II

Sai Baba of Shirdi can be placed in a long tradition of popular South Asian holy men and women who were believed to be endowed with divinity and who preached new ways of life and being in the world. They revealed their close relationship with the divine, and even their divinity, through displays of miraculous powers such as clairvoyance, thought-reading, inflicting supernatural punishment on opponents, materialization of rare objects and foodstuffs, controlling the elements, appearing in distant places and in dreams of devotees, restoring the dead to life, providing fertility to the barren, and healing the sick. They tended to come from either the Hindu or the Islamic religious traditions, and although it sometimes became blurred, as in the cases of such figures as Kabir and Guru Nanak, I shall argue that the distinction was important. These individuals often came from very humble backgrounds. In this section, I shall examine the miracles that were attributed to such people in medieval and early modern times to better to situate Sai Baba's miraculous powers in his own place and period.

First of all, holy men and women who we can place broadly within the Hindu tradition tended not to be healers in any important respect.Footnote ¹¹ The miracles that they deployed to expose the inferiority of their opponents were generally of a different sort. This was the case with Guṇḍum Rāüḷ, a thirteenth-century village holy man of what is now northeastern Maharashtra. His life was set out in a manuscript titled Ṛddhipuralīḷā, which was translated with a commentary by Anne Feldhaus in 1984 as The Deeds of God in Ṛddhipur.Footnote ¹² He is shown as acting in unpredictable and even whimsical ways.Footnote ¹³ A person who sought his help could never be sure of how he would react—the result could be either restorative or deathly, or an unpredictable combination of both. As with many deities of the Hindu pantheon, Guṇḍum Rāüḷ is portrayed as having a dual personality, alternatively benign and punitive.Footnote ¹⁴ In all this, he was hardly a model of elevated morality or good human conduct. However, as Feldhaus explains, because he was believed to be an incarnation of God, he was not expected to conform to normal standards of human social behavior.Footnote ¹⁵ She also observes that he was of a very different order from those divinities that are seen to embody in their actions and being the qualities of justice, rationality, and order.Footnote ¹⁶

Guṇḍum Rāüḷ was said to have brought three dead people back to life, as well as a cow and a donkey.Footnote ¹⁷ Four other cases are mentioned of his healing individuals, and also villagers as a group when they suffered an outbreak of grave illnesses.Footnote ¹⁸ None of these accounts mention other healers whose cures had been ineffective, and Guṇḍum Rāüḷ was not demonstrating the superiority of his miraculous cures over and above the methods of others. In addition, people are not recounted as having gone to him with the hope of being cured—he was far too capricious for that. People instead came because he had a reputation as an incarnation of God, and they were prepared to accept his ill temper and possible cures or curses in a spirit of unquestioning devotion to the divine. He did not, therefore, enjoy a reputation as any sort of compassionate healer. Healing appears to have occupied a relatively minor place in his thoughts and actions.

We can make a similar observation in the case of another renowned medieval figure of this sort—Vallabhāchārya (1479–1531).Footnote ¹⁹ Originally from Andhra, he was a scholarly religious reformer who participated in learned theological debates. He himself is not depicted as carrying out healing miracles—those that were performed were effected by close disciples who applied residual powers they enjoyed through following his path. This implied that his own power would have been yet more awesome if he had chosen to exercise it. As it was, the account of his life mentions very few cases in which such healing occurred. In one, two rival holy men were inflicted with paralysis after they had challenged his abilities and were restored to health once they accepted him contritely. In another case a king was cured of fever, and in still another a devil that had possessed a queen was cast out. There is no suggestion in all this that Vallabhāchārya wanted to project himself widely as a healer. His mission was rather to popularize devotion to a predominantly loving Lord—Krishna—who was to be worshipped nonviolently. Here he came into conflict with the followers of Shiva, who, as “Lord of the bhūts” (ghosts), was commonly represented as a fearsome deity able to command malevolent spirits to harm humans if he so willed.Footnote ²⁰ Vallabhāchārya sought to assure people that if they followed the path of devotion to Krishna they would receive full protection against such frightening forces. He was the founder of the major Indian sect known as the Pushti Mārg, which came to have a strong following among mercantile groups in India.Footnote ²¹

Similarly, Mahīpati's series of books on the lives of the popular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Maharashtrian bhakti sants (devotional holy figures in the Hindu tradition) shows them as performing many miracles.Footnote ²² Their main aim and purpose was to reveal the power of the vernacular devotion of the bhakti sants over and above the rituals of the Brahman elites with their Sanskrit chants, or of sannyāsīs with their yogic austerities. In this, they sought to show that the great devotee (bhakta) was particularly loved and blessed by God. Very few of the miracles that Mahīpati related involved healing. Rāmdās (1608–1681) is shown as healing a crowd of low caste men and women who fell ill with chills, fever, and vomiting while he was performing a devotional song for them. Their illnesses were, it was said, caused by some demons that had previously been worsted by the sant. Rāmdās persuade the king of demons to call off his hordes, and the crowd was restored to health.Footnote ²³ On another occasion he cured a young man of mental illness by exorcising the spirit who was haunting him.Footnote ²⁴ These are the only two such cases recorded in this detailed account of the life of the sant. In the biography of another great sant, Tukārām (1608–1650), Mahīpati provides just one case of his curing through the casting out of an evil spirit.Footnote ²⁵ In the case of Eknāth (1533–1599), too, we find just one such example, regarding a Brahman with leprosy. The disease was caused, Mahīpati informs us, because the Brahman had committed a great sin. Eknāth had the ability to intercede with God to pardon him of this sin, whereupon he instantly recovered.Footnote ²⁶ The lives of some other sants, such as Bhānudās, mention no such healing acts at all.Footnote ²⁷

Some of these figures even dismissed miracle working as a dubious method that merely encouraged superstition. Sahajānanḍ Swāmī (1781–1830), who founded the popular Swāmīnārāyaṇ sect in Gujarat, preached that it was wrong for a devotee of Krishna like him to use supernatural power to bring relief to his followers from their worldly miseries. Rather, they should bear the fruits of their actions with equanimity. In fact the comforts of the physical body were a handicap in achieving spiritual enlightenment.Footnote ²⁸ Sahajānanḍ Swāmī’s life coincides with the start of British colonial rule in core areas of Gujarat, though his main base at Gaḍhaḍā was in the princely state of Bhāvnagar in Kaṭhiāwāḍ. The British gave him moral and material backing for his role in pacifying the lower classes of the region through his preaching.Footnote ²⁹

The generally marginal role of healing for these Hindu saints is in marked contrast to that of their Muslim counterparts, particularly those associated with the Sufis. As with sages in the Hindu tradition, the mark of a saintly person was an ability to perform miracles of many sorts. This was all in full accord with the Qur'an, which proclaimed the reality of miracles. While a theological distinction was made between the miracles of the Prophet Muhammad—which could not be reproduced—and those of the darvishes, faqīrs, and pīrs who followed him, the latter still displayed an amazing range of such powers. Theologians identified twenty-five categories of miracles (karamat) made possible by the power (barāka) of the saint.Footnote ³⁰ Healing was a central trope, associated in particular with the shrines that grew up around the tombs of charismatic preachers and were known as the dargāhs of the pirs. Such people were seen as protectors of the poor and needy and healers of those sick in either body or mind. Shrines with a reputation for healing could attract large numbers, in particular at the annual festival, the urs.Footnote ³¹ Such places were found all over India. A folk ballad from Bengal spoke of one such pir: “He cures all sickness by applying dust, does not tell anyone his secret…. His miracles bring people in hundreds to have their needs fulfilled. He distributes all he is offered among the poor and hungry.”Footnote ³²

The shrines attracted people of all religious traditions, Hindus and Muslims alike. For example, there was in fifteenth-century Maharashtra a Sufi pir known as Davalmalak who gained a reputation for being able to cure eye diseases in both humans and animals. After his death in 1484, his reputation spread throughout the region, and large numbers from all religious backgrounds, including Brahmans, came to his shrine for such cures. To make the cure effective, all of them, including Hindus, would assume the dress of a Sufi mendicant and beg for food on the journey to the shrine. Once at the dargāh, they had to await a dream from Davalmalak in which it was announced that their eye problem was no more. The bhakti sant Eknath commented on this custom in the early seventeenth century, remarking wryly that people would become faqīrs so as to cure their eyes at the shrine of Davalmalak, after which they ate a sweet “from the hands of a Turk.” Even today, Hindus from all castes go to this shrine for this purpose.Footnote ³³ Here we see a clear division between the major religious traditions, with Sufi pirs focused on healing and Hindu sants on different forms of miraculous display.

It is only in colonial times that we observe a gradual shift by Hindu seers in this respect. One such figure was Jalārām of Vīrpur in Junāgadh State (1799–1881). Jalārām, who was from a prosperous family of small-town shopkeepers, was informed by a sage that that there were three types of fear—of hunger, disease, and evil spirits—and his destiny would be to help people to overcome them. He would feed the poor, heal bodily and mental diseases, and prevent attacks by evil spirits. After this, when working in the shop of his uncles, he began to give away food and provisions to the poor and needy, much to his family's consternation. Their stocks were nonetheless replenished miraculously, and it was soon noticed that the more food was served, the more it increased in quantity. Even during a great famine in 1834–1837 the stock was maintained.Footnote ³⁴ Although Jalārām did not see himself as a healer, he soon gained a reputation as one after a tailor who had donated a large quantity of rice to him to feed the poor immediately recovered from a severe stomachache that he had suffered for many years. When this was brought to his notice, Jalārām told the tailor: “I have done nothing. I do not know any Mantra, Yantra or Tantra [magic spells]. I am only bhakta [a devotee of God] who is feeding the poor and needy by his grace and chanting his great name by being his slave.”Footnote ³⁵ The story soon spread, and many others were soon reporting that they had recovered their health after invoking his name.

In one story, Jalārām bests a fraudulent healer of a nearby village who was said to be cheating the public by claiming to be able to cure them by reciting spells that were in fact bogus. When Jalārām happened to visit the village, the charlatan went on the counterattack by denouncing him in public, stating that he was an ignorant person who was misusing the name of God deceitfully. He said that if Jalārām was what he claimed, he should be able to restore the sight of a blind village woman. When Jalārām was told of this, he said that people could say what they liked. He added: “I am neither a doctor nor do I know any medicine. So forget about all that, let us chant only the name of Rama and if our prayers are sincere he may answer us.” Those present did this, and at that very moment the woman regained sight in both her eyes. The charlatan then broke down, confessing his misdeeds.Footnote ³⁶ In this story, we find a reluctant Jalārām being drawn into a conflict with a local healer, something not recounted about medieval and early-modern saintly healers, whose conflicts were with Brahman priests, renouncers, and holders of political power such as emperors, kings and their representatives. Jalārām was not here speaking truth to power, but rather exposing a false subaltern healer. No case was recorded in which Jalārām's remedy proved superior to that of a biomedical doctor, probably because at that time only a few very rich and privileged people would have had access to such treatment in Kaṭhiāwāḍ, so that it was hardly possible to see it as a competing system.

Jalārām is recorded as performing many other sorts of miracles such as restoring dead animals to life, providing rain during drought, changing the course of a river, finding lost jewelry miraculously, providing children for barren families, clearing the name of people charged falsely by the police, saving villagers from evil spirits, and raising the dead. He even managed to win the respect of the British political agent in Kaṭhiāwāḍ, who is reported to have compared him to Jesus Christ after he witnessed him at his kitchen multiplying chapātīs miraculously.Footnote ³⁷

Although Jalārām died in 1881, his miracles continued, with devotees obtaining their wishes by invoking his name. These included many cures that could not be explained scientifically.Footnote ³⁸ In many examples that date to the twentieth century, devotion to Jalārām is said to have brought about a cure after doctors who practiced Western medicine had given up in despair.Footnote ³⁹ Western medicine was now providing the alternative Other to the miracle cure, and the latter was coming to be seen as a national cultural resource that might hold its own against the medicine of the foreigner.

The battle in this respect had already been joined in the major colonial cities of India from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Many Indians who had received Western medical training in these cosmopolitan centers made it their mission to expose the “fraud” practiced by religious healers and exorcists. In his book Nationalizing the Body, Projit Mukharji describes an encounter played out before a crowd of onlookers in mid-nineteenth-century Calcutta between a rōjā, or exorcist, and some rationalist medical students, in which the latter exposed the tricks used by the fraudulent healer. Numerous other cases were described of such encounters between “superstitious” methods of healing and “scientific medicine,” with the latter, in these accounts, invariably emerging victorious.Footnote ⁴⁰ Then, with the emergence of a more assertive Indian nationalism and upsurge of Hindu revivalism in the closing years of the nineteenth century, confidence in such circles in the superiority of all things Western began to wane. Indian doctors argued increasingly that their allopathic technique should be combined with the ancient wisdoms of family life and faith in God.

Their instructions for protection from plague in Bengal in the late 1890s thus focused on the need to maintain daily family routines—an old Hindu idiom. The singing of hymns was said to be efficacious against plague, since faith was known to be important in curing disease. Faith, it was argued, stimulated the ability of the individual to resist and thereby prevent disease, and the stronger the faith, the greater the effect. Reference was made to Europeans who understood the value of séances, hypnosis, theosophy, Christian faith healing, and so on, the argument being that Europeans understood the power of faith in healing. It was also held that divine power was a physical force that was not yet understood scientifically. The Bengali religious reformer Swāmī Vivekānanda wrote a Plague Manifesto in May 1898 that set out the need for health and hygiene, high morals, ethical living, and so on. He asserted that a mind free from fear and with faith in God provided a strong base for resistance to disease. If a person sang devotional hymns every evening they would lose their dread of the plague. Other authors spoke of the “inner power” that had to be cultivated to combat plague. The neo-Hinduism of Vivekānanda and others of his time thus sought to reconcile faith and religion.Footnote ⁴¹ All of this played out against a background in which Western medicine—as practiced by Indian doctors—had become riddled with abuse,Footnote ⁴² so all that a patient could hope for was to have access to the “good” individual doctor or healer who possessed a moral sensibility, religious faith, and was sincere in his work. Such doubts about Western medicine were to lead many seemingly “modern” Indians to the abodes of miraculous healers such as Sai Baba of Shirdi in the early twentieth century.

III

Sai Baba was born in the late 1830s in Pathri, a largely Muslim village in the Marathi-speaking region of Hyderabad State. This was a center of Sufism, with five dargāhs in the village, most dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The largest of these celebrated an annual urs that was reported in 1967 as being visited by forty thousand people, both Hindus and Muslims.Footnote ⁴³ Although there are claims that Sai Baba was born into a Brahman family, he was brought up from infancy by Sufi faqīrs so that his culture was that of a Sufi and he spoke in Urdu.Footnote ⁴⁴ After a time as a wandering mendicant, in the 1850s he settled in the village of Shirdi in Ahmadnagar District of Maharashtra, where he lived until his death in 1918. Throughout his life his persona was that of a Sufi faqīr clad in tattered white dress who lived in a masjid (mosque) where he tended a sacred fire, or dhunī. After he settled in Shirdi, Sai Baba used to collect herbs and inexpensive drugs from the local shops and provide them for the sick. He is said to have cured snakebite, leprosy, and “rotting eyes.” Many began to call him hakīm, a term that designates both a doctor and a philosopher.Footnote ⁴⁵

There was no other indigenous doctor in the village at that time, and Sai Baba catered to a demand for medical treatment. This phase continued for some years until, in 1886, he had a mystical experience in which he is said to have left his earthly body for three days, after which he gained immense powers. Among them was the ability to cure all sorts of maladies using the ash (udī) from his sacred fire.Footnote ⁴⁶ From this time on, Sai Baba stopped using herbal remedies and gave the sick only blessings and udī. He might put some in their hands or apply it to their foreheads, and he often gave instructions that it should be ingested daily mixed in water. When a devotee regained health through this means Sai Baba would always exhort him to thank God alone.Footnote ⁴⁷ He also gained a reputation as able to beget offspring to childless couples in this way.Footnote ⁴⁸ Like Jalārām, he was insisting that the power was not his but God's, though unlike Jalārām he played an active role in healing by giving out udī.Footnote ⁴⁹

From the 1890s onwards, Sai Baba's healing reputation began spreading beyond the immediate locality and people started to come from far away seeking cures. This attracted the attentions of high caste Hindus of the Maharashtrian region of what was then Bombay Presidency, several of whom held positions in government service. Notable amongst them was a police constable called Das Ganu Maharaj who first met Sai Baba in 1892. He was renowned for his talents as a singer of kīrtans (devotional hymns),Footnote ⁵⁰ and it was said that he could hold a large audience spellbound as he sang for up to eight hours. He began to place a picture of Sai Baba beside him, and although the worship invoked the Maharashtrian bhakti sants Tukārām, Namdev, or Jnāndev he always referred to Sai Baba as the living sant for our own times, on a par with those earlier figures. People who attended Das Ganu's kīrtans then went to Shirdi, and reportedly tens of thousands were attracted in this way. He resigned his police position in 1903 and devoted his life to the study of the scriptures and singing kīrtans. He was said to have had visions of Sai Baba as forms of the different deities of the Hindu pantheon. Das Ganu was particularly a devotee of Vitthala (a form of Krishna) of Pandharpur, and he saw Sai Baba and Vitthala as one and sang of Shirdi as his Pandharpur. In this way he placed Sai Baba within the mainstream of the Maharashtrian devotional tradition, as the true incarnation of the great bhakti sants for the modern age. He later wrote a celebration of Sai Baba's life, publicizing him still further.Footnote ⁵¹

Another such figure was Balasaheb Bhate, who first visited Shirdi in 1896. He was then serving as a local official under the British. Although he had been a skeptic in his college days, he became attracted to Sai Baba and decided to take six months of leave to stay at Shirdi.Footnote ⁵² He subsequently resigned his position to become a full-time devotee. Bhate had a Brahman college friend named Narayan Govind Chandorkar who studied philosophy and had a good knowledge of the Hindu scriptures. He, too, was employed as an official under the British and had enjoyed considerable success in this role. When he first met Sai Baba in 1891 he was in his thirties, a pious Hindu undertaking pilgrimages to holy places. It was reported that when Chandorkar encountered problems on these travels Sai Baba miraculously helped him from a distance. It was also said that while Chandorkar was serving at Jamner in 1904 Sai Baba had seen clairvoyantly that his daughter was having serious difficulties in labor and sent his udī to her, and as soon as it was applied she gave birth easily. Chandorkar became a great publicist for Sai Baba, encouraging people to go to Shirdi and become devotees, and he has been compared to St. Paul for his missionary zeal.Footnote ⁵³

Followers such as these played a leading role in encouraging the worship of Sai Baba in a predominantly Hindu manner. From 1908, a systematic worship of Sai Baba began, with rituals that imitated those for Vitthala of Pandharpur. The system, devised by a Vitthala devotee named K. G. Bhishma, was initially based on individual worship but in 1908 it became congregational.Footnote ⁵⁴ Sai Baba, in common with many such mystics, appears to have regarded such religious and sectarian markers as comparatively unimportant—all that mattered was awareness of and devotion to the supreme, be it Allah or Krishna.Footnote ⁵⁵ He once stated, “All Gods are one. There is no difference between a Hindu and a Mohammadan. Mosques and temples are the same.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Each devotee could thus approach him through their own personal faith and he respected their sincere—though limited—beliefs in this respect.

Sai Baba's activities began to attract the attention of Indian nationalist leaders around 1910, during a period when the nationalist movement was relatively quiescent after the fervor of the Swadeshi Movement had abated. It was also a time when the more radical nationalists were in disarray, with their main leader B. G. Tilak in jail from 1908 to 1914. Like the Bengali nationalist Aurobindo Ghose, they appear to have been turning in a more spiritual direction at that time. Ganesh S. Khaparde (1854–1938), a Congress leader of Berar in the Central Provinces and a leading follower of Tilak, became a devotee of Sai Baba in late 1910 and kept a diary of his time at Shirdi. In his professional life as a lawyer he had lost many clients because of his engagement in anti-British activities. Shirdi became for him a refuge at difficult times in his life.Footnote ⁵⁷ Hari Sitaram Dikshit (1864–1926)—a well-known lawyer in the moderate wing of the nationalist movement—also became a follower, and in 1910–1911 he built a lodge for visitors to Shirdi.Footnote ⁵⁸ After his release from jail, Tilak himself was traveling in the area and followers persuaded him to visit Shirdi in 1917 and meet Sai Baba.Footnote ⁵⁹

In the years after Sai Baba's death in 1918 he was memorialized in a way that reinforced the notion that he was, above all, an inspirational figure for Hindus. This was all interwoven with nationalist sentiments, with devotees moving fluidly between nationalist politics and the propagation of an Indian spirituality. Even when they abandoned active politics and focused on a “higher” spiritual calling, their nationalism was not so much superseded as augmented on another plane.

This task was performed initially for a largely Marathi-speaking and high caste clientele. The first major biography, Shri Sai Saccharita (1929), was written in Marathi by one of Sai Baba's disciples, Govindrao Raghunath Dabholkar, or “Hemadpanth.” Following in the hagiographic tradition, it set out many of his miracles. Although Dabholkar, a Brahman, tended to portray Sai Baba as a Hindu while downplaying his Muslim identity, he at one point quoted him as stating “mi jātica Musalmān” (I am of the Muslim community).Footnote ⁶⁰ He also recorded that Sai Baba ate meat. The book was translated into English by N. V. Gunaji (1876–1963), a Maharashtrian Brahman who served as a local government official in Belgaum. He wrote a series of books on famous Indian spiritual leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with a biography of the African-American anti-segregationist Booker T. Washington, who was a hero to many Indian nationalists. Gunaji was an expert in naturopathy and massage who treated Gandhi when he visited Belgaum.Footnote ⁶¹ In his very free translation he emphasized Sai Baba's Hindu identity while omitting the Islamic elements. He ignored Sai Baba's frequent use of Urdu, his many statements about Islam and Sufi practices, his admission that he was a Muslim, and his meat eating. He held that since Sai Baba accepted Hindu rituals then he must have been a Hindu.Footnote ⁶²

Until the late 1930s, knowledge of Sai Baba was confined largely to the Marathi-speaking region and Bombay City. The person who above all changed this was a Telugu Brahman called B. V. Narasimhaswami (1874–1956). He practiced law in Salem in the Tamil region of Madras Presidency, and from 1914–1920 served as a member of the Madras Legislative Assembly, where he gained a reputation as an outspoken nationalist. He was a member of Annie Besant's Home Rule League and an admirer of Tilak. In 1925 he left his legal work and began a spiritual quest that took him all over India, and finally to Shirdi. He became a devotee of Sai Baba in 1931, believing him to be an avatār of Ram or Krishna. He made it his mission to propagate his new faith at an all-India level, using the English language to cut across linguistic divides. He had translations made of Marathi accounts by numerous devotees of Sai Baba, and of his miracles. Narasimhaswami also wrote many articles about him in the English-language press and a biography in Tamil (1938) that was translated into other Indian languages. He toured India speaking about Sai Baba and published numerous books, most importantly the four-volume Life of Sai Baba, written in English.Footnote ⁶³ Narasimhaswami more than anyone else made Sai Baba into an all-India figure.

Sai Baba's message fit well with the mood of the nationalist movement at that time, which was reaching out to gain a mass following under the leadership of Gandhi. Like the Mahatma, Sai Baba valorized India's poor and oppressed, and was spare in frame and dressed like a poor person. His portraits generally depict him with a troubled face that expresses suffering and compassion. He lived the life of a holy beggar, without possessions or material comforts, who exalted poverty as superior to wealth. He saw himself as a faqīr following the Sufi path of poverty (faqr), and once stated: “The fakir is the real emperor. Fakirship does not perish, but an empire is soon lost.”Footnote ⁶⁴ He was celebrated for standing up to the British and refusing their authority. One account told of how he put an arrogant British official in his place,Footnote ⁶⁵ and on another occasion Sai Baba contemptuously burnt a legal summons issued on him by a colonial court.Footnote ⁶⁶ Sai Baba could be seen to agree with the new mood of national assertion by a colonized people against their rulers.

Like Gandhi, he preached equality of all castes and communities and religious tolerance—an ethos with a clear nation-building agenda. In common with Chokhāmelā, the famous bhakti sant of Maharashtra, Sai Baba rejected the idea that any person was “untouchable” or that there was any such thing as ritual pollution.Footnote ⁶⁷ He worked actively to promote friendship and harmony between people of different religious faiths, and is presented as providing his benefits to believers of various religious affiliations—Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. To embrace the higher ecumenical divinity embodied in Sai Baba they had to suspend their existing sectarian beliefs. Sai Baba is portrayed as winning over even the most intolerant religious fundamentalists. In 1894, for example, when some Muslims of Shirdi objected to his use of their mosque and tried to physically prevent Hindu devotees from entering it, they were miraculously transfixed to the spot when one particularly staunch devotee walked through them to worship Sai Baba. Never again—so it was said—did they indulge in such behavior. In another case, a Pathan fundamentalist tried to attack Sai Baba with a large stick, but when Sai Baba looked him in the eye and caught his wrist the Pathan collapsed to the ground, completely powerless. He afterward acknowledged the saint's supernatural powers, and realized “that it was not for him to judge Baba according to his own concepts of what was right or wrong.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Sai Baba did not encourage religious renunciation, but rather expected his followers to carry on active lives in the world, earning a living—such as in business or the professions—and maintaining a family life. He showed a continuing concern for both the material welfare and health of his followers. He condemned idleness and praised hard work, and even gave advice on business deals, land purchases, and job choices, though he eschewed any personal involvement in business affairs. In the hagiographic literature, devotees who ignore his advice suffer financial reversals.Footnote ⁶⁹

Although Sai Baba often denied being in any way divine, several of his devotees claimed to have seen visions of him as a divine being.Footnote ⁷⁰ Being divine, he was said to exist outside of human time, with its categorical markers of dates, names, geography, social class, religion, economic livelihood, and the like. He refused to talk about his childhood and upbringing and actively discouraged any speculation about them. This, for many followers, provided a marker of his divinity. At the same time, many wanted to provide for him an authentic historical presence by writing biographies that addressed his position in the society of his day. They thus investigated his origins, trying to establish whether he had been born a Hindu or a Muslim. There was a tension here between the supposed timelessness of the authentic saint and the bourgeois compulsion to authenticate through the “facts” of history.

Johannes Fabian has pointed out how the philosophers of the European Enlightenment sought to replace history based on the notion of divine providence (in the Judeo-Christian tradition) with “the myth-history of reason.” History becomes the story of how reason asserts itself over religion and superstition. History, as a form of knowledge created in its modern form during the Enlightenment and subsequently elaborated, dealt with secular time.Footnote ⁷¹ Even when—as with Leopold von Ranke—the historian was a devout believer, history was seen to represent how a world that God had established and set in motion at the time of creation had then developed according to its own secular logic through the ages.Footnote ⁷²

In the case of India, nationalists were torn between their desire to write a history that would concur with the secular nation-building project and their adherence to the principle that such a way of thought was ultimately inferior.Footnote ⁷³ As it was, by the twentieth century it was no longer possible to keep the biography of a prominent person obscure, since it was all too easy to investigate and determine the “facts.” Thus it is that the biographies of Sai Baba all place him in historical time, but nonetheless hold that in a deeper sense he transcended history as an incarnation of a timeless divinity. The historical “facts” of his biography in this mundane world are mere details that fail to capture his essence; he is both historical actor and transcendent, timeless divinity. In this way, people within the nation-building project strove to reconcile the secular reason of the elites with the ahistorical reason of the nation-people.

They did so also by traveling to the supposed authentic heart of their civilization. Fabian has argued that in the Christian religious tradition of medieval Europe knowledge was gained through pilgrimages to holy places where blessings were granted and spiritual truths revealed. So too in India, though the object of travel there might also be to enter into the presence of a living incarnation of God. Fabian goes on to argue that in Europe this topos was replaced during the Enlightenment by a new theme of secular travel from the centers of learning and power to places inhabited by the anthropological Other. The philosophical traveler was seen now as traveling in time, to reach peoples that existed in an earlier time time-phase and record their customs and “backward” mentalities.Footnote ⁷⁴ In this way, the European could discover his true self. In India, the indigenous elites rejected the Enlightenment topos of travel from the centers of civilization to the places marooned in a time of “backwardness.” They put in its place the topos of travel by the person of reason to the heart of an authentic Indian civilization, where they were able to obtain a spiritual realization that transcended any knowledge that could be created through secular philosophical journeys. The elite had to surrender with humility to the higher truth of the Eternal. Yet in the process that higher form was rendered “modern” in various, subtle ways.

IV

Accounts of Sai Baba's miracle cures were set out by his publicists as a series of narratives that bear witness to his power. Personal and family misfortunes brought about by illness were resolved through the intervention of the saint. In this, Sai Baba won the gratitude, indeed devotion, of followers and their families. In a discussion of narratives of healing from Turkey, the medical anthropologist Byron Good has stated, “The stories we heard were life stories, and the temporal structure was organized around events of importance to individuals and families.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The illness was not as a rule understood in “objective” clinical terms so much as in the “subjective” vocabulary of an emotional, affective, and familial world. Good also notes how illness narratives that he encountered in Turkey often referred to callous and uncaring biomedical doctors and avaricious folk healers, neither of whom were able to cure the patient. The stories were recounted by people still suffering from their illnesses, who told of “shattered ambitions, loss of status and opportunity, and threats to family honor.…”Footnote ⁷⁶ The figure of the inspired healer who resolves such misfortunes is absent from the accounts set out by Good. It is nonetheless easy to imagine how the narrative structure might yearn for such a figure, and the gratitude and even devotion such a healer would invoke.

Given that such narratives relate to very real pain and suffering, they should not be understood as “fictions.” They provide a means of representing experience, of bringing order, meaning, and significance to daily life. As Good writes: “We understand the experience of others in some measure by the experiences provoked in us when we hear such stories, experiences which are affective, sensual, and embodied.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Narratives are framed within a cultural context, being variations, as a rule, on certain broad scripts, but each with its particularity. They also evolve in each telling, incorporating social and cultural changes, such as when healing narratives had to take account of the advent of Western medicine from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The narratives of miraculous cures that I shall set out in this section stand at the intersection of illness and religion, and show the effective healer as someone with a strong faith and spiritual power—the figure of the saintly healer enjoys the grace of God. Illness and the family suffering that it causes become charged with meaning, and in these accounts provide a path toward God.

It was said that Sai Baba could induce a feeling of ecstasy in his followers by merely touching them. As one of his followers said, “Sometimes he barely seemed to touch. Sometimes he seemed to press out something from the head. Sometimes he made passes without touching the head. Each of these had its own peculiar effect.”Footnote ⁷⁸ His physical presence, gaze, and gestures were all said to have a purifying and healing effect. Accounts of his life depict him as providing such benefits to people of all sorts—rural folk, city dwellers, government officials, clerks, lawyers, and practitioners of Western medicine. Sai Baba's miracles ranged from curing various maladies, including insanity and infertility, halting epidemics, restoring sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, reviving the dead, reversing misfortunes, bringing unexpected good fortune and wealth, and changing the qualities of physical objects, such as producing a flame from water as if it was oil.

In some cases Sai Baba cured by providing a “medicine” for the suffering person. In the majority of cases this was ash from his sacred fire—the udī. At times he prescribed specific foods that had the same miraculous effect.Footnote ⁷⁹ The recipes for these “medicines” were arbitrary and, it was claimed, ineffective without his blessing.Footnote ⁸⁰ He sometimes told the sick person to perform a particular good deed or ritual, and after doing so they recovered.Footnote ⁸¹ In some cases he provided treatment that purged a physical illness psychologically, both through his verbal assurances and by inducing dreams in the patients that recreated past traumas that were followed by a cure—as if some sort of psychotherapy had been carried out in the dream.Footnote ⁸² On other occasions Sai Baba told sufferers that he was freeing them of their affliction by drawing their malady into himself, as in one 1911 case when plague buboes appeared on his own body.Footnote ⁸³

Sai Baba did not always provide a cure, however. In some cases he announced that a person was not destined to recover and refuse to intervene. This may have been because he considered that they had lived their life in full.Footnote ⁸⁴ He was recorded as stating in one case that death would be a merciful release for the sufferer,Footnote ⁸⁵ and in another that a person was destined to die.Footnote ⁸⁶ He justified such actions by reference to the laws of karma, which he claimed had to work in their own way. He held that this law demanded a price be paid for deeds committed either in this life or past ones, and that any attempt to break it would bring disorder and chaos to the world. On certain occasions he intervened nonetheless—so he said—to ameliorate the effect of a person's karma for a time. He determined each case on its particular merits, following God's guidance.Footnote ⁸⁷

Sai Baba also exorcised the malign spirits and deities believed to cause both ill fortune and epidemic diseases. He is recounted as slapping a person so haunted, exclaiming: “Evil spirit, get away!” which resolved the problem.Footnote ⁸⁸ In another case he kicked away the “cholera goddess”—a terrible female apparition with wild disheveled hair, grimy face, and long protruding tongue—who was trying to seize the son of a devotee.Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1917, he saved the people of Shirdi from cholera by pouring wheat flour around the village boundary in a way that was said to prevent the goddess from entering.Footnote ⁹⁰ All of this tallied with popular beliefs about disease-causing spirits that are extensively documented in the ethnographic literature.Footnote ⁹¹

Sai Baba's great novelty lay in his ability to take on modern medical practitioners and prove himself their superior in his curative powers. This new theme was made possible only by colonial rule, with its “English medicine” and the nationalist reaction to that rule and the medical regime that it sponsored. Many such stories appear in the accounts of Sai Baba's life, two of which I will recount here to give their flavor.

In the first, we find a Mr. Borkar living with his wife Chandabai in the small town of Asvali, near Nāshik in Maharashtra. One night, Chandabai dreamed that a faqīr told her that on no account should her husband leave their home before eleven in the morning. When, next morning, she told Mr. Borkar her dream, he scoffed, and being a rationalist he deliberately left his house early. On reaching the railways station he was hit by a train and suffered a severe fracture to his leg. Some porters carried him to his home, where he was treated by the railway doctor who bandaged his leg. But the pain increased. That night Chandabai again dreamt of the faqīr, who told her: “Do you want the leg to be damaged permanently? Apply a mixture of coconut, dough and udī over the leg and bandage it. Then foment it with a mixture of leaves (of a certain medicinal plant), salt and turmeric and jowar (millet).” Even though this went against the railway doctor's instructions, she did it, and to her husband's surprise his bone healed and he regained full use of his leg. From that point he became a firm believer in Sai Baba, whom he recognized to be the faqīr.Footnote ⁹²

In the second story, Dr. D. M. Mulkey, a Bombay medical practitioner in government service at the Parel Laboratory in Bombay, fell seriously ill in 1916. His doctors were unable to do anything for him. Mulkey was of an atheistic tendency and held no belief in miracle cures. His brother, however, was a devotee of Sai Baba, and one night after he had entreated help from the saint Mulkey had a dream in which Sai Baba appeared and told him to come to Shirdi for his darshan. He woke drenched in perspiration—the fever had passed. Despite this, he failed to go to Shirdi. In 1917 he was posted to Mālegāoṇ and on his way there passed near to Shirdi. Even then, he did not stop off to visit Sai Baba. While carrying out surgery in Mālegāoṇ, he was infected by some pus that squirted in his eye, infecting it badly. The civil surgeon at Nāshik said that he was likely to lose the eye. He prayed to Sai Baba in a way that he had never done before, vowing that he would certainly visit Shirdi. After a week, his eye had recovered fully. When subsequently he went on leave he set out for Shirdi, but after reaching nearby Manmāḍ was dissuaded from going any further after an anti-Sai Baba tirade by the railway station's booking clerk, who was a Brahman. Instead, he went to the seaside to enjoy the rest of his holiday. While there, he dreamed on three consecutive nights that someone was asking him: “Do you still have faith in me?” He decided to set out for Shirdi. In the meantime, he was asked to treat a typhoid patient and resolved to leave only once his patient's temperature fell. To his surprise this happened the next day, much sooner than expected, and so he set out. At Shirdi, Sai Baba recounted all the vicissitudes that had stood in the way of his coming earlier, and Dr. Mulkey felt shamed and moved to tears. He stayed in Shirdi for four days, and on the last Sai Baba told him that on his return he would find a government letter informing him of his promotion and transfer to Bījāpur. When he reached home he found the predicted letter. He was particularly pleased because Bījāpur was in his home region of Karnataka. This was, he said, all due to the blessing of Sai Baba. Later, his nephew began to suffer from osteomyelitis, and treatment by the best surgeons of Bombay city proved of no avail. Dr. Mulkey procured some of Sai Baba's sacred udī ash, and with this he healed the boy's bone fully.Footnote ⁹³

Sai Baba's followers recount many such cases in which doctors, after initial skepticism, became convinced of his power. Despite their Western education and “scientific” practice, they are often portrayed as firm believers in a particular divine being, and they came to see Sai Baba as an incarnation or apparition of that deity.Footnote ⁹⁴ Miracles of this sort are scattered through the hagiographic literature alongside a diverse array of wondrous deeds performed for people from all walks of life. They appear persistently, however, and reinforce a message that the science of Western medicine was limited and circumscribed as compared with the touch of the divine. The doctors themselves are portrayed as bearing witness to this fact. Sai Baba himself refused any treatment from Western practitioners. For example, he once burnt his hand severely when saving a child from a fire. One of his devotees was so concerned that he procured a doctor from Bombay to travel to Shirdi to treat the saint. Sai Baba declined, stating that God was his physician. Instead, he had a person suffering from leprosy dress his burns, and was soon healed.Footnote ⁹⁵ On another occasion, when Sai Baba fell very ill, he recovered after his followers in Shirdi performed a sapta—a seven-day uninterrupted reading of a holy text or the repetition of divine names—with a mass feast for those who participated and others in the vicinity.Footnote ⁹⁶

Sai Baba did not have to be present in a place to perform healing miracles there. Many were reported to have occurred after he appeared to people in dreams as in the cases above or materialized in a mysterious way, or devotees had applied his udī. In such stories, Sai Baba was acting beyond restraints of time and space.Footnote ⁹⁷

Sai Baba made a number of statements about his powers, which were not always consistent. He once told his disciple Narayan Chandorkar:

At other times, however, he claimed to have direct supernatural powers, including even the ability to restore life to the dead.Footnote ⁹⁹ His lack of clarity in this area tended to augment the whole effect, for as Roger Keesing pointed out: “Cultures do not simply constitute webs of significance … [they] are webs of mystification as well as signification.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Some therapies are considered more efficacious because their mode of operation is mysterious or unknown.

Sai Baba's power was not considered to have ceased once he had died in 1918. He could still appear miraculously to devotees and perform acts of healing. B. V. Narasimhaswami collected hundreds of oral testimonies to this effect in the mid-1930s, and in 1941 published a selection under the title Devotees’ Experiences of Sri Sai Baba. In these, the cure was frequently carried out through the agency of udī obtained from Shirdi. Others spoke of apparitions of Sai Baba just before an operation, or when they were lying gravely ill in hospital, leading to a complete recovery. One devotee is recorded as stating after hazardous but successful surgery in J. J. Hospital in Bombay in 1936: “Where is Baba gone? He is still alive and active—more active, if that were possible, than he was before his Mahasamadhi [internment on death]. Anyone in downright earnest can get in touch with him, to-day and at once.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Accounts compiled by other devotees provide similar stories. Dr. Anil Kumar, who ran the Sri Sai Clinic in Nagpur, produced a nine-page pamphlet in 1972 that listed the miraculous cures carried out through the blessing of Sai Baba, such as his healing the brother of an advocate of the Bombay High Court, and a Parsi boy.Footnote ¹⁰² Such accounts spread Sai Baba's reputation, and his tomb at Shirdi became a major destination of pilgrimage from the 1940s onwards. According to one of his followers, Sai Baba had stated just before he died: “Now the stones of my samadhi [tomb] shall answer you.”Footnote ¹⁰³ To this day, people flock to Shirdi in huge numbers, drawn by a continuing faith in Sai Baba's miraculous power.

V

As recounted by his devotees and followers, the story of Sai Baba reveals the superiority of spiritual power over and above secular science. This theme is common to much twentieth-century Indian religious literature designed for a middle-class readership. The argument is put with various degrees of sophistication. In some cases, the writer claims to have a firm grasp of modern scientific theory and its relationship to the spiritual. The aim is to rank the spiritual in the superior position. A good example is found in the autobiography of the English-educated Bengali Mukunda Lal Ghose (1893–1952), who became a sādhu under the name Paramahansa Yogananda. In a chapter titled “The Law of Miracles,” he argues that the Vedas understand the natural world and its physical laws as māyā (illusion). Since there are no physical laws outside of māyā, scientific understanding can never go beyond māyā and grasp the Sole Unified Force, or God. The great sages, however, were able to merge their consciousness with the Creator through meditation and perceive the Unity of the Creator. In this, they were able to transcend the delusions of physical laws. Such yogis were then able to use their powers to carry out acts of will that defied physical laws, whether applied to natural objects, medicine, or human bodies. At night, Paramahansa Yogananda continued, we all have the ability while dreaming to suspend physical laws and meet long-dead friends, travel everywhere at will, resurrect the time when we were children, and so forth. The “God-tuned saint” has the ability to live in this state permanently and to rearrange “the universe to satisfy any sincere prayer of the devotee.” He claimed that modern physics, through Einstein's theory of relativity, was beginning to recognize the truth of all this.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In a long footnote at the end of this chapter, Paramahansa Yogananda argued that a “miracle” is commonly considered to be an effect or event that is beyond the laws of nature. But in fact, he asserted, a great master has a more subtle understanding of such laws. “Great prophets like Christ and Lahiri Mahasya usually perform many miracles. Such masters have a large and difficult spiritual mission to execute for mankind; miraculously helping those in distress appears to be a part of that mission. Divine fiats are required against incurable diseases and insoluble human problems. When Christ was asked by the nobleman to heal his dying son at Capernaum, Jesus replied with wry humor: ‘Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.’ But he added: ‘Go thy way; thy son liveth.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Other modernizing holy men offered their own explanations. For example, Swami Rama attempted to explain such a power in his book Living with the Himalayan Masters. He said that certain exceptional individuals were able to experience a cosmic consciousness that freed them from feelings of pleasure and pain. In this state, they felt delight in suffering for the sake of others. Once in such a state, they were able to heal people. The moment such an individual became conscious of his individuality, though, he lost his healing power. Only the healer who had transcended his lower mind could carry out such cures.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In such writings we see an attempt to valorize saintly miracle-workers in terms that reach out to an educated middle class, both Indian and Western. There is a marked stress on the superiority of a way that is seen to flourish most strongly today within an Indian civilization with a global presence. In such formulations, India and its culture are projected as being in a higher state of development than the West, with its supposedly narrowly scientific culture and fetishistic belief in the universality of material reality. Such texts argue that science has its uses, but in the end it can only corroborate the validity of India's ancient sages.

Rationalists tend to disparage this viewpoint as acting as a brake on modernity. Murray Last, for example, notes how those who practice such forms of healing “…are apt to make the body and its processes themselves ambiguous, and hence limit the development of a technical medical discourse.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet in India scientific medicine and miracle cures commonly exist side by side without noticeable tension. As we have seen, doctors practice their Western medicine in good faith while at the same time believing in the reality of miracle cures. M.S.S. Pandian comes perhaps closest to the truth when he argues that miracle-narratives challenge the accepted ways of thinking of social scientists: “What remains uncanny, unthinkable and unseemly for theory and social sciences is precisely what is possible for [such] texts.… They can weave together ‘heavens, industry, texts, soul and moral law’ and produce an ethical and political appeal that theory, as it is practiced, simply cannot.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

VI

To conclude, Sai Baba and the widespread following that he built up throughout India can only be understood within their particular historical context—that of the emergence of a more assertive Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century. He was seen to both bear and alleviate the many ills suffered by a colonized people. His persona of compassion and care echoed that of some (though not all) of the subaltern holy men of earlier times. Like his immediate predecessor Jalaram Bapa, Sai Baba was described as personifying the value of karuṇā (compassion), thus providing a riposte to the Christian missionaries and their claims that their religion embodied more kindly values. This perhaps explains the unrelenting focus amongst Sai Baba's followers on stories of his miraculous cures. The accounts of the lives of earlier saintly figures claimed by the Hindu tradition had not revolved around healing miracles; instead, these were seen as a minor and incidental element in saintly lives that had other more important goals, such as to inculcate a belief in the value of devotional worship or condemn caste hierarchy.

With colonial rule, the health of the individual and social body became a matter of central concern to both the state and its people. Foucault has, as I mentioned in my introductory paragraph, described this as the application of “biopower.” In India, the modern state has proved very deficient in its application of this program. Health provision for the masses is both inadequate and of a generally poor quality. In addition, we find many people advocating practices that appear by scientific medical standards to be irrational and superstitious. We hear frequent assertions that in India the superior technologies of a supposedly ancient civilization still have a central role to play in modern times, with ancient spiritual truths and techniques being applied to the service of today's ends. In such a scenario, godmen become agents of modern biopower, adapting their supernatural powers in the service of bringing health and wealth to their followers. They apply the supernatural rather than science. All of this gives Indian modernity a different quality than modernity in the West. There are direct links between politicians and godmen, each reinforcing the agendas of the other. In this, they find it important to stress their mutual Hindu identity.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ While Sai Baba himself came from a milieu in which his religious status was ambiguous, his modern champions have made a point of trying to prove that he was “really” a Hindu and a Brahman. Whereas Sufi faqīrs and pīrs in the past were granted their own integrity, revered after their death by Muslims and Hindus alike as figures within the Islamic tradition, high caste Hindus were no longer prepared to accept such ambiguity. They thus appropriated Sai Baba as a Hindu, and today his shrine appears to be that of a Hindu sage. In this way, he came to be invoked in a way that reinforces the contemporary, communalized nation state of modern India.Footnote ¹¹⁰