SHIRDI  SAI  BABA  AND  THE  SAI  BABA  MOVEMENT

The conflatory phrase "Sai Baba movement" refers to a complex phenomenon which has been given different interpretations. That disputed phrase encompasses the entities known as Shirdi Sai Baba, Upasni Maharaj and Godavari Mataji, Meher Baba, and Sathya Sai Baba. The treatment below analyses components of the contested convergence, with the primary accent on Shirdi Sai Baba, who has been revealed as a Muslim Sufi.

CONTENTS  KEY
6.1          Sufism  in  the  Deccan
6.2          The  Liberal  Muslim  Sufi
6.3          The  Hinduization  Process
6.4          Some  Aspects  of Teaching
6.5          The  Pathri  Legend
6.6          Religious  Syncretism  in  Maharashtra
6.7          Religious  Insularism
6.8          The  Disciple  of  a  Muslim:  Upasni  Maharaj
6.9          Meher  Baba
6.10        The  Sai  Baba  Movement  at  Issue

                Update: Tulasi  Srinivas  and  the  Politics  of  Religion
                Annotations

6.1   Sufism  in  the  Deccan   
                                  
The career of Sai Baba of Shirdi  (d.1918) is unusual in recent annals of Indian religion. The complexities relating to his religious background, and his location in certain sectarian schemas, enliven the portrayal. I am not myself a sectarian, and have approached him from another angle, commencing with a book published over twenty years ago.  (1)

This figure is now frequently known as Shirdi Sai Baba, the purpose here being to distinguish him from his controversial namesake, Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi. In 1943, the latter claimed to be the reincarnation of the Shirdi saint.  That sensational claim facilitated the rise to fame of the young Sathyanarayana Raju, alias Sathya Sai Baba. Born in or near the village of Puttaparthi, in Andhra Pradesh (and officially born in 1926), the putative successor appropriated the name of the Shirdi saint, an event which has not  been viewed with favour by the devotees of Shirdi Sai.  The Andhra celebrity subsequently claimed and elaborated the prerogative of avatarhood, meaning the role of a divine incarnation. Sathya Sai has been described as the most famous living Indian guru in  the world.

It seems true  enough that most followers of Shirdi Sai have not accepted the reincarnation claim. Yet some devotees of Sathya Sai Baba have written books which interpose lore about the Shirdi saint that derives from the Puttaparthi celebrity. This trend has caused confusions in the ongoing legendary portrayal, one already subject to “Hinduization” elements acquired in earlier decades.

The subject needs close study, and is not immediately unlocked by general readers. The literature is diverse, and many popular presentations have tended to be misleading, contracting the data.

Two different geographical areas are represented by the two bearers of the name Sai Baba. The original entity lived in Maharashtra, a Marathi-speaking state. Whereas the proclaimed duplicate emerged in Telegu-speaking Andhra, located further south. Yet the favoured language of Shirdi Sai was Urdu, an Islamic tongue widely used by Indian Muslims. The key to certain basic events was the Muslim occupation of the area formerly known as the Deccan. That broadly signifies the Deccan Plateau, a vast territory covering Andhra, Karnataka, and Maharashtra. The Muslims invaded the Deccan in the thirteenth century, after centuries of complex Sufi developments in Iran and Central Asia. [See my Early Sufism in Iran, 2010.] Various cities of the Deccan are strongly associated with the Islamic occupation, e.g., Hyderabad in Andhra, and Aurangabad in Maharashtra.

A little to the north of Aurangabad was the medieval town of Khuldabad, one which became a major pilgrimage centre in the Deccan, strongly linked with the Chishti Sufis. Shirdi is in the same zone of Maharashtra, and associations with Khuldabad have persisted in the lore attaching to Shirdi Sai. 

Scholarly discussion of  Deccani history has found in  the Khuldabad tradition a foil to the idea of militant religious activism, equated with Sufism via the ghazi religious warriors of the Anatolian frontier and the early Safavid state in Iran. (2)  The “Warrior Sufi” interpretation arose in relation to Bijapur, a city in the southern  Deccan, where a strong Sufi presence is also attested. The “Warrior Sufi” attribution has since been viewed as an  exaggeration. (3)

In the fourteenth century, the Sultan of Delhi transferred his religious and administrative elite south to Daulatabad, located in Maharashtra. For a time, this city functioned as the new Islamic capital in India.  The enforced move south in 1329 included many Sufis of the emerging Chishti order.  A substantial number of these men elected to stay on at Daulatabad when Delhi again became the favoured administrative centre of the Sultan. Relations  with the monarch had become strained. (4) 

Near Daulatabad and Aurangabad, the town known as Khuldabad (Rawza)  became a major Sufi pilgrimage site in subsequent centuries, and is noted for many domed tombs (dargahs) of Sufis. Khuldabad is rather less than a hundred miles from Shirdi, and has gained an association with Sai Baba, who is said to have stayed in a Chishti-related cave during his obscure early years.  That cave has strong associations with the legend and tomb of an early Chishti Sufi who migrated to the Deccan in advance of the enforced move to Daulatabad.  Very little is known about Zar Zar Zar Bakhsh, who is reported to have died in 1309. However, his legendary fame has exceeded that of other saints buried at Khuldabad. (5)

6.2    The  Liberal  Muslim  Sufi

Hyderabad was a major Islamic centre, and a home for the Urdu language which evolved in response to the Hindu environment. Urdu has been described as a form of Hindustani incorporating many Persian and Arabic words. Urdu became the official literary language of Pakistan, but many years prior to that development, Shirdi Sai Baba was an Urdu-speaker. He adapted to Marathi, but his basic linguistic and cultural affiliations reveal him as a Muslim, and more specifically as a Sufi of the liberal and unorthodox variety.  (6)

Sai Baba of Shirdi emerges in the early accounts as a Muslim faqir  or ascetic. He wore the typical garb of that category. The date of his birth is unknown (though attributions have been made), and his early life  is  obscure and legendary. By circa 1870 he had become a resident of Shirdi, a village in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, and  inhabited largely by Hindus. It has been estimated that about one tenth of the population were Muslims. The Hindus at first regarded him as an alien, as a Muslim faqir unsuited  for entry into Hindu temples. He made his abode in a dilapidated mosque of distinctly rural dimensions. One of his early Muslim disciples kept a notebook in Urdu which has permitted  a strong insight into the Sufi orientation  of  the  Shirdi  saint.

The Muslim disciple Abdul Baba  was a close servitor of the Shirdi saint for almost thirty  years until the latter’s death.  Thus, we know that the Sufism exposited by Shirdi Sai was in evidence from 1889 until his last years. Abdul would read the Quran in the presence of the saint, and at the latter’s behest. Sai Baba would make diverse utterances, and these were recorded in the notebook. Abdul’s Urdu manuscript was unpublished until very recently, (7)  and the basic significances had simply passed into neglect.

Dr. Marianne Warren  observed  that:

“the manuscript largely pertains to Muslim and Sufi material in Deccani Urdu; there are a number of quotations in Arabic included from the Quran and hadith [traditions of the Prophet]....the fact that the manuscript’s Islamic nature does not fit in with the accepted Hindu interpretation and presentation of Sai Baba may explain why it has remained unpublished.” (8) 

Moreover, the  translated Urdu notebook “establishes beyond doubt that Sai Baba was totally familiar with both the Islamic and Sufi traditions, and that as a Sufi master he taught this tradition to Abdul.”  (9)

The major devotional biography, written in Marathi, also confirms the Muslim background of Shirdi Sai. Unfortunately for popular assimilation, this book by Govind R. Dabholkar (alias Hemadpant) gained a very misleading English adaptation that seems to have been more widely read than the original.

The Marathi biography was entitled  Shri Sai Satcharita, composed by an early  brahman devotee who repeatedly acknowledged and indicated the Muslim faqir identity of the saint. Yet the English adaptation by N. V. Gunaji involved an attempt to omit the Muslim context, instead improvising a Vedantic complexion to the subject. (10) For instance, Gunaji ignored the frequent use of Urdu by Shirdi Sai, and omitted sections of Dabholkar which referred to  Muslims, Muslim practices, and Sufi teachings.  Gunaji  deleted  reference to the Islamic ritual of goat slaughter (takkya), though Dabholkar duly reported that  the saint would occasionally undertake this ritual so abhorrent to Hindus.

The name (or rather title) of this saint is evocative of Muslim origins. The word Sai appears to be derived from the Arabic sa’ih, a term used to designate itinerant ascetics in the Islamic world. (11) The word Baba is sometimes given a Hindu context, but that  is only partially correct. Baba is a common Marathi expression meaning “father,” though it was also employed in the medieval Indian Sufi tradition. Baba is a Turkish word that referred to diverse preachers and shaikhs, having an origin in the itinerant babas from Central Asia.  (12)

“The first festival performed in Sai Baba’s honour was significantly that of the urs, in1897. The  urs is a Muslim festival, and usually commemorates the anniversary of a  saint’s death, though in this instance it celebrated  a living saint who was being honoured by a Hindu, Gopalrao  Gund of Kopergaon, who attributed to Sai the birth of his son. The Muslim background of the saint was so obvious that Gund had to honour him in Islamic terms.” (13) (The word urs comes from the Arabic language.)

Sai Baba was frequently believed by Hindus to confer the blessing of childbirth. Many instances of this are reported in the hagiology. Social and religious taboos had conspired to make a childless couple seem very undesirable in Hinduism, and a strong stigma could result. Women were particularly subject to the accusation of disgracing the family, and a male child was highly prized. There were thus compulsive reasons for this preoccupation with progeny, which was  frequently projected onto holy  men, who were believed to be an alleviating factor.

The Hindus eventually came to substantially outnumber the Muslim devotees, and from about 1910 an urban influx of Hindu admirers sealed the pending eclipse of the Islamic context. To be sure, the saint was welcoming and inclusive, not  being a doctrinaire exponent of Sufism. He resorted to allusive speech, and tended to be very enigmatic.

6.3    The  Hinduization  Process

The Shirdi Sufi was later attributed with an intimate knowledge of the Sanskrit language, which was the medium for Hindu scriptures.  The attribution was based on the saint’s explanation of a verse in the Bhagavad-Gita, a  classic text associated with Vedanta. That explanation was imparted to a Hindu devotee.  Subsequent analysis has strongly contested the attribution, favoured by B. V. Narasimhaswami, who was writing many  years after the saint’s death. “That interpretation was  followed by other writers, and served to strengthen the tendency to portray the saint in a Hinduized manner.”  (14)

It has been observed that the feted interpretation of the Gita verse is “totally different” to the version of Shankara and  other canonical Hindu commentators. According to recent scholarship, the dialogue does not in fact prove that Sai  Baba knew the Gita or even Sanskrit, his emphasis being Sufistic. The very convincing version of Dr. Marianne Warren stresses that the saint gave a unique interpretation, and did not need to know the text at all, as the verse was read out to him along with a statement of grammatical meanings. This was done at his own request. “Sai Baba had all the raw material of the verse given to him, so there is no basis to the supposition that he in fact ‘knew’ Sanskrit or even the Bhagavad-Gita.”  (15)

During his lifetime, the saint was generally regarded as a Muslim faqir, with Sufi associations not in general well understood. His white robe (kafni) and headgear were clearly Muslim.  He used the Islamic name for God, and repeated Islamic sacred phrases, not  Hindu  mantras. He even had a habit of referring to God as the Faqir.

The influx of urban Hindus from Bombay in the last years of Sai Baba made the Hindus a clear majority in his following, and  tendencies to Hinduization appeared in the later reports culled from devotees who were interviewed by Narasimhaswami in 1936. Nearly eighty devotees were then interviewed, though only 51 have a clear religious identity. No less than 43 of those were Hindu, and 26 of that contingent were members of the elite brahman caste. Only four were Muslims, and there were also two Parsi Zoroastrians and two Christians.  (16)

A revealing factor emerges. Narasimhaswami asked all the devotees he interviewed a rather pointed question. Did they think that Sai Baba taught Vedanta?  “In all cases they said he did not.” (17) It therefore seems the more anomalous that Narasimhaswami  improvised his theme of the Sanskrit expert.  In the 1940s, Gunaji was giving an erroneous impression via his Vedantic interpretations of the Shirdi saint, which cannot be found in the original work by Dabholkar that Gunaji was rendering. 

Narasimhaswami had never met Sai Baba, and arrived at Shirdi nearly twenty years after the saint’s demise. He was not  familiar with either Marathi or Urdu.  (18) Yet his books on the subject became very influential amongst Hindus. He rather reluctantly referred to Sai Baba as a Muslim, and one whose teachings were indistinguishable from Sufism. He nevertheless admitted to knowing little about Sufism, and himself clearly preferred the bhakti (devotion) approach of Hinduism. Narasimhaswami constantly tended to project that conceptualism onto the Shirdi saint.  He had initially been repelled by the Muslim identity, and it is evident that this writer would never have become enthusiastic about the subject without the  latitude for Hindu associations in reports he edited.

Narasimhaswami could reason that Sai Baba was apparently a Muslim because he lived in a mosque, although the former was very partial to one report  (of Mhalsapati) which claimed that the saint was a brahman by birth. The Narasimhaswami version basically wishes to regard the subject as a Hindu, not as a Muslim.

The influential testimonies provided by Narasimhaswami were strongly in the direction of hagiology. That enthusiastic promoter of the “Shirdi revival” produced a work entitled Devotees’ Experiences of Sai Baba  (1942).  This has been described by a recent  assessor as:

“a detailed presentation of alleged miraculous phenomena.... the intent of the work is clearly hagiographic, aiming at the expansion of Sai Baba’s popularity among the public at large.” (19)

Narasimhaswami later produced in English a four volume biography of the saint. This has substantial documentary value, though exhibiting a strongly Hinduizing gloss that has been considered a major flaw requiring due caution. Two of those volumes portray devotees the author had interviewed. Narasimhaswami there says that the Hindu devotees had regarded Sai  Baba as a Muslim, though they worshipped him as a Hindu god. The same commentator also stated that the ideas with which the saint was saturated  “up to the last were in no way distinguishable from Sufism.”  (20)

In his last years, the saint  freely allowed his Hindu devotees to perform puja (worship) before him at the mosque. This concession annoyed Muslims, and there were initial problems. (21) Despite the liberal attitude of the saint to Hindu religious tendencies, he continued to make constant reference to Allah and maintained the simple kafni (robe) of the Muslim faqir. 

He was ruggedly ascetic to the end, daily begging his food from local  houses.  He redistributed money that was given to him, not  keeping it for himself.

Discrepancies in reporting apply to such stories as the alleged wrestling match of the saint in Shirdi with Mohidden Tamboli, evidently a Muslim. According to Gunaji, Sai Baba lost this contest, and thereafter changed his apparel to the kafni of faqirs.  The dating is obscure. It has been pointed out that this report  is in contradiction to Gunaji’s own statement that the saint had been wearing faqir garb from the outset of his arrival at Shirdi.  Furthermore,  the Hindu informant  Ramgiri Bua emphasised that Sai Baba did not wrestle, but instead had a disagreement with the son-in-law of Tamboli, as a consequence of which he retreated to the nearby jungle. This obscure episode has been tentatively dated to the 1880s.  (22)

The popular theme that Sai Baba was a miracleworker may be regarded as a devotional distraction culminating in the Shirdi revival of the 1930s. He did not perform “miracle” stunts like some Hindu holy men, and was merely in the habit of  giving sacred ash (udi) from his dhuni fire as a token of blessing. The ash became credited with healing properties.  Devotees  like  Dabholkar  did strongly credit him with miracles, generally of the minor variety, a major preoccupation being the birth of a child. Sai Baba himself is reported to have expressed annoyance at the mundane desires entertained  by visitors.

In temperament he was liable to be irascible. His strong tendency to allusive speech in his later years was perhaps intended to accentuate the gap  between the renunciate path to God and the life of householders. Most of the Hindu devotees were householders, meaning those in the married state. Their domestic preoccupations were a far cry from the ascetic milieu which Sai Baba represented.

At his death, there was a disagreement amongst his followers about burial procedures. The Muslim minority are reported to have included the category of theologians known as maulvis and maulanas. An air of dignity would thus have attended the argument. The Muslims wanted  Sai Baba to be buried in a Sufi tomb or dargah of the type well known in the Deccan.  Yet the Hindu majority wanted the saint to be buried in the courtyard of a guest-house (wada) recently constructed by the wealthy Hindu devotee Gopalrao Buti.

The Hindus were victorious, the Muslim proposal being offset by the heavy expense involved. However, the Hindus deferred to Muslim sensitivities by initially permitting the new tomb to resemble a dargah, and making Abdul Baba the custodian of the shrine. These details indicate that the Muslim  identity of the saint was still clearly recognised by the Hindu majority.

After a few years however, Abdul was denied his role as tomb custodian in 1922.  A prominent Hindu devotee, Hari Sitaram Dixit, overruled  the authority of Abdul  by setting up a Public Trust through the Ahmednagar District court, with the intention of  administering the tomb.  Abdul was persuaded by sympathisers  to challenge the court ruling and to file a counter-suit declaring that he was the legal heir to Sai  Baba and that the Public Trust was illegal. Abdul lost his case, and had to leave the room reserved for him at the shrine. The severe restrictions were relaxed at a later date, but the Muslim claim to dominance was permanently eliminated.

The new official Sansthan (Trust) was exclusively composed of Hindu members.  The tomb became known as the Samadhi Mandir. In 1952, a new and controversial development occurred in the tomb presentation. A marble statue of Sai  Baba was installed on a silver throne. Above the statue was placed a painted sign which identified Sai Baba with the Hindu god  (or avatar) Rama (Ram). This innovation caused offence to Muslims, and faqirs  are reported to have stopped visiting the tomb. (23)

Writers who followed in the wake of  Gunaji and Narasimhaswami produced diversions. They were strongly influenced by the Hinduization tendency. A Parsi writer composed a chapter entitled “What the Master Taught.” There is not a single reference to Sufism, but instead many to Hindu bhakti  and one or two that can be interpreted in terms of a simplified Vedanta. Furthermore, another chapter includes the statement:

“The saint of Shirdi  baffled his admirers !  No one knew whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim. He dressed like a Muslim and bore the caste marks of a Hindu !” (24)

The equivocal  theme of “Hindu or Muslim” had replaced the earlier awareness that the revered entity was a faqir, meaning an alien to Hinduism. The reference to caste marks is superficial, arising from hagiological tendencies.

6.4    Some  Aspects  of  Teaching

What did Sai Baba actually teach?  The original Hindu devotees like Dabholkar  testify that he was constantly uttering Islamic sacred phrases such as “Allah malik” (God is the only ruler).  Vedanta is not here evident, but rather a version of  the Sufi  theme tauhid (unity, oneness of God).  There were also many parables and enigmatic statements, plus gnostic assertions in the radical Sufi idiom.

The Urdu notebook of Abdul relays that Sai Baba strongly criticised false Sufis,  and also corrupt orthodox divines who accepted bribes. The saint  “was basically concerned with marifat or gnosis, and he is reported to have uttered many daring affirmations of his own identity with the divine; yet he ‘was also aware of  the dangers of giving sacred information to the ignorant.’ He stressed austere discipline as a prerequisite.”  (25)

These subjects are not the easiest to penetrate, and certainly cannot be brought under any simplified heading such as bhakti or devotion.  However, that is what too many writers have done with the mutated legacy of a radical Muslim Sufi.

6.5    The  Pathri  Legend

Arthur Osborne became well known for his interpretation of Ramana Maharshi, and also wrote The Incredible Sai Baba (1957). This book formed the introduction to the subject for most Westerners prior to the 1990s. Osborne made a sympathetic attempt to decipher the Shirdi saint, and grasped that he was not typical of the Hindu guru category. Yet the commentary is basically evasive of  the Islamic context. Osborne reports that Sai Baba was regarded as a Muslim faqir, but does not follow up this matter effectively. The Westerner appears to have been influenced by a detail found in Narasimhaswami, whom Osborne acknowledges as a primary influence. The Western writer states of Sai Baba:

“It is fairly certain that he was born of a middle class Brahmin family in a small town in Hyderabad State. Possibly his parents died when he was young, because at a very early age he left home to follow a Muslim fakir.”  (26)

There are some critical analysts who are sceptical of this version. Narasimhaswami had favoured the report given by the Hindu devotee Mhalsapati, a brahman priest who was one of the earliest devotees. According to this source, Sai Baba revealed in his later years that his parents were brahmans of Pathri. If there is any truth in that now popular legend, then Hindu parentage was quickly superseded by a Muslim ascetic lifestyle. The Hindu version of the saint has elaborated the Pathri legend, though less well known details could afford a different complexion.

Pathri is a small town in Maharashtra, to the  south-east of  Daulatabad.  It has been reported that sixty per cent of the Pathri population is Muslim, a fact reflecting the strong Islamic concentration in this zone. Pathri was a known centre of the Qadiri Sufis, and features Sufi tombs dating back to the medieval era. The most salient tomb (dargah) is that of Sayyad Sadat (Aminuddin Shah), whose urs festival (death anniversary) has been popular amongst  both Hindus and Muslims.  (27)

The defective Wikipedia entry on Shirdi Sai erroneously says that his philosophy was Advaita Vedanta, but correctly affirms that he was notorious for “giving vague, misleading and contradictory replies to questions concerning his parentage and origins" (accessed 12/12/2008).

6.6    Religious  Syncretism  in  Maharashtra

Strong tendencies to Hinduize the subject influenced writers like Arthur Osborne into making the Shirdi saint  a subject of equivocal affiliation. According to Osborne, Sai Baba “did not fully conform to either” religion, meaning Islam and Hinduism.  The primary reasons given for this rather deceptive view are that Sai Baba was a vegetarian and was worshipped in Hindu fashion. (28) The vegetarian theory has since been exposed as a myth, one which inadvertently sides with the Gunaji excision of Dabholkar’s reference to the Islamic ritual involving goat slaughter. The fact of Hindu worship, in the unusual circumstances prevailing (in a rural mosque), in no way proves an offsetting Hindu identity.

The most convincing explanation for the Shirdi phenomenon is that Sai  Baba’s assimilating approach to Hinduism  represented a continuation of syncretistic trends discernible in Maharashtra between Muslim Sufis and Hindus.  Indeed, Sai Baba’s enlightened (if at times eccentric) form of syncretism can appeal equally to the sociological and religious modes of analysis. The Shirdi saint  represented a Muslim minority amongst a  Maharashtrian Hindu majority, and to remove the Islamic significances is an error, because his achievement is  thereby reduced.

Sai  Baba  made diverse references to Hindu gods in his interactions with Hindus,and that gesture can be interpreted in terms of a liberal Sufi tendency. His speech was frequently so allusive that even the word brahman has been tagged as symbolic. (29) The story of a Hindu guru, favoured by some Hindu sources for the early life of the saint, has been discredited by critical scholarship. (30) A Hindu scholar (associated with the Shirdi Sansthan) arrived at the conclusion expressed in terms of “the fact that Sai Baba’s guru was a Sufi is not a matter of surprise.” (31)

It is relevant to focus here upon the first major account of Sai Baba, and one that has an elite reputation amongst Hindu devotees. I have referred above to Hemadpant, which was the name bestowed by the saint upon his brahman devotee Govind Raghunath Dabholkar. The contact of Dabholkar with the saint commenced in 1910, and resulted in the devotional biography known as Sri Sai Satcharita. This was written in Marathi verse, and   published in 1929.  Dabholkar was here following a long Hindu tradition of writing saintly biographies in verse format.

Dabholkar was concerned to describe miracles of the saint, and the hagiological tendency is evident. Legendary details and actual events  have been discerned to overlap, requiring careful analysis. Another realistic assessment about the verse of Dabholkar is that “when he did not understand the enigmatic mystic, he would rationalize sayings and events in conformity with his own religious background.”  (32)

Dabholkar’s poetic biography assimilated the devotional tendency to identify Sai Baba with the god Dattatreya, who is often depicted as an ascetic or yogi.  This Hindu deity is associated with the syncretism of  Hinduism and Islamic Sufism that has been traced in Maharashtra. The association is said to date back to the fourteenth century, and was revived in the case of Sai Baba circa 1910. Various Hindu gurus gained repute in the nineteenth century as incarnations of the ascetic deity Dattatreya, and most of these  figures (like Sai Baba) were reticent about revealing their personal histories.

A well known instance of Dattatreya association is Swami Samarth of Akalkot (d.1878), who was in affinity with Muslims. A subsequent “Dattatreya guru” representing a Hindu context was Narayan Maharaj of Kedgaon (1885-1945), an ascetic who favoured an opulent lifestyle in his later years while acting as a patron of Dattatreya worship at his ashram. (33)

At the beginning of each chapter, Dabholkar extols Sai Baba. The purpose was evidently to link the Shirdi entity with the Maharashtrian Hindu  bhakti  tradition of saints who also figure as poets.  It is obvious that Dabholkar “tried to accommodate the Muslim Sai Baba within the Maharashtrian Hindu milieu for his readers.” (34)  There were perhaps gains and losses in this literary feat.

In the opening chapter, Dabholkar extols Hindu gods and the Hindu bhakti saints of Maharashtra such as Eknath and Tukaram. The Eknathi  Bhagvat  has been discerned as a strong influence in his direction. Yet “he fails to mention any Muslim saints or famous Sufis, although there were many whose names were quite famous in Maharashtra.” (35)  According to Dr. Warren, the overall impression conveyed by the work under discussion is that  Dabholkar “personally regarded Sai Baba as a Muslim, although he was limited in fully understanding Sai Baba’s Muslim-Sufi identity due to his own ignorance of Islam and Sufism in Maharashtra.”  (36)

The indications are that Dabholkar wished to elevate the shrine at Shirdi to a place of pilgrimage. This can be interpreted as a sectarian ambition. However, some other emphases are more impressive. He associated Sai Baba with former saints who had attempted to unite Hindus and Muslims. He quotes the saying of Sai Baba that “Ram and Rahim were one and the same.” Ram here means the Hindu avatara/god Rama, while Rahim is an Islamic sacred  name.

Dabholkar further emphasised that Sai Baba associated with all castes and outcastes, ignoring the conventional caste distinctions. That may be considered correct;  the achievement  needed stressing to the caste bigotries which prevailed in Maharashtra and elsewhere in India. To the Hindus, the Muslim faqir was an outcaste, and unfit to enter temples. This stigma is discernibly at the root of many of the Shirdi saint’s enigmatic references. Dabholkar cites an instance of the formidable bias encountered.  A Ram bhakta (devotee of Ram) stated that he would never prostrate to a Muslim. The same insular devotee subsequently performed a full prostration to the Sufi after gaining a vision of Sai Baba as Ram(a). (37)

The poetic Dabholkar faithfully reported a significant episode. A Hindu devotee (Dr. Pandit)  was allowed by the Muslim saint on one occasion to apply sandal paste to his (Sai Baba’s) forehead, thus reproducing the tripundra emblem of the Shaiva tradition (i.e., of Shiva). When questioned afterwards as to why he allowed this unusual latitude, Sai Baba explained that although he was of the Muslim caste (mi jatica Musulman), Dr. Pandit  thought of him as a guru and was here performing ritual worship to the guru (guru-puja). The saint then revealingly added that “he (Dr. Pandit) did not even entertain the thought that he was  a pure brahman and that I was an unclean yavana  (Muslim).”  (38)

This episode highlights a psychological intricacy. The Sufi evidently made substantial concessions to Hindus who did not regard him as an outcaste.There were more resistant or enigmatic gestures reserved for those who were insular or otherwise deficient. His overall liberalism in a divided religious milieu is in many ways remarkable.

6.7    Religious  Insularism

The reported statement of Sai  Baba  that  “I am of the Muslim caste” is significant. Yet in passing from Dabholkar to the adaptation of Gunaji, we here find a serious case of contraction and omission. Gunaji neglected to include the statement of the saint about Muslim caste. He even attempted to deny the possibility that the saint could have been a Muslim. In a controversial passage, Gunaji poses the question: if Sai Baba was a Muslim, how could he keep a dhuni  fire  burning  in  his  mosque, and how could he keep a sacred tulsi plant in the yard outside, and how could he permit Hindu music, and how could he have pierced ears, and how could he have donated money to repair Hindu temples? This is more or less the credo of the “Hindu identity” suggestion that became widespread.  (39)

The insular thinking can be contradicted. The sacred fires known as dhuni were also favoured by Muslim faqirs. (40) The tolerance of Sai Baba in relation to Hindu ceremonial adjuncts should not be made antithetical to his own excised statement that he was a Muslim. The issue of pierced ears is not definitive. Many Hindus gained pierced ears at birth. Hindu biographers have urged that the Shirdi saint had pierced ears. Against this must be set an assertion of the Hindu devotee Das Ganu, in a well known poem which states that Sai Baba can reasonably be called  a Muslim because of such details as his ears not  being  pierced.  Das Ganu added his own conclusion that the saint was a Hindu, adducing the dhuni fire as support. Dabholkar is also contradictory, favouring pierced ears but indicating that Sai Baba was circumcised.  (41)

As to the repair of Hindu temples, in his last  years Sai  Baba gave away large amounts of money, daily gifted to him as dakshina or alms. His mosque was repaired by devotees, and a reciprocal gesture was generous enough. He did not actually want any  renovation of the ramshackle mosque, but an affluent devotee pointedly dumped cartloads of stone outside the building. The saint  responded by adopting an eccentric tactic. He eventually agreed to the renovation but continually interfered with the project, to the extent that workmen could only be on the site during nocturnal hours. Sai Baba insisted upon the standard minarets and nimbar recess in the west wall facing Mecca. The dhuni fireplace was an innovation, though he apparently regarded this as the ennobling of a  faqir  observance.

Sai  Baba did sometimes advocate to Hindus the reading of various Hindu texts. Yet he would not give  the formal initiations that  some  supplicants anticipated, and which are typical  of Hindu procedures. He occasionally recited the first chapter of the Quran.  Consisting of seven verses, that chapter is known as Al-Fatiha (“The Opening”).

The sectarian attitude frequently contradicts a due perspective. In 1930, a foreword was added to the Dabholkar book in Marathi by Hari Sitaram Dixit.  This was the same prominent Hindu devotee who had ousted Abdul Baba from the role of tomb custodian nearly a decade before.  Dixit always referred to Sai Baba as Sai  Maharaj, that title conveying a distinctly Hindu flavour. Dixit had evolved an interpretation of the saint that is considered idiosyncratic in some sectors. He now declared Sai Baba to have been born ayoniya, which literally means without a womb, i.e., without a human mother.

This new concept  avoided  the issue of whether the saint was born a Muslim or a Hindu.  Yet  the innovation was closely linked to an interpretation of divine incarnations in the Hindu tradition, entities who were all considered to be  the products of a virgin birth. The Shirdi Sufi had now effectively become a divine incarnation of  Hindu association.  (42)

6.8     The  Disciple  of  a  Muslim:  Upasni  Maharaj

Despite the sectarian manipulations of context, many Hindus continued to regard Sai Baba as a Muslim. Indeed, Narasimhaswami reacted to the widely emphasised Muslim identity during the early 1930s, and did not wish to visit Shirdi accordingly. Narasimha  Iyer, later known as Narasimhaswami, was an orthodox brahman of South India who early lived at the ashram of  Ramana Maharshi.  He moved on after reacting to the Advaita Vedanta of Ramana, which Narasimha found too intellectual for his own disposition.  (43)

By 1936 the pilgrim had arrived at Shirdi, subsequently to become celebrated as the “apostle of Sai Baba” via his new role as the founder and president of the All India Sai Samaj, based at Madras. By the early 1940s, Narasimhaswami had become the influential populariser of Sai  Baba in South  India.  His “Shirdi revival” quickly spread the fame of the shrine maintained at Shirdi by the Shri Sai  Baba Sansthan. His industrious spate of publications gave life to the “Sai  Baba bhakti” concept, although there has been scope for disagreement about many of his interpretations.

Narasimhaswami notably discountenanced the view in some Hindu quarters that Upasni Maharaj (1870-1941) was the successor of Sai Baba. Upasni (Upasani) was also a brahman, and had established an ashram at Sakori (Sakuri), a few miles south of Shirdi.  The intricacies of this situation are quite complex, and merit further attention.

Ironically enough, Narasimhaswami had formerly composed a glorifying biography (or hagiography) of Upasni. (44) Yet he had also fallen victim to some strongly circulated rumours (or libels) about the Sakori guru. The scandal was contrived by influential brahman opponents of Upasni, who were incensed at the importance he gave to a select group of his women disciples. Upasni broke orthodox stigmas by making those women an active symbol of participation in priestly rites and  recitation. He dispensed  with the supervision of male priests in their case, and emphasised a return to the Vedic tradition of kanyadin, a word connoting female celibacy and discipline.  Upasni even said that women could make more rapid progress in spiritual development than men (though he did not mean in all cases).

The very conservative libellers accused Upasni of immorality, although in fact the Sakori ashram was a scene of austere discipline. The selected women lived as nuns called kanyas.  In later years they emerged victorious from the libels, and their leader Godavari Mataji (1914-1990) became famous as a saint in her own right. She and others lived to tell the tale of what really happened. Their institution became known as the Kanya Kumari Sthan. By the time of Godavari Mataji’s  death, there were almost fifty nuns in the institution. Meanwhile, the belief was maintained by Narasimhaswami and others that Sai Baba’s continuing “miraculous” presence at the Shirdi tomb  was all sufficient for devotees.

Upasni  Maharaj  is similar in some  ways to Sai  Baba. He was a vigorous ascetic, with the same uncompromising attitude to physical  hardships.  Like Sai  Baba, he was also eccentric at times, and frequently enigmatic. There was a difference in that Upasni was a brahman, and unrelated to Islam or Sufism.  In his earlier life, he was a learned scholar of Sanskrit  texts, an  intermittent  ascetic, and  a householder with a professional career in Ayurvedic medicine.  When he first heard of Sai Baba, he did not wish to visit  the Shirdi saint because of the Muslim identity that was so well known in Maharashtra.

Upasni was the second son in a family of Maharashtra priests noted for religious accomplishment. He early favoured austerities that were extolled in the scriptures, and is reported to have adopted yoga asanas (postures) and breath control (pranayama) in his youth. Upasni resumed the latter practice intensively at a later date, after he relinquished his medical career and resorted to pilgrimage with his wife. The reliance upon pranayama now resulted in a severe problem, as his breathing lost all normal rhythm. He was only able to breathe, though with difficulty, when he massaged his stomach. This precarious condition continually lost the artificially induced rhythm, such as when he tried to sleep or eat. His stomach is reported to have become swollen.

In desperation, the pilgrim yogi left his jungle abode and travelled to Nagpur and Dhulia, searching in vain for a remedy. No doctor knew how to cure him. Upasni became convinced that only another yogi could cure him, one with more knowledge than he himself possessed. He commenced this new quest in April 1911. He visited a yogi known as Kulkarni Maharaj at Rahuri, but was disconcerted to find that this practitioner urged him to see Sai Baba of Shirdi, who was here identified as an aulia or Muslim saint. Kulkarni Maharaj reassured his visitor by emphasising that Sai Baba was above caste distinctions. However, Upasni (or Kashinath) possessed a strong caste pride and persisted in searching for a Hindu adept.

Upasni thereafter found a degree of relief by drinking only hot water, but he was in constant fear of a relapse of deficient breathing. He later returned to Kulkarni Maharaj in June, and the yogi again urged him to visit Sai Baba, emphasising that the latter was above creed and caste. This time Upasni acted on the advice, though still with reluctance. He arrived at Shirdi in late June,1911. His breathing ailment is said to have ceased miraculously. More reliable are the varied details which describe his growing affinity with the saint.

The visitor found that Sai Baba generally spoke in cryptic language, and this was not always easy to decipher. The enigmatic device muted the religious divide between the Muslim faqir and Hindus, but Upasni was still offput by the mosque environment at Shirdi. The visitor intended to leave and return to his wife, but via a combination of circumstances, he ended up staying at Shirdi (his wife died soon after). His doubts were eventually resolved, and he came to view the faqir as the most exceptional entity he had ever met.

Upasni became a committed disciple, and was introduced to an intensive phase of seclusion at a nearby Khandoba temple. That shrine was deserted and derelict. This bizarre phase lasted for a few years, and the accompanying interaction with Sai Baba was complex.  The liberal Sufi often made glowing references to his rather exceptional Hindu disciple. There is no doubt that the former now highly rated the latter.  Sai  Baba  eventually declared that Upasni had become a guru deserving worship like himself.

From the start of the phase at Khandoba's temple, Sai Baba contributed both specific instructions and allusive remarks. He enjoined that Upasni was to stay in the derelict temple for a few years, living quietly and "doing nothing." There were no prescriptions for meditation or sadhana (spiritual discipline). The faqir did not sanction exercises like pranayama, an adventure which Upasni did not repeat, knowing too much about hazards that were not generally envisaged by Yoga enthusiasts.

At first the disciple found the changes difficult to accept. He developed a habit at Shirdi of cooking his food and offering it to Sai Baba before eating it himself. One day he found that a beggar, a shudra by birth, was hovering nearby while the food was being cooked. Upasni drove the beggar away with some stern words, a gesture reflecting his brahmanical fear of pollution from lower castes.

When he subsequently took the prepared food to Sai Baba as usual, the old faqir refused to accept the food and instead drove him away. The disciple believed that Sai Baba was deliberately reflecting his own harsh treatment of the beggar. This event appears to have been the origin of Upasni's subsequent sense of identity with shudras and untouchables, an affinity that moved at an acute tangent to caste prejudices. "Wherever you may look, I am there," is one of the allusive statements made to him by the faqir.

Upasni initially stayed with other devotees at Shirdi. Then Sai Baba started to make statements like: "Have nothing to do with them. Your future is excellent; none of the others have such a future." At this juncture Upasni moved to the far more inhospitable Khandoba temple, which was inhabited by cobras. That temple was situated on the outskirts of Shirdi, and afforded a relative degree of seclusion. Most devotees and villagers would not have gone inside it, especially at night. Khandoba, sometimes described as a form of Shiva, was a popular deity in Maharashtra, and venerated by Hindu peasants and even by Muslims.

Resident devotees became jealous of the new recruit. Because of this distraction, Upasni kept asking Sai Baba that he (Upasni) might leave Shirdi. Permission was not granted, and instead there were more graphic and allusive statements from the faqir. "You should not now talk to me, and nor will I talk to you. After four years, you will have the full grace of Khandoba."

There were some occasions when Upasni adroitly approached the faqir during the latter's daily begging round in the village. Cryptic reassurances would be given. Then Upasni stopped seeing him, at last just "doing nothing" at Khandoba's temple. The caste life was over. He gained visions and experiences which he later described in fragments. He started to be averse to food, which he would throw away to dogs. He had no money left, and his clothes had become rags. Yet the faqir commented at the mosque that "everything I have has been passed to him (Upasni)." Such remarks were frequently puzzling to devotees.

There was a distinctive phase when Upasni stopped eating, reportedly for a whole year during 1913-14. He lost much weight, and became very thin. Yet during that same phase, he was intent upon performing hard manual labour, activities which extended to making roads and ploughing fields. He would now associate with untouchables, beggars, and common labourers. He had lost all caste pride. This development was an extension of "doing nothing," which entailed no obvious religious significance.

To some observers, he seemed crazy, no longer the decorous brahman mindful of the holy rites of his religious upbringing. He lived with snakes and scorpions in the distressed temple, and once embraced a dead horse. Some local youths and holy men mocked him, though some devotees remained incurably jealous. That situation of jealousy did not diminish when, in the summer of 1913, Sai Baba instructed some devotees to worship Upasni at the Khandoba temple in the same manner that he (Sai Baba) was worshipped at the mosque.

Thereafter, a reciprocal mood of empathy was in evidence to some close obervers. While sitting in the temple, Upasni would describe events that were occurring around Sai Baba in the mosque. Such happenings became celebrated as miracles in the reports later mediated via Narasimhaswami.

Upasni  Maharaj

The elevation of the disciple proved  too  much for the formative sectarian mentality at Shirdi, which subsequently discounted Upasni in preference for Sai devotionalism and the miracles attributed to Sai Baba. This development affords a significant  instance of  the  denominational  disposition  which  adheres to one revered  figure at  the  expense of more comprehensive factors.

Upasni became the target of acute jealousy from opinionated  devotees of Sai Baba. In 1914 he left the Shirdi area to move further afield, though he returned later (more than once), and finally settled on the outskirts of Sakori village in 1917. His very simple formative ashram was  initially an uninviting prospect, but a  number of Sai Baba’s devotees transferred allegiance to him.  Many brahmans were impressed by the ascetic saintliness and scriptural knowledge of Upasni  Maharaj (alias Upasni  Baba). He had become emaciated during  his sojourn at Khandoba’s temple, but he subsequently regained full  flesh and appears in photographs as an ascetic of robust  physique.

A distinguishing hallmark was his attire. Upasni appears to have disliked the conventional ochre robe that was worn by Hindu holy men. Instead he wore a strip of sackcloth (known as gunny cloth) that was draped over his body. His spartan lifestyle extended to confinement in a “cage” of  bamboo bars at Sakori ashram. His austere  traditional outlook disliked cameras, and he customarily scowled at the photographer.

Upasni made efforts to accommodate orthodox attitudes of the brahman caste, and these are reflected in his extant discourses. Yet there was an underlying  element of nonconformism. He early exhibited a strong sympathy with the untouchables, and also had a habit of bathing lepers. Such traits are not typical of Hindu gurus. He was very unpredictable in temperament, and like Sai Baba, he was prone to irascible moods when confronted  by inappropriate supplications and tendencies. He gained a reputation for leonine strength, and was known to place pretentious persons over his knee, slapping them like a naughty child.  He was six feet tall (or more), with a solid torso and powerful arms.

A very notable episode occurred at  Benares in 1919, soon after Upasni had settled at Sakori. The occasion was a maha-yajna, a sacrificial fire ritual attended by thousands of brahmans. There were over a hundred officiating priests at this revered rite. Upasni was contributing a feast, and insisted upon displaying a large painting of Sai Baba, who had died the previous year.

The priests reacted to that painting, and some of them complained that Sai Baba was a Muslim, which meant that they could not participate in a feast  which had such outcaste auspices. Upasni did not deny the Muslim identity, and at first tried to reason with the objectors. He was patient for some two hours, maintaining that Sai Baba was above religious distinctions, existing as much for brahmans as for Muslims.  He even offered to increase the payment for the ritual services of the officiating  priests.

His opponents insisted that the painting of the alien saint must be removed, and they refused to eat the food provided for them until this removal occurred. Upasni then lost patience, and told his disciples to give the unwanted food to the poor, who were summoned by banging drums. The objectors then anxiously apologised, realising that they were losing their food and the  increase in  payment (dakshina) for their officiating services.  Yet now it was Upasni who refused to comply. He derided the objectors, and asserted that Sai Baba was the real pundit (religious expert), and not the formal pundits of Benares. Now unrelenting, he broke up the entire assembly.  (45)

When in such a mood, Upasni  Maharaj could be very forthright.  He even demonstrated this to some extent when the increasingly famous politican Mahatma Gandhi visited him at Sakori. The date sometimes given for this event  is 1927. Gandhi apparently wished to gain the blessing of the sackcloth saint; however, Upasni did not award his visitor the red carpet treatment and was instead dour and offputting.  “You may be a great man, but what is that to me?”  (46)

Different interpretations of this event have been proffered. The most obvious one is that Upasni did not want any political involvement such as Gandhi represented. On his own part, Gandhi later complained to the Irani mystic  Meher Baba that he could not understand Upasni.  Meher  Baba was rather more amiable in temperament, and treated Gandhi with respect. However, the Irani (a disciple of Upasni) did assert that Upasni was a genuine spiritual master.

6.9     Meher  Baba

Meher Baba (1894-1969) was one of the two major disciples of Upasni Maharaj, and some say the most crucial instance. He was neither Muslim or Hindu, but an Irani  Zoroastrian. He was born Merwan Sheriar Irani, and his biography is far more detailed than that of Upasni or Sai Baba. His parents came from  the severely repressed Zoroastrian minority in Iran. Reared at Poona (Pune), he attended the Deccan College, having a talent for English literature. A spiritual experience then dramatically altered his horizons.

Afterwards Merwan personally encountered Sai Baba in 1915 on a visit to Shirdi. He subsequently became committed to Upasni Maharaj, visiting Sakori ashram from the inception, and even being present at the abovementioned  maha-yajna  in Benares. Merwan Irani  was also closely involved with the distinctive figure of Hazrat Babajan (d.1931), the female Muslim Sufi (and reputed centenarian) who became renowned at his birthplace of Poona.

The copious literature on Meher Baba includes important significators to the careers of  both Upasni Maharaj and Sai Baba.  Meher Baba and some of his disciples  knew a great deal about Upasni, and the Parsi Zoroastrian Gustadji Hansotia  was originally a pupil of Sai Baba before transferring to the other two.  The data from  these sources confirm that Sai  Baba was a Muslim, and reveal Upasni as a very complex figure elusive to hagiology.

The brahman devotees of Upasni stigmatised Meher Baba as an outcaste intruder into the Sakori ashram. He was unwelcome both as a Zoroastrian and as a favoured disciple of the brahman guru. The jealousy arising in his direction is reminiscent of the rather similar situation afflicting Upasni at Shirdi a few years earlier. Meher Baba moved on to other locales, arriving at a site a few miles south of Ahmednagar in 1923. That desolate and very inhospitable environment  was a disused military camp of the British, adjoining the village of Arangaon. Two years later, this site became Meherabad ashram, and was the eventual setting for the tomb of Meher Baba many years afterwards.

At Meherabad, the disciple of Babajan and Upasni created a hospital and a school for boys and girls, and also commenced his activity of personally ministering to the poor.  He gave close attention in varied ways to the local  untouchables of Arangaon. Yet  perhaps the most singular event was that in 1925 (July 10), the Irani ascetic  commenced strict silence, which he maintained until the end of his life.  He became dexterous at using an English alphabet board for communication.

Meherabad was in the same zone of  Maharashtra as Shirdi and Sakori, though further south of those two villages (located in Ahmednagar  District).  Meher Baba’s sympathy for the Indian untouchables emerged strongly  at Meherabad, and in 1932 he gained a significant (and completely unpublicised) interview with the untouchable leader Dr. Bhimrao R. Ambedkar.  Unlike many gurus, Meher  Baba would not compromise with caste stigmas or the elevation of ritualism. Caste was eliminated at his ashram.

A commercial writer who proved insensitive to various aspects of  the Irani’s background was the British journalist Paul Brunton (1898-1981), who visited  Meherabad in 1930 and who included misleading information in a popular book entitled A Search in Secret India  (1934).  Brunton here snubs Meher Baba as a “Parsee messiah,” and instead sides with the Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950). The narrative is deceptive, and not merely because the British writer gives a chronically inaccurate description of the Irani’s physiognomy. 

Brunton failed to disclose that he was initially an admirer of Meher Baba, and one who claimed telepathic experiences in this direction. Indeed, Brunton exercised such a strong interest in Meher Baba that he was regarded as a virtual devotee by the Saidapet ashram in  Madras, where he gave a talk in December 1930. This ashram was affiliated to Meher Baba, being run by well-educated Hindu devotees, who explicitly acknowledged Brunton as “the founder of the Meher League in England.” (The League had been created by the Saidapet  ashram, not by Meher Baba.)  It is evident from the documentation that Brunton was intending to further the League when he returned to Britain.

The conclusion is pressing that Brunton subsequently felt thwarted because his expectations were not fulfilled. His report of his subsequent sojourn at Baba’s Nasik ashram in February 1931 is more than a little misleading. The subsequent biographer of  Meher  Baba, namely Charles B. Purdom, states that when Brunton “then known as Raphael Hirsch, came to see me in London some time after his visit (to Meher Baba), he said he had no doubt Baba was false, as he, Raphael Hirsch, had  asked him to perform a miracle but Baba could not.”  (47)

Meher Baba was notably averse to the tendency of devotees and “seekers” to anticipate  miracles.  He evidently regarded that disposition as a psychological failing; he would sometimes shock this tendency, and at other times ignore it. 

The general context of Brunton’s published account in Secret India is very suspect, and some reported statements do not tally with other accounts of Meher Baba idioms. The clear intention of Brunton was to make the  Irani mystic look a fool for making extravagant claims. The latter did occasionally make private statements about  his “spiritual work” that can sound fantastic; however, the context awarded (or contrived) by Brunton might be considered more objectionable in view of background details that were omitted.

Brunton shows only a very superficial acquaintance with various factual details, and even derides Meher Baba’s  robe in terms of  “looks ludicrously like an old-fashioned English nightshirt.”  (48)  That long white robe was certainly a different  auspice to the ochre robe of the Hindu holy men who were a far more common sight.  Meher Baba never wore ochre, but instead a white  garment known as sadra that was closely related to the sacred shirt of Zoroastrian apparel. This garment did not in fact  match English nightshirts, and is rather more reminiscent of  the white kafni  worn by Muslim ascetics like Shirdi Sai. However, the relatively unfamiliar Zoroastrian context needs emphasising.

The distortions and pique of  Paul Brunton were strangely influential.  Many readers of his commercial book appear to have believed every word he wrote. He followed up with a string of bestselling “esoteric” books, and even added the description of himself as Dr. Paul Brunton to his public profile. He is on record as explicitly claiming the Ph.D. credential.

Many years later, it was discovered by an academic that the doctoral credential was fraudulent, amounting to a sheer  invention equivalent to the nebulous “Astral University,”  one of the fantasies in which Brunton indulged. (49)  Astral  travels are not  the best recommendation for misleading travel books about secret places. Some  partisans of Brunton continue to advertise the doctoral credential, and extol The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, which is a multi-volume work.

There is a pronounced  irony in the situation concerning  Ramana  Maharshi.  While Brunton chose to proclaim the merits of the Arunachala sage, no less a writer than B.V. Narasimhaswami was moving in the opposite direction.  The latter had composed the first biography of Ramana, as a consequence of his years at the Arunachala ashram as a disciple of Ramana.  The book Self-Realization  (1931) was widely read in later editions. Yet Advaita Vedanta proved too indigestible for Narasimhaswami, who then decided to adopt a different approach.  He now desired to become the disciple of  Meher Baba and to write the latter’s biography.  The Irani had gained Hindu devotees in Madras, and it was probably from this sector that the Arunachala disciple learned of the Meherabad  developments.

Narasimhaswami visited Meher Baba at his Nasik ashram (operative during the 1930s, and where Brunton stayed for several weeks in 1931)).  Yet the Irani mystic was not enthusiastic about accepting the new candidate as a disciple. The precise reasons are obscure.  (50)  Perhaps Baba felt  that  in defecting from Ramana Maharshi, Narasimhaswami might prove unreliable in future.  Meher Baba is known to have expressed respect  for Ramana, though they never met.  The Irani deflected Narasimhaswami to his fellow brahman Upasni Maharaj.  Narasimhaswami became the devotee and biographer of Upasni, but defected in the face of adverse impressions created by hostile brahmans, who wanted to enforce strict caste attitudes against  the equality for women that was nurtured by the Sakori guru.

Meher Baba had auburn hair, indicative of his Irani ethnicity. He wore his hair long in the early years of his career, though during the 1930s he resorted to a braid, which he subsequently favoured on a permanent  basis. Of average height, his cranium was in large proportion to his physique. He did not possess the dramatically receding forehead which Paul Brunton so dubiously described. His physique was lean, though filling out in his later years. He would probably have lost in a wrestling match with the formidable Upasni Maharaj, but his stamina appears to have been pronounced; it is said that only the strongest men in his entourage could maintain the pace  he demanded on so many of his laborious journeys in India, which could easily become marathon tests of endurance. Meher Baba was  a fast walker and an agile hill climber.

Charles Purdom has left the following firsthand description of the Irani saint, relating to the early 1930s:

“Baba is a small man, five feet six inches in height, slight in build, with a rather large head or a head that appears to be large, an aquiline nose, and an olive complexion. He is extremely animated, has a mobile face, constantly smiles, and has expressive hands and gestures. He creates the opposite of a sense of remoteness or strangeness, making an immediately friendly appeal to those who meet him. He is indeed disarming in his obvious simplicity, and the atmosphere that surrounds him might be described as that of innocence. He is childlike and mischievous as well as innocent. I discovered, and others have told me, that he is a superb actor with quickly changing moods.”  (51)

The reference to being mischievous relates to a sense of humour, which was pronounced. This attribute is confirmed by a number of the sources. Although an ascetic type, Meher Baba was anything but the stereotyped image of the mournful penitent. His fasts and seclusions are perhaps more interesting in view of such factors. He did not encourage asceticism or renunciation in his followers, and strongly advocated a "be in the world but not of the world" outlook.

The first thirty years of  Meher Baba’s ashram career were marked by many incognito journeys, including some to Western countries in the 1930s. In India, he customarily travelled by third class rail, which could frequently be a difficult experience. (52) He demonstrated strong humanitarian and philanthropic tendencies, personally ministering to lepers and diverse indigents. He had a rather uncommon habit of washing the feet of poor people  and presenting them with a gift of food and clothing (or cloth), and sometimes money.  He maintained these traits  until the end of his life.

In 1936,  Meher Baba created at Rahuri (about 30 miles north of Ahmednagar) a settlement for mad people, whom he personally tended. This became known as the Mad Ashram. Every day he would scour the ashram latrine, a task relegated to untouchables or low caste people in many Hindu ashrams. There was no publicity for this rather distinctive project, which had no economic motive.

The project was moved to Meherabad the following  year, and was the precursor of more specialised activities with the obscure category defined as mast (God-intoxicated), comprising many Hindu and Muslim specimens on a nationwide basis. The only publicity for this unusual pursuit occurred in a book published in 1948 and written by an English medical doctor  (William Donkin), who personally observed a number of the events described.  (53)

The charity for  the poor maintained by Meher Baba was frequently anonymous. The selected needy persons were generally given numbered  tickets supplying the address and date of the venue. The name of the benefactor was not given, and Meher Baba  was effectively incognito when he dispensed money or other gifts with his own  hands.  (54) Unlike certain Hindu gurus, he did not delegate philanthropic work to devotees, but instead performed the task himself.

There was no caste management at his ashrams. He supervised everything himself, maintaining a simple routine and gaining a degree of donor funding that enabled him to support various devotees and their families. The small number of ashram devotees were known as mandali, predominantly men but also some women, who all lived a simple lifestyle that involved ordinary clothes and no distinctive regalia. There was no ritualism or initiation.

During the late 1930s, a significant gesture was made by Upasni Maharaj. Via messengers, Upasni repeatedly requested Meher Baba to take over management of Sakori ashram. This tactic effectively dramatised the insular attitude of the existing caste Hindu management towards the Irani disciple. That management had been insisting for many years that Meher Baba was only an ordinary disciple of Upasni, just like them. This relegation was attended by their fear of his (Meher Baba's) resistance to caste ritualism and his known sympathies with the cause of untouchables.

The Irani disciple (now quite independent) would not agree to the request of Upasni, complaining at the Hindu ritualism that was prominent at Sakori and which signified caste exclusivism. Meher Baba stated that all the Hindu rituals would have to stop at Sakori if he agreed to the request.

After several years of this unusual series of communications (ongoing since 1936), Upasni became compliant with the counter request. In 1940, Meher Baba at last agreed to purchase Sakori ashram, on the basis of the exceptional arrangement about eliminating ritualism. However, nothing came of the proposal, which was evidently resisted by prominent Hindu devotees at Sakori, who viewed Meher Baba as an alien rival.

The last meeting between Meher Baba and Upasni Maharaj occurred in October 1941, at the insistent request of the latter. The venue was a solitary hut at Dahigaon, not far from Sakori.  These two entities had not met for nearly  twenty years. The event was unpublicised, and only a few  persons were present. Upasni died two months later  at Sakori. 

Not until the 1950s did a new attitude emerge at Sakori. This change was brought about by Godavari Mataji, the female disciple of Upasni who had become the recognised spiritual leader of Sakori ashram. Her role had been elevated by the management, who were now very disconcerted to discover that she revered Meher Baba.

Godavari prevailed upon the management to allow Meher Baba to visit Sakori, first in 1952 and later in March 1954. The first visit was very brief. A detailed account exists of the more extensive sequel. Meher Baba proved to be tactful on that occasion, despite the stigmas which had been aimed at him in the past. He was very appreciative of Godavari Mataji, who also visited Meherabad with some of the other Sakori nuns. Meher Baba subsequently made further visits to Sakori ashram due to the intervention of Godavari. (55)

Though born  a  Zoroastrian, Meher  Baba was markedly universalist in outlook.  His early following comprised Hindus, Muslims, and  Zoroastrians. He was noted for his disciplined way of life. Despite his lifelong silence commencing in 1925, he communicated  fluently via an alphabet board and gesture language. His major book exhibits an unusual  format, including many terms drawn from Sufism and Vedanta. He spoke Persian, Gujarathi, Marathi, and English. The Sufi streak in his thinking is fairly strong, though by no means  total. He would not identify himself with any one religious or mystical tradition. For such reasons, he has proved difficult to classify.

Meher Baba abundantly demonstrated the religio-mystical syncretism which had been occurring in Maharashtra over the centuries. He made this very explicit in his major work, published in 1955, which incorporated Arabo-Persian and Sanskrit (and Marathi) vocabularies, thus strongly attesting Sufi and Vedantic  associations. Ironically, this significant factor has been generally ignored. 

He may be viewed as a successor  to some aspects of the legacy associated with the Nizam Shahi kingdom of Ahmednagar, founded  in 1494 and surviving into the seventeenth century.  That regional dynasty was established by a brahman  convert to Islam, namely Ahmed Nizam Shah, who had a strong ancestral link with Pathri. The Nizam Shahi dynasty, with their capital at Ahmednagar, exhibited more religious tolerance than many other Muslim overlords. They were keen to patronise learning, with Persian constituting their official language. The Deccani Urdu dialect was strongly nurtured in this territory, resulting from a combination of  Persian, Arabic,  and Marathi.  (56) 

Certain associations with Hinduism are misleading. Meher Baba did integrate some features of Hindu philosophy and terminology, but he was basically at variance with the caste system, religious ritualism, and diverse trappings believed to represent spirituality. He was known to criticise Vedantic punditry, which so fluently recited scriptures and assumed that numerous renunciates were "knowers of Brahman." He himself ministered to sadhus (holy men) in his rather distinctive charitable projects, but he would emphasise that such categories are not spiritually advanced (save perhaps in exceptional cases).

His own teaching does strongly feature reincarnation, though in an expanded format difficult to find elsewhere. He applied an intensive emphasis to the Sanskrit word sanskara ("impression"), here meaning an impression in the mind or a binding operative in consciousness. Ritualists and yogis had used this term differently; Meher Baba is much closer to the latter, though still distinctive. He discountenanced yogic exercises, which he viewed as bindings comprising impressions (sanskaras) that trap the mind.

He sometimes referred to the situation of yogis who claim the "stopped state of mind" in meditation. That condition, in which the mind is temporarily suspended, is deceptive. Meher Baba observed that when the meditation ceases, the yogi is again subject to the complex flow of impressions in the mind. He has not escaped the sanskaras, which may even intensify.

Meher Baba did not view meditation as an end in itself, and maintained that this common resort cannot achieve what he called "God-realisation." This latter attainment he depicted as being extremely rare, one reason being that the impressions in the mind must be completely eliminated for this realisation to occur. Yet the elimination is virtually impossible in view of the nature of impressions acting on the mind.

The scope for delusion is prodigious amongst enthusiasts of "nondualism" and other mystical concepts. How does anyone break through the subjective net of impressions which determine thoughts and actions ? According to Meher Baba, only some of the 56 God-realized entities (living at any one time) are capable of eliminating the binding sanskaras in the mind of a suitably prepared individual. This version differs quite substantially from conventional and popular presentations of enlightenment, and also from the Aurobindo format [see Anthropography: Diverse Studies and Aurobindo Ghose].

The "spiritual hierarchy" theme of Meher Baba has some affinities with the "hierarchy of saints (awliya)" found in Sufism, though the format is different. The five leaders are here described in terms of qutub, an Arabic word meaning "axis" or "pivot." In Sufism, the five are sometimes split into the qutub and four awtad ("pillars"). The Irani exegete included (as an equivalent for qutub) the Hindu term sadguru, which he translated as "perfect master," a nuance intended to distinguish between a proficient grade and lesser roles of guru, yogi, and advaitin.

The version of Meher Baba was that of an independent mystic who had no link with organisational groupings associated with Islamic Sufism or Hinduism. His correlation of terminology between the Sufi and Vedantic traditions appears to have been unique. Furthermore, his version of transmigration through the species is explicable from a Darwinian perspective, though in a spiritualised format eschewing both Darwinist materialism and the superstitions about retrograde incarnation that can be found in Asiatic religions.

        
During the latter part of his life, from the 1940s, Meher Baba was active at another ashram called Meherazad, to the north of Ahmednagar and nearer Sakori. That new ashram (near the village of Pimpalgaon) remained secluded, and was very different to some of the more public institutions of Hindu gurus existing elsewhere. Meanwhile, he continued his incognito journeys, though he also undertook public darshans on a very intermittent  basis.  In the 1950s he made an open claim to being the avatar, a Hindu term  meaning a divine incarnation. That proved to be the most controversial aspect of his career.

A motoring accident in 1956 curtailed his movements, leaving him with a damaged hip.  In the late 1960s, he became noted for contesting the supposed spiritual validity of drug experiences, a notion which had become fashionable in the West.  He was especially concerned to oppose the popular beliefs about LSD that became rife amongst the hippy generation. His tomb (built to his own specification in 1938) at Meherabad  resembles the Sufi dargahs of the Deccan, though relatively plain and unadorned.  (57)

After his death, the Western followers of Meher Baba promoted a rather sentimental devotionalism. Many of them tended to favour simplistic catchphrases like “Don’t worry be happy.” That represented an aside of their figurehead, not his teaching, which remained relatively obscure, like many of the biographical details. [See also Meher Baba profile, 2010.]

6.10     The  Sai   Baba  Movement   at  Issue

The close juxtaposition of the abovementioned three saints (or whatever they are diversely called) in Maharashtra  has been considered distinctive, and even unique. These three entities (Sai  Baba, Upasni Baba, Meher Baba) were closely interlinked in terms of personal affiliations. Their geographical proximity is relevant. They covered a whole century and three Eastern religions between  them, with Christian and other followers being  added. The linguistic range encompassed  Persian, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarathi, Sanskrit, and English.

This convergence has been dubbed the “Sai Baba movement.” Yet a problem is evident in such description. That is because the phrase “Sai Baba movement” has been innovated by supporters of Sathya Sai Baba, whose career occurred in a different part of India. The contention of those supporters has amounted to endorsing the claim of Sathya Sai to be the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai. The assumption is that Sathya Sai represents the culmination of the “movement” signified. This view has been contested, and the basic claim has been particularly unpopular with the Sai  Baba Sansthan of Shirdi, who are the most influential of the three Maharashtrian sects (or movements) mentioned above.

Analysts have noted that the supporters of Sathya Sai  tend very much to relegate Upasni  Maharaj and Meher Baba (and others) in  the sectarian preference for Shirdi Sai being reincarnated as Sathya Sai. Those intervening figures are mentioned (mainly Upasni), but in a purely secondary context.  From Shirdi to Puttaparthi is the basic  emphasis of this interpretation.

The Puttaparthi ashram of Sathya Sai Baba is situated in Andhra Pradesh. From the initially humble beginnings in 1948, that ashram (known as Prashanthi Nilayam) grew into a very wealthy complex of buildings. Devotees have extolled  the  humanitarian  activities of Sathya Sai, and his ashram has been promoted as a paradise of love and spirituality. His miracles are believed to confirm his authority as a God-man, and his major work Sathya Sai Speaks has received partisan acclaim as divine messages. That work is an extensive multi-volume presentation, the sub-title being  Discourses of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba.  No less than thirty-six volumes have appeared since this project commenced over fifty years ago.

In another camp, disaffected Western ex-devotees say that  the humanitarian activities at  Puttaparthi are easy to maintain via wealthy devotees, who actually do the work involved. Sathya Sai is said to maintain a formidable security force to protect the ashram. There have been allegations of sexual (homosexual) abuse by the guru, though these are denied by devotee spokesmen. Many Western devotees left the movement in disillusionment from  the year 2000 onwards. There have been some strong criticisms from that sector of Sathya Sai Speaks, and also the hagiological works supporting this lengthy collection of discourses.

Accusations have been  lodged about economic manipulation at  Puttaparthi.  There has certainly been an extensive funding involved, making possible the elaborate building programme at Puttaparthi. The ashram mandir(temple) is ornate, and Sathy Sai Baba has been described as creating “palaces.”  A comparison with the Maharashtra trio in the  “movement”  is surely relevant.

Shirdi Sai never created an ashram, and merely lived in a rural mosque while daily begging his food. Upasni Maharaj did permit his brahman  devotees to build temples at Sakori ashram, a development which changed the character of that simple site, though the scale of innovation was not comparable to the far more lavish Puttaparthi project. 

Meher Baba established two permanent ashrams in the Ahmednagar zone, but these were both simple in appearance.  The Irani mystic did not permit temples, and the utility structures in favour were basic, not elaborate.  Indeed, the early colony at Meherabad was dismantled after only two years duration (1925-6), the population subsequently decreasing and eventually becoming sparse. This was not a public venue after the 1920s. Meherazad also remained simple to the end, housing only a small number of devotees and likewise not being a public venue. There was nothing here even remotely resembling the daily darshan (audience, meeting) at  Puttaparthi, where Western guests were encouraged in large numbers from the 1970s onwards.

The disputed claim of Sathya Sai to be a reincarnation of Shirdi Sai arose in circumstances influenced by the popular “Shirdi revival” associated with B. V. Narasimhaswami, whose  books were  read  in South India  from 1938, being published at Madras. The official date for the declaration of reincarnation is 1940, though this has been revised to 1943 by ex-devotee Brian Steel. Either date would accommodate Narasimhaswami’s version of  “Sai Baba bhakti” and the attendant hagiology  of  miracles. However, the revised date allows a much stronger anchorage in this respect.

Another controversial  feature of Sathya Sai’s teenage years was his strong inclination to practise sleight of hand magic tricks, which critics say he later developed into an ambitious programme of deception extending to jewellery and holy ash.  A further drawback is that the extensive literature on Sathya Sai is markedly hagiographical.

The version of Shirdi Sai by Sathya Sai has been enthusiastically extolled at Puttaparthi, but  received with caution elsewhere. The relevant discourses have been observed to minimise the Muslim Sufi element and to reflect some themes of Narasimhaswami, including the alleged birth at Pathri.  (58)

The term “Sai Baba Movement” arose in the 1970s and was proposed by a Western academic in 1972. The innovator was principally referring to Shirdi Sai, Upasni Maharaj, Godavari Mataji, and Sathya Sai. He was evidently influenced by the Sathya Sai sect, and had met Sathya Sai at the latter’s Whitefield ashram (near Bangalore) in 1969. (59)  Another academic writer in the pro-Sathya category added a brief version of  Meher Baba at a later date.  (60)

Ex-devotee Brian Steel has recently commented on the misleading nature of  the 1972 version, which stated: “The competence of Sathya Sai Baba to serve as the successor of Shirdi Sai Baba is increasingly recognised in the Sai Baba cult.” (61) Steel duly emphasises that “it is no secret outside Andhra Pradesh that most followers of Shirdi Sai have never accepted Sathya’s incarnation claims.” See further the critique by Brian Steel, On the Terms “Sai  Baba” and “the Sai  Baba  Movement” (December 2008).

A number of scholars were observed to accept the description of “Sai Baba Movement” in a rather facile manner. This seems to have been initially the case with the late Dr. Marianne Warren (d. 2004), though she eventually repudiated the basic associations in train.  A devotee of Sathya Sai, her research on Shirdi Sai arrived at the overwhelming conclusion of a full-bodied Sufi identity that contradicted the Hinduized accounts. Observers noted the acute discrepancy with the version of Sathya Sai. Dr. Warren’s lengthy book Unravelling the Enigma (1999) was a clarification of many anomalies, though some issues were still awaiting resolution.

Soon after publication of the first edition, Dr. Warren seceded from the Sathya Sai movement, instead siding with the growing ex-devotee mood of reaction.  She subsequently contributed a revised edition (2004) of her book shortly before her death,  amending the preface with some accusing statements aimed at her former guru. She now  said that Sathya Sai had introduced “typical puranic stories” about the birth and life of the Shirdi saint, and  by this she meant  fictions of a Hinduizing nature.  Dr. Warren also wrote the introduction to an intended future volume that would expose Sathya Sai. She now totally disagreed with the reincarnation claim, which  she viewed as a symptom of opportunism.  See my web entry Shirdi Sai Baba and Dr. Marianne Warren's Rejection of Sathya Sai   (2008).

Another ex-devotee has pointed out  that what the reincarnation claim enthusiasts are celebrating is actually the “Sathya Sai Baba Movement” of Andhra, not the earlier associated events in Maharashtra. See Brian Steel, web article linked above, and citing a recent academic work by Dr. Smriti Srinivas.  (62)  See further the review by Steel of that work.  Brian Steel here accuses Dr. Srinivas of failure to give due attention to the first two volumes of Sathya Sai Speaks, which comprise discourses and claims recorded between 1953 and the early 1960s, “a period which most academics have also ignored, preferring to be guided by the Sathya Sai Organisation’s simplistic selection of four ‘landmark’ Discourses to indicate the progression of Sathya Sai Baba’s claims.”

Steel also urges that Dr. Srinivas has demonstrated “a tendency to read and use material favourable to Sathya Sai Baba and the official story of his Mission, while ignoring other points which have recently come to light.”  Brian Steel stresses that certain critical works are missing from the lengthy bibliography of In the Presence of Sai  Baba (2008), including those by Dr. Dale Beyerstein which query the alleged paranormal powers of the Puttaparthi  guru.

“Although she (Srinivas) shows signs of being aware of critical Internet activity about Sathya Sai  Baba in the past six years, she has chosen, deliberately (see pp. 333-334), not to examine it, thereby laying herself open to the criticism of staying too close to the ‘official line’ on Sathya Sai Baba, however unconsciously this may have occurred.”  (Steel, internet review of Srinivas, section 5).

The Steel analysis continues by emphasising the discrepancy evident in the Srinivas book of not adequately distinguishing between “two Sai Baba Movements.” He justifiably states that the Shirdi Sai (Baba) Movement should be distinguished from the Sathya Sai (Baba) Movement. The point being that “Srinivas makes frequent specific references to the ‘Sathya Sai Baba Movement’ as a synonym for her (debatable) concept of the ‘Sai Baba Movement’.”

Brian Steel pointedly alights upon the idea (favoured by Srinivas) of the two Sai figures being “identified” within the Sathya Sai Baba Movement.  He observes that this claim “is clearly Sathya-centric and Shirdi-exclusive.” Nearly forty pages further on, Dr. Srinivas acknowledges that the Sai Baba Sansthan at Shirdi “does not recognise any successor to [Shirdi] Sai  Baba.” 

Steel concludes that the Srinivas presentation “makes the elementary mistake” of regarding the allegations of sexual abuse as being the most central of the recent controversies about Sathya Sai. Some academics conveniently treat the status of allegation as being cause to ignore the controversy. 

“Coincidentally, but more deliberately, the Sathya Sai Organisation often adopts a similar attitude in order to be able to issue lofty dismissals of all critical comment and discussion” (Steel review of Srinivas).

According to Steel, a more fundamental issue than the sexual allegations are the obvious discrepancies in the content of Sathya Sai Speaks and the original Telegu discourses.  Yet these too are ignored by the disputed commentary.

The present writer contributed an annotated book on the “Sai Baba Movement” that was repudiated and suppressed on Wikipedia by an American partisan of Sathya Sai. The strident attack by Gerald Joe Moreno (in 2006) was made in a clear context of total opposition to ex-devotee objections (and allegations) in relation to the Puttaparthi guru, objections which I had reported in appendices. The text of the proscribed book gave a basically sympathetic treatment to three other gurus/saints (Shirdi Sai, Upasni Maharaj, Meher Baba). The observer verdict over quite a  wide spectrum has been one of alarm at belligerent sectarian tactics. See further my web entries Wikipedia Issues and Sathya Sai Baba (2009) and Wikipedia, Gerald Joe Moreno, Google (2008). See also Internet Terrorist on the present  website.

The activities of some American sectarians, comprising a vehement campaign against ex-devotees and other critics, have created a further bad reputation in the West for the Puttaparthi guru. That adverse reputation is  mounting in sectors not yoked to the concept of Sathya Sai Baba Movement, which derives support from the questionable claim of reincarnation identity and miracle beliefs. 

The discrepancies attaching to “Sai Baba movement” conceptualism are not restricted to the reincarnation  controversy. There is also the relatively neglected matter of  two avatars being discernible in the supposed “movement” theorised by Charles White  and  others. The word  avatar belongs to the Hindu lexicon and generally has the  meaning of divine incarnation. The two major devotional biographies of Meher Baba supply relevant details. In February 1954,  Meher Baba  publicly confirmed  his avatar  role  by dictating on his alphabet board the words “Avatar Meher Baba ki jai,” representing a devotional  salute  that he had never before acknowledged. The biographers make much of this, and relay that he was formerly indifferent to what people called him.  (63)

It is true enough that for many years the title of Meher Baba was often merely Shri, a common term of respect amongst Hindus, and sometimes Sadguru, which is more celebratory. But as from February 10, 1954, Meher Baba referred to himself as avatar both in public and in private. He subsequently supplied complex explanations of the avatar role. He is known to have made earlier sporadic private references to his avatar identity, and these date back to the late 1920s.

The venue for the public confirmation was  Mahewa, in the Hamirpur district of Uttar Pradesh. This event occurred during a darshan  tour, which gained a sequel that same month in Andhra. In response to invitations, Meher Baba visited a number of towns in Andhra, such as Eluru and Rajahmundry, many thousands of people being involved. These darshan  tours represented a major extension of his contact with Hindus in a devotional milieu.  At Eluru, he also visited a temple dedicated to Shirdi Sai, and is reported to have said of the latter: “He is my Grandfather.”  (64) The meaning related to a spiritual ancestry devolving via Upasni Maharaj.

These events occurred during the very early years of the Puttaparthi ashram, and before the discourses of Sathya Sai began to be published in 1955 (in the form of Sathya Sai Speaks).  The  avataric claims of both Meher Baba  and Sathya Sai Baba sound  fantastic to most critical assessors, though the former did not annexe any recent saint in his claim.  Meher Baba instead referred to a long term cyclical manifestation of avataric entities, meaning the founders of religions. This theme might  be interpreted as an attempt  to embrace or unite different  religions, five of which were mentioned in the exegesis under discussion. The Irani avatar of Maharashtra nevertheless remained impervious to miracle consumerism, which he frequently criticised, and this is one of his most impressive traits. He was also very resistant to the caste system and attendant forms of ritualism.

In contrast, Sathya Sai  formulated a theme of “triple avatar,” as this has been called. The pivotal reference often cited dates to July 6, 1963, and can be found in Vol. 3 of Sathya Sai Speaks.  In the relevant discourse Shiva-Shakthi, Sathya Sai  briefly referred to himself as an incarnation of Shiva and Shakti  (Shiva is the Hindu “destroyer” deity, and Shakti is the feminine consort). Shirdi Sai is here described as an incarnation of Shiva, while the third in the series is named as Prema Sai Baba, here identified with Shakti. (The description has caused confusion in some reports, though it is actually quite explicit.)  In a later statement, Sathya Sai said that he will live  to the age of 96 (i.e., 2022), and that Prema Sai will be born eight years after.

It is difficult to ignore the fact that two rival avatars emerge in this scenario. The earlier one is obscured by the contemporary Sathya Sai Baba Movement. However, the Shirdi Sai Sansthan also tends to screen out  extensions, and so outsiders may duly reflect on the complexities involved in “Sai Baba movement.”  In general, the latter phrase amounts to a rather confusing  academic convenience, a superficial blanket ascription in which sectarian preferences are accentuated.

A contested book by Professor Smriti Srinivas is In the Presence of Sai Baba (2008). This work acknowledges that the bulk of material employed was furnished by the Sathya Sai Baba Movement. The Srinivas coverage evidences a disinterest in critical sources from ex-devotees and others. In the eyes of critics, that form of   presentation, though innovative in a sociological sense, is nevertheless too convergent with sectarian exegesis. Such convergence is increasingly questionable in view of what has recently been occurring in this field.

A sectarian tactic was conducted by Gerald Joe Moreno on Wikipedia in 2006, and has a blog/website sequel. The loaded pro-Sathya campaign of Moreno denotes an unyielding attitude amounting to: “remove or caricature all sources that compromise sectarian priorities and beliefs.”

The disadvantages of sectarian tactic should be obvious. Yet  American anthropology extends a form of argument (associated by critics with Professor Smriti Srinivas) that has similarly eschewed sources embarrassing to sectarian conceptualism and doctrine.  Until the distorting nature of sectarian thinking is seen for what it is, sociological and anthropological clichés about, e.g., urban/rural distinctions, devotional memory, and sectarian globalisation, might count more as a distraction than a social science solution to data complexities.

The Srinivas presentation benefits from fieldwork in different countries, and formulates a sociological theory in relation to sectarian centres of the Sathya Sai  Baba  Movement.  This theory differs from official doctrines of the sect.  Some basic themes are declared in the sub-title, i.e., body, city, and memory. Some analysts think that devotional memory is the most significant of these components. Yet there are disadvantages signified by the  excision factor and the convergence with sectarian beliefs denoted by "Sathya Sai Baba movement." Devotional (and sectarian) memory frequently screens out matters disconcerting to doctrine, and in this respect the same process is at work in both urban and rural locales.  Perhaps even worse, basic events are easily obscured if an academic coverage has a tendency to bypass some of the most revealing information.

The web inquisition of Gerald Joe Moreno is strongly associated with the SSO (Sathya Sai Organisation), sometimes described as International Sai Organisation, which is misleading in that  there are two Sai entities to account for. The SSO is inseparable from the presiding official  Michael Goldstein of California, who is strongly alleged to be in affinity with the internet terrorism located in an urban locale (Las Cruces) of New Mexico.  The  total absence of sectarian accountability has resulted in a defamatory agenda aimed at critics of anomalies. 

The limitations of “devotional memory” can be pronounced. The Muslim faqir Shirdi Sai was de-Islamized to fit Hindu devotee preferences.  The Irani Zoroastrian Meher Baba was censored  by brahmanical caste prejudices in the devotional following of Upasni Maharaj at Sakori.  The Shirdi variant of devotional memory discounted the eulogistic statements of Sai Baba about Upasni and instead opted to view the latter as a peripheral  factor. The Hindu champion of female celibates was subsequently libelled by ultra-conservative Hindu insularists, who were  devotees of various gods and scriptures.

Moreno  internet  terrorism (associated with Goldstein and the SSO)  militates against anything outside SSO sectarian exegesis. That  is what  can happen in devotional memory and globalisation drives, and the urban populations should be alerted accordingly, in case more extensive injuries result  to outsiders from the campaign of web harassment. 

While a sector of American anthropology (associated with the University of California) opts for the excision factor, the standard of elucidation remains at the heavily compromised stage of effective support for sectarian sources at the expense of ex-devotee and related non-sectarian critiques. Criteria such as “devotional memory” require to be complemented and enlarged. The globalisation of the Sathya Sai sect is surely no excuse for libellous blogs and the extremist website saisathyasai.com (quite apart from the proscribing Wikipedia User page of SSS108, perpetuated on Google Search even though Gerald Joe Moreno, alias SSS108, has been banned by Wikipedia). See article 5 on this website.

Two of the buzz phrases associated with the disputed book In the  Presence of Sai Baba (2008) are “understandings of citizenship” and “new  forms of urban modernity.”  What  does this actually mean in real life rather than academic theory?  To take a known recent  example: an eighty year old relative of mine (my mother) has been harassed by the Moreno sectarian campaign flourishing in the urban  modernity of New Mexico (not too far away from California).  Five copyrighted photographs of her have been insolently and vindictively paraded on the primary Moreno website known as saisathyasai.com, a sectarian excess permitted by the SSO and also by Google Search. There was an accompanying mockery caption, and an offensive paragraph which incorporated a known libel promulgated by the dubious Findhorn Foundation (against whom legal action has commenced in Britain). 

The victim had done absolutely nothing to merit  such a calculating attack from the internet terrorism of the Sathya Sai Baba cult, which is capable of extremist  license.  She was attacked because she is my mother. The issue of relatives being targeted by manic cult psychology is now on the agenda for realistic analysis.

The  problematic insulation from citizen realities demonstrated by “social science” stands in contrast to the concern elsewhere with visible drawbacks. For instance, it has been observed how the Moreno syndrome demonstrated the shift  from vilification of ex-devotees to denunciation of a complete outsider – though some journalists and the BBC had  also  been castigated.  While it is conceded by close  analysts that  many of  the devotees (especially in India and Africa) do not evidence aggression, a growing  fear is that  the provocative  example set  by Moreno (allegedly backed by Goldstein) could prove contagious elsewhere in the Sathya Sai movement, more  especially in America. This matter might too easily lead to a widespread  spate of  harassments and libels, plus other problems.

The intensive blog output of the libeller in New Mexico has recently received close appraisal, and a strongly negative conclusion has  been reached. The preferred anonymity of  Gerald Joe  Moreno (alias Equalizer et al) is unfortunately another problem, making it difficult for uninformed parties to discern the web ploys conducted in  the cause of Sathya Sai  Baba.

“New forms of urban modernity” are perhaps particularly dangerous in a country like  America, where there is no limit to misrepresentation by the blog detritus and cultweb encouraged by blogspot.com and wordpress.com.  New forms of international  legal expertise are required to deal  with the excesses, which are American, and inimical to  the misunderstood and abused citizenship trashed by “devotional memory” and  sectarian globalisation at defective blogger level.

Meanwhile, the ex-devotee analyst Brian Steel has contributed an important online bibliography relating to Sathya Sai. His reports on the relevant  literature have included a description of the influential four volume biography by Narayan Kasturi as “rank hagiography.” (This refers to Sathyam Sivam Sundaram, 1961-80)). Kasturi is reported to have acknowledged a heavy debt to a booklet of 30 pages dating to 1944, originally written in Telegu by  V. C. Kondappa.  Sixty years later, the translation has been entitled Sai’s Story, and includes the claim that this was the first book ever written about Sathya Sai. The contents include several pages of alleged early Shirdi Sai biography in relation to the reincarnation claim of Sathya Sai which had so recently been aired, in 1943 and not in 1940 as Kasturi believed.  (65)

Brian Steel has also offered many pressing reflections upon the discourses of Sathya Sai. He comments upon the recent Convocation discourse of 22/11/2008. In that discourse, the guru gave the misleading message of “No bombs for India,” a statement which completely ignored the ongoing terrorist attacks in India. The embarrassing statement was quickly removed from the (visible internet) discourse in question by the Sathya Sai Organisation  and devotee websites.

Ex-devotees made much of this matter. In the excised paragraph, Sathya Sai stated that "in India, there is no fear of bombs; India will never have any such attacks." This invalid assertion was made immediately prior to the grim terrorist attack at Mumbai in late November 2008. The guru mistakenly claimed that America and Germany were in a far more critical condition of fear about terrorism. It was well known that India had been suffering terrorist attacks for two years or so. Sathya Sai was clearly out of contact with current events.

According to Steel, “the constant disappearance of embarrassing or incorrect utterances by Sathya  Sai Baba  is a well documented phenomenon.” Critics maintain that extensive editing has been applied before publication to the Telegu discourses of the Puttaparthi guru.

In 2002, a flourishing multilingual website maintained by some devotees of Sathya Sai (a group called Premsai) “totally disappeared from the Internet.” This Premsai website  inadvertently afforded clear proof about the extent of official editing pertaining to the guru’s Telegu discourses before their publication in several languages. Steel relates that “the new insights into the Discourses also raised important questions outside devotee circles about  the official image of Sathya Sai Baba as  projected for so many years by the Sathya Sai Organisation.”

The same researcher further urges that  a comparison of  literal  translations and the final edited form of discourses reveals that Sathya Sai Baba's “impromptu public preaching in Telegu is rambling, not very well structured, and sometimes contains unclear or muddled statements, discrepancies, and errors.” Ex-devotees have  accordingly objected to the guru’s  claim of omniscience which has been strongly promoted by the Sathya Sai Organisation. See Brian Steel, Sathya Sai Baba Discourse Evidence Disappears from Public View: the Latest Case  (December 2008).  Click  here. The same writer has also made a recent visit to the ashram of Sathya Sai.  (66)

In more general terms, the problem of deficient gurus has recently been spotlighted by the Indian Rationalist cause. One of the spokesmen here is Professor Narendra Nayak, who has urged the elimination of godmen and superstitions from India. This is a controversial issue, though one recently lent profile by events in Kerala. In May 2008, Swami Amrithachaithanya “was arrested in Kochi for alleged rape and possession of narcotics and pornographic films.” Furthermore, “after the incident, complaints against  godmen started pouring in from various parts of the state [Kerala], prompting the government to initiate a statewide crackdown.”

Kevin  R. D. Shepherd
July 2009

UPDATE:  Tulasi  Srinivas  and  the  Politics  of  Religion

In 2010, a significant book was published by Columbia University Press.  Professor Tulasi Srinivas, an anthropologist at Emerson College, emerged with a version of the Sathya Sai Baba sect that broke new ground in academic literature. Professor Srinivas included some coverage of dissident online reports. This dimension is considered relevant by the more thorough investigators, though frequently ignored to date by political strategies and one-sided academic commentaries.

A variety of sources were employed by Professor Srinivas in Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism through the Sathya Sai Movement (2010). In contrast to the amiable academic reviews was a very hostile coverage by the Pro-Sai activist Gerald Joe Moreno (of New Mexico), appearing on his website saisathyasai.com and his blog at geraldjoemoreno.wordpress.com. That disapproving review is dated June 30th, 2010, and is composed in the third person, as are many Moreno pseudonymous blogs that appear under names like Equalizer. Moreno asserts that Winged Faith is "poorly researched, highly biased." This opinion urges that the book by Professor Srinivas "heavily relies" upon the critical internet material supplied by disillusioned devotees of Sathya Sai Baba.

Moreno applied the stigma of "tattered research" to the Srinivas book. This is strongly reminiscent of other verdicts from the same blogger concerning materials and publications that are not invested with academic status. The fact that professorial research is also denigrated as an aberration may be significant. Professor Srinivas spent nine years in her research, and therefore may have been getting to grips with the controversial subject.

Emerson College has supplied a description of Winged Faith in terms of telling "the promising and problematic story of a rapidly globalizing Indic sect." However, Gerald Joe Moreno does not recognise any problematic elements, which are instead considered to lie solely with the critics.

A familiar theme of Moreno is that he is not a devotee of the guru (though formerly he was one). He accuses Professor Srinivas of neglecting this contention. He states correctly that he did provide this information on his FAQ page in 2005 (which I have elsewhere acknowledged, and with the comment "though Moreno says that he is not a devotee, it is obvious that he considers himself to be a Pro-Sai Activist"). However, in view of the very strident defence of Sathya Sai Baba made by Moreno in innumerable blogs, observers have frequently interpreted his contribution in the context of a devotee supporter. Furthermore, his vehement attacks on critics and objectors have been so severe in a number of cases that a contrasting identity requires special pleading. If not a devotee, then surely a very militant supporter with a strong devotee background in his earlier years.

Sectarian overtones of his Pro-Sai activist argument are strongly deducible. Moreno's extensive agitation against persons he called "Anti-Sai" commentators has been considered a prime instance of sectarian standpoint, and one that is increasingly notorious (though he has also opposed critics of other gurus). His general presentation of Sathya Sai Baba is that of the immaculate guru who transcends all allegations of abuse made by ex-devotees. Many of the latter regard Moreno as a blog bully and internet hit man; his website at saisathyasai.com is viewed as an excessive exercise in justifying the guru against all criticisms and allegations, which are there ridiculed in terms of "smear campaign."

Moreno's own explicit campaign has extended to defamatory google blogs claiming to "expose" a number of persons (including myself) who have argued against him. Rational dialogue cannot occur in such a situation. Strong suspicions of an underlying cult tactic have been aroused.

The Moreno review of Winged Faith states that "although Moreno runs the largest internet websites exposing the many smear campaigns waged against Sathya Sai Baba by critics and ex-devotees, Tulasi Srinivas never attempted to contact Moreno even once although she cited links to his websites." The accusation of not contacting Moreno was also made by him in my direction a few years ago (in 2007), and was transparent as a rhetorical device, especially in view of his then very recent hostile gestures.

In his capacity as Wikipedia editor SSS108 (a role subsequently terminated by an arbitration committee), he had less than a year earlier attacked my books on a Wikipedia User page and strongly insinuated that my publishing output was effectively off the map and totally inconsequential. See Wikipedia and Moreno. He followed up this "official" denunciation with a related aspersion on a sectarian blog at wordpress.com. My subsequent online objections were evaded and dismissed in various ways, including the accusation of not having contacted him. I had seen online what happened to persons who did contact him, their emails being paraded as proof of error and worse.

Moreno finds fault with some of the notes in Winged Faith, and even implies that Professor Srinivas would be laughed out of Emerson College in the light of his disclosures. To date, that exit has not occurred, and is even less likely to happen when the accusations have been duly assessed. I will here confine attention to the accusations with which I am more intimately acquainted.

In reference to pages 353-4 of Winged Faith, Moreno chastises the author for having referred to myself as a "biographer of Shirdi Sai Baba." His sense of courtesy can be overwhelming. The identity of biographer is clearly taboo in the sectarian non-devotee blog world. A bizarre justification for this indictment is supplied in terms of "a vanity self-publisher who admitted he is not an academic and who admitted he dropped out of school at the age of fifteen." I have objected to such stigmas more than once, but to no avail in the sector of sectarian hate campaign. See Hate Campaign Blogs.

I have not had to admit anything, as I never claimed anything in respect of academic status. This is known from my published output since 1983, nearly thirty years ago, and long before Moreno appeared on the web. My route through life and study has intentionally bypassed the salaried career of credential (as some academics do appreciate). See Autobiographical Reflections. The Moreno commentary is more than superficial, being vindictively deceptive. He himself has no academic credentials, and also no history of private library research or authorship of annotated books. He is currently classifiable as an inhabitant of the American blogosphere since 2004.

The Moreno review of Srinivas also describes me as "a malicious critic of Sathya Sai Baba." What I actually did was to report the submerged views of dissidents and critics like the late Basava Premanand, an Indian Rationalist who referred to many disturbing murders and other molestations closely associated with the guru. I contributed a web article entitled Sathya Sai Baba: Problems. This was not malicious, but effectively defensive, and in the face of censorious antipathy devolving from Wikipedia via Pro-Sai activism. If Premanand was even partly right, the Indian situation was horrific for many years and nurtured a strong element of terrorism.

I am also described by Moreno's third person rhetoric as having "fanatically accused Moreno" of being an internet terrorist. That description was indeed evoked from me in 2009, though not in any fanatical cause. The web article Internet Terrorist was a defence and statement against the dismissive libel to which I had been subjected, and which has invited legal analysis (also implicating Wikipedia, and possibly to a serious degree).

The Moreno web campaign against myself subsequently infiltrated Wikipedia at a renewed angle in 2009, and to such an extent that superficial editors and administrators (having no obvious research ability) were deceived by the blog tactics. Professor Tulasi Srinivas has been more resistant to the politics of sectarian religion, and can be congratulated upon a standard of reporting and research that is far more objective than the customary academic relegation of such matters to oblivion.

Professor Srinivas was correct to cite me as a biographer of Shirdi Sai Baba, though I do not claim any great achievement in that respect. I have to date provided two published and annotated biographical overviews, and one online annotated overview on the present webpage. Non-sectarian analysts have concluded that I contributed the first annotated version of Shirdi Sai in his Muslim Sufi context (Gurus Rediscovered, 1986)), and the first annotated biographical commentary disputing some emphases found in two academic works of note (Investigating the Sai Baba Movement, 2005, Part One).

Moreno ends his hostile aspersion against myself with the remark that "this is the type of person that Tulasi Srinivas deemed credible enough to cite as a reference in her book." Once again, the contrivance of total stigma, unfit to be cited, further justifying Moreno's Wikipedia editorial role in 2006 when he had reacted to a citation of my book Investigating the Sai Baba Movement. The disdained citation appeared in the Wikipedia article on the ex- devotee and retired academic Robert C. Priddy. The "Anti-Sai" opposition was favouring me, so I had to be censored by Pro-Sai activism on Wikipedia. This situation imposed the absence of any due investigation of the unread books that were stigmatised on the Wikipedia User page of SSS108 (alias Gerald Joe Moreno). See also Wikipedia Issues.

In April 2010, I deleted the sole known image of Moreno from my websites. He was aggravating about this matter, and so I complied. He prefers the anonymity. It is obviously convenient for anyone to avoid the protocol of due pictorial web identity, a common trait of the blogosphere and Wikipedia. Moreno did not return the conciliatory gesture, instead preserving the images of myself that he had appropriated from my Citizen Initiative website, and also retaining the abused images of my mother (who had never mentioned him). Further, in June 2010 he made the additional disparaging references abovecited in his misleading review of Professor Srinivas. That is "the type of person deemed credible enough" as a role model by Pro-Sai activism (allegedly funded by an official of the Sathya Sai Organisation).

Moreno also berates Professor Srinivas for citing Conny Larsson, an eccentric ex-devotee whose activities in new age "workshops" and "counselling" have been profiled. Moreno is well known for his attacks on Larsson, due to the latter's fame as a major testifier to abuse (meaning sexual abuse by Sathya Sai Baba). Moreno here makes the very misleading statement that "Robert Priddy and Kevin R. D. Shepherd attempted to defend Conny Larsson and were subsequently silenced by two scathing responses by Moreno."

A few words can be said about this misrepresentation. Firstly, Gerald Joe Moreno has frequently referred to me in combination with the ex-devotee Robert Priddy (his major and ultimate opponent). The truth is that I am a complete outsider to the Sathya Sai Baba sect, and hold independent views to those of ex-devotees.

Priddy has valid complaints, and demonstrates an extensive output. The persistent attempt of Moreno to "expose" him has been strongly denied, e. g., Robert Priddy Not Exposed. More graphic is Priddy's own statement at Gerald Moreno. Priddy complains of an excessive and distorting campaign moving well beyond the conventions of legitimate criticism. These matters of sectarian psychology generally sound almost incredible.

In more philosophical areas however, I do not agree with Priddy's overall worldview, as his disillusionment with Sathya Sai Baba created in him a strong tendency to materialist scepticism which I do not share. This shift of outlook frequently happens to people in his category, and is quite understandable. The ultimate truth remains elusive. Priddy closes down metaphysical issues, whereas I leave those open, though not in any sectarian or cultist context. Remote from such intellectual complexities, Moreno has devised the ludicrous story that I endorse Priddy as an LSD consumer. The poverty of sectarian contrivance is acute.

Secondly, I did not defend Larsson's eccentric "workshop" career, which I regard as an indulgence and distraction, and a cause of further confusions. A number of ex-devotees have sought psychological reassurance in other "alternative" avenues after their acute dissatisfaction with the guru. To be fair, Larsson has contested the accusations made against him by Moreno, and Priddy has not been silenced on that matter.

I merely cited the statements of Larsson about alleged sexual abuse and related matters. Moreover, I was not silenced by the extremely misleading responses of Gerald Joe Moreno, and the following year I provided a commentary on the Moreno-Larsson role problems, the purport of which was ignored by Moreno, who never accepts criticism of his extremist arguments and tactics. The title of the relevant entry was New Age Confusions and Sectarian Misinformation, meaning Larsson and Moreno respectively.

Until more academic researchers rigorously evaluate sectarian occurrences, including the blog campaign category, there will be no due education on these matters, with proportionate casualties and confusions in the public sector. Those drawbacks include the Wikipedia establishment, whose aggregate ability to penetrate sectarian argument and the blogosphere is dismally deficient, as events have demonstrated. Wikipedia anomalies should not be forgotten, in case these happen again, afflicting further victims.

In the interests of transparency, my total web output is indexed at Kevin Shepherd Bibliography.

Kevin R. D. Shepherd

February 2011

ANNOTATIONS

(1)    Shepherd, Gurus Rediscovered: Biographies of Sai Baba of  Shirdi and Upasni Maharaj of Sakori (Cambridge: Anthropographia, 1986). Revisions and amplifications occurred in a later work of mine. The preliminary version was recognised in some circles as a relevant  innovation in dealing with two figures who had become separated into contrasting sectarian figureheads.

(2)    “Contemporary sources show that the mystical philosophy and social role of the Chishtis of Daulatabad differed markedly from that of the Turkish babas and the Safavis in Iran, which both combined radical elements of  Shi’ism with tribal military affiliations.” The quote comes from Carl W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center  (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 100-101.

(3)   Cf. Richard M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur  1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval  India  (Princeton University Press, 1978).  In support of the non-warrior counter theory, Professor Ernst states that “the early Chishtis were generally either urban Sufis with close connections to the court or else reclusive teachers who maintained their lodges in remote areas” (Ernst, op. cit., . 101).

(4)    See further Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India Vol. One (New Delhi: Manoharlal, 1978), pp. 175ff., 189, describing frictions with the Sultan Muhammad binTughluq, the ambitious monarch who established Daulatabad in an effort to maintain subjugation of the Deccan, and who wished to transfer many Sufis to that new centre in order to undermine their influence in Delhi. However, the philosophers (falasifa) are reported  to have benefited from political developments.

(5)     Marianne Warren, Unravelling the Enigma: Shirdi Sai Baba in the Light of Sufism  (New Delhi: Sterling, 1999), pp. 91ff., and citing the statement of  Meher Baba. The cave on Hoda Hill is closely associated with the Chishti Sufi known as Zar Zari Zar Bakhsh (d. 1309), alias  Muntajebuddin  Zarzari. The reference of Meher Baba was  first exhumed in my Gurus  Rediscovered, pp. 11-12.  Dr. Warren attributes one of the reports involved  to Naosherwan Anzar, but in fact that Parsi merely edited the narration of  Eruch B. Jessawala, which comprises the work entitled The Ancient  One: A Disciple’s Memoirs of Meher  Baba  (New Jersey 1985), and cited in Gurus. On the legendary Muntajebuddin, see Ernst, Eternal  Garden, pp. 235ff.

(6)     A specific Sufi link was proposed for Shirdi Sai Baba in B. K. Narayan, Saint Shah  Waris  Ali and Sai  Baba (New Delhi: Vikas, 1995).  The mentor here suggested is Haji Shah Waris Ali (1819-1905), a Sufi who became noted for tolerance towards Hindus, and who has some similarities to the Shirdi saint.

(7)     See Warren, Unravelling the Enigma, first edn, pp. 261-333, which includes a translation of the Urdu notebook. Some pages of that document were written in the obscure Marathi script known as Modi, but  most of it consists of Deccani  Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. Though idiosyncratic in some ways, the notebook (or Saibaba MS) attests the saint’s familiarity with Islamic history, including early Shi’ism,  Ismaili teachings, and the Sufi orders in India. The comments of the saint arose from reading verses in the Quran, alarge copy of which was kept for  this  purpose. Dr. Warren believed that only “a very small percentage” of the  commentary ever got written down by Abdul (ibid., p. 313).

(8)    Ibid., p. 267. Abdul mentioned his notebook in his later conversations with Narasimhaswami during the 1930s, but the latter evidently could not assimilate the significances, and was at a linguistic disadvantage, not being able to read Urdu.

(9)    Ibid., p. 277.  Dr. Warren had the notebook of Abdul examined and translated into English by three Urdu specialists, who all agreed that the manuscript comprises random jottings relating to Islamic and Sufi topics (ibid., p. 272). The notebook is not therefore a treatise demonstrating continuity of thought, but it is nevertheless evocative.

(10)    Ibid., pp. 3-8.  See also Nagesh V. Gunaji,  Shri  Sai  Satcharita or the Wonderful Life and Teachings of  Shri Sai  Baba  (1944), which has seen many reprints published  by the Shri Sai Baba Sansthan of Shirdi.   See also Indira  Kher, trans., Shri  Sai  Satcharita: The Life  and Teachings of Shirdi  Sai  Baba (Delhi: Sterling, 1999).

(11)   Shepherd, Gurus  Rediscovered, p. 26;  Warren, op.cit., pp. 35-6; Antonio Rigopoulos, The Life and Teachings of Sai  Baba of  Shirdi  (State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 3. See also J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam  (Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 49, 310, and translating the Arabic word sa’ih as itinerant, an equivalent of the Persian darvish (anglicised  to dervish).

(12)    Trimingham, op. cit., p. 301; Ernst, Eternal Garden, p. 375. Many Hindu sadhus or holy men are commonly addressed as Baba, frequently with the respectful suffix ji. Alternative titles are Sant (saint) and Maharaj(a), the latter word having regal connotations.

(13)    Shepherd, Investigating  the  Sai  Baba  Movement (Dorchester: Citizen Initiative, 2005), p. 26. This development was later obscured by the ascendancy of the Hindu festival known as Rama-Navami, which eclipsed the urs after the saint's death (ibid., p. 179 note 118). That process added to misunderstandings about the religious background of Sai Baba.

(14)    Ibid., p. 179 note 106.  The explanation of  the Gita  verse was recorded in B. V. Narasimhaswami, Devotees’ Experiences of Shri Sai Baba (Madras: All India Sai Samaj, 1942).  The explanation was given to Nanasaheb Chandorkar, a brahman devotee.

(15)    Warren, Unravelling the Enigma, p. 357. The  Gita verse (IV.34) under discussion is here described in terms of approaching a guru to be taught divine knowledge (jnana).  Dr. Warren interprets that Sai Baba quickly grasped the opportunity to expound  the Sufi counterpart.  It is discernible that the saint of Shirdi actually argued against the Gita  verse, emphasising that what the guru teaches is ajnana (ignorance), not jnana, amounting to a thorn designed to remove another thorn. Sai Baba further asserted that  “divine knowledge is to be realised, not  taught” (ibid., p. 359). Warren connects this interpretation with the Sufi theme of removing veils or layers  of ignorance.

(16)    Ibid., pp. 360, 404ff. The interviews conducted by Narasimhaswami during 1936 were reported in his subsequent popular work entitled Devotees’ Experiences of Shri Sai Baba. The majority of those persons interviewed became devotees of the Shirdi saint after 1910. Only three of them had a link with Sai Baba prior to 1900.

(17)    Warren, op. cit. p. 348. The same scholar adds a translation from Dabholkar’s Marathi work,  which describes Sai Baba’s refrain of  Allah malik in terms of: “he disliked any thought contrary to this assertion and would not tolerate any dissent” (ibid., p. 349).  We may deduce that the Shirdi saint taught a form of Islamic Sufism, not Vedanta.

(18)    Ibid., p. 356, commenting that, as Narasimhaswami could not speak these languages, he did not interview faqirs in the Shirdi environs who had known Sai Baba.  Dr. Warren emphasises in her book that an important aspect of Sai Baba’s activity was contact with  the  wandering  faqirs, who spoke Marathi or Urdu.

(19)    Rigopoulos, The Life and Teachings of  Sai  Baba of  Shirdi,  p. xxv. The hagiology was extensive by the 1950s. In 1954, Meher Baba complained that the miracle atmosphere at Shirdi had led to a commercialisation of Sai Baba, whose image could be found "in cinemas and on match boxes." This reference comes from Charles Purdom and Malcolm Schloss, Three Incredible Weeks with Meher Baba (The Awakener - Special Issue, Seattle, Washington, 1955), p. 50.

(20)   See  further  B. V. Narasimhaswami, Life  of  Sai  Baba  (4 vols, Madras: All India  Sai  Samaj, 1955-56). Narasimhaswami also composed other works on the subject that  proved popular, starting with his early Introduction to Sri Sai  Baba  of Shirdi (1938) and the oft-cited Sri Sai  Baba’s Charters and Sayings, which has frequently been reprinted.  The quotation from the Life was pointedly utilised in Warren, Unravelling the Enigma, pp. 2, 356, and citing Vol. 3, p. 152.

(21)   The chronology for these events is uncertain. “A few Hindus began offering him some kind of worship inside the masjid [mosque], though Sai Baba strongly disapproved” (Rigopoulos, op. cit., p. 69). The Muslims of Shirdi protested, and several of them resorted to clubs one morning when they guarded the mosque entrance. According to Narasimhaswami’s  Life,  the chief worshipper here emerged victorious by gaining the support of Sai  Baba. This was  the brahman Mhalsapati, who  would  apply sandal  paste  to the saint’s forehead  (ibid., pp. 107-9).

(22)    Rigopoulos, op.cit., p. 66; M. V. Kamath and V. B. Kher, Sai Baba of Shirdi: A Unique Saint  (Bombay: Jaico, 1991), p 79, describing the son-in-law as a mantrika. Cf. Warren, op. cit., pp. 104, 127 note 10. The report of Ramgiri Bua appeared in Narasimhaswami, Devotees’ Experiences of  Shri  Sai  Baba (1942; new edn, 1989). It was Ramgiri  Bua who stated that the saint had long hair when he arrived in Shirdi, but this rather Hinduizing detail is at variance with the  kafni  and cap reported in his meeting with Chand Patil, the Muslim village officer of Dhup  who was encountered prior to the final arrival at Shirdi (Rigopoulos, op. cit., pp. 51-2). The dating for that early  event  varies in the sources between 1858 and 1872. Further, a number of formerly unknown Shirdi Sai  photographs have recently emerged on the internet.  One or two of these have been queried in terms of  attribution.  The most distinctive of these photographs shows a figure with long hair and a loincloth, reminiscent of a Hindu yogi. This has been claimed as a portrait of Shirdi Sai in his early years.  Even if authentic, this photograph does not prove that the subject was a Hindu.  Long hair appears in the depiction of Persian dervishes during the Qajar era; also, a minority of Muslim ascetics in India appear to have converged with features of the sadhu vocation. All the other images of Shirdi Sai attest the Muslim faqir apparel, which was also worn by his disciple Abdul  Baba.

(23)    Warren,  Unravelling The  Enigma, pp. 268-70, 346-7, and reporting a personal communication with Abdul  Baba’s grandson Rahim  Khan in Shirdi.  Dr. Warren comments that the lifesize marble statue (murti) of Sai Baba  is probably the main deterrent to Muslims, who are averse to anthropomorphic representation.

(24)    Mani Sahukar, Sai  Baba: The Saint of Shirdi  (third edn, Bombay: Somaiya,  1983),  p. 24. The confusion about bearing the caste marks of a Hindu was a reference to the application of paint to the saint's forehead during the controversial ritual worship at the mosque. Hindus are also known to have enthusiastically applied a ceremonial mark to the forehead of Meher Baba during some darshan events. However, the Irani Zoroastrian was obviously not a Hindu, despite such devotional attention.

(25)    Shepherd, Investigating the Sai Baba Movement (2005), p. 46. The notebook “includes conciliatory verbal gestures to Hindu themes, testifying to the fact that Sai Baba was not insular” (ibid.).

(26)     Arthur Osborne, The Incredible Sai  Baba (Calcutta, 1957; London: Rider, 1958, pp. 15-16). In his prefatory acknowledgment, Osborne writes that he had spoken to Narasimhaswami before the latter's demise, and been requested to make full use of the Narasimhaswami publications.

(27)     Warren, op. cit., pp. 86-8; Rigopoulos, op. cit., p. 8, who duly remarks that “the motif of the Hindu birthof reputed Muslim figures is often attested to in Indian hagiographic literature.” Cf. Kamath and Kher, Sai Baba of Shirdi: A Unique Saint, pp. 14-18, which reports an investigation of Pathri  Hinduism in the 1970s, and positing the  theory that Sai Baba originated from the Bhusari  family of brahmans. Cf. Warren, op. cit., p. 87, stating that "even today sixty per cent of the population [of Pathri] is Muslim and it is not surprising that Pathri's rich Muslim Sufi heritage is the environment which nurtured Sai Baba in his early years."

(28)     Osborne, op. cit., p. 69, and adding the belief that Sai Baba "referred frequently to his Hindu Guru and to Hindu scriptures and Gods" (ibid.).

(29)     E.g., Osborne, pp. 78, 122, who emphasises that Sai Baba used the word brahman (anglicised to brahmin) in the sense of a spiritually inclined person or spiritual elect.  See also Shepherd, Investigating the Sai Baba Movement (2005), p. 9.

(30)     Warren, Unravelling the Enigma, p. 37ff., referring to the influential legend of Venkusha of Selu that is primarily associated with Das Ganu, a direct Hindu devotee of Sai Baba who linked a laconic reference of the Shirdi saint with Gopal Rao Deshmukh. The reference of Sai Baba to “Venkusha” remains typically enigmatic. The Muslim writer  Dr. Abdul Ghani (Munsiff)  was liberal towards Das Ganu’s Marathi work Bhaktalilamrita, though he had a significant source of independent references from his teacher Meher Baba, who strongly maintained that Sai  Baba was a Muslim, and moreover a qutub, to use esoteric Sufi terminology.  Ghani’s article entitled Hazrat Sai Baba of Shirdi appeared in The Meher Baba Journal Vol. 1 (Ahmednagar, 1938-39). Very few people outside the Meher Baba movement had seen that  article when I included reference to it in Gurus Rediscovered (1986).  Meher Baba’s emphases were the underlying component in Ghani’s contribution, and these are now considered by close analysts to be more relevant than Das Ganu hagiology. Dr. Rigopoulos appropriately included the Ghani  article in his list of primary sources, duly grasping that the Muslim factor had been eclipsed in the Shirdi movement. All other primary sources listed by that scholar were Hindu works. See  Rigopoulos, op .cit., pp. xxiv-vi.

(31)     Kamath and Kher, Sai  Baba of Shirdi: A Unique Saint , p. 31, and incorporating the account of Swami Sai Sharan  Anand, a brahman devotee of Sai Baba who was told by the saint that  Roshan Shah  Mia was his (Sai  Baba’s) guru. That is a Muslim name for the obscure entity, conceivably the same teacher as “Venkusha.”  The co-author V. B. Kher was a trustee of the Sai  Baba Sansthan of Shirdi from 1984-89, and has  composed various  articles on Sai  Baba. See also Sai Sharan  Anand, Sri Sai  Baba  (New Delhi: Sterling, 1997). Sharan Anand was originally named Waman Bhai Patel until he became a sannyasin in the 1950s. He stayed for nearly a year at Shirdi in 1913. His biography of Sai Baba was written in Gujarati during the early 1960s.

(32)     Warren, op. cit., p. 5. Although Dabholkar (Hemadpant) has the reputation of having gained the saint’s permission to write the biography, this factor does not exempt him from exegetical limitations. His contact with Sai Baba began in 1910, and he became a resident of Shirdi  in 1916 upon his retirement from a career as a government clerk.

(33)    Cf. Warren, op. cit., pp. 140ff., who describes Swami Samarth of Akalkot as “extremely unorthodox, treating Hindus and Muslims equally and having equal respect for temples and mosques... as well as having a total disregard for caste.” Dr. Warren cites  E.  Bharadwaja, The Supreme Master (Sri Akkolkot Maharaj), 1973. On Narayan Maharaj, see Bhau Kalchuri, Lord Meher Vol. One  (Myrtle Beach. S.C.: Manifestation, 1986), pp. 20-47, which has numerous  photographs. For a more exhaustive  work on the Dattatreya phenomenon, see Antonio Rigopoulos, Dattatreya: The  Immortal  Guru, Yogin, and Avatara (State University of  New York Press,  1998).

(34)    Warren, Unravelling the Enigma, p. 149. Dabholkar assimilated the identification of Sai Baba with Dattatreya, a trend occurring during the saint's closing years. This identification was assisted by the ascetic repute of Dattatreya. "Sai Baba was a celibate ascetic all his life; he had no possessions beyond a danda or short stick and a chilim or pipe" (ibid., p. 146).

(35)    Ibid., p. 150. Three of the most well known contemporary Sufis in that sector were Hazrat Babajan of Poona, Tajuddin Baba of Nagpur, and Banemiyan Baba of Aurangabad. Sai Baba did have some rather obscure connection with the third Sufi named here, who is known as Bane Mia  (or  Bannemiya) in some accounts (ibid., pp. 116ff.). It is on record that Banemiyan Baba came to Aurangabad in 1856, and his grandson stated to Dr. Warren in 1990 that Sai Baba was his disciple. The Aurangabad Sufi died in 1921, reputed to be 105 years old.  In 1915 he had been visited by Merwan Irani, alias Meher  Baba, who held Banemiyan in high esteem, subsequently describing him in Sufi terms as a majzub.

(36)    Ibid., p. 150. One  preoccupation of Dabholkar verse was here the Maharashtrian bhakti  saints such as  Jnanesvar, Janardan, Eknath,Tukaram, and Ramdas. Dabholkar appears to have been strongly influenced by the Eknathi Bhagvat, and recognises Ramdas as a mediator with Islam. Dabholkar observed admiringly that Sai Baba ignored caste distinctions, though this achievement was relatively easy for a Muslim not geared to the brahmanical conception of social stratification.

(37)    Cf. Warren, p. 152.  Ram or Rama is the avatar (divine incarnation) celebrated in the Ramayana epic, and  who was frequently the chosen ideal of bhakti  exponents.

(38)    Ibid., p.351. Dabholkar states that the social origins of Sai Baba were unknown, and also asserts that it did not really matter whether the saint was Hindu or Muslim. That attitude is too equivocal for some assessors, who detect an element of evasion based on religious conditioning. More recent Hindu treatments of the subject exhibit diverse shades of approach. See, e.g., Acharya E. Bharadwaja, Sai  Baba the Master  (fourth edn, Ongole 1993); Ammula Sambasiva Rao, Life History of Shirdi Sai  Baba  (New Delhi: Sterling, 1998); V. B. Kher, Sai Baba: His Divine Glimpses  (New Delhi: Sterling, 2001); Balkrishna Panday, Sai Baba’s 261 Leelas: A Treasure House of Miracles (New Delhi: Sterling, 2005). The lastmentioned work is in the idiom of leela  (play or sport), stressing miraculous interventions in the lives of devotees, varying from the curing of sickness to visions.

(39)    Cf. Warren, Unravelling the Enigma, pp. 350-1, and citing the Gunaji adaptation of Shri Sai Satcharita. The tulsi plant that the saint permitted in the mosque courtyard was set in a masonry block and known as tulsi brindhaban. The tulsi plant is sacred in Hinduism, and is the object of circumambulation. There are various theories about the origins of  this rite, which appears to be ultimately archaic.

(40)    Shepherd, Investigating the Sai Baba Movement  (2005), p. 19 and note 83. The customs of Hindu sadhus are better known. Many sadhus maintain a dhuni, and some are known as Babas. The martial spectacles and ascetic stunts of sadhus require a certain amount of historical context, which can be traced back to the medieval era. Another similarity between sadhus and some Muslim faqirs was the habit of smoking a pipe or chilum. On the pipe-smoking of Sai Baba, see Shepherd, op. cit., pp. 181-2, note 135.Sai Baba is associated with the Muslim convention in Maharashtra of tobacco-smoking, though some parties have assumed he resorted to cannabis or even opium. The misunderstanding relates to practices amongst sadhus who maintain dhuni fires. Both Shaiva and Vaishnava ascetics have kept a fire, though that custom is more generally associated with Shaivas, i.e., the followers of Shiva. The Shaivas are the more extremist category in the world of sadhus. The Shaiva pipe ritual frequently employs a mixture of tobacco and charas (hashish or cannabis). Charas is strongly asssociated with Shiva, and is popularly interpreted in terms of divine intoxication. Many sadhus thus believe that they participate in the ecstasy of Shiva, and use various mantras to accentuate this sense of elevation. However, the practice is controversial amongst sadhus, it is fair to state. "Charas may be used by Shaivas and Vaishnavas, but many Babas do not smoke at all and may even condemn the habit as low caste and counterproductive." The quote is from Dolf Hartsuiker, Sadhus: Holy Men of India (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 99. Many sadhus come from a low caste background, and are noted for an exhibitionist element that may resort to "miracle" stunts. The martial trappings of some sadhu fraternities date back to real life sectarian skirmishes. See, e.g., Klaus K. Klostermaier, A Survey of Hinduism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 53-4, reporting that "in the nineteenth century, the kumbha-melas, when a large number of sadhus of all sampradayas congregated, witnessed regular battles between Shaivas and Vaishnavas in which many lost their lives."

(41)    Warren, op. cit., pp. 105, 352, and citing Das Ganu’s  Shri Sainath Stavan Manjari (1918), which comprises verses in praise of  Sai Baba. Significantly, Dr. Warren states: “we may infer that Sai Baba was almost certainly circumcised, because if not, the fact would have been duly reported by his Hindu biographers” (p. 105).

(42)   Ibid., pp. 149-150. Hari Sitaram Dixit (also spelt Dikshit) was a prominent devotee from 1909, and called Kakasaheb by Sai Baba.  His memos appeared in M. V. Pradhan, Shri Sai Baba of  Shirdi: A Glimpse of Indian Spirituality (1933), which has frequently been reprinted by the Sai Baba Sansthan of Shirdi. This account has been awarded the status of a primary source by some scholars, though a Hinduizing standpoint is represented.  Both  Dixit  and Pradhan were brahmans.

(43)   See further Sai  Padananda, Sri Narasimha  Swamiji: Apostle of  Sri Sai Baba, the Saint of Shirdi (Madras: All India Sai Samaj, 1973). The glorification of Narasimhaswami had earlier met with resistance from Meher Baba, whose disclosures in the 1950s were less flattering. Briefly, Meher Baba regarded Narasimhaswami as being in error for emphasising petty “miracles” of the Shirdi saint such as the anecdote of lighting lamps with water instead of  oil.  Meher Baba himself disowned miracles, and attributed these to the faith of his devotees.  I made reference to this interpretation in Gurus Rediscovered (1986), citing a little known journal which had published a diary of Kishan Singh that reported statements of Meher Baba disclosed in 1954. This information was differently received;  Dr. Warren was one of those who resisted Meher Baba’s criticism of Narasimhaswami, even though she did opt to favour other interpretations given by the Irani mystic.  I was here vicariously blamed for criticising the Apostle of Sai Baba.  Dr. Warren did not  cite the Singh diary, and it is obvious that she had failed to locate  this relevant  source, which was relatively obscure. Meher Baba had actually known Narasimhaswami, who many years earlier had petitioned him as a potential biographer. The former deflected the latter, who afterwards went to Sakori and Shirdi.  Cf. Warren, op. cit., pp. 353-4. Cf. Gurus Rediscovered, pp. 3-4, 74 note 7. A drawback in the otherwise compelling book of the late Dr. Warren is her gullibility with regard to miracle lore, a factor that seems closely related to her estimation of Sathya Sai Baba, who encouraged this lack of critical disposition. Dr. Warren’s illusions with regard to the Puttaparthi guru were shattered not long after the first edition of her book, causing her to create a revised edition, amongst other matters.  

(44)    B.V. Narasimhaswami, Sage of Sakuri: Life Story of Shree Upasani Maharaj  (Madras 1938; repr. Sakuri: Shri Upasani  Kanya  Kumari  Sthan, 1985).  Meher Baba’s assessment of this work was very critical. As one of the two major disciples of Upasni Maharaj, his view has to be taken into account. Cf. Shepherd, Gurus Rediscovered (1986), Part Two. Some revisions and amplifications were duly presented in my Investigating the Sai Baba Movement (2005), Part Two. See also ibid., Part Three, pp. 136-7, where it is reported that “Meher Baba blamed Narasimhaswami for having created the ‘miracle  instinct’ at both Shirdi and Sakori.” The same critical source described half of the book Sage of Sakuri as being “absolute nonsense” (ibid., p. 137).

(45)   Shepherd, Investigating the Sai Baba Movement  (2005), pp. 79-80. This episode at Benares (Kashi) occurred two years after Upasni had settled on the outskirts of Sakori, in an uninviting locale that later become an ashram featuring temples.

(46)   Ibid., p. 93. Gandhi discussed this event with Meher Baba a few years later in 1931, when he was voyaging to Britain and the Round Table Conference.

(47)   Charles B. Purdom, The God-Man: The life, journeys and work of Meher Baba  (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), p. 128.  See also ibid., p. 440, stating that Meher Baba ignored Brunton’s request for a miracle. “When Baba ignored the request, the journalist expressed an adverse view of Baba’s spirituality.”

(48)   Paul Brunton,  A Search in Secret India  (London: Rider, 1934; second edn, 1970), p. 47.  In the same paragraph, Brunton expressed his now notorious statement that Meher Baba had a low and receding forehead. This assertion is graphically disproven by photographic evidence. For a critical commentary on Brunton’s version of events, see Shepherd, Meher Baba, an Iranian Liberal (Cambridge: Anthropographia, 1988), pp. 146-176.  This supplement  includes reference to the Saidapet ashram and other matters.

(49)   See Jeffrey Masson, My  Father’s  Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion (London: Harper Collins, 1993), pp. 85-6, 160ff, stating that  Brunton knew no Sanskrit (despite his implication to the contrary), and furthermore, that  the degree Brunton attributed under duress to Roosevelt  University was “fraudulent.” By 1945, Brunton had devised notepaper  emblazoned with “Dr. Paul  Brunton.” His publisher took up this shallow credential, strongly implying a Ph.D., which has misled many readers ever since. In a conversation with Dr. Masson, Brunton explicitly claimed that he had gained the Ph.D. credential.

(50)    In 1954, Meher Baba described Narasimhaswami as a “dear erring soul,” and as a “very good soul who made a mess of things because of his ignorance.” Baba complained of the superstitious “miracle instinct” created by Narasimhaswami at both Sakori and Shirdi, though principally the latter.  He related that the erring person came to him at Nasik and said “Baba, I want to stay with you and write your biography.” Meher Baba commented, “I  told him I don’t want that and he could go to Sakori and write Maharaj’s biography; this dear fellow got very upset.” These and other remarks can be found in the diary of Kishan Singh reproduced as “At Sakori with Baba,” The Glow Quarterly  (Dehra Dun, May 1975) 10 (2): 4, 20.

(51)    Charles B. Purdom, The Perfect Master (London: Williams and Norgate, 1937), p. 230.  Much of Purdom’s reporting is strictly factual, and there is no hagiography.  He first met Meher Baba in 1931, when the latter initially   visited Britain.  Purdom’s depreciatory attitude to miracles reflects that of his inspirer. Though he did briefly credit  Meher  Baba with healing abilities, this was in a context of transiency for any such ability  (ibid., pp. 269ff.). Purdom even stated that: “the performance of miracle, while it may be evidence of powers beyond those of ordinary men, may often be regarded as a  sign of defective spirituality” (ibid., p. 270).  See also The God-Man (1964), p. 441, where Purdom states that Meher Baba “brushes aside attempts to explain happenings as due to his miraculous  intervention.” Indeed, Purdom here informs that his teacher had declared many times: “I  have never consciously  performed a miracle.”

(52)    See Eruch Jessawala, That’s How It Was: Stories of Life  with  Meher Baba  (Myrtle Beach, S.C.: Sheriar  Foundation, 1995), pp. 226ff., stating “we almost always went third-class, especially in the early years.... you had to fight even to get on board the train.... All during the war years, when the trains were always overcrowded and most of the cars were reserved for the military, we travelled throughout India.” This continued to be the case in the dangerous period after the 1947 Partition of India, when trains could be found piled with corpses.  The late Eruch  B. Jessawala was a sturdy Parsi who was a frequent travelling companion of Meher Baba. His reminiscences include some graphic descriptions of events.

(53)    William  Donkin, The  Wayfarers: An Account of the Work of Meher Baba with the God-intoxicated, and also with Advanced Souls, Sadhus, and the Poor  (Ahmednagar: Adi  K. Irani, 1948).  Dr. Donkin was a distinctive devotee, having become an inmate of Meher Baba’s ashram at Meherabad in the 1930s. The small  group  of resident devotees were known as mandali.  Donkin reports factually, though he does follow the complex descriptions formulated by Meher Baba for the mast and related categories.

(54)    Ibid., p. 350, for an instance afforded by the occasion when  1,500 poor men and women were each gifted one rupee at Saharanpur in August  1946. The venue was a private room in the  public library. Donkin reports that “Baba’s name is never given” on the numbered tickets distributed amongst the recipients. Donkin here credits the belief that spiritual work was in occurrence.

(55)     On the events relating to Sakori, see Shepherd, Investigating the Sai Baba Movement, pp. 131ff., and citing Natu, Glimpses of the God-Man Meher Baba Vol. 6 (1994), for the visit to Sakori in 1954. For the Dahigaon event, see Donkin, The Wayfarers, pp. 227-8; The  Meher  Baba Journal  Vol. 4 (November 1941): 56. The meeting at the Dahigaon hut lasted for about half an hour, and the attendants were told to remain outside.

(56)     See  Meher Baba, God  Speaks: The Theme of Creation and  Its Purpose  (New  York: Dodd  Mead & Co., 1955; second edn, 1973).  It  has elsewhere been observed that due to the mood of tolerance in the Ahmednagar kingdom, “most of the sixteenth century sants  (mystic poets) came from the kingdom of Ahmednagar” (Warren, Unravelling the Enigma, p. 86).  Hindu saints like Janardhan Swami  (teacher of Eknath) are here denoted. Many Hindu relatives of the Nizam Shahi  kings gained high positions, a factor which has been deemed significant. The Muslim population in the Ahmednagar kingdom included converts to Islam known as dakhani  Muslims. There were also incoming Muslims from Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Ethiopia. The newcomers brought  Islamic learning, including Shia philosophy associated with Iran  (ibid., p. 88).

(57)    For varying approaches to  Meher Baba, see Charles B. Purdom, The God-Man (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964); Ivy O. Duce, How A Master Works  (Walnut Creek, California: Sufism  Reoriented, 1975); Kitty Davy, Love Alone Prevails: A story of life with Meher Baba (Myrtle Beach, S.C.: Sheriar Press, 1981); Shepherd,  Meher Baba, an Iranian Liberal (Cambridge: Anthropographia, 1988); Bhau  Kalchuri, Lord Meher (20 vols, American edn 1986-2001). See also Part Three of my Investigating  the  Sai  Baba Movement (2005).

(58)    Rigopoulos, Life and Teachings of Sai Baba of Shirdi, pp. 21ff.; Sathya Sai Baba, “The Shirdi Sai Saga,” Sanathana  Sarathi  (November 1992).  The article by Sathya Sai has received strong critique from ex-devotees.  The book  by Dr. Rigopoulos is informative about Shirdi Sai, and also has the merit of acknowledging a Muslim faqir  context,  though an underlying  pro-Sathya  affiliation is discernible, as in pp. 247-9, where he says, for instance, that Narasimhaswami has provided involuntary support to the reincarnation claim of Sathya Sai.  In contrast, one can comment here that the devotional preoccupation of the former with miraculous events proves nothing  about  the disputed  claim of the latter.  In another direction, the late Dr. Warren complained that Rigopoulos relied upon Gunaji  in many of his citations, not having access to the original Marathi work by Dabholkar. See Warren, Unravelling the Enigma (1999), p. 18, also stating that Rigopoulos “never academically questions the obvious Hindu bias” and “has actually contributed further to the Hindu gloss on Sai Baba.” However, one should add here that Dr. Rigopoulos scrupulously reported how “the majority of Shirdi Sai Baba’s bhaktas have not shifted their devotion to the present Satya Sai; many of them ignore him or are critical of him: when I was doing research at  Shirdi, people preferred to avoid the  issue  altogether” (Life  and Teachings, p. 249).

(59)   Charles S. J. White,  “The Sai Baba Movement: Approaches to the Study of Indian Saints,” Journal of  Asian Studies (1972) 31 (4): 863-878.

(60)    Rigopoulos, op. cit.,  pp. 208-10, and presenting a very skeletal version of Meher Baba’s “avataric career.” The brevity might have been  more acceptable if SUNY Press had not advertised on the cover that “a vast and diversified religious movement originating from Sai Baba of Shirdi, is often referred to as ‘the Sai Baba movement’.... light is shed on the various ways in which the important guru figures in this movement came to be linked to the saint of Shirdi.” Although Dr. Rigopoulos does quote one account of that  linkage in the case of Meher Baba, his version of the “career” is strongly related to Western “Meher Baba Centers,” which were  primarily a distraction of the 1960s and after.  He does in fact  write “particularly in the sixties and early seventies” (ibid., p. 209).  Cf. Shepherd, Investigating the Sai Baba Movement  (2005), pp. 142ff., which is critical of Meher Baba Centres.

(61)   White, art. cit., p. 874, and cited by Brian Steel in the web entry entitled On the Terms “Sai  Baba” and “the  Sai  Baba  Movement”  (2008). A rather different academic assessment to that of Professor White came from Professor Lawrence A. Babb, who detected  in the discourses of Sathya Sai “a view deeply conditioned by the ideology of caste.” See Babb, “Sathya Sai Baba’s Miracles” (277–292) in T. N. Madan, ed., Religion in India  (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 290.  The same analyst also affirmed of Sathya Sai that “the strict facts of his personal  biography and  manner of life are buried beneath layer upon layer of hagiography” (ibid., p. 279). This article  was a reprint from Babb, Redemptive Encounters (University of California, 1986). Professor Babb had  formerly expressed an  “anthropology of credibility” with regard to the miracle lore, dating to his fieldwork in the late 1970s amongst Sathya Sai  devotees in Delhi. He has the repute of being a sceptical but sympathetic commentator on this subject.  Brian Steel has commented that Prof. Babb gave too little attention to Sathya Sai Speaks, opting  instead  to focus upon the miracles which figured so largely in devotee thinking. Steel urges that there are “frequent and clearcut  divine and avataric claims” in the Discourses prior to the well known Shiva-Shakti declaration of 1963. See the Bibliography at  http://bdsteel.tripod.com/More/sbresearchbib1.htm. See also Parts 2 and 3 of that bibliography.

(62)   See Smriti Srinivas, In  the  Presence  of  Sai  Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global  Religious Movement  (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008). This book is about Sathya Sai  Baba and “globalisation,” a theme that  moves between Bangalore, Nairobi, and Atlanta.  Some analysts feel that the context of “Sai Baba movement” needs to be redefined in relation to Maharashtra, in order to determine the nature of occurrences too loosely associated with, and obscured by, the globalised  “movement.” A  book of a different  kind was Srinivas, Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred  and the Civic in India’s High-Tech  City  (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). See also Srinivas, “The Brahmin and the Fakir: Suburban Religiosity in the Cult of Shirdi Sai Baba,” Jnl of Contemporary Religion (1999) 14(2): 245-61. See also Srinivas, “Sai Baba Movement” in Encyclopaedia of Religion Vol. 12  (second edn, New York, 2004), pp. 8026-29.   Cf. the review  in Brian Steel’s internet bibliography (note 61 above), observing a “research gap” on the part of Dr. Srinivas in relation to Dr. Warren and other sources. 

(63)     Bal  Natu, Glimpses  of  the  God-Man  Meher  Baba  Vol. 5 (Myrtle Beach, S.C.: Sheriar Press, 1987), pp. xi, 73,76; Bhau Kalchuri, Lord Meher  Vol. 12  (1997), p. 4283. Both Natu and Kalchuri were long-term devotees of  Meher Baba.  Kalchuri’s lengthy work was originally written in Hindi.

(64)     Kalchuri, op. cit., p. 4313; Natu, op. cit., p. 142.  An earlier version of the Andhra tour was skeletal, namely Francis Brabazon, Journey with God (Beacon Hill, New South Wales, 1954), written by the Australian poet who joined the mandali at Meherazad. The account in Purdom’s The God-Man (1964), pp. 215ff., is also brief.

(65)    See the review of Kondappa by Brian Steel. The title covered is V. C. Kondappa, Sai’s Story, as revealed by Sathya Sai  to His Teacher, trans. from Telegu by P. O. Reddy (Bangalore: Sai Towers Publishing, 2004).  Kondappa was the ex-schoolteacher of Sathyanarayana Raju (alias Sathya Sai Baba), and had visited the young guru at Puttaparthi in the company of another ex-teacher. That was in 1944, shortly after the teenage celebrity had commenced his new career as a guru with the sensational claim to reincarnation honours. That claim was revealed to the two schoolteachers, who were evidently impressed. Steel remarks that his coverage assumes the booklet to be a faithful  translation and that  the original was published in 1944.  With regard to the revised date of 1943 for the  reincarnation claim, this is derived from R. Padmanaban et al, Love Is My Form Vol. 1: The Advent (1926-1950), published at Puttaparthi in 2000. Steel has described this work as a well researched hagiography which improves markedly upon the version of Kasturi in Vol. 1 of  Sathyam Sivam Sundaram: The Life of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai  Baba.

(66)    Brian Steel made a visit to Puttaparthi and the Prashanthi Nilayam ashram in October  2008.  His revealing  report refers to “the steady physical decline of Sathya Sai Baba in the past four or five years,” necessitating the use of a wheelchair. Steel  further says that, on the day he visited, “I only saw a handful of foreign visitors.” See Steel, Visit to Puttaparthi.    

Copyright © 2011 Kevin R. D. Shepherd. All Rights Reserved. Page uploaded August 2009, last modified February 2011.