjects, 82 Cities in Evolution, 341 key visual performance for Sathya Sai citizenship, 7, 144–5, 153–6, 211–2, Baba, 79–85 259, 284–5, 290–1, 319, 344–5 of Sathya Sai Baba, 68–9, 84–5, Civil Rights movement, 297, 310, 317 172–3, 177, 239, 324 Clarke, Peter B., 338 on Internet, 106 Cleveland, 318 philosophical perspectives, 160 Cliff Palace, 292 sensorium, 76–8 Coca-Cola, 279 Das, Veena, 12 code-blending and code-switching, Das Ganu, 29, 34 307–17, 331 Dassera, 55, 57, 199 Coimbatore, 60, 189, 223, 230 Dattatreya, 45–6, 72, 224 Coimbatore district, 223, 228 Dave, Avni, 271 Collins, Judy, 310 Dave, Sachin, 271 Colombo, 143 Dayalbagh, 164 Columbus, 318 Deccan, history, 164–6 Colusa, 92, 292 imaginary, 215, 343 Colusa Nilayam, 292 Muslims, 314 Comaroff, Jean, 112, 339 region of Maharashtra, 23 Comaroff, John, 112, 339 region where Shirdi Sai Baba spent Coney, Judith, 70 childhood and youth, 32 Congress Party, 225 regions connected, 217 Connecticut, 293 states linked spatially, 48

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Suﬁ tradition, 29 East Prashanti block, 173 unique development, 74 East Zone, 244 Deccan College, 42 Eastern Europe, 137, 199 Deccan Herald, 212 Eastleigh, 269–70 Deeb, Lara, 13 Ebenezer Baptist Church, 297 Defense Accounts, 234 ECC Construction, 64 DeKalb County, 301 Eckankar, 302 Delhi, 10, 59, 118–9, 131–4, 164, 249 Eddy, Mary Baker, 1 Delhi School of Economics Department Edinburgh, 213 of Sociology, 10, 11–12 Educare, 113, 146–7 Desai, Madhavi, 208 education, 62, 179, 145–56, 196, 248, Desai, Miki, 208 279–83 Detroit, 318 Education in Human Values (EHV) Devi, 303–4 Program, 129, 146, 196, 280 Devi, Indra, 139 Ekalavya, 107 devotional sensibility, 7, 17–18, 19, Eknath, 313 79–81, 343–5 El Salvador, 328 Dhakappa, Nagesh, 129, 135, 142 Eldoret, 260–1, 276 Dhanvantri, 118 Electronic City, 222–3, 227, 252 dharma, 148, 154, 157, 199, 201, 204, 211 Embaksi airport, 259 Dharma Vahini, 66 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 298 Dharmakshetra, 61, 139–40 England, 84, 156, 267, 275–6, 277 Dharwar district, 244 English Dhruva, 248 Christmas carols at Prasanthi Dhyana Vahini, 66 Nilayam, 198 Dinakaran, Brother, 232 clergyman, 310 Diouf, Mamadou, 285 discourses and writings of Sathya Sai Divine Life Society, 59 Baba, 194 Diwans, 221 education of Meher Baba, 42 Dominican Republic, 136 in bhajans, 105, 286, 289, 304, 307, Doraville, 301 311–12 Drona, 107 knowledge of Shirdi Sai Baba Drona mountain, 183 devotees, 38 Droz, Yvan, 290 library at Someshvarapura, 235 Dubai, 249 media, 333 Dundee, 213 people portrayed in Vassanji’s novel, Durban, 344 269 Durkheim, Emile, 340 spoken by Indians in East Africa, 264 Dwarakamayi, 39 translation of Sanskrit chant, 315 Dwarakamayi Center, 279–80, 287–8, translation of Sathyam Sivam Sundaram, 291 50 Dwarakanadh, N.R., 250 translation of speeches of Sathya Sai, Baba, 66 Easwaramma, 52, 171 version of Sanathana Sarathi, 188, 192 Easwaramma Day, 171 Enumalapalli, 187 Easwaramma School, 151 Eternal Heritage Museum, 7, 21, 185 Easwaramma High School, 179 East Africa, Easwaramma: The Chosen Mother, 171 Esalen Institute, 83 East Africa, 245, 254, 258–9, 263–4, Estonia, 199 272, 275, 284 Eurocentric, 339–40 East Africa Protectorate, 256 Europe/European East African Federation, 270 and Meher Baba, 43–4, 89 East Asia, 137, 296 Arts and Crafts movement in East Indians, 314–5 nineteenth century, 209

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cities’ comparative urbanist, 341 infl uence on Martin Luther King, Jr. colonialism, 263 297 components in architecture of inspiration for Sarvodaya, 112 Chaitanya Jyoti, 185 meeting with Upasni Maharaj, 41 devotees of Meher Baba, 44 Gandhi, Ramachandra, 12 farms in Kenya, 266 Gandhian movement, 90 negotiation of citizenship through Ganesha, 89, 103, 118, 173, 179, 234, seva, 286 245–7, 303–4 other mind of, 340 Ganesha Gate, 173, 175, 178 population in Vassanji’s novel, 269–70 Ganpuley, N.G., 114 process of creating suburbs and Gavaskar, Sunil, 183 settlements, 251 Gay and Lesbian Sai Baba Center, 292 segregated areas in Nairobi, 256 Gayatri, 96–8 radio broadcasts, 105 Gayatri mantra, 90, 96, 224 relief network, 279 Gayatri temple, 175 religious minorities, 139 Geddes, Patrick, 186, 213, 341, 344 Sai Centers, 136–7 Geetha Vahini, 66 systems of naturopathy and Geneva, 198 hydrotherapy, 124 Georgia (nation), 137 Euro-American melodies, 311 Georgia (in United States), 295, 301, Euro-American models, 284 311, 323 Euro-American tunes, 309 Georgia State University, 301 Eutopia, 341, 344 German East Africa, 263 Evangelical Baptists, 300 Germany, 114, 136, 198 Export Promotion Industrial Park Ghana, 84, 103, 114 (EPIP), 151, 222, 243–4, 252 Ghannam, Farha, 20, 216 Gibraltar, 228 Faith for Living, 344 Giri, Ananta Kumar, 22, 112, 319 Family Care Foundation, 279 Gnostic, 71, 109 Felicity, 314 Goa, 38, 132 Fiji, 140, 265 God Florida, 293, 323–5, 329 and African ancestors, 85 Fordist, 330 and architecture, 214 Frankenberg, Ruth, 316, 331 as Shivam, 95 Frankfurt, 239 as teacher, 124 Free Life phase of Meher Baba, 44 belief in, 135 French, 318 belonging to all, 204 Frontline, 335 body and temple as dwelling of, 210 Fuller, Margaret, 298 breath of, 155 defi ned in principles of Sathya Sai Galilee, 342 Organization, 140 Gambia, 325 descent to earth, 51, 70 Ganapat Rao Dattatreya Shasrabuddhe, devotees and food, 123 29 friend of Shirdi Sai Baba, 32 Gandhi, M.K. (Mahatama) identifi ed with Shirdi Sai Baba, 237, 239 as spiritual leader and thinker, 1 identifi ed with Sathya Sai Baba, 329 association with C. Rajagopalachari, in dreams, 84 230–1 in Sathya Sai Baba’s discourses in condemnation of the city and Sanathana Sarathi, 199 celebration of the village, 211 intoxicated persons, 43 critique of modern civilization, 340 glory of, 124 ideas in Hind Swaraj, 155 grace of, 125 ideas in Key to Health, 21, 124–5, 146, invoked in the Sarva Dharma Prayer 214 90

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love of, 124 Guidelines for American Sathya Sai Baba names of, 306 Centers, 303 oneness of, 298 Guindy, 54, 102 outstretched hand of, 110 Gujarat, 131–4, 237, 254, 264, 276 pathways to, 141 Gujarati, 42, 267, 272, 274, 284 perceived by particle physicist, 198 Gunaji, N.V. 25 personal and familiar, 311 Guru, the 89 realization through personal effort, Gurupurnima, 45, 57, 60, 232, 235, 315 260–1 remembrance of the name, 33, 85 Guyana, 265 seat of, 48 Gwinnet County, 330 seeker and servant of, 44 service for, 142–3 HAL 2nd Stage, 218 sharing implied by bhakti, 317 HAL 3rd Stage, 218 temple at Sai Darshan, 249 Habitat for Humanity, 22, 112, 319, 337 union of Muslim saint with, 36 Hackett, Rosalind I.J., 290 Godavari Canal, 37 Haﬁ z, 42 Godavari Mai, 42 Haider Ali, 220 Godavari Mata, 46 Hajis, 38 Godavari River, 37 Halagappa, 93, 325 Godavari District, 63 Halbfass, Wilhelm, 336 Goddess, the, 89, 338. See also Great Halbwachs, Maurice, 21, 45, 342 Goddess. Hall, Stuart, 85 Godtalk, 316 Hampi, 164–6 Goethe, 340 Hansotia, Gustadji, 41–3 Goh Say Tong, 63 Hanuman, 103, 126–7, 165–7, 173, Gokak, Anil, 148, 153 183, 186, 215–6 Gokulam, 179 Hard Rock Cafe, 5, 63, 292 Goldstein, Michael, 198, 322 Hardwar, 44, 59, 96 Gollapalli, 49, 167 Hare Krishna devotees, 76 Gomez, Jose, 327–8 Hare Krishna temple, 273, 300. Google, 105–6 See also ISKCON center. Gopal Reddy, N., 225 Hari, 304–5 Gopala, 242, 305–6 Hariharan, T.V., 329 Gopalakrishna temple, 54, 167 Harlem Globetrotters, 179 Gopalrao Gund, 35 Haryana, 131 Gopuram Gate, 173, 178, 183 Hawkins, Sophie, 5, 107 Gorakhnath, 45 Hawley, Chris, 279 Gospel music, 297 Hawley, Jack, 326–7 Gothic, 185 Hawley, Louise, 326 Gounders, 223 Hawley, Magarita, 279 Govardhan hill, 242 Hawley, John Stratton, 102 Govinda, 305 Haynes, Charles, 45, 47 Grady Hospital, 319 Hayward, 318 Granth Sahib, 76, See also Adi Granth. Hazrat Baba Tajuddin, 47 Great Goddess, 70. See also Goddess. Hazrat Babajan, 42–3, 47 Great Seclusion of Meher Baba, 44 healing/health/medicine 54, 66, 113–28 Greater Atlanta Vedic Temple, 302 Hebrew University, 213 Greece, 212–3 Heelas, Paul, 338 Gregory, Robert, 283 Hemadpant, 25, 34 Groups. See Sai Groups Hervieu-Léger, Daniele, 13, 21 Guatemala, 328 Highway 316, 330 Gucci, 323 Hill View Stadium, 149, 183–5, 212, Guenon, Rene, 157 215, 322

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Himachal Pradesh, 132 Hindu nationalism, 24, 335 Himalaya, 126, 132 Hindu Right, 60, 96, 160 Hind Swaraj, 155 Hindu Studies, 335 Hindi, 23, 69, 90, 194, 262, 289, 304, Hindu Temple of Atlanta, 302 315 Hinduism Hindu/Hindus alternative to discourse on, 338 and Baba devotees, 336 and ancient India, 335 architectural elements, 208 and experiments of Ramakrishna, 159 aspects of devotion to Shirdi Sai as category, 302 Baba, 234 construction of, 336 audience of Sathya Sai Baba, 157 displaying anti-Christian potential, brother in Amar Akbar Anthony, 23 333 categories in discourses of Upasni identiﬁ ed with sanatana dharma, 158 Maharaj, 41 inadequate for full analysis of Sai charitable organizations, 120 Baba movement, 48 concepts in bhajans, 307 larger body, 233 conceptualization of the avatar, 45 militant, 215 deities, 303 pre-modern, 336 deity status of Shirdi Sai Baba, 228 privileged in Euro-American analysis devotees at Shirdi Sai Baba temple in of Sai Baba movement, 6 Mylapore, 232 represented on Sarva Dharma pillar, devotees attending Southeast Regional 62, 157 Conference, 325 scholarly debates on, 336 devotees of Sai Baba at Shirdi, 38–9 series in well-known presses, 335 dharma not privileged by Sathya Sai understanding of 335. See also Baba, 62 Neo-Hinduism. gods identiﬁ ed with Shirdi Sai Baba, Hinduization, 39, 342 237 Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd., 237 groups reworking older historical Hindustani, 34, 89, 105, 305–7, 312 traditions, 338 Hindutva, 335–6 guru status of Shirdi Sai Baba, 47 Hirakud Dam, 56 in Atlanta, 301 Hislop, John, 293, 296 in Bali, 138 Hispanic, 296, 324 in Britain, 267 Hokkein, 307 in East Africa, 264–5, 283 Hollywood, 136 in Gandhi’s thought, 155 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 298 in Sikkim, 132 Holston, James, 20, 259 inseparability from Islam at The Holy Man and the Psychiatrist, 83 Vijayanagara, 165 Home for the Aged, 162 lower castes, 237 Home Rule movement, 228 middle class, 239, 342 Hong Kong, 140 parentage of Shirdi Sai Baba, 28–9, Hosur Road, 218, 223 71, 81 House of Blues, 292 religious beliefs constructed in Shirdi Houston 23, 323 Sai Baba temples, 233 Human Values, 198 religious fellowship, 267 Huzuri Bhavan, 164 Sathya Sai Baba as essentially, 343 Hyderabad, 9, 42, 54, 57, 162, 187, sectarian groups united, 252, 297 218, 222 suburban communities, 238 Hyundai, 223 tradition, 158 Trinidadians, 92 Ibrahim Street, 234 unity with Muslims emblematic of Id, 29 Shirdi Sai Baba, 231 Idaho, 293 Hindu Education Foundation, 335 Idi Amin Dada, General, 260, 266, 268

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Illich, Ivan, 327 food, 178 Illinois, 293 framework for a new social order, 231 The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, graduate of Sathya Sai Baba’s 268–71 educational institutions, 282 Independence Day parades, 259 gurus, 68, 72 India/Indian hermitage of Sathya Sai Baba, 106, academic community, 335 108 academy of Vedic scholars, 60 high-tech city, 223 African devotees’ immigration, 290 hippies, 338 alternative modernities, 340 hub of Sai movement in Asia, 137 and Patrick Geddes, 341 ideal citizens, 212 architecture, 208 ideal village, 164 artists, 98 ideological encounters with the as Bharat, 160, 199, 212 West, 336 audience of Sathya Sai Baba, 157, information city, 222 60 Internet sites, 105 author’s home, 292 languages, 50, 198, 304, 309, 333 auto-rickshaws, 25 literary characters, 107 bhajan sessions, 89–90 magazines, 339 Bal Vikas teachers, 196 medical tradition, 118 bhajan mandali, 139 melodies, 309 Boy Scout movement, 125 member of Madras Legislative Christian theology, 314 Council, 228 civilization in Gandhi’s thought, 155 mercantile activity in West Africa, 103 clothes, 324 middle classes, 194, 215, 343 colleges planned by Sathya Sai Baba, migrants, 255 148 modernity, 340 colonial and post-colonial milieu, 156 music, 79, 88, 179, 315–6 community portrayed in Vassanji’s National Board of Examinations, 115 novel, 269 national service cadres, 143–4 constituency of Sai movement, 138 New Age, 339 context of Ramakrishna and people drawn to special ethereal Ramana Maharshi, 157 entity or Body, 233 cricket team, 212 presence in East Africa, 263–71 culture, dharma and religion based pilgrimage destination, 83 on the Vedas, 154–5, 160 practices of the body, 214 culture and sanathana dharma, 159 production site of Sathya Sai Speaks, devotee in Singapore, 198 261 devotee attending Southeast Regional progressive magazines, 335 Conference, 325 religious culture and history, 66–7 devotees attending World Conference reform movements and Unitarians, of Sathya Sai Seva Organizations, 298 139, 141 religious community, 107 devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, 58, 65 revival of yoga, 214 devotees traveling to visit Sathya Sai Rishi Valley school, 156 Baba, 239 rupee price of Sanathana Sarathi, 188 devotional movements, 305 rupee value of fl owers sold at educational crisis, 146 Someshvarapura, 235 engineering, 105 Sai Centers, 64–6, 276–8 epidemiological transition, 120 Sai movement represented in excluded from Asia zone of Sai Sanathana Sarathi, 192 Organization, 137 Sai devotees volunteering in, 111 fi rst city electrifi ed, 221 saint, 334 following of Meher Baba, 44 samitis, 303–4

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Sathya Sai Baba recognized by International Sai Organization, 1, 61, millions in, 1 106, 137, 139. See also Sai segregated areas in Nairobi, 256 organization. separated from other countries within International Seva Conference, 327 the Sai Organization, 141 International Technology Park, 243 science of spiritual culture, 160 Internet, 105–10, 151, 321–2, 331, service opportunities, 318 333–4, 338, 343 social conditions in early twentieth Interstate 85, 301 century, 143 Interstate 285, 299 source of students for Summer Introvigne, Massimo, 139 Courses, 131 Iran, 42, 43 Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization, Iranis, 38 113, 128–35 Ireland, 84 television, 105 Ishvar, 306 temples and organizations, 302 ISKCON, 151 temporalities and spatialities, 284 ISKCON center, 301 tertiary health care, 119 Islam therapeutics, 124 and Coomaraswamy, 159 Theosophy, 75 as a single religion, 336 thought and ashes, 92 as world religion, 3 travel by African intellectuals to, 85 connections of Sathya Sai Baba, 170 travel itinerary of Meher Baba, 42–4 in Shri Sai Satcharita, 28 urban sites and Shirdi Sai Baba, institutions at Vijayanagara, 165 temples, 218 portrayed in Eternal Heritage urban sites and unregulated Museum, 8 acredness, 216 represented on Poornachandra visuality of culture, 180 Auditorium, 201 India, Government of, 118, 148 represented on Sarva Dharma Stupa, India, Governor-General of, 67 62, 194, 198 India, President of, 179, 198 role in Puttaparthi’s urbanization, 215 India, Prime Minister of, 243 Shirdi Sai Baba’s familiarity with, 29, India, Vice-President of, 194 35 India’s Silicon Valley, 221 site of the repressed, 85 Indian American business community, unity of the Spirit, 316 297 Ismailis, 264, 283 Indian Cultural and Religious Center, 302 Ismailia Tea Room, 270 Indian High Commissioner, 260, 266 Italy, 39, 118, 136–9, 178, 198 Indian Institute of Science, 220–1 Indian National Congress, 38, 230 Jackson, Michael, 329 Indian Ocean, 137, 254 Jacobs, Jane, 20 Indian Telephone Industries, 237 Jai Santoshi Ma, 96 Indian Women’s Associations, 283 Jain/Jainism, 120, 165, 261–2, 264–5, Indiana, 320 273, 283–4 Indiranagar, 218, 222, 242–3, 252 Jain, Arun Kumar, 150 Indologists, 336 Jakarta, 139 Indonesia, 1, 137–8 James, C.L.R., 212 Indoor Stadium, 179 Jammu and Kashmir, 131 Indore, 42 Jamner, 38 Indo-Saracenic architecture, 208 Japan, 137, 327, 337–8 Indo-Trinidadians, 92 Jayprakash Nagar, 228 Industrial Area, Nairobi, 270 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 139 Institute for Social and Economic Jerusalem, 213, 342 Change, 10, 11 Jesus, 85, 89, 102–4, 277, 306, 313, International Chairman, 141 316–7, 319

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Jewish, 83–4, 298, 338, 342 Kasturi, N. Jews, 300. See also Judaism. account of Sathya Sai Baba’s African Jharkhand, 133–4 visit 260, 266 Jinja, 260 author of Easwaramma: Jivanjee, Esmailjee, 264 The Chosen Mother, 171 Jomo Kenyatta Hospital, 280–1, 288 author of Sathyam Sivam Sundaram, 49, Jones, Quincy, 329 60, 94, 110, 114, 146, 167, 186 Joseph, May, 20, 259, 275 compiler and translater of Sathya Sai Joy ice-cream factory, 239 Baba’s speeches, 61 Jnana Vahini, 66 death, 194 Judaism, 8, 85, 157, 336 editor of Sanathana Sarathi, 188, 139 Judeo-Christian, 335 primary biographer of Sathya Sai Juergensmeyer, Mark, 164 Baba, 72 recounting stories for students, 152 Kabir, 29, 45, 47, 69, 314, 327, 329 translator of bhajans composed by Kakinada, 230 Sathya Sai Baba, 306 Kalashnikovs, 270 Kayastha, 38 Kalki, 70 Kazakhsthan, 137 Kallicharan, Alvin, 183 Keda Gaon, 47 Kalpatharu/kalpavriksha, 170 Kempe Gowda, 219–20 Kalyan, 38 Kennedy, John F., 83 Kama (Kaama), 92 Kent, Alexandra, 5 Kamlapuram 52 Kenya Kampala, 139, 192, 249, 259–61, 266, academic curriculum, 280 269, 277 devotees’ construction efforts, 64 Kanchipuram 57, 163 emigration of Asians, 286 Kannada, 194, 234–5, 237, 248 malaria, 283 Kanu, Victor, 85, 282 middle class, 343 Kappalabanda, 187 national history, 256 Karaga festival, 220, 227 negotiation of citizenship through Karnatak music 88 seva, 286 Karnataka neo-liberal, 271 association with Shirdi Sai Baba, new and old South Asian devotees, 284 131–2 newly independent, 259, 265 bhajan, 139 opinion of Sathya Sai Baba, 277 communities of Sidis, 254 Pentacostal, evangelical, or residential centers of Sathya Sai charismatic movements, 289 Baba, 57 presence of Asians, 264–72 samitis, 131–4, 244 railroad, 263, 269 site of the third manifestation of Sai Organization, 135–6 Sai, 74 structural adjustment policies, 256 site of ambrosia production, 93 temporalities and spatialities, 284 Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization, visit of Sathya Sai Baba, 259–62 118, 129 Kenyan African National Union, 271 Suﬁ traditions and Shirdi Sai Baba, 32 Kenyan Immigration Act, 266 Karnataka, Chief Justice of, 196 Kenyatta, Jomo, 268–70 Karnataka, Chief Minister of, 94 Kerala, 77, 131–4 Karnataka, Government of, 63, 115 Keshava, 304 Karnataka, Governor of, 196 Key to Health, 124, 146, 214 Karthik, Murli, 212 Khandoba, 30, 32–3, 41, 45 Karur, 54 Kharagpur, 41 Kashinath Govindrai Upasni. Kharpade, G.S., 34, 38 See Upasni Maharaj. Kheirabadi, Masoud, 1 Kashmir, 178 Khulabad, 32

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Kibera, 257 Labor Day, 323 Kikonda, 261 Ladakh, 10 Kikuyu, 262, 287 Lagos, 102 King, Anthony D. 17, 251 Lakshmana, 173 King, Sallie B., 22 Lakshmi, 34 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 83, 297 Lakshmi-Narayana temple, 175 Kisaju, 282 Lal Bagh, 220 Kishore, N. Sai, 111 Lamu, 279 Klass, Morton, 325, 336 Lang, Jon, 208 Kodaikanal, 57 Larsen and Toubro, 63–4, 105, 115, Koi, 185 185, 209 Kondama Raju, 52, 167 Latin America, 279 Korean, 301 Latvia, 199 Kote Subbanna, 52 Laxman Mama Jog, 45 Krishna Laxman, V.V.S., 212 appearing in pictures, 81–2, 321–2 Laxmibai Shinde, 38 as avatara, 45, 59, 70–1, 185 Le Corbusier, 208, 242 as charioteer in Sanathana Sarathi, Leadbeater, C.W., 286 188–9, 194 Lee, R.L.M., 307 as Venugopala in Sanathana Sarathi, Leeds, 267 192 Lefebvre, Henri, 15 associated with birth of Sathya Sai Lepakshi, 167, 179, 215 Baba, 49 Life Positive, 339 at Nairobi Sai Center, 277 Limuru Road, 262 at Puttaparthi, 167 lingam at Spirit of Love home, 286 appearing in photograph, 175 ﬁ gure in global or transregional at Rupena Agrahara, 223, 225 imaginary, 215 at shrine in Someshvarapura, 234 harmony with Christ’s teachings, contact between guru and devotee, 78 315–6 conveying presence of the guru, 109 iconic reference not present in Atlanta in temple sanctum transforming into Sai Center, 303 Sathya Sai Baba, 165 identiﬁ ed with Shirdi Sai Baba, manifested by Sathya Sai Baba, 55–7, 234 71, 94–5 image at Brindavan, 74, 240–1 Lionnet, Francoise, 285 image originally to be placed in Lions Clubs, 260, 283 building where Shirdi Sai Baba Lithuania, 199 was buried, 39 Little Five Points, 301–2 image overlooking Hill View Little London, 270 Stadium, 183 Little Rock, 320 in bhajan sessions, 89, 304–6, 317 Locherla, 187 performance of stories from his life, Locherla Tank, 187 248 London, 102, 269, 344 Krishna, S.M., 94 Lorenzen, David, 16 Krishnamurti, J., 21, 156, 293, 295 Los Angeles, 139, 292, 301, 315 Kuala Lumpur, 249, 328, 344 Lotus Circle Pillar, 157, 171, 175, 192 Kulkarni Maharaj, 41 Lowenberg, Reuben, 103 Kumar, Dharma, 12 Lucas, Phillip Charles, 13 “Kumbaya,” 311, 316 Lucknow, 59 Kushalappa, 145 Lutgendorf, Philip, 183, 215 Kushalappa, U.B., 246 Kutchi Memon, 39 M.P. Shah Hospital, 283 Kuwait, 139 Maasai, 282–3 Kyrgyzstan, 137 Macedonia, 320

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Macrae, Opal, 139 Mahayana, 109 Madagascar, 136 Mahmood, Saba, 13 Madhava, 125, 304 Makarere University, 260 Madhvanis, 264 Malayalam, 194, 306 Madhya Pradesh, 132–4, 139 Malaysia, 10, 63, 92, 136, 185, 201, Madras 307, 328 All-India Conference, 61, 139 Malik, Aditya, 336 college students, 101 Malleswaram, 228, 244 drinking water project, 63 Malta, 140 hospitals, 119–20 Malur Srinivasa Thirumala Iyengar, 56 ministry of Narasimha Swami, 229 Man of Miracles, 101, 139 residence of Sathya Sai Baba, 57 Mandarin, 307 road connection to Bangalore, 218, 239 Mandir (at Prashanti Nilayam), 65, 79, Shirdi Sai Baba temple, 231–2 175–7, 204 site of bhajan gatherings, 88 Mangru, Ami, 92–3, 292 visit of Sathya Sai Baba, 54, 196–7 Manipal Hospital, 119 within activity space of Shirdi Sai Manipur, 131 Baba’s devotees, 38 Maratha, 30 Madras Christian College, 228 Marathi, 25, 34 Madras Law College, 228 Marcus, George E., 14 Madras Legislative Council, 228–9 Marietta, 301, 319 Madras state, 56 Markovits, Claude, 255 Madurai, 163 Marquardt, Marie Friedmann, 13, 301 Mahabalipuram, 338 Martin Luther King Historic District, Mahabharata, 70, 74, 107, 160, 188 302 Mahar, 41 Martin Luther King Historical Site, 297 Maharashtra Maruti, 30, 234 association with Shirdi Sai Baba, 25, Marwari, 234 131–2 Marx, Karl, 340 association with Suﬁ traditions, 28–30 Maryland, 293 association with Upasni Maharaj, 40 Masindi, 261 business connections in early Mathare Valley, 257 twentieth century, 227 Mathura, 59, 74, 306 Deccan region, 23 Mau Mau, 269–70 colonial economic development, 37 Mauritius, 136–8, 282 colonial middle classes, 32 Maya, 52 Dattatreya worship, 46–7 Mbale, 260 home of family members of devotees Medak District, 63–4 in Someshvarapura, 237 Meera, 152, 214. See also Mirabai. home of Shirdi Sai Baba devotees in Megha, 36 Bangalore, 234 Mehaboobnagar District, 63 Home Minister, 192 Meher Ashram, 43 nationalist center, 24 Meher Baba, 40, 42–8, 67, 70, 229, oldest devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, 132 239, 342 pilgrimage sites including Shirdi, 57 Meherabad, 43–4, 343 poet-saints and Pandharpur, 69 Meherazad, 44 samitis, 131–4 Mehtas, 264 sant tradition, 72 Melbourne, 105 site of ﬁ rst among triple incarnations memory, of Sai, 74 chains, 46, 342 site of Shirdi village, 3 devotional, 21, 74 Maharshi Mahesh Yogi, 68, 105 implicated in urbanization and Mahasamadhi, 233 transnationalism, 6 Mahatma Gandhi. See Gandhi, M.K. incorporating written and oral Mahavira, 89, 279 traditions, 10

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of usable pasts mapped onto hopeful community in America, 297 future, 342 Deccan connections, 314 part of the sensorium, 77 devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, 198 pathways, 46–8, 51 devotees of Shirdi Sai Baba, 39 social and spatial processes, 342 groups reworking older historical somatic orientation of, 214 traditions, 338 transformation, 45 holy men, 77 Merwan Sheriar Irani. See Meher Baba. identity of Shirdi Sai Baba, 29, 32–3, Mesa Verde, 292 35–6, 81, 237 Methodists, 300 in Atlanta, 301 Mexico, 137, 139 in East Africa, 264–5, 283 Mhalsapati, 30, 33, 34 in Gandhi’s thought, 155 Miami, 318, 320, 325 month of Muharram, 38 Middle East, 43, 137, 198 mystic, 25 Milner, Lord Alfred, 269 not living near Someshvarapura Milner Road, 269 shrine, 237 Ministry of Health, Republic of Kenya, not represented at Sai Darshan, 248 283 organizations, 120 Minister for Land Settlement, 270 patients in hospitals, 117 Ministry of Education, 148 population of Shirdi, 30 Mirabai, 306. See also Meera. repertory at Shirdi, 43 Mirpuri College of Music, 179 reverence of Kalpatharu at Missouri, 83 Puttaparthi, 170 Mistry, Kekie, 277 saints’ dargahs, 232 Mizoram, 131 unity with Hindus emblematic of Modernist, 209 Shirdi Sai Baba, 231 modernity, 6, 7, 12–14, 20, 154–5, Muthaiga, 269 339–44 Muthuswamy, 223, 225 Mohammed, Prophet of Islam, 33. Mwaza, 261 See also the Prophet. Myers, Helen, 314 Moi, Daniel arap, 268, 275 Mylapore, 231 Moldova, 137 Mysore, 54–5, 61, 220–1, 227, 325 Mombasa, 139, 256, 261, 269, 276 Mombasa-Uganda railway, 256 Nagamani Purnaiya, 81–2, 85, 102 Moorish architecture, 185 Nagpur, 41, 47 Moreno, 118 Nainital, 59 Mouride, 13, 258 Nairobbery, 273 Mt. Vernon Highway, 299 Nairobi Muharram, 29, 38 Asian presence at beginning Mukta, Parita, 269–70 of new millennium, 271–6 Mukuru, 257 bhajan sessions, 304 Müller, Max, 334 case study of Sai Organization, 10, Mumbai. See Bombay. 78, 217, 274, 276–91 Mumford, Lewis, 344 construction of Sai Center, 64 Murchison Falls National Park, 261 devotees attending the First World Murphet, Howard, 83, 101, 103, 139, Conference of Sathya Sai Seva 293 Organizations, 139 Musa Gitau Road, 277 devotees moving through, 145 music, 67, 74, 76, 79–81, 87–8. history, 256, 269–70 See also bhajan. hybrid urbanism, 272–3 Music College, 89, 215 inhabiting and mapping space in, 344 Muslim/Muslims naming of Sai Center, 290–1 brother in Amar performative regimes of devotional Akbar Anthony, 25 citizenship, 259 carriage driver, 52 population, 255

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produced through sensory and New England, 299 somatic regimes, 286 New Jersey, 106 relocation of Deccan imaginary, 343 New Life phase of Meher Baba, 44 resemblance to Atlanta, 300 New Mexico, 292 resemblance to Bangalore, 251 New Religious Movement (NRM), 74, shantytowns, 256–8, 280 338–9 transportation system, 287 New Testament, 342 visit of Sathya Sai Baba, 259–62 New World, 317 Nairobi airport, 262 New Year festival, 57 Nairobi National Park, 260 New York, 83–4, 139, 293, 318, 322–3 Nairobi Youth Network for Peace, 257 New Zealand, 201 Nakuru, 260, 269 Newton, John, 310 namasmarana (remembrance of the Ngara, 261 name), 5, 86, 124–5, 186, 306, 326 Ngong, 269 Name, the, 331 Ngong Hills, 279 Nanak, Guru, 69, 89, 92, 98, 277, 314 Ngorogoro crater, 260 Nanda, 306 Nigeria, 102 Nanded, 38 Nigerian Ports Authority, 102 Nandy, Ashis, 12 Nightengale, Florence, 298 Nanyuki, 260 Nimgaon, 30 Narasimha Iyer, B.V. See Narasimha Ninth Symphony, 312 Swami. Njoroge, 269 Narasimha Swami, 45, 47, 218, 228–33, Noble Truths, 112 239, 252, 342 Non-Cooperation movement, 229 Narasimhan, V.K., 194, 201 Norcross, 301 Narasimharaja Colony, 228, 234 North America, 89, 108, 137, 315, 341 Narayan Maharaj, 41, 42, 47, 229 North Carolina, 323, 329 Narayana, 304 North Dakota, 293 Narayana Reddy, 224 North Fulton County Shelter, 319 Narayana Seva, 145, 247, 280, 287 North/northern India, cities visited by Nasik, 38, 40, 43 Sathya Sai Baba, 59 Nath, 33, 69, 306 city of Ayodhya, 211 Nathpanthi, 45 devotional centers, 306 National Board of Examinations, 115 patients at SSSIHMS, 117 National Dairy Research Institute, 237 poet-saint Sur Das, 314 National Endowment for the Radhasoami movement, 164, 337 Humanities, 334 sants, 69 National Games, 214 states, 194 National Highway, 4, 7, 218 understanding of Hinduism, 335 National Institute of Mental Health North Indian Canteen, 173, 177 and Applied Neurological Sciences, North Kanara District, 129, 244 121 Northwest Unitarian Universalist National Museums of Kenya, 271 Church, 299 Native American, 292 Nyerere, Julius, 214 Ndola, 282 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 208 Oakland, 93 Nellore, 240 Obote, Milton, 266 Nelson, Niki, 257 Ogunkolati, Dare, 198 Neo-Hinduism, 6, 302, 336–8 Ohio, 293 Nepal, 118 Ohio State University, Department of Nevada, 293 Comparative Studies, 11 New Age, 74, 292, 302, 311, 338–9 Olcott, Henry Steel, 158, 314 New Britain, 310 Old City (of Bangalore), 220, 237 New Delhi, 187, 208 Old Life phase of Meher Baba, 44

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Old Madras Road, 218, 239 Perfect Master, 32, 42, 45, 47 Old Mandir in Puttaparthi, 54, 87, 171 Perimeter Mall, 301 Old Testament, 342 Persian, 33, 42, 220, 314 Olny Hymns, 310 Peru, 140, 325 Olympic Games, 150, 212, 300 Philippines, 84 “Om Sri Sai Ram”, 320 Pinney, Christopher, 23, 101, 185 Oman, 137 Pittsburgh, 297 Ootacamund, 151, 262 Plan Voison, 242 Operation Firimbi, 257–8 Plato, 210 Orange County, 292 Poland, 137, 199 Oregon, 293, 339 polis, ideal, 210, 215 ORG INDIA, 187 Ponce de Leon Avenue, 300 Orientalism, 159, 337 Poornachandra auditorium, 65, 175–7, Orissa, 131–2, 139, 248 196, 198–9, 201 Oriya, 194 PowerPoint, 324 Orsi, Robert A., 20, 329, 334 Prabhu, 306 Ostara Music, 104 Prarthana-Samajists, 38 Ottowa, 198 Prasanthi Council, 1, 141 Overseas Chairman, 137 Prasanthi Vahini, 66 Prashanti Nilayam Padmanaban, R., 9 architectural and planning history, 63, Pakistan, 117 162–215 Palegara, 166 audio visual center, 105 Pallis, Marco, 157 Christmas celebration, 199, 318 Pampa, 164–5 development, 343 Pandhari Bhajan group, 52, 72, 86 educational institutions, 148–50 Pandharpur, 29, 36, 38, 47, 60, 74, 164 ﬁ rst hospital, 114 Pandit, V.N., 196 foundation of Prasanthi Council, 141 Pandya Clinic, 283 foundation stone laid, 56 Pangani, 269 hermitage of Sathya Sai Baba, 18 Paracelsus, 340 inauguration, 171 Paramahansa Yogananda, 296, 315–6, 343 inauguration of academy for the Paramatma, 305 study of the Vedas and Sanskrit, 60 Paris, 239 interviews with Sathya Sai Baba, 139 Parklands, 269 properties managed by Sri Sathya Sai Partha Sarathi, Doctor, 127–8 Central Trust, 140 Pasadena, 196 pilgrimage destination, 323 Patel, C.G., 259–62 publishing center for Sanathana Sarathi, Patel, Madhuben, 261 293 Pathak, G.S., 194 represented in Sanathana Sarathi, Pathri, 30, 32 189–208 Patiala, 213 Sarva Dharma Pillar, 74, 157 Patidar building, 260 service tasks, 132 Pattandur Agrahara, 243 Seva Conference, 326 Pechlis, Karen, 13 site for darshan, 79 Pedaballi, 162 site of Gayatri temple, 96 Pedda Venkappa Raju, 52, 171 stadium, 149 Pedda Venkappa Raju Kalyana vision of ideal polis, 20, 210, 215 Mandapam, 171 visit of President of India, 196 Penn, Charles, 139 World Council ofﬁ ce, 140 Penn Hills, 297 world Seva Dal conference, 196 Pentacostalism, 289–90 Prashanti Nilayam Township, 187 Penukonda, 52, 165, 167, 215 Pravara Canal, 37 Penukonda Taluk, 63 Prebish, Charles, 108

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Prema Sai Baba, 61, 72, 74, 91 Race Course Road, 269 Prema Vahini, 66 Radha, 242, 306 Presbyterians, 300 Radha-Krishna, 88 Presley, Elvis, 310 Radhakrishnan, 336 Priestly, Joseph, 298 Radhasoami movement/religion, 21, 67, Protestant/Protestantism, 300, 314, 316 70, 77, 135, 164, 337 Prophet, the, 327. See also Mohammad. Radio Sai Global Harmony, 105 Prothero, Stephen, 314 Radio Sai Listener’s Journal, 186 Provincial Governor, 37 Rahata, 30, 33 Public Works Department, 237 Rai, Vimala, 234 Pumwani, 269–70 Raina, Suresh, 212 Pune, 8, 38, 42, 45, 47, 234 Rajagopalachari, C., 67, 230–1 Punjab, 131, 139, 263, 267 Rajamma, 8–9, 223 Punjabi, 248, 271, 273, 274, 277, 284 Rajasthan, 131 Purab aur Paschim, 90 Rajeshwari, C., 114 Purandaradasa, 160, 248 Rajneesh, Bhagwan, 339 Puttaparthi Raju, 52 architectural and planning history Ram/Rama 162–215 as avatar, 45, 59, 70, 185 contact with international Sai battle with Ravana, 126 Centers, 136 birthday celebration, 36 development, 343 iconic reference not present in Atlanta early devotees’ gatherings, 129 Sai Center, 303 early life of Sathya Sai Baba, 51–4 identifi ed with Shirdi Sai Baba, 234 educational institutionsm, 113, 151–2 in bhajan sessions, 89, 304–6, 312, 317 events recorded in Sathya Sai Newsletter, in religious tableau at Prashanti USA, 318 Nilayam, 173 familiarity of African bhajans, 286 in Vijayanagara, 164 festivals, 88–9 representing dharma, 211 hospitals, 113–22 served by Hanuman, 183 Internet substitute for pilgrimage to, 106 signifi cance of the name, 86 offi ce of Sathya Sai Baba, 241 Rama Navami, 29, 36, 57, 235 pilgrimage destination, 21, 80, 83–5, Rama Rajya, 199 239, 325 Ramakatha Rasavahini, 66 population, 187 Ramakrishna Ayi, 36 presence of devotees from different Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, 24, 38, 68, countries, 138 98, 131, 156–7, 159, 334–5, 336 purchase of sacred ash, 92 Ramakrishna Mission, 208 residence of Jack and Louise Hawley, Ramakrishna movement, 143, 334 326 Ramakrishna schools, 156 service volunteers, 132 Ramalingaswami, 160 site for institutional development of Raman, Srilata, 313 Prashanti Nilayam, 61–3, 148 Ramana Maharshi, 68, 157, 229, 231, site of the avatar, 74 306 site of hermitage, 1, 7, 18, 320 Ramayana, 66, 70, 74, 105, 126, 160, 211 site of rebirth of Shirdi Sai Baba, 81 Ramnagaram, 247 site of Shivaratri celebrations, 94 Rao, Baoji, 227 shops near hermitage, 96 Rao, Shekhar, 121 urbanization, 215 Rao, V.K.R.V., 11 vision of ideal polis, 210, 215 Rao, Venkoji, 227 visits of Nairobi devotees, 277, 288 Rathor, Rajyavardhana Singh, 212 Ravana, 126 Qadiri, 32, 39 Ravi Associates, 118 Queen, Christopher S., 22 Ravi Shankar, Sri Sri Sri, 243 Quran, 35, 98, 277 Ravishankar, 118

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Rayalaseema, 166 and the body, 7, 19 Redﬁ eld, James, 302 and the sant tradition, 69–70 Reformation, 298 and three cities, 217 Reiki, 107, 126–7, 302, 339 architecture and central ideas, 209 religious movement, 17, 290. See also Sai architecture and ideal polis, 210, 215 Baba movement and New Religious as a cult misleading devotees, 333 Movement. as Hindu movement, 336 remembrance of the name. broadcasting, 105 See namasmarana. centered in South India, 337 Rig Veda, 90 circulation of devotees between sites, Right, religious, 334 218 Rigopoulos, A., 33, 39, 46 cities, 19–20 Ring Road, 218–9, 222–3 citizenship, 7 Rio de Janeiro, 136 creating signiﬁ cant epistemological Rishikesh, 59 intersections, 302 Rishi Valley school, 156 education/character, 62 River Road, 270 Euro-American context, 6 Riverdale Hindu temple, 297 experiment in Eutopian modernity, Robbins, Thomas, 13 341, 344 Roberts, Allen F., 13, 258, 285 fabric of devotion, 75 Roberts, Mary Nooter, 13, 258, 285 frames for the sacred, 98 Robinson, Jennifer, 20, 344 healing/health/medicine, 62–4, 122 Roland, Romain, 334 in Africa, 20 Roll Back Malaria, 283 in Atlanta, 11, 20, 300 Roman Catholic. See Catholic/ in Bangalore, 10–11, 20 Catholicism. in Bradford, 266–7 Ronald Ngala Street, 261 in cyberspace, 204 Roswell, 301 in India, 6–7, 9, 128–35, 339 Rotarians, 260 in Malaysia, 5 Rotary Clubs, 283 in memory, 7, 9, 46, 74 Rubik’s cube, 179 in modernity, 5 Rumi, 42 in music, 69, 87–9 Rupena Agrahara, 218, 222–7 in Nairobi, 11, 20 Rush, Dana, 103–4 in Trinidad, 5, 315 Russia, 136–7, 139, 199 in the United States, 317 Russian, 199 novelty and uniqueness, 337 on Internet, 106–9 SSSIHMS. See Sri Sathya Sai Institute other saints/gurus/Indian movements, of Higher Medical Sciences. 3, 5, 21–22, 46, 87 SSSUDA. See Sri Sathya Sai Urban outside India, 135–42 Development Authority. pan-Indian phenomenon, 132 Sabarimalai, 131, 306 programs, 113 Sachdev, Tribhuvan, 151 projects around Puttaparthi, 187 Sacramento, 93 recent phase, 317 sacrality of urban sprawl, 222, 251–3 remembrance of the name, 306 Safaya, A.N., 121 represented in terms of institutional Sagar Arts, 23 innovations for public service, 204 Sahajanand Swami, 143 resemblance to other movements, 337 Sai, the divine mother, 127 scholars of, 306 Sai Baba, TV serial, 23 self-construction, 199 Sai Baba Avatar, 83 sense of space, 7, 19, 244, 316 Sai Baba, Sathya. See Sathya Sai Baba. sociality, 7 Sai Baba, Shirdi. See Shirdi Sai Baba. sociology and anthropology of Sai Baba movement education, 180 and the nation, 214 somatic project, 343

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South Asian diaspora, 6 Sai Leela, 28, 40 study of material environment, 209 Sai literature, 140, 247 support amongst middle classes, Sai movement. See Sai Baba movement. bureaucracy, and government Sai Nurseries, 262 offi cials, 194 Sai Organization transnationalism and globalization, activities described in Sanathana 17, 19, 139, 201, 208 Sarathi, 188, 201 traversing terrain of multiple fi rst All-India Conference, 61 modernities, 340 in Karnataka, 244 Sai Baba temple, 54 in Nairobi, 279 Sai Baba tradition, 7, 45, 107, 218, 252, in the United States, 292 342 logo or emblem, 157, 192, 194, 198, Sai Bhajana Mala, 89, 304 246, 299 Sai Bhakthi, 233 offi ce-bearers, 326 Sai bhakti family, 317 offi ces in various countries, 148 Sai Center non-proselytizing, 328 altar design, 49, 303 relief activities in Bhopal, 196 case studies of, 64 Sathya Sai Baba standing at its children, 326 apex, 1 defi nition, 128–9 service activities, 328 devotes circulating between transnational project, 139–43 metropolitan regions, 304 virtual devotional space, 252 development near beltways, 330 work memorialized and celebrated, fi rst outside India, 135–6 185 in Africa, 254–5, 258, 261–2 Sai parenting, 318 in California, 83–4, 194 Sai Ram, 317 in Eastern Europe and the erstwhile Sai Ramesh Krishnan Hall, 240–1 Soviet Union, 199 Sai samiti, 18, 79, 244, 128–35 in Kenya, 276–91 Sai Sanjeevini system, 126–7 in Lithuania, Latvia and Estoni, 199 Sai Sanjeevini Foundation, 127 in Los Angeles, 194 Sai sessions, 307 in New Jersey, 106 “Sai Songs from the Heart”, 104 in New York, 318, 322 Sai Spirit of Love Children’s Home in San Francisco, 318 Trust, 279 in the United States, 292–7 Sai Sudha, 230 joined by graduates of Sai colleges, Sai teachings, 293 152 Sai Towers, 277 leaders of, 65 Sai World: A Newsletter for Children and local and global, 108–9 Youth, 293 local collective, 18 Sai youth, 320 main work at local level, 145 Sainet, 283 service activities report, 327 Sairam shed, 240 sources of electronic media, 105 Sakamma, 56, 63 web sites, 105–6 Sakori, 41, 42, 47, 239, 343 Sai community, 142 Salem, 228, 230–1 Sai Dasan, 232 Salem Cooperative Bank, 228 Sai Darshan, 106, 145, 245–51, 303 Salem Municipality, 228 Sai devotion, 258, 261, 277, 283, 331 Salvation Army, 84 Sai events, 194 Samadhi Road, 171 Sai family, 204 Samiti. See Sai samiti. Sai Gita, 179 Samsara, 54 Sai Group, 128–39, 192, 299–300 sanatana dharma (eternal religion), 61, Sai Kulwant Hall, 79, 176, 322 140, 157–61, 316 Sai Kusumanjali, 249 Sanatana Dharma Samaj, 260

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Sanatana Dharma temple, 273 at Sai Darshan, 245 San Diego, 293 containing elements of theosophical San Francisco, 93, 318 unity, 157 San Jose, 249 in American Guidelines, 303 Sanathana Sarathi message to readership of Sanathana case study of representational Sarathi, 208 patterns in covers and contents, on covers of Sanatana Sarathi, 194–204 188–208 projecting theosophical universalism, describing Chaitanya Jyoti Museum, 215 185 replaced on front cover of Sanathana discourses of Sathya Sai Baba, 66 Sarathi, 204 distributed in the United States, 293 resembling pillar before Chaitanya ﬁ rst publication of Sai Baba Jyoti Museum, 185 movement emblem, 139 symbolizing the movement, 74 hospital case reports, 114 Sarva Mathaikya Stupa, 62 inauguration, 59 Sarvodaya movement, 90, 112, 143, 211 locating representational shifts, 163 Sastry, C.V.K., 282 mentioning world Seva Dal Satana, 40 conference, 183 Satchitananda Sai Baba, 312 reporting manifestation of lingam, 94 Sathya Age, 72 Sandur, 55 Sathya Sai airport, 162, 178, 187 Sandweiss, Samuel, 83 Sathya Sai Australia Conference, 198 Sanskrit Sathya Sai Baba academy in Prashanti Nilayam, 60 addressed in bhajan, 312 college motto, 148 African visit, 258–62, 285–6, 290 gurus, 68–9 appearing in dreams, 83–4, 93, in bhajans, 89, 201, 286, 307, 312, 101–2, 110, 287–8, 323 314–5 appearing in electronic channels, in Shrivaishnava religious literature, 104–8 313 appearing in fragrance of ash, 93, 110 scholar from the Sorbonne, 139 appearing in photographs and Shirdi Sai Baba’s knowledge of, 35 pictures, 84, 91–3, 98–101, 110, textual tradition providing a universal 118, 127, 162, 171, 173, 175, 178, point of reference, 336 189, 192, 201, 241, 245–6, 250, verse recitation at Someshvarapura, 277, 279, 286, 292, 303, 320–2, 323 235 appearing in video, 324, 329 verse recitation by Sathya Sai Baba, appearing in vodun markets, 103 53, 65, 325 appearing on dais at Hill View word tapas, 45 Stadium, 149 Sant/sants, 69–70, 72, 337 appearing on disks, 325 Santa Cruz airport, 259 appearing on television, 254 Santo Domingo, 136 as accessible magus, 251 Saran, A.K., 12 as avatar, 8, 18, 51, 58–62, 67–72, Saraswati, 179, 215, 240 75, 109–10, 312, 341 Sarnath, 44 as Bhagawan, 121, 135, 250, 262, 312 Sarva Dharma, 89, 304, 306 as divine king, 49 Sarva Dharma Prayer, 90 as guru, 51, 67–72 Sarva Dharma Pillar/Stupa as living deity, 50 amid architectural complex at heart as magician, 333 of Prashanti Nilayam, 175–7 as sadhu, 262 architectural symbol of the Sai avatar, as sant, 51, 67–72 62 as Swami, 8, 81–2, 106, 111, 129–30, at Prashanti Nilayam, 277 135, 142, 145, 150–2, 249, 289, at Sai Center in Nairobi, 277, 291 313, 320–2, 325, 327–8

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association with African history and identifi ed with Krishna, 192 culture, 289 identifi ed with Shirdi Sai Baba, 3, association with Shaiva tradition, 189 7, 8–9, 46, 54, 61–2, 69–72, 91, awakened by chanting, 177 94, 101–2, 105, 165, 192, 252 bhajan groups in Mallesvaram, 244 Indiranagar temple, 218 birthday celebrations, 55, 57, 60, 62, infl uence on lives of Chinese students, 179–83, 185, 194, 196, 201, 204, 198 212, 277, 279, 283, 307, 320 journeys and relocation of Deccan buildings associated with, 208 imaginary, 343 charisma, 290, 322 life history, 49–63, 165–8 childhood events represented at linked with bhakti movements, 3 Chaitanya Jyoti, 185–6 linked with Nagamani Purnaiya, 82 childhood home, 167 linked with other saints/gurus/Indian city made sacred by his presence, 215 movements, 3, 5, 21–22, 47 Christmas discourse, 198 linked with the New Age, 3, 5, 16, composer of bhajans, 305–6 74, 338–9 consecrating Gayatri temple, 175 linked with new religions/New convergence of plural ontologies, 284 Religious Movements, 3, 6, 74 creator of energy, 326 meeting with Governor of Karnataka, creator of plays, 329 196 declaration of mission, 344 meeting with Muslim devotees, 198 devotees aware of criticisms, 334 meeting with President of India, 198 devotees’ behavior, 68, 78–81 parents’ memorials, 171 devotees bound together through his performer of miracles, 5, 16, 55, fi gure, 145 57–8, 71, 82, 93–5, 103, 113, 135, discourse about Jesus, 199, 316 322 discourses during Dassera, 204 physical appearance, 1, 49, 80–1, 83 existential consequences for adherents, presence signifi ed by empty chair, 335 277, 279, 286, 292, 303, 324 experienced by African devotees, principles for devotees, 141 287–90 relationship with transnationalism, fondness for devotional fi lms, 152, 6, 7, 75 214 relationship with urbanization, 6, 7 founder trustee of Sri Sathya Sai relationship with world religions, Central Trust, 140 3, 6, 8 Google search, 105–6 residence, 175, 247 granter of charter and principles for singing Sanskrit verse, 325 Sai Organization, 140 speeches and writings, 5, 59–62, ideas on architecture, 210–4 65–7, 74, 105, 188, 198–9, 318, 320 ideas on the body, 7, 8, 66, 85, 96, signifi cance for urban middle class, 142, 188, 210 3, 16, 96 ideas on cities, 211 spending time with animals, 173, 179, ideas on citizenship, 211–2 240 ideas on education, 145–56, 196 support for sports, 213–4 ideas on health and healing, 66, terrain of connectivity through, 342 111–28 urban-spatial imagination of devotees, ideas on music, 67, 74, 79–81, 87–8 249 ideas on the recitation of the name, with lion dancers, 201 87–91 witnessing children’s performances, ideas on service/seva, 66 248 identifi ed with 108 attributes, 89, 304 writings, 302 identifi ed with other forms of younger brother, 162 divinity, 84–5 Sathya Sai Baba Book Center of identifi ed with Jesus, 102–3 America, 293

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Sathya Sai Baba Center of Atlanta. Sevananda, 302 See Atlanta Sai Center. Shah, Amritlal, 261–2, 266 Sathya Sai Baba movement. Shah, K.J., 12 See Sai Baba movement. Shah, Savita, 261 Sathya Sai Center. See Sai Center. Shaiva, 175, 189, 215, 227, 232–3, 234, Sathya Sai Baba (Central) Council of 238, 306, 343 America, 292–3, 296, 318 Shakti/Sakthi, 60–1, 70–2, 304 Sathya Sai Education Trust, 282 Shakti Mandir, 302 Sathya Sai Institute of Education, 147 Shamsuddin Mea, 39 Sathya Sai Nag Champa, 5 Shankara (philosopher), 160 Sathya Sai National Trust-Kenya, 283 Shankara (epithet of Shiva), 304 Sathya Sai Newsletter, USA, 293, 318 Shankaracharya, 229, 315 Sathya Sai Nigeria Society for Shanthi Vedika, 183 Education in Human Values, 102 Shards of Memory, 269 Sathya Sai Railway Station, 187 Sharma, Pandit Shiv Kumar, 212 Sathya Sai schools, 147–8, 282, 320 Shepherd, Kevin, 45, 47 Sathya Sai Seva Organization. Sherinian, Zoe, 314 See Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization. Shilpa Shastra, 209 Sathya Sai Service Opportunities, 293, 318 Shimoga District, 129, 244 Sathya Sai Space Theater, 179 Shimpi, Bala Ganpat, 34 Sathya Sai Speaks, 5, 61, 66, 153, 261 Shinto, 8 Sathyabhama/Sathyamma Temple, 54, Shirdi 167 and regional tradition of devotion, 74 Sathyam Sivam Sundaram, 49, 60, 139, 167 and story of Shirdi Sai Baba’s Sathyanarayana Raju, 48, 51 ministry, 34–41 Satpathy, C.B., 47 association with Perfect Master, 47 satsangh, 18, 135, 267 brought into Nairobi, 291 Saturn, 216 ﬁ re kept burning by Shirdi Sai Baba, Scher, Jack, 83–5 232, 250 Schoun, Frithjof, 157 growth into small city, 164 Schulman, Arnold, 83, 85, 296 in evolving architectural fabric, 343 Scotland, 186 in mid-nineteenth century, 30 Scottish, 310 pilgrimage site, 57, 234 Sea Islands, 311 residence of Shirdi Sai Baba, 3, 29, 32 Seager, Richard, 13 ritual practices, 227 Second Great Awakening, 310 tradition connected with Puttaparthi, Secret Valley, 260 175, 291 Seethamma, 9 visit by Shivamma Thayee, 224 Self-Realisation, 229 visits by Upasni Maharaj, 43, 45 Self-Realization Fellowship, 315–5 Shirdi ke Sai Baba, 23 Selu, 30 Shirdi Sai Baba Sen, Keshab Chander, 299 appearing in dream, 107 Senegal, 258, 285 appearing in photographs and sensorium, 24, 76–8, 109, 258–9, 291, pictures, 107, 171, 175, 235–7, 285–6, 343–4. See also Body and 246, 250, 277, 279, 303 sensory reform. appearing in Sanathana Sarathi, 194 Servants of India Society, 143 appearing in vision of Sathya Sai seva (service), 19, 61, 64, 140, 143–5, Baba, 101–2 204, 279–84. See also Sri Sathya Sai appearing in vodun markets, 103 Seva Organization. appearing on disks, 325 Seva Conference, 326 as faqir, 25, 165 Seva Dal, 178, 183, 196, 241 as guru, 228, 235 Seva Dal Block, 175 as royal and divine image, 228 Seva Samiti, 143 as living saint, 75

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as Perfect Master, 42 identifi ed with Sathya Sai Baba at Rupena Agrahara shrine, 223–7 through lingam at Someshvarapura shrine, 218, 232–9 identifi ed with Shirdi Sai Baba, 224, chains of memory about, 342 234, 237 devotees, 68 image overlooking Hill View Stadium, iconicity within vision of ideal polis, 183 215 images of his sons, 225 iconography, 24, 39, 54, 171 in bhajan sessions, 89, 304, 306 identifi ed with Krishna, 192 in Vijayanagara, 164–6 image at Coimbatore, 189 in vodun markets, 104 image at Sai Darshan, 245–7 lingam at Someshvarapura shrine of images at Puttaparthi, 179, 183 Shirdi Sai Baba, 234 in bhajan sessions, 306 manifested during Shivaratri as life history, 23–38 lingam, 94–6 linked to Hinduism, 39 on facades, 215 linked to other saints/gurus, 21, 69 temple in Nairobi, 261 linked to Sufi sm/Islam, 3, 39 temple in Puttaparthi inaugurated by interaction with Meher Baba and Sathya Sai Baba, 167 Upasni Maharaj, 42–45 worshipper appointed priest of living in Dwarakamayi mosque, 279, Shirdi Sai Baba’s congregational 291 worship, 36 mediation of metonymic cultural Shivaji Theater, 56 chain, 80–81 Shivamma Thayee, 218, 223–7, 239, ministry of Narasimha Swami, 229–33 252, 342 pathways of memory, 342–3 Shivaratri, 55, 57, 59, 71, 94, 139, 235, pendants, 93 320 portrayed in fi lm, 23 Sholapur, 38 portrayed on television, 105 Shri Sai Satcharita, 25, 28–30, 32–4, recreated in memory of older village 36–8, 45, 107, 224, 238 deities, 252 Shrivaishnava, 297, 313 role in Puttaparthi’s urbanization 215 Sichuan Teacher’s University, 198 temples 23 Sidis, 254 transmission of charisma, 10, 40–8, Sierra Leone, 85 71, 132, 217 Sikh/Sikhism worship with sacred ash, 94 attempting to create Indian worship with lingam, 94 modernity, 340 Shirdi Sai Parthi Sai Divya Katha, 105 continuities with Sathya Sai Baba Shirdi Sai Sanstan, 39, 40, 45–6 movement, 21 Shiva gurdwara in Atlanta, 302 and ashes, 92–3 in bhajan sessions, 304 appearing in vodun markets, 103 in East Africa, 265, 283 as Dattatreya, 46 portrayed at Eternal Heritage as folk deity Khandoba, 33 Museum, 8 as great teacher, 179, 192 relationship to sants, 69 as Shiva-Shakthi identifi ed with resemblance to Sathya Sai Baba Sathya Sai Baba, 71–2, 74, 166, 192 movement, 337 associated with birth of Sathya Sai sacred cities, 164 Baba, 49, 55 scriptures, 76, 314 avatar manifested as Sathya Sai Baba, Sikkim, 132–4 61 Silicon Valley, 243, 335 dancing represented on Simone, AbdouMaliq, 20 Poornachandra Auditorium, 201 Sinai, 257 iconic reference not present in Atlanta Sind, 237, 263 Sai Center, 303 Sindhi, 234

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Singapore, 63, 139, 185, 198, 201, 243 philosophy, 103 Singing with Sai Baba, 325 precolonial, 23 Singh, K.P.R., 260 premier information city, 243 Singh, R.P., 212 postcolonial, 46 Singh, Yuvraj, 212 presence in East Africa, 263–76 Sinhalese Buddhist Revival, 314 professional scholars, 335 Sita, 173 religion and sonic theology, 307 smarana (remembering), 72–5. religious experience, 335 See also namasmarana. religious movements, 143 Smartha Brahmin, 229 religious scholars, 336 Smyrna, 302 religious sensorium, 76 Social Service Leagues, 283 religious universe, 312 social theories of religion, 6 sacred city, 163 social theories of cities, 6, 341, 344–5 Sai Centers, 137 sociality, 7 Shrivaishnava religious literature, 313 Societies Registration Act, 135 social landscape, 317 Soja, Edward, 301 Suﬁ sm, 88 Soka Gakkai, 3, 90, 112, 139, 155–6, technical personnel, 301 337–8 terrain of connectivity, 342 Soka University of America, 155–6 tradition of revering the master’s Sole Commissioner of Bangalore, 220 feet, 98 Somali, 270, 284 traditions in bhajan, 312 Someshvarapura, 218, 222, 228, 233–9, Unitarian connections, 296 244 South Carolina, 311, 323, 326 Sompura, Ravibai, 261 South Dakota, 293 South, the, 299, 310 South/southern India South Africa, 136–8, 275, 282 alternative network of pilgrimage South America, 137 sites, 57 South Asia architectural style, 173 chain of remembering, 71 audience of bhajans, 306 circulation of merchants and Ayyappan temple in Nairobi, 273 commercial workers, 255 bronzes, 178 cities’ plans, 341 center of Sathya Sai Baba movement, constituency of Sai movement, 138 337 desi magazines, 335 cities visited by Sathya Sai Baba, 59 devotees, 106–7, 255, 258, 260–2, four linguistic groups, 248 276, 324 languages, 194, 306 devotional imagination, 82 migration to Kenya, 275 diaspora, 47, 63, 138–9, 255, 314, patients at SSSIHMS, 117 330, 337 Shirdi Sai Baba temples, 239 gurus, 68–9 style of distributed urbanization, immigrants and workers in Atlanta, 297 163–4 indigenous, 339 temple architecture, 246 landscape, 340 urban temples, 233 links with Africa, 254 South Indian Canteen, 173, 177–8 members of Atlanta Sai Center, 300, South Kanara district, 244 316, 319 South Prashanti block, 173 movement from colonial to Southeast Asia, 136–7, 301 postcolonial milieu, 40 Southeast Region, 320, 323 mythology, 70 Southeast Regional Sai Conference, negotiation of citizenship through 323–9 seva, 286 Southern Europe, 137 new audiences attracted by Sathya Soviet Union, 137, 199 Sai Baba, 51 space, producing/models of, 7

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Spanish, 196, 309, 318, 329 Sri Sathya Sai State Trusts, 64 Spastics Society School, 248 Sri Sathya Sai Taluk, 63, 162 Spirit of Love home, 286, 289 Sri Sathya Sai Unity Cup, 183 Spirit of Love primary school, 279 Sri Sathya Sai Urban Development Sreenivas, C., 121 Authority, 186–8 Sreesanth, S., 212 Srinagar, 59 Sri Lanka, 1, 112, 136–7, 183, 211. Sringeri 57, 229 See also Ceylon. Srinivas, M.N., 11 Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi, 70 Srirangapattana, 93, 325 Sri Sai Darshan Marg, 249 Srisailam, 60 Sri Sathya Sai Arts and Science College Srivathsan, A., 120 for Women, 113 St. Louis, 83 Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications St. Martha’s Hospital, 119 Trust, 5, 89, 98, 104, 173, 188, 304 St. Petersburg, 136, 199 Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, 63–4, 79, Star Plus, 23 106, 121, 140, 148, 157 State Trust, 245 Sri Sathya Sai College, 151 Stone Mountain, 302 Sri Sathya Sai General Hospital, 114, Subbalakshmi, M.S., 88 117, 179 Subbamma, 54, 170 Sri Sathya Sai Health and Education Subrahmanya, 89, 173, 237 Trust, 114 Subramaniam, L., 212 Sri Sathya Sai Higher Secondary Subramaniam Gounder, 223 School, 179 Sudan, 284 Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Sufi Learning, 62, 113, 148, 153, 179, brotherhoods and ascetics, 32 196, 198 Deccani tradition, 29 Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher garments, 25 Medical Sciences (SSSIHMS), 63, heritage of Shirdi Sai Baba, 71, 233, 113–5, 179, 204, 208–9, 243–4, 252 239 Sri Sathya Sai International Center for ideas of the avatar, 45 Sports, 179 infl uence on Meher Baba, 42–3 Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization movements, 337 activities represented at Chaitanya music, 76 Jyoti, 185–6 pathway for transmitting Shirdi Sai branches, 113 Baba tradition, 40 dress of volunteers, 143 pirs, 77 First World Conference, 61 practices linked to Shirdi Sai Baba, 33 gatherings in Hill View Stadium, 183 Qadiri tradition, 39 in America, 198, 292 saints’ tombs, 164 in Bangalore, 244–51 texts, 35 mapping onto the nation-state, 141–2 traditions’ relationship to the sants, 69 model of service as spiritual praxis, universe and the Perfect Masters, 47 144 Sufi sm, 28, 29, 35, 45–6, 88 offi ce bearers, 79 Sukyo Mahikari, 302 offi ce in Puttaparthi, 174–5 Summer Course(s) in Indian culture and organizational structure within India, spirituality, 113, 131 128–35 Summer Showers in Brindavan, 66, 153 organizational structure outside India, Sundaram Service Society, 104–5 135–42 Sunday Times, 229 referrals to hospital care, 115 Sunrise Convalescent Home, 318 roots in the nineteenth century, 142 Sur Das, 314 transformation of devotional Sutra Vahini, 66 memory, 74 Swahili, 261–2, 264, 277, 284, 286–9 volunteers in hospitals, 118 Swallow, D.A., 5, 95

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Swaminarayan, 279 Trinidad, 5, 80, 92, 314–5, 325 Swaminarayan movement, 21, 143, 272, Trinidad and Tobago, 137–8 277 Tshidi Zionist churches, 112 Swaminarayan temple, 272, 302 Tulsidas, 316 “Sweet Auburn” Avenue, 301. Tungabhadra Dam, 56 See also Auburn Avenue. Tungabhadra River, 164 Sydney, 196 Turkmenistan, 137 Turning Point, 319 Tadzhikistan, 137 Tustin, 84, 136, 293, 296 Tagore, Rabindranath, 315 Tyagaraja, 88, 160 Tajuddin Baba, 42, 47, 232 Takyi, H.K., 84–6 Uberoi, J.P.S., 12, 308 Tales of Sai Baba, 23 Uberoi, Patricia, 308 Tamil, 194, 223–4, 234–5, 237, 274, Uganda, 192, 259–60, 263–9, 286 306–7, 313–4 Uganda, President of, 268 Tamil Nadu, 57, 131–2, 139, 223, 230, Uhuru Park, 270 239, 336 Ukraine, 137 Tanganyika, 264 Unicorn Music and Marketing, 104–5 Tantra, 160 Union Carbide, 196 Tantrism, 46, 71 Unitarian, 295, 298–9, 343 Tanzania, 214, 259–60, 265, 268, 286 Unitarian Universalist, 297, 299, 302, Teheran, 140 330 Telegraphs Department, 237 Unitarian Universalist Association, Telugu, 66, 88, 151, 164, 192, 194, 262 298 Tendulkar, Sachin, 212 United Arab Emirates, 137 Test match, 213 United Kingdom, 85, 136–8, 199, 266, Texas, 323 290 Texas City, 323 United Nations, 256 Thailand, 147 United States (U.S., USA) Thane, 8, 38 academic community, 335 Theosophical Society, 21, 125, 143, 156, and Meher Baba 43–4, 50 314, 338 and Opal Macrae, 139 Theosophy/theosophical, 75, 157–9, articles and poems by devotees, 199 161, 199, 215, 286, 289, 293, 296 bhajans, 90 Thirumala Rao, 54 cities, 330 Thoreau, David, 298 Central Council, 322 Tibet, 70, 178 commentators on New Religious Tigalas, 220 Movements, 338 Tigrett, Isaac, 63 delegates to Seva Conference at Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 38, 228 Prashanti Nilayam, 326 Tippu Sultan, 220 fastest growing county, 330 Tiruchengodu, 231 politics of race and ethnicity, 335 Tiruchi Swamigal, 243 regional conference, 323–9 Tiruchirapalli, 54 residence of Jack and Louise Tirupati, 54, 57, 74, 131, 164 Hawley, 326 Tiruvannamalai, 229, 231 Sai Centers, 136–8, 194, 292–5 Togo, 103 Sai devotees in, 111 Tokyo, 140, 249 Sai movement, 317 Tong, Goh Say, 185 service opportunities, 318–9 Toronto, 320, 323 South Asian immigration, 275–6, 290 Tororo, 260 South Asian temple building, 296–7 Transcendental Meditation, 76 Sri Sathya Sai Seva Organization, 292 Transcendentalist, 295, 299 travel by African professionals to, 85 Trayee Brindavan, 240–1 urban streets, 317

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Unity Church, 297, 330 content of Sathya Sai Baba’s Unity School of Christianity, 302 message, 71 Universalist Church of America, 298 highest experience proclaimed, 154 University of California, Davis, providing a universal point of Department of Anthropology, 11 reference, 336 University of Bombay, 341 references made by Narasimha University of Delhi, 196 Swami, 233 University Grants Commission, 148 revelatory nature, 76 Untouchables, 67 rites, 92 Upanishads, 66, 68, 90, 160, 299 road map and guide book, 160 Upanishad Vahini, 66 sampradaya tradition fi nding Upasni Maharaj, 40–8, 229, 239, 342 roots in, 69 Uravakonda 52–3 signifi cance placed on texts, 158 Urban, Hugh, 5 thought, 160 urban religion/religiosity, 20, 216–7 truth and righteousness, 154 Urdu, 42 truths, 161 USSR. See Soviet Union. unity of the Spirit, 316 Uthiru, 279 verses in bhajans, 90 Uttar Pradesh, 131–2 Vedanta, 34, 40, 45, 47, 153, 156, 302 Uttarkhand, 132–4 Vedic Foundation, 335 Uzbekistan, 137 Vellore, 230 Venkataraman, R., 198 Vaishnava Venkatesa Agraharam Street, 232 devotee and Sathya Sai Baba, 250 Venkateshwara, 131 devotion, 85 Venkatagiri Iyer, 228 devotional memory, 74 Venkatgiri, 55, 59 elements at shrine of Shirdi Sai Baba Venkusha/Venkusa, 32 in Someshvarapura, 234, 238 Venugopala, 74, 192, 194, 208 ideas of the avatar, 71 Venugopalaswamy temple, 54, 167 narrative of ambrosia, 93 Victoria Memorial Hall, 118 orientation at Vijayanagara, 165 Vidyagiri, 166, 179–80, 211, 215 poet-saints in Maharashtra, 69 Vidyagiri Stadium, 180–81 ritual practices in Shirdi Sai Baba Vidyanagara, 165 temples, 232–3 Vidyaranya, 164–5 Sathya Sai Baba as essentially, 343 Vietnam War, 83 tradition and Hanuman, 215 Vietnamese Buddhist Association of tradition connected to Sathya Sai Georgia, 302 Baba, 165 Vijay Sinha, J.B., 150 traditions linked to Shirdi Sai Baba, Vijayadashami, 38, 57, 233, 235 46 Vijayanagara, 164–7, 175, 185, 215 understanding, 335. See also Vishnu. Virgin Mary, 70 Vajrayana, 109 Virupaksha, 164–5 van der Veer, Peter, 259 Visa Oshwal, 283 Vasquez, Manuel A., 13, 301 Visa Oshwal Mahajan Wadi, 262, 273 Vassanji, M.G., 268 Vishnu, 35, 46, 70, 89, 93, 175, 234, Vatican Council II, 316 247, 304. See also Vaishnava. Vedas/Vedic Visram, Allidina, 264 academy in Prashanti Nilayam, 60 Vithlani, Ramniklal, 261 ashram of Upasni Maharaj, 239 Vithoba, 29, 30, 41, 69, 312 basis of Indian culture, 160 Vittala/Vitthala. See Vithoba. breath of God, 155 Visveswaraya, M., 221 bund regulating fl ow of feelings, 160 Vivekananda, Swami, 21, 143, 156, 295, chanting at Prasanthi Nilayam, 177 336 chanting at Sai Darshan, 247 vodun, 103–4

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Voleti, Choudhary, 326 Wodeyar (Odeyar) kings, 220, 227 Vyasa, 235 Women’s Center, 319 Word, the, 331 Waghorne, Joanne, 217 World Conference of Sri Sathya Sai Waiyaki Way, 277 Seva Organizations, 61, 72, 140–1, Waiyaki Way Center, 279–81, 287, 291 259 “Wake, Yet Wake, O My Saint”, 315 World Council of Sri Sathya Sai Wal-Mart, 321, 331 Organizations, 140–41 Warburg, Margit, 13 World Health Organization, 198 Warren, Marianne, 28, 29, 35, 39 World Parliament of Religions, 295 Washington, D.C., 107, 293, 322 World Teacher, 325 “We are the World”, 329 World War I, 103, 264, 269 Weber, Max, 340 World War II, 264, 344 Wellingborough, 307 World Wide Web, 108 Werbner, Pnina, 13 WorldSpace Satellite Network, 105 Wesley Woods Senior Center, 319 Wycliff, 287–90 West, the, 336–7, 339–40, 344 Wyoming, 293 West Africa, 103 West Bengal, 131–4, 139 Yadav, J.P., 212 West Hollywood, 292 Yoga, 340 West Indies, 136, 140, 198, 212 Yogananda. See Paramahamsa West Virginia, 293 Yogananda. Western Canteen, 173, 177 Young Adults, 326, 328 Western devotees, 333 Yukteswarji, 315 Western esotericism, 338 YWCA hostel, Madras, 101 Western Europe, 124, 137 Western music, 179, 311, 314–5 Zambia, 282 Westlands, 262, 287 Zarathustra, 45, 92, 183, 215, 277 Where Golden Dreams Dwell, 316 Zen Buddhism, 83, 85, 338 White, Charles, S.J., 5, 46 Zeus, 212 White, William Sakamoto, 301 Zoroastrian/Zoroastrians, 42, 43, 92, Whiteﬁ eld, 57, 114, 218, 222, 239, 240–3 201 Williams, Raymond Brady, 13, 297 Zoroastrianism, 3, 8, 62, 157 Wockhardt, 121 Zululand, 103

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