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whole volume of his collected speeches focuses on this figure (see p.240 below)
23
.
Gerson (1998:13-14) also acknowledges the importance of Sathya Sai Baba’s iden-
tity as an avatar, but has little to add to what we have already seen, merely giving
a couple of paraphrases of academic and hagiographical views on this subject
On traditional views of the avatar in this context, Harper (1972:26) writes:
As conceived in its contact with finite man, the Absolute is Ishvara, Brahman sa-
guna (Brahman “with attributes”), who “descends” to man as an avatara…. Al-
though the term avatāra is often rendered into English as “incarnation,” some
Hindu scholars strongly deny that the “descent” of the deity is a true incarnation.
24
For them the term avatāra implies that “the Supreme Lord appeared in this world in
His own Eternal Form out of His Own Inconceivable Prerogative without accepting
any physical body.”
Interestingly, he goes on to say that: ‘The adherents of the contemporary personal-
ity cults… do not agree entirely with this point of view…. The founders of their
cults… manifest certain human as well as divine qualities’. Odd as it may seem,
Sathya Sai Baba’s views present parallels to both of these viewpoints. I will return
to this issue later (see Chapter 6).
The main point of Harper’s study is to understand the attraction of figures like
Sathya Sai Baba to their American devotees, and, in accordance with what we saw
in Section 1.4, over and above his “miracles”, it is Sathya Sai Baba’s divine persona
that emerges as the key factor in this. Harper (1972:237) quotes one American
devotee as saying of Sathya Sai Baba: ‘He is sage, father, mother, child. …Never
have I stood so close to God’, and tells of another couple who were drawn to
Sathya Sai Baba after ‘they prayed “for the Highest Living Master to come and take
us to our goal.”’
25
Robert Elwood (1973:245), in a similar study, also makes this
point—he says that, whilst Sathya Sai Baba has never been to the United States,
this is not entirely necessary, because of his status as ‘an avatar, a divine incarna-
tion, of Krishna, and of Shiva and his shakti or consort… to whom distance and
natural law mean little.’
Finally, on a different note, Morton Klass (1991:77) suggests that: ‘Though
Sathya Sai Baba claims to be the reincarnation of the “Saint of Shrdi [sic]” he has
made no effort to look like the latter, or to behave in ways attributed to the older
23
Bowen (1985:484,509) also notes Sathya Sai Baba’s affinity for advaita, giving some references to
Sathya Sai Baba literature in this regard.
24
NB Western scholars have also made this point—see, e.g., p.12 above.
25
NB Sathya Sai Baba’s divine persona is also a major theme of several short documentary films that
were made in the 1970s and early 1980s by American film-maker Richard Bock (see Bibliography),
these often serving as tools of recruitment to the cult in the West [see also S. Ruhela (1985:95)].
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Fig.11a An early photograph
of Sathya Sai Baba in a pose
and with a walking-cane remi-
niscent of Sai Baba of Shirdi.
Fig.11b A typical painting of
Sai Baba of Shirdi (d.1918) in
his characteristic pose—right
leg resting on the left knee.
Fig.11c Two Sais—the Shirdi
Sai idol (at front) is said to
have miraculously appeared.
holy man’ (excepting the parallel usages of vibhūti that we saw above). There are,
however, many photographs of a young Sathya Sai Baba in a pose (Fig.11a)
26
imi-
tative of characteristic depictions of his namesake (Fig.11b)—these, in turn, being
imitative of icons of Dattātreya (e.g. Fig.6 above)
27
. And one of the early West-
ern devotees of Sathya Sai Baba recalls seeing two self-portraits that Sathya Sai
Baba had painted when he was in his late teens, one of which was in the guise of
Shirdi Sai Baba. Sathya Sai Baba evidently concluded that they were ‘Not good’,
and despite protests of devotees to the contrary, had them both destroyed
28
.
Still, it is true that, as H. Daniel Smith (1978:57) writes: ‘It is surprising how
rarely a picture of the earlier Shirdi Sai Baba appears as part of the paraphernalia
presented with Satya Sai Baba’. And the reason for this perhaps lies in the fact
that, as we have seen, Sathya Sai Baba, in addition to claiming identity with Shirdi
Sai, has long claimed to be “the avatar”—an identity that provides him, and his
devotees, with a vast fund of alternative symbols out of which to fashion devo-
tional “paraphernalia”. Moreover, as we will see in the next section, even his first
claim to identity with Shirdi Sai Baba invoked other significant religious figures.
26
NB For more examples of Sathya Sai Baba in this pose, see LIMF 164,
192,197,200,202,248.
27
NB For some other (non-Sathya Sai Baba-aligned) examples of Dattātreya in the pose exemplified
in this image, see: http://www.sivanandabrasil.com.br/images/dattatreya.jpg; http://www.adv
aita.it/images/Dattatreya1.jpg; http://www.kamat.com/indica/faiths/gods/13040.jpg [28-5-2007].
28
GC 86