Sathya Sai Baba

Ratnākaram Sathyanārāyaṇa Rāju alias Sathya Sai Baba (Telugu: Satya Sāyibābā) was born in the village of Puttaparthi (Telugu: Puṭṭaparti), in the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh, on 23 November 1926. He was the fourth of the five children of Pedda Veṅkama Rāju and Meesaraganda Easwaramma. From the early 1940s young Sathya established himself as a charismatic guru claiming to be the reincarnation of the popular Maharashtrian saint Sai Baba of Shirdi (d. 15 October 1918) and presenting himself as the avatāra of the age. He fixed his headquarters in his native village by founding the ashram of Prasanthi Nilayam, lit. “abode of highest peace,” where he eventually died of a cardiorespiratory failure on 24 April 2011, at age 84. In India and throughout the world his devotees number in the millions, predominantly from the urban upper-middle classes. Portraits of him smiling under a round mass of hair clad in an ocher robe are familiar both in public spaces and in private homes. His towering fame was and is due to his alleged miraculous and healing powers, which have always been his distinctive mark, attracting masses of people from all over the world to Prasanthi Nilayam in order to have his darshan (lit. “vision”), sparśan (lit. “physical contact”), and sambhāṣaṇ (lit. “conversation”). Materializations were his characteristic feat: besides the production of ashes (vibhūti) which he gave out daily as a token of his grace, he is credited with the creation of rings, pictures, stones, rosaries, fruits, sweets, various types of food, statues of dieties, and a myriad of other items. He himself subdivided his avatāric career in three phases, the first sixteen years of his life being characterized by childish play (bālalīlā), the next sixteen years by miracles (mahiman), and starting from his thirty-second year up to the end of his life by teaching (upadeśa). From 1953 onward his teaching activity has been intense, both through his public discourses and through his writings: steeped in bhakti, his instruction follows the tenets of non-dual (advaita) Vedanta and insists on a spiritual regeneration of the educational system and the practice of sevā, service to society, as is typical of neo-Hinduism. Sathya Sai Baba’s transnational movement promotes social service and education in human values through the creation of schools, hospitals, and a variety of charitable works.