Sai Baba

The mystic Sai Baba (1838 - 1918) is one of those peculiar Indian phenomena that so exasperate all those who want rational thinking and an ordered sequence to biographies. For while it is indubitable that Sai Baba lived in the public eye for over fifty years, it is also only too true that his life has almost no connection with normality as it is generally understood.

Amongst his many devotees there is a breathtaking disregard for evidence and a dazzling susceptibility to the miraculous. In fact as a rule of thumb, a miraculous rather than natural explanation for any act of his is normally preferred. Sai Baba has suffered the fate of all saints - he is swallowed by the hagiographies. Even by Indian standards however his life makes for most peculiar reading. He has become transformed into a myth, rather than a real person of great spiritual attainments.

A myth gives meaning to reality without fully embodying it. If we use that as a working definition for the phenomenon of Sai Baba then we can make more sense of all that has been proclaimed in his name.

Shirdi was, and is, a little dusty no-horse town about twenty-eight kilometers from Nasik city in Maharashtra and about a hundred kilometers from Pune city. It was of no consequence before the saint decided to settle down there. It is today one of the fastest growing pilgrimage centers in India. Of all the miracles attributed to Baba, as he is known, perhaps none is more impressive than the fact that a dead man continues to be the economic mainstay of thousands of people. The entire town in fact, has a rationale only because of him.

Baba has become, in the communally surcharged atmosphere of today, a useful tool to promote the synthetic and ineffective notions of Harmony that are deemed useful for the ignorant masses. As a consequence you find all sorts of literature and even a court judgment that repeats the currently popular line that He was neither Hindu nor Muslim. While true at an absolute level, the facts seem to be at variance with this comforting and agreeable belief.

Briefly, Sai Baba seems to have been born of Hindu parents, raised up by Muslim foster parents, lived as a Sufi fakir all his life, and died with enough ambiguity about his behavior to be classified as belonging to all. In practice he has been almost completely Hinduised and his memorial is now a full-fledged temple, with all the daily rituals of pooja as performed at any other temple. Even the story of this birth has enough elements of the miraculous. His parents were supposed to be Brahmins of the village of Patri, in Aurangabad and then under the Nizam's dominions. Today it is in Maharashtra state. His father was supposed to be one Ganga Bavadia and his mother a Devigiriamma. As his birth neared however, his father felt that most powerful of all impulses in India, vairagya, the irresistible pressure to renounce the world. His wife followed him on this quest. She was overcome by labour pains in a forest close by, but the gripped-by-vairagya Bavadia left her there and forged on.

In the cultural context of this mythic retelling of divine origins, this is not reprehensible behavior but actually a laudable act. The urge to seek God overcomes all other emotions, no matter how cruel the behavior may seem and it reflects on Baba's glory too that he had a father so determined to renounce the world. A grand and terrible gesture somehow reassures the devotees that the vairagya is the real thing. His wife gave birth, wrapped up the infant in some cloth and abandoned him, hastening after her husband. That too is regarded as laudable in the context, her duty prescribes she follows her husband no matter the cost.

A wandering Sufi fakir and his wife chanced upon the infant in one of those miraculous coincidences, and as they had no children themselves, kept the boy as an act of God.

There is no evidence for any of this except pure hearsay and the doubtful process of inner insights offered at various times by various people, but for the faithful that is enough. Indeed this story was never meant to be taken seriously as we understand it in modern times. It was always a divine origin myth, and it needs to be treated at that level. Even the life of Kabir, a medieval saint, has this abandonment by Brahmin parents and Muslim upbringing theme. Indeed Baba is supposed to be a reincarnation of Kabir. His devotees have at some time or the other claimed him to be a reincarnation of almost every divinity known to India so that is that.

The young boy lost his foster father when he was five and his mother put him into a sort of ashram at Selu, run by one Venkusha - who may have been Hindu or Muslim. (We never know what Baba's name was before he came to Shirdi, so perforce we have to call him boy.) In another typical mythical construct, his brilliance outshone all the students there and excited their jealousy, so much so that a murderous assault was made upon him. His attacker immediately falls down, struck by divine retribution, and Baba performs his first miracle in restoring him to health.

About the age of sixteen Baba suddenly appeared in Shirdi, looking like a typical wandering Sufi fakir. In later life he spoke of his teacher, one Roshan Shah, who had initiated him into this path and there is some confusion whether Venkusha is a mispronunciation of Roshan Shah. After a sojourn of about two months he disappeared again into the great open spaces of India, performing the wanderjahre that is so essential a part of all Indian spiritual striving. He reappeared in Shirdi in 1858 and then never budged from the spot till his death in 1918.

It is ironic that the saint wanted to live in the near-abandoned Khandoba temple but was stopped by the person who would become his first and closest devotee, Mhalsapathi. This Brahmin priest was shocked at the thought of this Muslim-looking person entering the temple and subtly suggested that he might consider an old abandoned mosque instead. This was the famous greeting that gave the saint his name. "Ya Sai, (Welcome Sai) are you looking for the mosque?" Sai was a common appellation for the Muslim fakirs of the time, and Baba accepted both the name and the hint with a quiet, "Then let it be so". Strangely, he named the masjid (mosque) where he would live out all his life, and where his Muslim followers would regularly offer namaz, as Dwarka Mai or Mother Dwarka. Dwarka is the holy city associated with Krishna and this was very peculiar indeed.

Sai Baba's mystic quest did not end once he had settled down. He practiced a great deal of austerities and meditations regularly at spots he claimed to recall from previous births. His spiritual stature was growing by leaps and bounds and some time in 1886 he had a direct experience of union with god. So strong was this state that his body exhibited all the symptoms of death for three full days and only the faith of Mhalsapathi prevented the body from being carted away. After this incident he began to manifest his miraculous powers regularly.

Sai Baba had also become a beacon of sorts for all the Sufis on the spiritual path at the time and they were constantly drawn to the sheer power of his spirit. He regarded himself as a sort of mentor, not a guru to these fakirs and he was always giving them advise and spiritual exercises and instructions. After his death and the building of a temple over his remains the numbers of these Sufis coming to Shirdi have declined drastically. It is a matter of great regret, one that has been overlooked in the general rush to proclaim Sai Baba as a via media between the Hindus and Muslims. This is the famous Boa constrictor simile used to describe the assimilative powers of the Hindu cultural system, and there could be actually no better example than that of Sai Baba.

The mystic used to keep a fire going which was never allowed to be extinguished and it is still tended to today. The ash, udi, from this fire became his panacea for all illnesses as well as a blessing he would hand out. The Sufi tradition does have a constantly tended fire amongst its practices, so it is not as Hindu as it may appear. He also developed the practice of never sleeping two nights in a row at the same spot. Every day he would switch from the masjid to a structure known as the chavdi, and reverse the process the next day. In the last years of his life this had become a spectacle of its own with a crowd of devotees trailing him. In the last eight years of his life Baba had also allowed his Hindu devotes to offer worship to him as if he were a Deity in a temple and that has a lot to do with subsequent events.

Sai Baba's miracles were the reason he became immensely famous even in his own lifetime. These miracles are accepted in the Sufi tradition as special dispensations of God's grace and as signs of the holiness of the fakir. These miracles are known as Kara mat to distinguish them from the miracles of the Prophet Mohammed, which are unique to him alone, unrepeatable, and are known as mu'jizat. Baba had all the familiar features of such powers. He knew what was going on in people's minds, he could discern the karmic causes of their miseries, he had the power of bilocation and he could dole out wealth. Sai Baba was supposed to have saved a great many devotees from physical harm and accidents and he was a famous curer of disease. He used to give away money as soon as he got it and a steady stream of it poured out to benefit all the wandering fakirs and devotees. He also had the rather disconcerting habit of telling people to look for money at the spot where they went to answer the call of nature! There are many people who claimed to be so enrichened. But the prime reason for his fame was his perceived ability to remove the curse of sterility and barrenness. In child-mad India that was enough to convert the few faithful into a flood of miracle seekers. Apparently the code was a mango-gift for boy children and a tamarind for female offspring.

The mystic himself had never any patience with pretence and self-importance in anybody and his temper was formidable. He was called the mad fakir for his apparently bizarre behavior, a famous example being his grinding enormous quantities of wheat during a cholera epidemic and then spreading the flour in a circle round Shirdi. Shirdi escaped the cholera ravaging the district and his reputation grew immensely. In his teachings there was never anything specifically Hindu in terms of terminology, theology or philosophy. On the contrary, he was constantly muttering "Allah Malik" or God is the master, and he used to indulge in typical Sufi practices like the bhandara, a community feast with meat dishes, hardly a Hindu practice.

In India a guru or saint who promises or seems to promise miracles is always more popular than a guru who teaches and gives knowledge. Baba became popular because of his miracles but he was also the spiritual guide for a lot of people, a fact that is forgotten or submerged under the tide of miracle-seeking devotees. He had no system or rituals that needed following, it was a set of spiritual practices that he would prescribe to each aspirant according to their individual natures and their abilities. It is a tragedy that there is almost no literature on this aspect of his life, and nobody seems to have focused on collating the data on this topic.

Since Baba never left a systematic compendium of his teachings, none emerged. He used to teach according to the needs of his querents and he used all the common theological ideas current in this time. Because he was so eminently of a tradition that did not value the codification of knowledge, preferring the company of holy men, it is difficult to set down any philosophy of Sai Baba as such. There isn't any. The mystic is the message, period. He is actually dangerously close to being regarded as an avatar of god and many millions of people do so regard him as such, literally god on earth. Debate and discussion is difficult in these circumstances. Sai Baba's representations are now found all over India and nearly every taxi and auto-rickshaw in Maharashtra carries a little image or photo of him as a talisman. As a real focus of religious belief he is hard to beat.

Shortly before his death however he set down Eleven Promises, or articles of faith .We reproduce them to give some insight into the zeitgeist of this faith.

The more contemporary Sai Baba is the world famous god man at Puttaparthi, he of the flaming silk robes and Afro hairstyle. He claims to be the reincarnation of the Shirdi Sai Baba and has a colossal following. He has also made the interesting prediction that he will die in 2O22 and then the same Sai energy will reincarnate after seven years. The two sets of followers maintain an uneasy peace between themselves.

Shirdi is a spot of unusually strong spiritual power and it can hit people almost physically if they are so attuned. That a spiritual giant had once lived and meditated there is only too evident. A great many people still have significant spiritual experiences there. Even one of Indiayogi's Panelists, Justice Dudhat, met a spiritual teacher there who significantly shifted his life. The kitsch that is making Shirdi into a spiritual supermarket is a looming danger for the future. As it stands today however it is a monument to the sheer magnificent power of ones man's attainments in living the life spiritual.

- Rohit Arya

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