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and “God”’. Klass suggests that this renders Sathya Sai Baba’s claims to be “God”
rather less extraordinary than they might seem to non-Hindus, but we will see that
Sathya Sai Baba’s claim to divinity is something extraordinary even in Hindu con-
texts. In fact, Klass (1991:161) himself tells of a case amongst Hindus in Trinidad
in which Sathya Sai Baba’s claim to divinity was contested by some of the local
Hindu leaders, via ‘a communication to practicing pandits’:
advising them not to permit pictures of Sathya Sai Baba at services over which they
preside…. They are advised to object to bhajans [devotional songs] that are revised
to include the name of Sathya Sai Baba, and so on.
There are even, he says, ‘incidents of pandits lecturing in the streets to passers-by,
claiming that Sathya Sai Baba is a charlatan and no avatar’. To this I would add
that the results of a multi-choice questionnaire that parapsychologist Erlendur
Haraldsson (1997:226ff.,233) put to a number of persons of Indian ethnicity show
that Sathya Sai Baba’s avatar claim alienated several of his earliest devotees.
It is true that such views are in the minority, but there does not seem to be any
significant cultural bias in the more usual view amongst devotees—that Sathya Sai
Baba is indeed an avatar. Haraldsson’s conclusion was that ‘the great majority of
the respondents… felt that Baba was an avatar’, and this holds true of most Indian
Sathya Sai Baba devotee’s that I have encountered. Moreover, despite the above-
noted suggestion by Klass, anthropologist Bob Exon (1997:172), interviewing
Western devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, notes that they too ‘seem to have no prob-
lem accepting that he is God incarnate’. Christian scholar Reinhart Hummel
(1984:18-19) confirms that Sathya Sai Baba’s fulfilling this role is a key factor in
his attraction to Westerners, although he casts this in a somewhat sinister light as
he refers to Sathya Sai Baba’s ‘anti-Christian potential’—i.e. that he ‘presents him-
self consciously as substitute Christ… and is, in that sense, an anti-Christ’
39
.
Sathya Sai Baba’s divine persona is, then, a topic of sufficient depth, complexity,
and cross-cultural import, to warrant further investigation. But anthropologist
Lawrence Babb (1987:170) raises another potential problem with any attempt,
such as my present one, to give an “objective” account of Sathya Sai Baba:
The first thing that must be said about Sathya Sai Baba is that the man himself is
39
NB Whilst, so far as I am aware, none of Sathya Sai Baba’s followers from Christian backgrounds
see him as fulfilling the traditional eschatological role of the “Antichrist”, it is interesting to note
that the fact that contemporary American religious leader José Luis de Jesús Miranda (b.1946) con-
sciously presents himself both as the “Second Coming of Christ” and as the Antichrist seems to be
popular with his large international following—see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Luis_de_Jes
us_Miranda [27-5-2007]. Even if, as some of Sathya Sai Baba’s critics would like, Sathya Sai Baba
were to be widely proclaimed to be the Antichrist, this might not detract from his appeal.
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nearly impossible to find. …Submerged somewhere in the hubbub and symbolic
paraphernalia of his cult is a person that we, as outside observers, would call the
“real man.” But whoever this real Sathya Sai Baba is, he is inaccessible….
I would argue, however, that we do have one important window on the “real
Sathya Sai Baba”—his speeches. However heavily edited they may be before pub-
lication (see p.14 above), they are invariably delivered ex tempore. As he put it in
the course of giving one of his early speeches: ‘without my conscious effort, words
are bursting out from within my stomach’
40
. And even his writings are usually
suffixed with the title Vahini, giving the sense of “stream (of consciousness)”. Not
that his works are completely disorderly, he generally employs traditional scrip-
tures or concepts in the structure of his own outpourings, but the style is direct
and informal, and so should from this perspective give us a good indication of his
“real” ways of thinking.
Babb’s assertion, as we will see (p.97), is partly based upon his assessment of
Sathya Sai Baba’s “authorized biography”, Sathyam Sivam Sundaram (“Truth,
Goodness, Beauty”), written by N. Kasturi. Sathya Sai Baba himself acknowledges
that this work might appear ‘like a fairy tale’ to its readers—who even, he is said
to have told Kasturi, might ‘doubt your sanity’. Nevertheless, he claims that future
generations would ‘blame’ Kasturi for ‘underestimating’ his greatness
41
. For
Sathya Sai Baba, if anything, Kasturi has erred on the side of caution. Still, Kasturi
was an author of independent renown
42
, and his works displays as much of a liter-
ary as a historical consciousness (which they do display—Kasturi taught history at
university level for many years). Thus, despite Sathya Sai Baba’s comments,
Sathyam Sivam Sundaram strays far from being a detached presentation of rea-
sonably determinable historical facts. Cambridge scholar Deborah Swallow’s
(1982:126) characterization of it as ‘dramatic, exaggerated, simplistic, unsophisti-
cated, and intellectually undemanding’ is only slightly overstated
43
.
Accordingly, Babb (1986:161-162) writes in regard to Sathya Sai Baba that:
the strict facts of his personal biography and manner of life are buried beneath layer
upon layer of hagiography… no objective account of Sathya Sai Baba’s life has been
written by anyone close to him. Indeed, such an account may be an inherent impos-
40
Sathya Sai Baba (10-1949) LIMF 485
41
DI 75-76
42
On Kasturi, see his autobiography, Loving God (1985), and Gangā Rām Garg (1987), Vol. 4, p.71.
43
Many devotees, at least, do find Kasturi’s work intellectually demanding (not to be read without a
dictionary close at hand), and whilst Kasturi is far from critical of his sources, I do not think that he
has much exaggerated their claims—the exaggeration, if any, rests with them, and (as we will see)
with Sathya Sai Baba himself.