The Mendicant of Shirdi

CHAPTER ONE

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 dias- pora. 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 sec- tions 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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