Sathya Sai Baba

Sathya Sai Baba, who died probably aged 84, was India's most famous, and most controversial, Swami or holy man, and one of the most enigmatic and remarkable religious figures of the last century.

Photo: EPA

 

To his followers, Sai Baba was a living god; a claim he did nothing to disavow. He would frequently liken himself to such figures as Christ, Krishna, and the Buddha, claiming that he was the avatara of the age – an avatara being a living incarnation of the Divine. To his detractors he was a charlatan, albeit one of considerable ingenuity and enormous personal charisma and power.

From humble beginnings, his following grew until by the end of the 20th century it was estimated to number more than three million people around the world.

This made him a powerful and influential figure in Indian social and political life; he numbered many high-ranking politicians and public figures among his devotees and several Presidents and Prime Ministers, including Deva Gowda and Narasimha Rao, found it politically expedient to make their way to his ashram in the town of Puttaparthi in southern India to be photographed paying their respects.

Sai Baba's reputation was founded largely on claims of his miraculous powers. These included the apparent ability to materialise various tokens of devotion, such as amulets, rings and pendants, out of thin air; to produce "vibhuti", or "holy" ash in prodigious amounts from his fingertips; and to manifest fully formed lingams (ellipsoids made of crystal or quartz) from his stomach by regurgitation.

These feats made him the target of numerous sceptics and debunkers, who claimed that the "materialisations" where little more than legerdemain which could be replicated by any competent Indian street magician. Sai Baba consistently refused to have his powers scientifically scrutinised, explaining that they were "part of the unlimited power of God. You call them miracles, but for me they are just my way."

Such is the mixture of myth, fabulation and hagiography that grew up around Sathya Sai Baba that the facts of his life are hard to establish. He is thought to have been born, as Sathya Narayana Raju, on November 23 1926, into a poor farming family in the village of Puttaparthi, in the arid state of Andhra Pradesh.
According to legend, as a child he would avoid places where animals were slaughtered and bring beggars home to be fed. At the age of 14, after apparently being bitten by a scorpion, he began to display signs of delirium and hallucinations. Convinced that he was possessed, his parents summonsed a local exorcist who shaved the boy's head, scored four X's into his scalp, and poured the juice of garlic and lime into the wounds. Shortly afterwards, he declared himself to be a reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba, one of southern India's most revered saints, who died in 1918. Challenged to prove his claim, he is said to have thrown some jasmine flowers on the floor; in falling the flowers arranged themselves to spell out the name "Sai Baba" in Telugu.
Leaving his family, he travelled throughout southern India, gathering followers around him, and in 1950 he inaugurated his first ashram in Puttaparthi.
Sai Baba professed that his mission was ecumenical: the emblem of his organisation included symbols of all the world's great faiths, but his message was essentially drawn from Hindu teachings about man and God being inseparable by virtue of the atman, or eternal soul – the "universal divine spark" which is present in all beings. The atman, he declared, "can be known only through love" – a philosophy that he distilled in the maxim: "Love all, serve all."
All men, therefore, are God. But to his devotees Sai Baba seemed to be more God than most. One of his closest disciples, Professor N Kasturi, the author of a four volume biography, described him as "a multi-faced avatar" – the embodiment of Rama, Christ, Krishna, Buddha and Zoroaster. Perhaps his most unlikely champion was a Vatican priest, Don Mario Mazzoleni, who in 1990 published a book, A Catholic Priest Meets Sai Baba, in which he declared that Christ and Sai Baba were the same manifestation of God on earth. After refusing an invitation from the Vatican to "retreat from his heretical doctrinal positions", Mazzoleni was excommunicated in 1993.
Sai Baba frequently talked of himself as being "the Supra-worldly Divinity in Human Form", and the World Saviour. When American devotee and biographer, Dr John Hislop, asked him directly whether he claimed to be God, Sathya Sai is said to have replied: "Let us say, I am the switch."
Sathya Sai's message and his alleged miraculous powers brought him an enormous following not only in India, but also in the West. This went far beyond the hippies and spiritual seekers who had made their way to India in the Sixties in search of enlightenment. The numerous Sai groups that proliferated in Europe, America and Australia were liberally peopled with physicians, psychologists and teachers. By the 1990s the tiny village of Puttaparthi had swollen to the size of a town and an airport was built to accommodate the growing numbers of pilgrims.
Twice a day Sai Baba, a stocky figure in a red, floor-length robe, his head crowned in a frizzy halo of black hair, would appear for "darshan" in the ashram's main temple. He would move among the adoring crowds, sometimes "materialising" vibhuti into outstretched hands and summoning favoured devotees for private audiences. His followers would frequently talk of miraculous healings, of being "called" to him in dreams and visions, and of Sai Baba being able to read their minds – powers that were widely held among the faithful to be evidence of his "omniscience", and which sceptics dismissed as either self-delusion or an expert use of the technique of "cold reading", whereby facts are drawn out of a subject and fed back to them later without them realising it. An Icelandic researcher, Professor Erlendur Haraldsson conducted interviews with 29 subjects on Sathya Sai's mind-reading abilities. Of these, 19 reported that he had done so correctly, and five only partially correctly. One woman whom Sathya Sai advised "should get married" was married already.
As his organisation grew, Sai Baba established an extensive network of schools and colleges throughout India, and his programme of Education in Human Values (EHV) was adopted by schools in Europe and America. The most extravagant display of his largesse was the Rayalaseema water project, inaugurated on his 70th birthday, which provided water to more than 750 villages and several towns in Andhra Pradesh.
In 1991 he inaugurated the Sathya Sai Super-Speciality Hospital, which provided a range of medical services, up to major heart surgery, free of charge to local villagers. The hospital, which was designed by Dr Keith Crichlow, the director of the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture, was largely funded by an American follower, Isaac Tigrett, who had co-founded the Hard Rock chain of restaurants.
Sai Baba always maintained a cloak of secrecy over his financial activities and the affairs of the ashram. In 1993 he was the victim of an apparent assassination attempt, when four armed men broke into his private rooms. His chauffeur and cook were murdered, but Sai Baba managed to escape unscathed. The intruders were shot dead by police. Thereafter, pilgrims entering the ashram had to pass through metal detectors.
According to ashram officials the assassination attempt was the result of a struggle between rival factions of devotees who had been denied positions of influence in the ashram. But the attempt on Sai Baba's life hinted at other, darker currents that had begun to eddy around his mission. Not least of these were allegations that young male devotees had been sexually abused by their guru in the course of private audiences. These allegations were given wider currency with the advent of the internet, and an international campaign by devotees in Europe and America calling for his prosecution. But Sai Baba seemed impervious to criticism. He was never investigated by the Indian authorities, and pilgrims continued to flock to his ashram in their hundreds of thousands.
Sathya Sai Baba was certainly wrong about one thing having, in 1963, announced that he would live until 2020. It remains to be seen whether another prediction is closer to the mark – that in 2028 his "third incarnation", Prema Sai, will be born in the village of Gunaparthy in Karnataka state. "With his [Prema Sai's] efforts, love, goodwill, brotherhood and peace will abound throughout the world," Sai Baba declared. "He will receive universal recognition from mankind."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/religion-obituaries/8471342/Sathya-Sai-Baba.html