6
6
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.
.
I
I
N
N
T
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N
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regard to his actions. Babb concludes that ‘the very haphazardness of Sathya Sai
Baba’s acts—magical or not—becomes a kind of evidence in support of his claim to
divinity’. And Sathya Sai Baba himself seems to actively encourage such percep-
tions, in this case explicitly aligning himself with Kṛṣṇa:
It is only when Yasodha found every length of rope a little short to go round His
belly that she discovered He was the Lord. So too, you will realise every description
of My Mahima (Divine Glory) a little too short of the actuality; and then you will get
convinced.
13
The reference here is to traditional stories in which Kṛṣṇa’s mother attempts in
vain to bind the child Kṛṣṇa in order to stop him getting into mischief, before fi-
nally recollecting his divine nature—upon which he allows himself to be bound.
14
There thus is a sense in which Sathya Sai Baba does portray himself as being
comprehensible, but, as he elsewhere makes clear, this is not the type of compre-
hension that we are seeking here; rather, it is an assertion of traditional beliefs in
the spiritual unity of human and divine (cf. p.13 above):
when Divinity comes down as Avathaar (divine incarnation), man is unable to pierce
the veil and revere the Divine. …Only those who are aware of the current within,
the Aathma, can identify the Source of Power before them [(7-1974) S12 42:246].
Indeed, he explicitly states his view that the purpose of the avatar is to make ‘man
aware of Him in him, when He finds him desperately searching outside of himself
for Him who is his very core’
15
. This again echoes traditional portrayals of
Kṛṣṇa—Bhāgavata-Purāṇa, a “classical” scriptural synthesis of Kṛṣṇa mythology
and theology, has Kṛṣṇa addressed as follows:
How pitiable is the ignorance of these ignorant people that they consider you, their
real self, as other (different from themselves)… And thus they think that their real
self is to be searched for outside in external objects.
16
As we will see, Sathya Sai Baba’s often seem to draw his ideas from such works.
My attempts to contextualize Sathya Sai Baba’s popular orations with respect to
“classical” traditions that were written down many centuries ago might plausibly
be seen as problematic, but as Sumit Sarkar (1997:317-318) observes:
Historians in recent years have been moving away from sharp elite/popular, tex-
tual/oral disjunctions towards an understanding of ways in which elements of high
textual culture could sink into and intermix with predominantly oral practices.
13
(23-2-1958) http://www.sssbpt.info/ssspeaks/volume01/sss01-05.pdf [12-7-2007]
14
See, e.g., Bhāgavata-Purāṇa 10:9.14-20.
15
Sathya Sai Baba (24-12-1980) S14 60:386
16
Tagare (1978), Part IV, p.1346.
1
1
.
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3
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1
Sarkar notes that, though illiterate, Ramakrishna (1836-1886), who we will see to
be a figure closely comparable to Sathya Sai Baba:
could have relatively easy access to ‘high’ knowledge, despite poverty and lack of
formal education, as he happened to be of Brahman birth. …[Moreover, he] could
imbibe mainstream Hindu traditions through watching folk theatre performances of
epic and puranic tales… and he soon started acting them out himself with friends.
And we will see that, whilst Sathya Sai Baba is not of Brahmin birth
17
, his caste
has traditionally fulfilled Brahmin roles, in fact being charged with remembrance
and transmission of mythology (and, evidently, dramatization of the same).
Sathya Sai Baba, despite a lack of formal religious education, grew up surrounded
by “high” traditions, and it is thus no surprise that references to these constitute a
significant portion of the subject matter of his discourses and writings.
This said, the chain of transmission linking such ideas to Sathya Sai Baba is not
always direct. As we will see, there is evidence that the ideas of figures like
Ramakrishna—modern figures who have identified themselves as avatars—have
themselves influenced Sathya Sai Baba’s thinking. We may thus provide some fur-
ther context for understanding Sathya Sai Baba’s claims by referring to such fig-
ures. In regard to the issue at hand, for example, we may note that, like Sathya
Sai Baba, Ramakrishna (1965:216-219) avers that it is very difficult to understand
or even recognise an avatar; Aurobindo (1958:410) holds that ‘it is impossible for
the limited human reason to judge the way or purpose of the Divine’; and Meher
Baba was believed to be ‘inscrutable, imponderable, and totally unpredictable’
18
. I
will say more of these figures and their relationship to Sathya Sai Baba in due
course. They are important in that they constitute a modern milieu within which
Sathya Sai Baba’s avatar claims can be better understood. And there are some
other significant areas of influence that will also be worthy of our consideration; I
will hint at some of these towards the end of this section in the process of consid-
ering another example of Sathya Sai Baba’s ideas.
17
On Sathya Sai Baba’s caste see Section 2.2. NB Bharati (1981a:54) erroneously describes Sathya
Sai Baba as ‘a brahmin of low literacy’, but he has written several books, and, whilst it its true that,
as Haraldsson (1997:142) notes, some of his close devotees testify that he does not read newspapers
[cf. Aitken (2004:152)] and ‘never had a book in his room’—this does not necessarily imply a lack
of ability on Sathya Sai Baba’s part. Indeed, he treats this as an ethical issue—referring to newspa-
pers as “nuisance papers”, or condemning novels as a “debilitating” waste of time. And Haraldsson
(1997:184) writes of the first edition of his own book, a courtesy-copy of which he sent to Sathya
Sai Baba: ‘My impression was that he had read it with interest. He complimented me, but also
complained that I had in some instances been misinformed’ (for some of the instances in question—
which cast Sathya Sai Baba in a bad light—see pp.54,209ff.).
18
Daniel Bassuk (1987b), p.83.