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Shiva and Shakthi were engaged in a competitive dance, trying to find out who
could dance longer. Eight days passed thus, before Shakthi noticed Bharadhwaaja
standing in the cold. She just cast a smile at him and danced along as before! The
sage mistook the smile as a cynical refusal to notice him; so he turned his back on
Kailaasa and started to descend. To his dismay, he found his left leg, hand and eye
put out of action by a stroke. Shiva saw him fall; He came up to him and consoled
him… Then, Shiva revived him and cured him, sprinkling water from the Kaman-
dalu. Both Shiva and Shakthi granted the Rishi (sage) boons: …Shiva said that They
would take human form and be born in the Bharadhwaaja Gothra (lineage) thrice:
Shiva alone as Shirdi Sai Baaba, Shiva and Shakthi together at Puttaparthy as Sathya
Sai Baaba and Shakthi alone as Prema Sai, later. Then Shiva remembered the illness
that had suddenly come upon Bharadhwaaja at Kailaasa on the eighth day of the
waiting in the cold on the ice. He gave another assurance. “As expiation for the ne-
glect which Shakthi showed you at Kailaasa for 8 days, this Shakthi will suffer the
stroke for 8 days, when We both take birth as Sathya Sai and, on the 8th day, I shall
relieve her from all signs of the disease by sprinkling water, just as I did at Kailaasa
to cure your illness.” It was the working out of this assurance that you witnessed to-
day, just now.
31
The ‘different sports of their choice’ referred to in Swallow’s above paraphrase are
evidently a reflection of what is here described as a ‘competitive dance’.
Significantly, Wendy Doniger (1980b:141,143) writes that:
In South India, Śiva and Kālī [a wild and destructive form of the goddess] are often
said to compete in a dance contest…. The one form in which Pārvatī [a generally
more reserved and gentle form of the goddess] may participate is as half of the an-
drogyne… her function in this particular icon is to provide a peaceful contrast to his
wild dance. For when the androgyne dances, the male half, on the right, performs
the tāṇḍava and expresses the “horrific” emotion (raudra); the female half, on the
left, performs the lāsya [“gentle” dance] and expresses the erotic emotion’.
What I will label as the androgyne and stroke motifs in Sathya Sai Baba’s account
thus parallel features inherent to the sport (/dance) motif as it appears in this con-
text. But this motif itself—if we are to go by a number of similar traditional
myths—is a euphemism
32
. Swallow (1982:141) describes, for example, a passage
from the Padma-Purāṇa in which:
The sage Bhrgu goes to visit Siva, sent by the gods to decide which of the gods is
greatest. At the door of Siva’s house a guard stops him entering, explaining that Siva
is making love to Parvati, and that he risks his life if he disturbs them. Bhrgu waits
31
Sathya Sai Baba (6-7-1963) S3 15:90,91 ‘Indhra’ (Indra) is the traditional regent of the gods.
The ‘Kamandalu’ [kamaṇḍalu] is a ritual water vessel that Śiva is invariably traditionally depicted as
carrying. ‘Kailaasa’ [Mt. Kailāsa] is the traditional abode of Śiva. NB A story notably similar to this
and told well prior to Sathya Sai Baba’s birth, is attributed by devotee Pedda Bottu (2005:99) to an
ascetic by the name of ‘Thapaswi Maharaj’, who ‘came to know of it from a maharshi’.
32
For more on this see Wendy Doniger (1980), pp.130ff.
1
1
1
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for many days, but finally curses Siva to take the form of the lingam in the yoni
33
as
he is immersed in the embrace of a woman and dishonors the sage.
Of note here, in common with Sathya Sai Baba’s story are what I will call the wait-
ing, dishonour and curse motifs, and again that of the androgyne—this time with
an explicit incarnation motif.
Swallow (1982:142) goes on to cite another myth, which she says ‘establishes
an even closer parallel with the Bharadwāj story’:
All the gods and sages go to pay homage to Siva on Kailasa, when he is there with
Parvati. All except the sage, Bhrngin, who has vowed to worship Siva alone, tact-
fully avoid the couple. Parvati is angered and curses Bhrngin to be a skeleton. Siva
in turn, seeing that the sage cannot stand, gives him a third leg, and the sage dances
with pleasure. But this again angers Parvati who ‘performs tapas [penance] for Siva’
and is granted her desire to become part of his own body. Then the wily sage, taking
the form of a beetle, pierces a hole through the androgynous form of Siva and Par-
vati and manages to circumambulate Siva alone—a feat which even wins the ap-
proval of Parvati who ‘shows him grace’.’
Again, there are obvious similarities to Sathya Sai Baba’s account—the curse, the
fall/stroke and restoration/grace from it, the dance, and the androgyne—but Swal-
low goes further than this, claiming that:
The pattern of the three mortal births [in Sathya Sai Baba’s account] follows exactly
the sequence of events in the Bhrngin myth:
1. Parvati performs tapas/ /Sakti is born alone as Sai Baba the ascetic.
2. Parvati joins the body of Siva (takes androgynous form)/ /Siva-Sakti are born
as the androgynous Sathya Sai Baba (an ambiguous ascetic erotic figure).
3. Bhrngin through persistence worships Siva alone/ /Siva is born alone as 3
rd
Sai.
To me, this seems tenuous in its own right—but, in any case, it is obviously un-
dermined by the misquote that I pointed out earlier.
Still, the more general similarities do hold good, as perhaps does a further im-
plication of Swallow (1982:140,n.34) that this is an echo of ‘one of the best known
sequences in the Siva mythology’—in which, as she writes:
the gods and sages, disturbed that Siva’s tapas will destroy the universe, send Kama,
the god of desire, to distract him. Siva with the heat of tapas burns Kama to ashes.
They then send Parvati, the daughter of Himalaya to excite him, but she only suc-
ceeds after she has enhanced her own beauty by performing tapas herself. Later and
more paradoxically, the gods, having brought the pair together in order to produce a
child to destroy a monster threatening the earth, are worried that Siva’s endless
lovemaking will destroy the universe, realising that the god need never come to cli-
33
NB The yoni, “womb”, is a traditional icon of Śakti, as the liṅga (“phallus”) is of Śiva. See Danié-
lou (1964:222ff.) for some traditional accounts of the significance of the symbolism involved here.