Doubtful Illusions: Magic,Wonder and the Politics of Virtue in the Sathya Sai Movement

The problem of magic: ¹ apprehending neo-liberal illusions, material and immaterial culture

On February 1, 2005, the obituary of Dr H Narasimhaiah (84), rationalist, skeptic, scientist, and academic ran in the Deccan Herald newspaper ⁱ , the most widely circulated English language newspaper in Bangalore, South India. The opening paragraph detailed his long and contentious relationship with the charismatic Indian guru and “godman” Shri (honorific) Sathya Sai Baba (b. 1926). According to the obituary, in June 1976 Dr Narasimhaiah recruited 12 of the best scientists in India to create: “The Committee to Investigate Miracles and Other Verifiable Superstitions” (hereafter “The Committee”) whose primary goal was to investigate Sathya Sai Baba and his miraculous materializations of sacred objects. For Dr Narasimhaiah (1976), as he himself stated, the problem was simple: if he could prove Sai Baba to be a “mere magician” rather than a divine figure, he could then persuade Indians to look elsewhere for rational answers (Deccan Herald, 1976c) to their myriad and enduring problems.

In July 1976 The Committee went to the village of Pandavapura, where a young boy called Sai Krishna (believed to be a protégé of Sathya Sai Baba) claimed to materialize vibhuti (healing ash) ⁱ . On 15 July, while the boy was producing vibhuti, one member of the team noticed a thread dangling from his waist (Deccan Herald, 1976b) which he pulled it, it released some fine ash into the boy’s palm. The unveiling of Sai Krishna as a possible fraud raised a heated discussion on rationality and religion in the public sphere. Both regional vernacular and national English language newspapers—The Hindu (2011) ⁱⁱⁱ and The Deccan Herald (1976b)—reported the story in great detail. There was aidespread interest. The Deccan Herald (1976a) in debating rationalism versus superstition had previously included a variety of letters from readers—a Mr JC Harvey reminded readers about the miracle of miraculous conception, while a Mr VT Rajshekar Shetty took the opportunity to congratulate the scientific team for upholding “a scientific outlook.”

The Committee and Dr Narasimhaiah, buoyed by their success, demanded that Shri Sathya Sai Baba, the resident “godman”-guru and patron of the young boy, Sai Krishna, prove publicly that he had divine powers (Illustrated Weekly of India, 1976) by materializing an object larger than his fist to prove that he was no “ordinary” magician, ² a challenge that Sathya Sai Baba ignored, much to their chagrin.

But a month or so later, one of the physicists on The Committee developed a strange skin condition that could not be diagnosed. Soon after, another scientist lost interest in the investigation and retreated to his home in the country. ³ One by one the scientists seemed to lose interest in the unveiling of the godman as a fraud. The strange coincidence of some members of the team falling inexplicably ill, or abandoning the Sai project, set off a storm of speculation and rumor in Bangalore. Journalists likened the Sai investigation to the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb by Howard Carter in 1922, ⁴ and recounted, with lurid detail, the wave of bad luck, illness, and death that dogged members of the archaeological team.

Through this significant moment of public contestation between discourses of superstition and rationality, I locate and analyze the embattlement of two embedded cultural discourses: the rationalist mission to counteract the sway of the wondrous and magical religious figure by appealing to modern, scientific, “progressive” idioms and paradigms; and the folk and native Hindu and Sufi belief in shamanistic healing and magical materializations (Jones, 2010: 67; Styers, 2003).

To clarify, I turn to Cohn’s (1987) work on cultural objectification in India, where in the twentieth century “Western educated Indians” began to look at themselves and their culture reflexively, turning their culture into “a thing”. Furthermore, once culture is so objectified and othered, it becomes the site of: “political, cultural and religious battles” (Cohn, 1987: 229). Indeed as Pels (Meyer and Pels, 2003) states in his introduction to a co-edited work on magic and modernity, it is at this embattled intersection between rationalism and magic, between “revelation and concealment” that the subject is “constituted as patient, skeptic, magician or fraud”, and it is at this moment that “an infolding” of “culturally available repertoires of authority occurs” (Meyer and Pels, 2003: 38). This unambiguous and clear site of contest is, according to Gyan Prakash, “between science and superstition” where the center stage of a nationwide self-understanding of India in which the “backwardness” of superstition and the authoritative discourse of science and rationality as the discourse of modernity and progress play out (Prakash, in Meyer and Pels, 2003: 40). But science and rationality cannot: “subordinate and appropriate the difference that enunciates its power” and science and superstition in India do not oppose one another but “come(s) alive” in the space of their “alienation” (Prakash, in Meyer and Pels, 2003: 40–41) and so, a consideration of this moment of contest offers a refreshing position on magic. Sai Baba’s magic does, I suggest, offer such refreshment, as it is the contest for much more—for the “correct” discourse and the appropriate values for a nation and a society steeped in folk religious beliefs that has pockets of modernity and has garnered entry into global circles of political economy. The juxtaposition and parsing of these conflicting views of the same public religious phenomena gives us new insights and new ways of rethinking the world (Urban, 2003: 269) for as these systems collide, intersect, and morph, the potential emerges for evolving forms of subjectivity and effect, unexpected politics of knowledge, forgotten inheritances of thought and value, and the reconsideration of the boundaries inscribed between superstition, fact, and knowledge (Asad, 1993).

But what this story fails to demonstrate is the larger story of neo-liberal globalization, particularly the intersections between the forces of globalization and religion, which I have written about in some detail (Srinivas 2010, 2012a, 2012b). The confusion over what contemporary magic represents in theological, philosophical, and scientific terms is key to apprehending how the rhetorical apparatus around it functions both submissively and subversively within the neo-liberal context as well as understanding the modes of valuation of the context and the modes of valuation within the context. I am not interested in magic as a performative act of wonder alone, for in analysis of its spectacular performance it has tended to cover up concepts of power that underpin our evocation of wonderment. Given the history of anthropological and theological understandings of magic it is easy to focus on its spectacular performances and ignore its deeper political exchanges and meanings.

Additionally in many ways, as anthropologists such as Bateson (1958 [1936]) and Evans-Pritchard (1936) have shown in societies as far apart as the Iatmul and the Azande, magic is a discourse of power and secrecy and has been seen as a liberating discourse from anxiety, illness, and fear and has operated on the boundaries of critical understandings of religion. But I argue that magic needs to be placed within the wider and contentious discourse of material structures of post-modern society as it is shadowed by the distal causation of neo-liberalism both to critique of the politics of neo-liberalism and its redemptive fascination for bourgeois civic culture (Copeman, 2009), and to understand the politics of magic in the economy of late capitalism—a Polyani (1969) inspired substantivist enterprise. This is valuable because in focusing upon Sai magic (Babb, 1986) and the affect-ridden fights around it we can excavate the enormously powerful undergirding of neo-liberal economics and modes of production that it is constructed by and sustains.

My analysis will therefore attempt to push beyond the: “normatively staged confrontations” (Mazzarella, 2006: 474) between illusion and debunking performances, and transparency and probity politics, to read these binaries as devices of conventional representation of contradictions, and to move beyond them in an attempt to understand the frame of neo-liberal political economy within which these discourses are suspended (Quack 2011). The contest reflects the external manifestations of a long struggle in India between various centuries and geographies of thought, and encapsulates the moral repugnance associated with magical materializations for many rationalist Indians, and its seemingly paradoxical institutionalization and fascination for “native” believers. As Graham Jones (2010) states, in his illuminating and in-depth study of the deployment and contestation of magic in French colonial Algiers, magic was powerful: “in constituting … the normative ontology of Western modernity—a set of assumptions about reality and perception that received widespread support in the scientific and scholarly institutions of post-Enlightenment Europe” (Jones, 2010: 68).

Magic here is also a metaphor to: “re-envision and re-describe”—a heuristic tool that enables a rethinking of the role of religion in the everyday (Urban, 2003: 272) and a critical but productive rethinking of understanding itself (Carrette and King, 2004). Is magic in this setting seen as ultimately “othering”, a regressive discourse and practice—one that is mysterious, illogical, and therefore oppositional to the nature of scientific and secular discourses? Must magic be dominated to bring civilizing progressive forces such as rationalism, science, and technology to the forefront? Can we suggest a framework wherein that which is unrepresented and that which is, perhaps, unrepresentable, align?

This paper is thus a critical reflection on the often sensationalized understandings of magic in the subcontinent and an account of one long-standing contest over its meaning between the neo-Hindu, Indic Sathya Sai movement and the Indian rationalist movement, within neo-liberal late capitalist discourses. I draw on Mazzarella’s (2006) creative terminology of the “politics of immediation” – that is political practice that: “in the name of immediacy and transparency, occludes the potentialities and contingencies embedded in the mediations that comprise and enable social life” (Mazzarella, 2006: 476) and where mediation is: “the ambiguous foundation of all social life” (Mazzarella, 2006: 476) to demonstrate that Sai magic is relational and affective, where practices of: “mediation are formalized as mechanisms, externalized as technologies, and naturalized as social orders” (Mazzarella, 2006: 476). They are not impersonal, objective processes, but are the basis of belief, affect, and self-transformative desire, and in that sense quite self-conscious. My project in this paper is thus three fold: at the most basic particular level I examine the production of magical objects by Sai Baba and his own discourses about them to reveal embedded virtuous and moral discourses about materiality and immateriality—what I term a virtuous materiality—and an economy of relational affectivity located in a desire for intimacy; at an intermediate level I want to examine the nature and dynamics of magic in terms of the politics of debunking and the paradoxical commitments to occlusion and transparency, and the complex links to discourses of neo-liberalism—what I will call a virtuous rationality—where rational overturning of “superstition” is seen to be akin to a progressive ideological development agenda for the nation-state; and at the most general level I wish to examine the seemingly opposing national narratives of progress and backwardness to enlarge upon our understandings of “mediatory dynamics” (Mazzarella, 2006) within the contested space of magic—a politics that foregrounds the moral and ethical value of virtue.

Materiality is a key organizing principle for global capitalist economies (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000) and so it matters a great deal how objects are produced and consumed. We can understand the fear that rationalists and scientists had about magical production since by its very existence it reordered and challenged the established dominance of post-Fordist global neo-liberalism through inexplicable manners of production and consumption, and establishing new boundaries of value. It is this subversive value of magic that anthropological literature has always acknowledged. For magic requires something that neo-liberalism cannot provide: that is the relationship, however subtle, with an “other” being, presumably divine. It is in this interaction that the magical and magical production derives its power and becomes problematically dangerous as well (Douglas, 1966).

So I explore two basic accounts –the performance of magic by Sai Baba (usually seen as “lower” folk practice) in the constructing and maintaining belief in a globalizing Indic religious sect through the Hindu philosophical concepts of and the logics of maya (illusion) against chamatkar (conjuring). I examine the rationalist “poetics” (Herzfeld, 2004) of debunking performances and the rhetoric around it, re-exploring Sai Baba’s discourses around the magical materializations, specifically as they relate to the politics of knowledge around hegemonic notions of rationality and native magical performances and beliefs—that is the way the magical performance is discussed, described, and transgressed, to creatively rethink its role in religion. Let me note that I am very aware of the colonial politics that can be attributed to such an act, that it might be thought to re-inscribe the colonial narrative of the “irrational” native and the “rational” European. I suggest that we need to get beyond such binary debates rooted in historical geographies of power and into complex politics and freedom of “knowing” in the 21st century where scientific Indians and mystic Europeans inhabit the same spaces (Cohen, 2008). It requires us to acknowledge, at the very least, the conflict-ridden nature of these moments. Problematizing the underpinnings of rationalist techno-scientific neo-liberal discourses as authoritative and raising concerns over the neo-liberal emphasis on centrality, rationality, and uniformity, this article suggests that we need to validate diverse ways of knowing.

The miraculous Sathya Sai Baba and his magic: economies of intimacy, the logics of rationality, and the politics of power

The 52-year-old Sai movement is unrivalled in its explosive growth across Asia and the West, or it was until his death in 2011. Its tightly organized transnational infrastructure, the prominence of many of its devotees, and the controversies that surround the leader, the charismatic Sathya Sai Baba, have all been studied by scholars and laymen alike (Babb, 1986; Kent, 2005; Srinivas, 2010). Hundreds of thousands of Sai devotees from all over the globe used to assemble at the Sai ashram—Prasanthi Nilayam—in the South Indian town of Puttaparthi to get darshan (sacred spectating/sight) of the divine leader, Sathya Sai Baba, himself. Sathya Sai Baba ⁵ is believed to be Bhagawan (God) by his devotees, and is referred to by this name. Estimates of the total number of Sai devotees around the world vary between 10 and 70 million, though an article in the news magazine India Today estimates their strength at 20 million in 137 countries and their net worth at approximately US$6 billion ⁶ in 2000. Unlike other transnational charismatic civil religious movements emerging out of India, the Sai following is not confined to the Indian diaspora (Babb, 1986; Srinivas, 2008; Srinivas, 2010, 2012a and b), but has expanded to include the cosmopolitan and professional middle classes of many different countries and cultures drawn by the ecumenism of the faith, the potential of magical healing, and the call to do charitable service (seva) for the less fortunate (Palmer, 2005).

The stories of the miracles of Sai Baba include, ⁷ but are not limited to, teleportation, mind reading, telekinesis, bilocation, physical disappearances, changing inedible material into edible substances, changing water into another liquid, producing objects on demand, changing the color of his gown while wearing it, multiplying food, healing acute and chronic diseases, appearing in visions and dreams, making different species of fruit appear on any tree, controlling the weather, physically transforming into various deities, and emitting brilliant light (Krystal, 1985; Murphet, 1971; Sandweiss, 1975).

Central to this paper, Sai Baba also materialized ⁸ objects and substances that were believed to be healing, life affirming, and transformatory (Haraldsson, 1997). He produced objects such as rings, watches, jewelry, and other precious items that bear his likeness, specific to the individual devotee’s tastes or needs, and gifts them to devotees (Kent 2004: 47) as images of divine beings and deities (Pinney, 2004). He also produced edible substances such as ambrosia (amritham), candy, fruits, and sacred ash (vibhuti). Historically, says author and Sai biographer-devotee Kasturi (1989), Sai Baba has materialized:

sandal wood images, silver icons, silver sandals, ivory figures, idols in the sacred alloy of the five metals, emblems of Siva in blood red stone, green or blue topaz, or sapphire have all been given. He has also given gem sets and lockets of different varieties as the need and the mood of the moment dictates … (1989: 150)

often: “plucking them out of the air” (Murphet, 1973: 37) or digging them: “out of the sand” around where he sat (Murphet, 1973: 85).

Babb (2000, [1986]), correctly in my opinion, suggests that for prospective Sai devotees and supplicants, stories of “miracles” are therefore the most important rather than the doctrinal and theological components of the Sai sect (Babb, 2000 [1986]: 174). Sai devotion: “is about the miracles” (Babb, 2000 [1986]: 174). The “personal confrontation” with Sai Baba’s miraculous powers is a powerful theme in devotees’ accounts of their “conversion” to Sai faith, (Babb, 1983: 118) in which both the seeing of Sai Baba at darshan and the accompanying production of magical objects and healing substances, jolts people out of their “amused skepticism” and into faith in Sai Baba (Raheja, 1988). Babb (1983) notes that “conversion experiences” of Sai devotees were deeply influenced by the magical appearance of these religious objects, and devotees: “see these experiences as deeply important in their life histories” (Babb, 1983: 118). The witnessing of the magical act shifts the perspective of the potential devotee from skeptic to believer and supplicant, turning the public magic act into one of tremendous personal intimacy for the devotee located in a desire to be close—what I have called elsewhere a proxemic desire—to divinity. It is the recognition that the magical materializations form a global “economy of intimacy” located in the act of creation of objects that speak to this desire. Babb (1983, 1986) suggests that the litmus test to distinguish between genuine believers and non-believers is their attitude regarding this intimate act of creation. For some devotees Sai Baba’s powers are evidence of yogic siddhi (magical accomplishments accrued through spiritual practices) and are real magic, but not in the frame of divinity.

The magical materializations also are significant in Sai Baba’s understanding and description of his mission. According to his discourses and the apostolic literature, Sai Baba has divided his life into four phases in which miracles (mahima), illusions (maya), and divine play (leela) have a significant part. According to his hagiography, during the first sixteen years of his life he is believed to have engaged in mischief and playful pranks (balaleela); during the second sixteen years of his life he is said to have performed miracles; in the third sixteen-year segment of his life he dedicated himself to general teaching (upadesha), while still performing miracles; and from this period on (which would have ended around 1984) forward, Sai Baba dedicated his life to teaching select devotees his spiritual discipline (sadhana) while still performing miracles. Accordingly, devotees gave him the title Maha Mahima Manusha Murthi (the man of almighty miracles) (Subba Rao, 1990).

Over 10,000 devotees were believed to assemble for the twice daily Sai darshan in the Sai ashram in the town of Puttaparthi in rural South India when Sai Baba was alive. As Lawrence Babb (2000 [1986]) notes, devotees longed to have tactile, optical, and alimentary intimacy with Sai Baba during darshan (Babb, 2000 [1986]: 189), and this intimacy is keyed to canonical sensory modes, primarily of the tactile optics of witnessing, but also of feeling, tasting, and touching where the unseen and unfathomable animating principle of leela (God’s divine play) is converted to a worldly yet inexplicable maya (illusion), where magical objects and essences are materialized that allow for feeling, tasting, and touching and other sensory intimacies. During darshan, the receiving of the magical objects and essences—sacred ash (vibhuti), ambrosia (amritham), or any other substances—are considered an intimate blessing, part of Sai Baba’s mercy (daya) and kindness (karuna) toward individual devotees. The consumption of the substances or their touch is believed to give the devotee happiness, freedom from want, removal of danger, a bestowing of all good things, and healing of the body and mind. For devotees the material objects and essences are evidence that the world that is comprised of materiality (prakriti) is evolved from divine consciousness (purusa), and “gross and subtle matter” requires: “agency and consciousness to produce” (King, 1999: 65), which is what Sai Baba does, and the act and the object are thus transformatory in their effect. The objects themselves are symbolic of a dyad between God and devotee (Swami-bhakta), creating an economy of intimacy (Herzfeld, 2004) located in the sensoriality of affect (Srinivas, 2010, 2012a).

Author-devotee, Murphet (1971), notes in his writings on miracles that the materialized objects are specific to the receiver and their production is magical and inscrutable to humans.

Taking a green betel leaf he cut a small disc from it which he marked with a symbol. Passing the leaf to me he asked me what the symbol was … I really had no idea. Without enlightening me he took it back and placed it on the youth’s palm … and when he took his fingers away in the boy’s palm lay another disc of about the same size but this one had an enamel front that bore the picture of Vishnu … the boy’s favorite deity. (Murphet, 1971: 97)

What Murphet does not comment upon, but is of interest, is the form of production whereby Sai Baba “cut” the disc of the leaf and transforms it materially into a pendant. The “production”, if we may call it that, of the material object indicates some manipulation of the material by Sai Baba. He took the common edible leaf and cut it, and marked it with an unknown symbol. In the transference to the boy’s hand the leaf “becomes” a pendant with an image of Vishnu, the boy’s “chosen” deity; an individual gift for the devotee. In some instances Sai Baba deliberately takes “found objects” and refashions them through manipulation and his breath into something individually meaningful for the devotee. For example, in one oft quoted story by devotees Sai Baba materialized a wooden crucifix for Hislop, another author-devotee. Hislop (1985) claimed that he was privy to a miracle (mahima).

As we passed a bush Baba broke off two twigs, placed them together and asked me ‘What is this, Hislop?’ ‘Well Swami, it is a cross’, I answered. Baba then closed his fingers over the twigs and directed three somewhat slow breaths into his fist, between thumb and forefinger. Then he opened his hand to reveal a Christ figure crucified on a cross, and he gave it to me. He said: ‘This shows Christ as he really was at the time he left his body, not as artists have imagined him or historians have told about him. His stomach is pulled in and his ribs are all showing. He has had no food for eight days’. I looked at the crucifix but found no words. Then Baba continued, ‘The cross is wood from the actual cross on which Christ was crucified’. (Hislop, 1985: 19)

The fashioning of the cross from two twigs, Sai Baba’s breathing on it, and its apparent reconstitution into a crucifix with the image of Christ, speaks to Sai Baba’s divine ability to change matter magically through his breath (prana) and his will (sankalpa). Sai Baba says of his will that it is divine.

In another example, Sai Baba used his breath (prana) to refashion a ring that Indira Devi, a devotee, did not like. Devotees suggest that the body of Sai Baba—particularly his breath—is transformative. By breathing on or blowing on an object he can make it alter its shape and transform it.

One day Baba materialized for her an ornate ring, set with a large spray of colorful stones. Indira Devi told me she had no liking for jewelry … Anyway she was not happy about the ring … when Sai Baba entered the room he asked her to hand him the ring … Then, holding the ring between his thumb and forefinger with the display of stones uppermost and in full view he blew several times on the stones as though blowing out a match. Suddenly, as all watched, the spray of brightly colored stones merged into one single sparking diamond. (Murphet, 1973: 164)

In other cases it is the touch (sparshan) of Sai Baba that is transformatory. When Sai Baba produced ash for devotees they commented on his “circling” his hand in the air thrice, or his “whirling” his hand and then opening his clenched fist to let a stream of the ash appear. Skeptics claimed this was merely a distracting technique that all magicians employ, but devotees believe it is this action that is significant in its ability to transform energy into matter. Sai Baba’s touch was also thought to be healing and life affirming. One devotee told me how his son had been a drug addict and after Sai Baba touched his head the young man stopped doing drugs altogether.

Devotees believe that those who were “lucky” enough to receive a magical object or a magical healing touch or look from Sai Baba must be deserving of it; that their devotion (bhakti) is unswervable and that they are, in some unknown, or unapprehendable sense, more virtuous than other devotees. Thus the actuality or even the possibility of receiving a magical engagement with Sai Baba raises the devotee’s virtuousness in the eyes of other devotees. Shanti, a Sai devotee of over 20 years, told me about another woman devotee.

See that Leela, she is so close to Swami (the Lord, i.e., Sai Baba). Every day he looks at her and she gets vibhuti every time. She is lucky… but she has bhakti. For so many years she has been coming; even when her mother was ill she would take a bus and come to ‘Parthi’ for darshan.

William, a Sai devotee of nine years, posited a relational morality as part of bhakti: “Only when you realize how to behave with other people does Bhagawan take notice of you. You don’t just show up! It takes some spiritual work and some self-work” (Srinivas, 2010). But the receiving of magical objects during darshan was not the only evidence of Sai Baba’s magic that devotees talked about.

During the nine years of fieldwork I heard innumerable stories of cures and healings for virtuous devotees ranging from simple dermatitis to cancer. Devotees believed they had been cured through the healing touch of the divine sacred figure of Sai Baba. In some cases Sai Baba performed shamanistic style healings through touch. In one example, in 1960, Sai Baba was called to the house of Dr Bhagavantham, then a devotee and the Director of the Institute of Science in Bangalore. His son was unwell. Sai Baba materialized ash and after rubbing it on the boy’s back he “took from the air” a surgical needle.

The boy seemed semi-conscious, apparently anaesthetized by Baba’s vibhuti. Without hesitation Baba inserted the needle, showing that he knew the precise spot at which such an insertion should be made. To the watching father the needle seemed to go out of sight … Meantime Baba was massaging his back and removed fluid through the needle … then massaging more strongly and in a different way Baba brought the needle out of the boy’s back … he held it in the air as though handing it to some invisible nurse. (Murphet, 1973: 179)

Devotees mentioned healings that included a Lazarus-like raising from the dead of one devotee—a Mr Walter Cowan—that has irked rationalists who have attacked the story as being “impossible”. Evidence such as this is cited to suggest that the “dilemma” that men of science feel in believing in Sai Baba could be “resolved”. Dr Bhagavantham is believed to have told Murphet:

In our laboratories scientists may swear by reason, but we know that every time we have added a little to what we know, we have known of the existence of many other things, the true nature of which we do not know … Thus while adding to knowledge we add more to our ignorance too. What we know is becoming a smaller and smaller fraction of what we do not know”. (Murphet, 1973: 181)

Sai Baba appeared to agree to this reading, for in a discourse about the materializations of objects he stated that the process is not mere stage magic but is divine power that could not be “designed, disciplined or developed”:

They are neither magical tricks nor siddhic (occult) powers, which can come to everybody with the appropriate discipline and yoga exercises, but My powers to protect, heal and save people and materialize objects originate in God and can be used only by an Avatar. They are in no way designed, disciplined or developed, but flow from cosmic power. (Karanjia, 1976)

In one spectacular case that occurred annually during Sai Baba’s lifetime, the materialized object emerged from the divine body of Sai Baba of its own volition rather like a birthing. Howard Murphet (1971) records the materialization of a lingam (small, egg-shaped object denoting the sacred phallus of the Hindu God, Shiva) in one of the early darshans he attended in 1966.

At around eight thirty Baba sat down and drank from a flask of water (after singing). Several times he tried to sing but it was impossible. Now he began to show signs of real pain. He twisted and turned, placed a hand on his chest, buried his head in his hands, and plucked his hair… After twenty minutes or so of watching Baba’s mouth I was rewarded. I saw a flash of green light shoot from his mouth and with it an object which he caught in his hands cupped below. Immediately he held the object high between thumb and forefinger so all could see it. It was a beautiful green lingam and certainly bigger than any ordinary man could bring up through his throat. (Murphet, 1971: 47)

This materialization, called lingodbhava, is the central point of the Mahashivarathri celebration at Puttaparthi even today, rendering moot Sai Baba’s organization of his life into four parts in which magic was supposed to play a diminishing role. In reality, as Sai Baba grew older, the magical production seemed to increase, both in activity and in value.

In 2001 half a million followers gathered at Puttaparthi to witness the lingodbhava. The photographs and video of Sai Baba “birthing the egg-shaped object” traveled within minutes across the globe through modern technology and devotees gazed in delight upon the lingam. Here we find that a Shaivite conflation between sexual power, sexual relations, and divinity extends itself to include the magicality of the materialized object. The divine presence remembered through the lingam in the act of materialization, as well as the act of power and fertility that the lingam signifies, productively conflates the encounter with God’s own divine power and the devotees’ submission to divinity. The introduction of an accepted Hindu divinity adds meaning and value to the materialization, shaping it into a new higher order than that of mere conjuring, making the performance one of virtue and the object a virtuous one as well. Thus, Sai Baba forces an interrogation of the object itself as well as the reception of it. The birthing of the lingam forces us to ask if the witnessing of the magical materializations are personally liberating and transformative for Sai devotees.

But in this focusing on seeing, knowing, and unknowing, what was not touched upon is that the production of magical objects is a nexus where regular capitalist production can be rethought. The regular register of production is a site of compliance with the neo-liberal structures of transactional exchange. The value of transactional exchange is located in the authority of neo-liberalism, which in turn is located in the emergence of a techno-scientific discourse of the industrial revolution that underpins all contemporary understanding of production in India (Chatterjee, 1999). Additionally, this magical economy of production of virtuous objects is both open and transparent, and closed and esoteric simultaneously. New, and to capitalists worryingly unregulated, forms of sociality and exchange emerge. The production of the object through magical means informs the devotees’ perspective as a revelation of God, which allows the magical objects that are constructed of virtue and imbue them as being capable of subverting the mundane discourses of rationality and economics of production—a truly Polyani (1969) inspired experiment—potentially threatening the dominance of the neo-liberal discourse. What is valuable, of course, is the irony that transcendent narratives are symbolized through a produced physical object, which is an important representational marking overturning accepted understandings of production and consumption.

Virtuous materiality: the instability of quiddity, the politics of knowledge, and the nature of meaning

Interestingly, Sai Baba himself questioned the symbolic power of a materialized object on occasion. For example, Al Drucker, a famous author and devotee, records the materialization of a silver map of India, in his book Love in Action.

We all caught our breaths … It had a round black onyx base and on it was a silver map of India. Surrounding the map were 18 jewels that glistened in the dark, from some mysterious inner light. He said that on the map were inscribed 100 Sanskrit verses giving the history of the Avatar from birth to the time when it leaves the body … He said: ‘I will not reveal the future. Everything will be revealed in due time. Why do you hanker after this object when you have its creator? You have Me and I have you …’ ^iv . (Drucker, 1989)

As Babb (1983) notes, the items and substances materialized are to be conceived as media for their donor’s actual presence, and they form an existential link between the donor and the devotee (Babb, 1983: 120), which is what Sai Baba suggested. The magical object is not magical because of its production alone, but because it stands for a transformative relationship between Sai Baba and the devotee. So: “the power carried and manifested by the substances and objects he gives to others are not simply an impersonal force of some kind, but arises in the context of interactions and relations” between Sai Baba and the devotee (Babb, 1983: 120). This is a quite different reading from Urban’s (2003) work on “magical production” in charismatic sects. Urban (2003) argues that the magical production of objects exemplifies the spiritual logics of late capitalism. But Sai devotes seem to suggest quite the reverse—that the context of the sacred object’s emergence gestures to the possibility of the objects as a “site of resistance” to the logics of late capitalism. Sai devotees’ reading of magical production allows for a speaking back to Urban’s (2003) theory through a re-evaluation of the production of the sacred object. Here in Sai Baba’s magical production we find a site of resistance to the dominant language and logics of late capitalism by shifting the focus to the moral self-worth of the devotee and the virtuous selfhood that deserves magical engagement. The demands of this method of production are not some antiseptic economics of the industrial factory, but one that demands belief and passion in moral and ethical social relationships (Klass, 1991).

Additionally, the substance of the object is also considered magical, because it emerges from the magical source, and virtuous, because it appears from the source of morality—the body of Sai Baba himself. Marriott’s work on substance transaction argued that in India a diverse yet particulate substance transaction that is located in the giver–receiver and in the substances transacted themselves is in operation, in a constant circulation of the substance-code, and in the transformation in the givers and receivers as they exchange substances/objects (Marriot, 1990). Marriott himself in discussing substance transaction notes:

The supposedly disparate values of ‘power’ and ‘purity’ are both implicated in indigenous thought about such transactions … toward a unitary Indian concept of superior value-power understood as vital energy, substance-code of subtle, homogeneous quality, and high, consistent transactional status or rank. All of these are regarded as naturally coincidental or synonymous. (from Marriott 54a: 137, in Raheja, 1988: 506–507)

Sai Baba emphasized this idea of the co-mingling of ideas of power and purity in his own explications of his miracles. Devotee, GV Subba Rao, claims:

When I remarked to Swami that He is Siddha Sankalpa Purusha, Swami immediately corrected me and said He is Sankalpa Siddha. He stated that Siddha Sankalpa refers to the powers of Siddha Purusha (enlightened being) with acquired, and therefore, depletable yogic powers whereas Sankalpa Siddha signifies the state ‘mere willing is fulfilling!’. (Subba Rao, 1993)

But are the magical objects imbued with virtuous signification? Or with positive moral value? How can an object have inherent morality? Or is it a transmission of Sai Baba’s qualities into the object? For devotees the objects are paradoxically both objects and evidence of Sai Baba’s moral being. They are objects that are imbued with magic and moral force, because they have a connection with his magical and moral body. The incessant story telling of the production of these objects, that I have quoted at length here, is the work of legitimation. The objects gain their virtue and their moral force because they emerged from Sai Baba. They retain the conduit to his moral power and act as a presence of his moral force in his absence. The objects thus become virtuous objects by virtue of their ephemeral temporal and embodied link to Sai Baba.

But the paradoxical fact of the quiddity of the object intrudes upon its role as symbol, which brings new value and understanding of the object as a symbol of magical interactions with divinity. To overcome this, Sai Baba suggests that the object itself is immaterial and “trivial” and is merely representative of the bond between him and the devotee.

…do not crave from me trivial material objects; but, crave for me [italics mine], and you will be rewarded. Not that you should not receive whatever objects I give as sign of grace out of the fullness of Love … I shall tell you why I give these rings, talismans, rosaries, etc. It is to signalize the bond between me and those to whom they are given. When calamity befalls them, the article comes to me in a flash and returns in a flash taking from me the remedial grace of protection. That Grace is available to all who call on me in any name or form, not merely to those who wear these gifts. Love is the bond that wins grace. (Sai Baba, 1974).

In the ultimate story of materialism, and as a parable of the folly of desiring the material, Sai Baba is alleged to have materialized the priceless Kohinoor diamond (part of the Crown Jewels) for the MBA students of the Sathya Sai University in Puttaparthi (Rudolph, 1987). After passing it around for everyone to look at, he is recorded as saying;

All of you were so engrossed in looking at the diamond. Did any one of you even glance at Me, who created it, as you clamored for a look at that piece of creation? The whole world is like that. It runs after the created, the materialistic desires, and not God, the creator. Money comes and goes, Morality comes and grows. Money and materials are temporary … Then how come these materials will give you lasting joy? Seek the Highest and everything else shall get added on to you.

In this understanding, the material object is rejected as illusion and a distraction from the truth of salvation and love embedded in the transaction. The virtue of the material object lies in its overturning of the material value of its quiddity. The object becomes in its very objectification the powerful symbol of the illusion of the world. Further, the substance of Sai Baba’s morality is imbued within the object elevating it and making it magical, moral, and virtuous. Nicholas Dirks (1988: 18) has called this play of substances, a South Asian “poetics of power” where these substances transformations can both legitimate and subvert existing power structures. This poetics of indigenous power systems of purity and substance transactions create a new ethics of exchange—a moral exchange based on the virtue of the object—that undermines the logics of neo-liberal exchanges. For devotees though, the unrestrainability and unmanageability of substance-code transactions in their magical incarnations is what makes magical objects so subversive of capitalist modes of production. While critics of Sai Baba have often used the allegations of “trickery” to de-legitimate the value of the production and of the objects themselves, for devotees the objects are magical in nature in multiple ways and their production is unquestionably moral. For devotees Sai Baba becomes a pure force, the moral origin of these objects. Devotees, even one-time skeptics, write of these divine gifts with wonder, and attribute to them a transformatory power (Sandweiss, 1975); that is, because of their association with Sathya Sai Baba, the objects have the ability to transform the selves and habitus of devotees making the devotees whole, pure, and full of devotion.

The idea of divinity is seen here, not as the fountainhead of material magicality, but as pure virtuous emotion—as Love—as Sai Baba would have it. To devotees, religious specialists like Sai Baba are able to straddle both the material and immaterial worlds and transmutate energy from one to another. Shanti, a devotee, said to me in an interview:

Bhagawan gave me this pendant. When he got it in his hand it glowed bright like fire. We know when he gives us these things or he takes lingams from his mouth he is not doing it simply. He is transforming the universal energy to make these things. That is why they are powerful. (Shanti, 10 May 2004)

For Sai devotees this poetics of power inherent in transaction is real. For them the materialized objects are transformed substantially through their contact with the sacred being of Sai Baba from a leaf to a pendant; the objects themselves are believed to carry this magical transformative power within them, and be inherently transformative of space and time.

Stephen, a devotee, said:

Actually what He is doing is not materialization, he is doing transformation. He transforms spiritual energy into objects, or amrith, or healing energy, depending upon what the bhakta (devotee) needs. I know in one case he used this energy to send messages to Nepal where they would be written in turmeric powder. ⁹

Everyone there called it Sathya Sai Baba’s “turmeric fax”. In essence, in devotee’s logic, leela (divine play) becomes maya (illusion) so that humans can apprehend the wonder (adbhutha) of divinity through a transformation of the immaterial world into the material. But this view of the world as enchanted and enchanting is part and parcel of magic. To change the logics of production into a virtuous, moral, and occluded force, rather than an economic and mechanical one, challenges existing social and economic structures, and is a politically powerful move.

The shift in register from an economy of intimacy to an appreciation of the structural logics of illusion and the creation of wonderment, combined with the interactional transcendency of virtuous objects, allows for the object to become a pathway to the revelation of divinity. But what this concern with symbols fails to register is the problem of mere quiddity—an object qua object. What the rationalists feared in the magic was precisely that the production of the object could not be explained by rational means nor could it be replicated in a controlled experiment. The magical objects threaten the power of the techno-scientific discourse that scaffolds neo-liberalism.

Toward rationalism: wonderment, illusory production, and the philosophy of doubt

Materializing healing sacred ash or vibhuti (oodhi) is one of the most important, popular, and regular materializations that Sai Baba performs for his devotees. In discussing the production of the healing ash (vibhuti) devotees notice how he whirls his fist in the air three times and as he pinches them together, the ash emerges from his fingers. Sai Baba suggests that the ash is metaphorical for life and death, that it “burns all passions and attachments” of this life allowing the devotees supposedly to see past the illusion (maya) of life. He distinguishes its magical production quite clearly from “trickery” or conjuring:

In the first place, it is symbolic of the life-death cycle in which everything ultimately reduces itself to ash. ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou returnest.’ Ash or dust is the final condition of things. It cannot undergo any further change. In the spiritual context, it constitutes a warning to the receiver to give up desire, to burn all passions, attachments and temptations, and makes one pure in thought, word and deed. It is in order to press home this lesson that I materialize ash for those who come to Me with love and devotion. Like the other materializations, it also acts as a talisman, healing the sick and giving protection to those who need it. It is the symbol of divinity, quite different from the magician’s trickery mentioned by you. (Karanjia, 1976)

Here the critical question is how the unseen is measured and managed. Devotees spoke of “surprise”, “shock”, “delight”, “wonder”, “awe”, and “happiness” when discussing the magic materialization and the object or substance received. Their wonder at the “act of creation” that they felt they had witnessed was genuine and undisguisable. The effect and desire that they feel is linked to the emotion of amazement and wonder—the suspension of disbelief.

Siegel (1991), in his evocative study of street magicians in India, argues that evoking “amazement” (vismaya) is at the core of magic. Within traditional Indian aesthetics vismaya is considered one of the eight fundamental emotions: “the effects of these emotional experiences … can be transformed or enhanced to create a purely pleasurable experience that evokes an aesthetic sentiment (rasa) in the heart of the spectator” (Siegel, 1991: 426), and the human emotion of being amazed can be “dramatically enhanced” to aesthetic sentiment of wonder (adbhutha). Sai devotees see the objects as unique and powerful because they are formed by Sai Baba, but they are also in the process creating a divine magical economy of exchange that is not within the scope of neo-liberal political economy to measure or police, which overturns the fundamental structure of neo-liberalism (Copeman, 2011). In such an economy the object is beautiful, not because it is produced well and cheaply but that it holds within it the rapture of divinity. It is the enactment of faith between Sai Baba and the supplicant.

But some disaffected followers regularly make surreptitious allegations of “black” magic and sorcery against Sai Baba. In a consideration of the multiplicity of magical typology, Howard Murphet (1973), a long-term devotee, suggested that there were three kinds of magic: “black magic” or sorcery that was: “limited and fraught with danger to the practitioner” where “evil motives will attract evil spirits” (Murphet, 1973: 16); “grey magic”, in which he suggested: “the aim was to make money” and where: “fame, ambition and avarice are among the powers” (Murphet, 1973: 16); and finally “white magic”, good magic of the kind that Sai Baba performs that is: “ entirely different … in motive, power and range” (Murphet, 1973: 16). In white magic: “money, ambition, fame, personal power and security” (Murphet, 1973: 16) do not motive the miracle worker, rather the miracles are the: “power of God coming through a purified person who reincarnates” (Murphet, 1973: 16). For genuine devotees, Sai Baba not only has extraordinary powers but his powers have “extraordinary implications” (Babb, 2000 [1986]: 188). His devotees believe that his miracles are occluded to rational explanations. They are proof of Sai Baba’s siddhi, his divine power, and their manifestations are at his will, his divine leela, or play. But as Babb (2000 [1986]) notes, while Sai miracles are: “impenetrable, they are not meaningless” (Babb, 2000 [1986]: 190) and Sai Baba himself and his magical acts are subject to analysis and interpretation by devotees.

In the magical, what is unseen is more powerful than the seen, and the absent presence influences the insubstantiation as a playful trick on the ability to gauge, predict, and trust reality. Sai Baba gestures to this inverted relationship between reality and illusion when he stated as early as 1976 that the product of his illusions were merely “symbols”:

All performances of magic, as you know, are done for the sake of income. They constitute a kind of legalized cheating, the transfer of an object from one place to another by a trick of the hand which goes unnoticed. I do not cheat people by transferring objects, but I create them. Again, I do so not because of any need or desire of exhibition of my powers. For me this is the kind of visiting card to convince people of my love for them and secure their devotion in return. Since love is formless, I use materializations as evidence of my love. It is merely a symbol. (Karanjia, 1976)

The immediate purpose of the symbol and its creation is simple and instrumental: to draw potential devotees and turn them into supplicants. Sai Baba states that the magical acts and the materializations bring devotees to him, and then in an evolutionary twist, they reorient devotees to the goal of self-realization. The Sai devotional webpage states that Sai Baba’s miracles “establish divinity” but also “prod” devotees along the “path of self-realization”:

Swami (the Lord, i.e., Sai Baba) often says that miracles are for nidarshana, i.e. establishing divinity and not for pradarshana, i.e. exhibition. He points out the role of a miracle in the overall scheme of his plan: first chamatkar, a miracle. Then sanskar, or refinement. Next comes paropakar, or selfless service and finally saakshaatkaar or the ultimate vision of the Divine. That is, He attracts us through the miracles, refines our hearts and minds with His teachings, and prods us along the path of selfless service which leads us to self-realization. ¹⁰

But the immediate purpose of the act of magical materialization or healing is to create wonderment (adbhutha) so as to remove any cynicism or doubt. Most centrally for Sai devotees it turns upon the evocation of wonder in the act of materialization. Devotees used words and phrases such as, “I couldn’t believe”, “I was surprised”, “amazed”, “shocked”, “delighted” to describe their wonder. It is thus a central engagement with notions of wonderment, submission, and self-realization, and my concern relates to all these expressions and feelings, but all in slightly varied ways.

In parsing wonder, we rely on the ancient Hindu philosopher-dramatist Bharatha, the legendary writer of the Sanskrit dramaturgical and sacred text Natyashastra (circa second century AD) or adbhutha can be produced by seeing a divine magical act (maya) or a conjuring act (indrajala) (Siegel, 1991: 426). But according to Abhinava Gupta, an eleventh century scholar–linguist, maya is glossed as: “causing transformations in the bodily form—a divine changeability and adoption of guising that is the attribute of divinity, mythic beings and demigods—whereas indrajala or chamatkar is ‘ordinary magic’—making things appear and disappear by means of mantras (runes) and other magical devices and indexes (Siegel, 1991: 426). In Hindu philosophical thought the purpose of sacred illusion (maya) is to reorient space and reorder time to make the real into the unreal and the unreal, real producing “delight” and wonder. Devotee author Murphet (1973) suggests the same in this episode:

One evening a party of us were sitting in his suite … Swami asked me the year of my birth and when I told him, he told me that he would get for me from America a coin minted in that same year. He began to circle his down turned hand in the air in front of us making perhaps half a dozen small circles saying all the while, ‘it’s coming now … coming … here it is!’ Then he closed his hand and held it before me. When the coin dropped from his hand to mine, I noticed that it was heavy and golden. On closer examination, I found to my delight that it was a genuine milled American ten dollar coin with the year of my birth stamped beneath a profile head of the Statue of Liberty. (Murphet, 1973: 84–85)

This location of a philosophy of affect within an object has a long and storied history in Hindu thought. According to Richard King (1999), the Carvaka school (a non-theistic school) was explicitly hedonistic and situated itself as a critique to Brahmanical mores of self-denial, and to this school sense perception was the: “only valid means of knowledge” (King, 1999: 17–20)thus rejecting authority and locating understanding in the material world and its complex processes. As he delightfully notes, the Carvaka school has: “clear resonances with contemporary cultural and philosophical trends in modern, urban, Western culture” (King, 1999: 22).

The question of materialized objects that indexically carry effect brings the problem of perception to the forefront in dynamic ways. King (1999) suggests that, while Indian philosophy is thought to be highly speculative and metaphysical in reality: “it places supreme importance on perception (pratyaksha) as a valid source of knowledge (pramana)” (King, 1999: 38). The dominant Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy understands perception: “as contact between two independent factors—the sense organs of a sentient being and a sense object” (King, 1999: 150), so any apprehension—seeing, tasting, touching, smelling—is imagined as “acquisitive and extrusive” to engage directly with objects: “seen and to bring something of those objects back to the seer” (Babb, 1981: 396–397) where the sense organs move outwards, including the mind, which is constituted as a form of matter (King, 1999: 149). In a sense then one becomes what one apprehends. This is the core logic and philosophy of Sai Baba’s materializations. That in materializing the object he enables the devotees to enter the path of self-transformation through mere apprehension of the object.

The place of doubt is significant in apprehension. One such site—The Sai Critic—urges devotees to believe only their experiences with Baba, stating: “When doubt walks in through the front door, faith walks out of the back door” ^v . The apta—“the person who has direct knowledge of the object concerned and is motivated by a desire to communicate the object as known to him” (commentary on the Nyaya sutra 1.17 in King, 1999: 14)—was a religious authority figure. The acceptance of authority and revelation was a valid foundation of knowledge for many Hindu philosophers and it: “did not constitute a rigid adherence to a dogmatic religious orthodoxy but reflects instead an acknowledgment of the inevitability of tradition” (King, 1999: 15). I would add that the tradition was dynamic and flexible as well.

So when Sai Baba or his devotees claim knowledge of the magical objects and their materialization, they speak to this knowledge embedded in tradition, and the location of authority. Even in later philosophical schools such as Samkhya, apprehension of the material world is problematic, discriminating through abstraction the principles of reality. The problem of apprehension, comprehension, and interpretation of the material object rests with the audience of devotees. That is why Sai Baba refers to his magical, materialized objects as symbols. They are symbols of devotion that need interpretation. The apprehension of the object through sensory modes is an illusion, but the effect created of devotion (bhakti) is real. These symbols have the potential to destabilize existing cultural and politico-economic orders as they collapse several dialogical categories—sacred and profane, object and subject, produced and consumed, and self and other. This is because the symbol is only valuable to the devotee and not supposedly inherently valuable of itself (though some such as jewelry might be). Thus the problem becomes not one of philosophy (and so here I abandon King (1999) and his project), but rather to find an economic and accompanying discourse of exchange that permits this polymorphous and multifaceted symbol.

The virtuous performances of debunking: rational discourse and embedded tensions in the magical materializations

In 1995 the BBC (BBC, 1995) aired an “exposé” documentary entitled Guru Busters, produced by filmmaker, Robert Eagle, where Sai Baba was accused of “faking” his materializations. The documentary suggested that stage magician’s tricks, including palming and sleight-of-hand and conjuring, were involved in the illusory production of the magical objects. A videotape was circulated through various newspapers and journals, and was mentioned in the Deccan Chronicle (1992 in Ruhela 1997: 71). The accusations of “magic”—i.e., conjuring tricks and misdirection—have never disappeared, and today clips of the alleged “sleight-of-hand trickery” circulate endlessly on the internet, made more potent with voiceover in which the observer is directed to “keep a close watch on the protagonist’s hand”. The underlying assumption about the rationalist unveiling as legitimate is the exemplary status awarded to exposés in India, particularly in relation to unexplained religious phenomena viewed as “superstition”. As Copeman notes “paradigmatic status” engages shedding superstition to “make modern subjects” (Copeman and Reddy, 2005 n.d.: 5).

The significance of rationalization is in viewing it as a critical marker for modernity, and viewing progressivism as a sign of being a member of the community of present-day progressive secular elites separate from the “unthinking, backward” masses. Copeman and Reddy argue that rationalism had:

[a] very particular stature as both critical means and evidence of ‘reform’, a stature consequent on the widespread opinion that it is in this domain that an intensely concentrated set of taboos, rituals and other assorted forms of ‘backwardness’, compelling to the population at large and extremely disruptive … reside”. (Copeman and Reddy, 2005, n.d.: 5–6)

Cohen (2003, 2007: 107) explains that backwardness: “enjoys a sort of national conversation” in India, and the problems, indicative of backwardness, turn up references to: “superstitions, taboos, obscure ideas of bygone centuries [that] stand in the way of progress”, “inherent prejudices and religious taboos”, “poor people with religious biases”, and the need to “serve” society by “trying to rid it of superstition”. Distilling and conflating the progressivist agenda with the overturning of “native” superstition allows rationalists to credibly argue that unveiling stage magic tricks and discerning the “trickery” is allowing for much more besides. So the skeptical (some would say anti-godman) project in India had become centrally part of the agenda of social reform in the 1970s and 1980s. Rationalists and critics of religious superstitions hold “camps” all over India in rural areas primarily performing stage magic tricks and conjuring and demonstrating their replicability.

One of Sai Baba’s most long-standing critics was the Indian atheist and skeptic, Basava Premanand, who died in 2006. During his lifetime, he was known as a “guru buster” for challenging several gurus, but most prominently Sai Baba over his alleged divinity. Premanand published, often with unknown publishers, several critical books about him with telling titles such as Lure of Miracles (1976) and Divine Octopus (1977) ^vi . He also attempted to bring Sathya Sai Baba to court, alleging his violation of the Gold Control Act and claiming that he violated the Government act in producing gold jewelry. Premanand, a former devotee, became disaffected in 1975 or thereabouts and began a campaign to discredit Sai Baba based on a rationalist model of unveiling the stage magic “tricks” that he claimed Sai Baba performed. He took to performing what he argued were “the very same tricks” in villages all over India to alert “superstitious” villagers to the capacity for godmen to dupe them. Thus the narrative of rationality was never entirely free of the invocation of intimacy itself whereby the notion of intimacy and trust were key turf in the war between rationality and superstition.

Premanand’s rationalist leanings heightened as he became the editor of the premier Indian rationalist journal The Indian Skeptic and he claimed he became an atheist, a position that he claimed that he adhered to on his deathbed (Copeman, 2006). Premanand was featured in the UK Chanel 4 documentary (1995) ^vii on Sai Baba’s miracles, claiming that Sai Baba was “a charlatan” who “must be exposed”. The BBC website notes that Premanand: “believes that it is his duty to dispel the ‘curse of gullibility blighting his country in the form of myth and superstition’, and replace it instead with the ‘gospel of pure, scientific understanding’” ^viii (UK Chanel 4, 1995). Rationalism thus becomes the anvil against which a new, modern, progressive India is forged. As Copeman (2006) states: “When rationalism replaces religion as inspiration for social reform, however, our point is that these modular forms acquire a distinctly demonstrative edge” (Copeman, 2006: 9). Thus the dispelling activities took on a clear affective intimacy as well.

Premanand and other skeptics such as Abraham Kavoor, rationalist and author of Begone Godmen! focused on the materializations of objects as the cornerstone of their destabilizing of “superstitious faith” in Hindu godmen. ¹¹ One particular example of this that took place in 1973 and revolved around the materialization of a watch, has re-emerged repeatedly among former devotees as evidence of Sai Baba being a “charlatan”. According to devotees, the head of the Seiko watch company, Mr Hattori, created a new brand of watch and locked it in his safe in Tokyo. When he arrived in the Sai ashram Sai Baba materialized the very same watch for him. This was cited by devotees as evidence of Sai Baba’s ability, but it became a test case for the rationalists. Dr Kavoor reportedly traced Mr Hattori and asked about this story and was told that he knew nothing of it. Dr Kavoor proceeded to use Mr Hattori’s “testimony” to declare his intention to save “innocent devotees” of godmen of India from being “duped”. ¹²

For the benefit of numerous innocent devotees of godmen of India I reproduce below Mr. Hattori’s reply. This I do with the sincere hope that they will be sensible enough to realize the truth that these charlatans who go about in the garb of holy men have numerous agents … everywhere working in collusion to propagate the huge hoax and profit materially. (Kavoor, 1976)

As Babb (2000 [1986]) notes, skeptics abound in the discussion of Sai “miracles” and their attitude is one of: “pure (some would say dogmatic) skepticism—that is the view that the materializations are nothing more than sleight-of-hand trickery” (Babb, 2000 [1986]: 188). As he notes: “Indian audiences of wonder workers are quite attuned to the idea of fraud as a possibility” (Babb, 2000 [1986]: 188). Indeed many of his: “strongest informants said that this is precisely what they thought Sathya Sai Baba’s magic must be before they actually saw it” (Babb, 2000 [1986]: 188). So the act of magic is tainted either by the gullibility of the naïve native, or by the cynical realism of the sophisticated disenchanted viewer. I want to deliberately refuse the either/or mentality of Western binary epistemology in order to problematize this in multiple realms, indicating that the move from the text to the context of the magic is significant for parsing its value. What is at issue here through the discussions of occlusions and visibility, is a circling around the modern urge for transparency of process (Morris, 2000). As Mazzarella (2006) thoughtfully notes: “is the optical counterpart to the functional ideal of disintermediation” (Mazzarella, 2006: 489). The politics of immediation—manifested, for example, in the discourse of rationality— are in one sense merely an: “intensification of the kind of bureaucratic ethos” that Max Weber identified with such precision a hundred years before (Gerth and Mills, 1946: 196–244) (Mazzarella, 2006: 489) that occurs in neo-liberalism.

The accusations of “mere magic” became a repeated rhythm whenever Sai Baba was mentioned. The desire to uncover his magic, whether divine illusion or mere magic, was so great that ex-devotee websites suggest that Sai Baba’s magic materialization of the lingam is nothing more than the most famous American magician, Harry Houdini’s, regurgitation of an egg trick: “the person who first achieved this… the famous illusionist Harry Houdini! Fascinating… Houdini practiced with an egg-shaped object attacked to a piece of strong thread until he could swallow it and later regurgitate it without the thread”. ¹³ The rationalist positing of the debunking of “magical trickery” as a liberating exercise that enables the freeing of the “backward” masses from the shackles of “superstition”, makes the performance of the materialization and their understanding central to the comprehension of the neo-liberal project.

The rationalist project is merely a contemporary evocation of the Orientalist and colonial project of domination that Jones (2010) details in his delightful study of the French takeover of Marabout magic in Algiers. Jones (2010) argues that, for stage magicians in the post-colonial neo-liberal era, the acknowledgment of the need to disenchant the audience and not to claim extraordinary powers is significant: “the performative counterpart to a rational disenchanted world view” (Jones, 2010) emerging from post-Enlightenment Europe, a distinctively “modern cognitive repertoire” one that promotes “critical self-reflexive subjectivity” (Jones, 2010: 68) within the audience, allowing for delight but not for delusion. The self-reflexive subject is critical to the success of modern magic and it follows that modern stage magicians are obliged to demonstrate, or to gesture to the fact that any magic is a “trick” building into their routines some way in which the “trick” can be revealed or hinted at while all the while reinforcing the enchantment of the magical through their narratives. The European Enlightenment: “did not so much assault magic as absorb and secularize it” (Schmidt 1998: 275–277 in Jones, 2010: 69) and so anyone who is: “aware of the secret workings of the (magic) trick … can still see what others see, (but) at the same time, (can) see through [italics mine] what others see. I am not moved, amazed, enchanted anymore.” (Siegel, 1991: 432). Secrecy and its mirrored double, transparency, is thus key to rendering the practice of magic opaque.

As Bauman (2011) notes, the relation between these two conditions (of privacy and the capacity for worth) tends, however, to be volatile—and “the intention of hiding” … “takes on a much greater intensity when it clashes with the intention of revealing” (Bauman, 2011; n.d. ) ⁱⁱ . This “greater intensity” to keep what is hidden a secret, places the very wonderment of magic in danger transforming it from a cosmological act to an act of mundane trickery. Luhrmann’s wonderful treatise on the witches in London and their esoteric practice suggests that magic is intimately connected both with secrecy (Luhrmann, 1989: 131–165), which enables the magicians to straddle the separateness induced by the spectacle of the magic bridging the two words of the magical and the mundane (Luhrmann, 1989: 141), and with secret and open, giving them a sense of excitement, of power and difference. So magicians can: “insulate their claims from skeptical criticism—both other people’s and their own” and can: “hold their beliefs” without: “subjecting them to scoffing unbelievers” (Luhrmann, 1989: 141).

Thus secrecy serves to act as a distinct and enforceable boundary to separate the world of the magical and the rational. Magical moments imply both aesthetics and practicality, the explainable and the unexplained, and the replication and transfer of objects, images, and emotions within a bounded space. Luhrmann (1989) suggests that turning the possibility of what the set of magical beliefs implies into a mundane reality requires work (Luhrmann, 1989: 142) to cross the boundaries that secrecy imposes. It also implies that magicians and those who believe in the magical are comfortable with the separation between the two worlds, and the cloak of concealment enables this separation by fostering a deference to secret knowledge (Luhrmann, 1989: 142),. As Jean and John Comaroff have said: “It is precisely the relation between the manifest and the inscrutable … that undergirds the enduring fascination evinced by human beings almost everywhere with the properties of power” (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003: 288). So rendering visible what is to be kept hidden is part of the modern mandate.

The “management of transparency” (Mazzarella, 2006: 495) is key to acquiring legitimacy and authority in the neo-liberal world. Contemporary magicians straddle the gulf between occult and rational practices using all the occult iconography and symbolism while working to: “demystify occult practices and beliefs” (Jones, 2010: 68), so that contemporary audiences do not mistake illusion for reality, thus performing both a diagnostic and an epistemological function. In the post-modern world therefore a successful magician’s trick is a case of a doubled illusion—to both delude and then be transparent—to show you how the trickery is achieved, and be legitimate, rather than to claim transcendent knowledge and power, seen as fraudulent. The role of disenchantment as a road to transparency and accountability is firmly fixed in the post-Enlightenment world, something that Sai Baba plays with in intriguing ways, which point to a way of getting beyond these normative, hegemonic, and neo-liberal ways of viewing the world as parsing reality and illusion. The embedded magic of Sai Baba and the rhetoric around it have long been seen by both colonial and post-colonial commentators as detrimental to the formation of Western-style bourgeois civic culture.

But this separation of mystery and magic, of delusion and illusion, is crucial at this point. In this modern version of magic, mystery and illusion take on secular forms, but both are subject to an effect of ambivalence. While it is not a question that in some cases the transcendent magical and the plebian illusion might overlap in significant ways, there are big problems in understanding magic as theological in the contemporary context. It is, in essence, a different order of experience to see Criss Angel levitate over a Las Vegas casino than it is to see a shaman remove a bone from a suffering supplicant in Nairobi. The context and the belief held in illusion is crucially significant.

What is often lost is that the new understanding of magic that Jones (1990) refers to is a modern invention, a socially constructed one that uses the language of religion to reinvigorate magical practices for the purpose of entertainment. Magical discourses of healing and illusion permeate modern magical acts. Furthermore, it is important to see how these discourses are politically generated acts that enable the techno-scientific discourse to retain its hegemony while appearing to privilege the religious discourse. So two tasks are at hand: one, is to examine the discourse of magical illusion in a religious tradition such as Hinduism and its performative practices, which obviously include bringing some critical concepts from these traditions to illuminate our understandings; and second, we have to ask what the discourse of transformatory sacred magic in late capitalist societies can teach us about the political–economy of materiality and healing. To do so I follow Foucault (1982) in articulating the need to think about: “a culture which invents ways of relating, types of existence, types of values, types of exchanges between individuals that are new and are neither the same as, nor superimposed on, existing cultural forms” (Foucault, 1982: 39). What seems compelling—and indeed the main issue—is the nature of material relations, the production of materiality and the ethics of exchange, in relation to the politics of knowledge in terms of neo-liberal thought,a bourgoise preoccupation (Hatcher 2007).

The performance of debunking, ambivalent creation, and the poetics of transgressive rhetoric

In the context of post-modern and global contemporary India, the poetics of debunking performance practices become of ever greater interest as they are a demonstration of “power calculated to both disenchant local modes of religious authority” (Jones, 2010: 67), and in turn enchant ideas of rational techno-economic power, the scaffolding of neo-liberal paradigms. The performance of debunking exhibits a poetics of power (Herzfeld, 2005), particularly colonial power. With regard to how it relates to perception, King (1999) notes that the “modern sense of rupture with the traditional and the religious in the post-Enlightenment West” did not prevail in India, but with modernization programs and secularized education of the elite of post-independence India, the rupture between the traditional and religious was effectively engaged. Narasimhaiah and his Committee of scientists are proof that scientific rationalism was exported to the educated middle classes of India.

Two things are clear in the aftermath of the Narasimhaiah Committee’s investigation. First, that the magical is still contested—what is seen as magical and benevolent by devotees is seen as “superstitious” and “fraudulent” by others as mere “mechanical trickery or sleight-of-hand” tricks (Babb, 2000 [1986]: 188); and second, that the colonizing of the imagination is a real project with successful outcomes. For here it is not directly the West that is up for critique, but it is Western derived scientific rationalism that has been absorbed thoroughly by the secularized middle classes of India such that a cultural clash prevails between those who believe in indigenous forms of magic and their embedded meanings and those who do not. In the Sunday Magazine (1993) ⁱⁱⁱ the article recounted the infamous incident (some believe apocryphal) where PC Sorcar Jr, the most famous of all Indian’s stage magicians, met and contested Sai Baba to a duel of magic. The article reads;

According to the magician, he had asked for an appointment with the Baba on many occasions, only to be turned down. Finally, he asked to see the Swami, posing as the son of a prominent West Bengal industrialist. The godman agreed to see him. After Sai Baba had given him darshan, Sorcar asked for a gift. The Baba asked him to wait, and went into the next room, presumably to hide some object or other up his sleeve [italics mine]. Meanwhile, Sorcar had seen a plate of sweets lying in the room. He grabbed one and hid it on his person. Sai Baba returned shortly, and duly produced a sandesh ‘out of thin air’. Sorcar said he didn’t like sandeshes, and changed it ‘miraculously’ to a rossogolla instead. The livid godman threw the magician out. Today, Sorcar scoffs, ‘He is no godman. He is not even a good magician. He is so clumsy that he is spoiling the name of all magicians. I think he should practise a lot more’”. (Sunday Magazine, 1993)

In the article the magician, Sorcar, not only suggests that Sai Baba is a simple prestidigitator who needs to “hide” something in his sleeve, but also “scoffs” at him for being an inept magician, indicating that Sai Baba’s skill level leaves something to be desired. For Sorcar, not only is Sai Baba not transcendent as his devotees believe, but he is a bad performer of modern stage magic. When challenged by Sorcar and other magicians to produce something larger than his fist, such as a pumpkin or a cucumber, Sai Baba responded:

Pumpkins and cucumbers can be materialized as easily as rings or objects. But these are perishable objects and the whole point of materialization, as I have already explained, lies in their permanence. That is why rings or watches become more serviceable as talismans or means of contact and communication, between the Avatar and his devotees. The point they (the skeptics) are trying to make is that big objects like pumpkins cannot be transferred while small ones like rings can be. But as I have repeatedly said, I do not transfer things by a sleight-of-hand. I create them to be talismans [sic]. ¹⁴

Babb states: “he is certainly more than the mere parlor trick magician many of his critics claim that he is” (Babb, 1991) [ 164]. But the concept of the illusion remains insufficiently articulated and accounted for. Polyani (1969) in his work on epistemology and ontology suggests that the knowing of an illusion is dependent upon how the object of apprehension is set against the background that leads to perception of various kinds. In fact, he suggests that we look for “clues” in the unattended background as we foreground the object of attention. He argues that seeing and apprehending an object is a combination of seeing the object itself and the background against which it is set, and this seeing may in fact be illusory. The clues we use to discern and apprehend are “deep within the body”—summoning our sensual reading—and are part of our prior experience of the world (Polyani, 1969: 115), but the need for apprehension itself is rooted in the “conviction” that we can make sense of the experience because: “it hangs together in itself” (Polyani, 1969: 116). To gain a complete understanding one must both alternately “integrate” and “dismember”—use experience and assign meaning—to move us from not knowing to inference to knowing. What is crucial to parsing the various ways in which Sai’s miraculous materializations are understood is the assignment of meaning that renders the experience transparent or opaque, valuable or worthless. Evans-Pritchard (1936) argued, in a Durkheimian sense (though he would probably dispute being classified as a Durkheimian), that a belief in witchcraft among the Azande distinguished crucially between natural and supernatural phenomena. Witchcraft, or indeed any magic, is a closed system of logic, as is science, and it is internally cohesive. It not only deals with the causal explanations for natural phenomena that one cannot explain but, unlike science, also deals with social normative explanations—such as the breaking of taboos, the loss of face, the failure of norms—and the punishments meted out for these transgressions (Evans-Pritchard, 1937).

It is this gap of meaning and value that allows for the failure of the Narasimhaiah project of convincing devotees that the Sai materializations were fraudulent. Post the 1970s Sai devotion did not significantly decrease as would be expected nor did the lack of faith seep out to other godmen or religious figures (Smith, 1998 [1979]). Devotees held to their faithful positions with greater tenacity, arguing that indeed Sai Baba transformed energy and matter in his quest to transform people:

Swami is able to make the material world immaterial, and the immaterial world, material. He can heal people and make vibhuti. He is a seer and can see into the future. All this just proves that we are stupid and ignorant in dividing these categories as ‘real’ and ‘unreal’. They are all reality, just different levels of it.

Setting aside the philosophically interesting question of reality as Sai devotees perceive it, we are still left with the problem of production of the objects themselves. For Sai Baba devotees the line dividing the two is an artificial construction, and the materialized substances and objects work in a realm of alternate logic of magicality (Kent, 2004: 47–48) where the possibility of a transformative experience and transcendence lie. Devotee Murphet (1971) states:

on the subtle plane of being, interpenetrating our physical plane of existence there may be classes of entities for whom our physical space would actually be non-existent: our ‘here’ and ‘there’ would be all one to them. The ancient wisdom teaches … that the physical object can be disintegrated into a subtler substance or ‘energy system’, which can be moved by some agency at near light speed, and reintegrated to form the original object”. (Murphet, 1971: 84) ¹⁵

But the flow of this account is framed by a decisive gap. Raising the possibility of a hinterland of industrial production of these magical objects cannot be investigated without seeming to question the faith of devotees and the divinity of Sai Baba. As Babb (1983) notes devotees distinguish between Sai Baba’s illusions and miracles as mere chamatkar (magic) or even siddhi (spiritual accomplishments) (Babb, 1983: 187). In this context skepticism is of importance. Since those objects given by Sai Baba are presumed to be materialized “out of thin air”, raising the question of their production is tantamount to declaring oneself a non-believer. For the past 30 years former devotees have followed Indian skeptics in addressing the whole economy of production as a weak spot in the materializations’ thesis and they contend that Sai Baba is a fraud who merely palms manufactured goods. There has been a whole debate on the internet about the watches produced by Sai Baba, which have serial production numbers on them proving that they are of this world and not transmutation of matter as contended by the apostolic literature. ¹⁶

Skeptics, both Indian and non-Indian, in interviews repeated the “fact” that many of the watches that Sai Baba produced often had serial numbers of production on their shells. ¹⁷ Also, disaffected devotees often use the fact that the gifts given by Sai Baba are manufactured (sometimes poorly) to argue that Sai Baba has no special powers. In a significant example in 2002 former devotee, Robert Priddy, ¹⁸ took what he claims Sai Baba had told him was a diamond ring to a reputed jeweler in Copenhagen where: “the ‘green diamond’ Sai Baba gave me in 1986 was examined by Mr Peter Hertz, the Danish Queen Margarethe’s jeweler, a top Scandinavian expert on precious stones and diamonds. All was filmed in detail by Øjvind Kyrø’s team for Danish TV. The result of the investigation, which took two days, is that the stone is a synthetic green sapphire.” Furthermore, he claims that: “it [the stone] turned out to have a layer of green silver foil behind the stone to enhance the green color and reflect light.” Another former devotee website entitled “Unmasking Sai Baba” claims that “he apparently has many local jewelers who ‘supply’ him with these articles.” But no local jewelers have stepped forward to claim that they are the original producers of the magical objects.

These stories and countless others have led to Sai Baba constructing and articulating a refutation of the performance of magical materializations by questioning the position of rationalist and measurement itself. He states:

I am beyond the reach of the most intensive enquiry and the most meticulous measurement. Only those who have recognized my love and experienced that love can assert that they have glimpsed my reality. Do not attempt to know me through the external eyes. ¹⁹

He argued that science is limited by its understandings of the world:

Science is merely a glow-worm in the light and splendor of the sun. It is true that it can research, discover, and gather a lot of information about nature and its material functions and use it for the development of worldly things. Spiritualism, on the other hand, reigns over the cosmic field where science has no place. That is why some discoveries of science are useful while others can be disastrous.

Furthermore, he suggested a Jamesian “will to believe” when he addressed the oppressive power of science directly:

Science must confine its inquiry only to things belonging to the human senses, while spiritualism transcends the senses. If you want to understand the nature of spiritual power you can do so only through the path of spirituality and not science. What science has been able to unravel is merely a fraction of the cosmic phenomena… .

In questioning the role of science, Sai Baba used metaphors of technology and science to explain the power of his miracles and he hinted at this “impregnation” of meaning:

The main thing is that these trinkets or talismans, by whatever name you call them, give people a sense of security and protection they need in times of troubles or crises and create a symbolic link covering the long distances between them and Myself. When the devotees need Me, these objects flash the message as if by wireless and I instantly come to their rescue.

Sai Baba himself is believed to have stated:

The optical sense cannot visualize the truth. It gives only false and fogged information. For example, there are many who observe my actions and start declaring that my nature is such and such. They are unable to gauge the sanctity, the majesty, and the eternal reality that is me. The power of Sai is limitless; it manifests forever. All forms of ‘power’ are resident in this Sai palm.

These multiple realities of Sai Baba are spaces into which one can step and one leaps from one reality into another—so devotees can move from worlds of science into worlds of magic. This movement is a shift or orientation that is correlated, but not causal. A scientific reality is characterized by that of a “disinterested observer” (Tambaih, 1990: 103) obligating the scientist to suppress his subjective points of view and orient himself to certain rules of epistemology and methodology. Participation and causality form two distinct orientations of the world where, as Tambaih (1990) states, causality is: “represented by categories, rules and methodology of positive science and discursive mathematico-logical reasoning” (Tambaih, 1990: 106), but participation was the relationship between the world and the person and: “ultimate participation enacted the relationship between man and the immanent” (Tambaih, 1990: 106), what Eck (1982) has called a “sacramental natural ontology” in which symbols constitute the whole.

So places, subjects, and objects can all be represented iconically and can transfer attributes and energies indexically (Tambaih, 1990: 190) making understanding and affect the key metrics of success. Furthermore, all the attributes are conveyed through the sensory modalities: tasting, touching, and feeling. So while the discourse of causality and science is framed as distancing and neutrality and the language of “analytical reason”, the discourse of participation and magic is framed in terms of “sympathetic immediacy”, “affective communication”, and “ritual action” (Tambaih, 1990: 108).

But Sai Baba’s own rhetoric surrounding his materializations hints at a deep ambivalence regarding the nature of these performances. As we have seen in the previous pages, Sai Baba often materialized objects and then denigrated them. He would materialize objects of great beauty and value and then scoff at his followers for valuing them, belittling the magical gifts and calling them his “visiting cards” that enable him to get to the heart of a possible devotee.

Many of you are under the mistaken notion that all My materializations have worldly significance; it is a gross mistake; don’t think like this. These (objects) are ladders that shall enable you to ascend to a bright and ideal future. So long as you are in possession of such sacred objects, only pious thoughts will be generated in you. Miracles are an innate part of Me. I was with them…Baba’s Miracles show clearly that He is not bound by Time, Qualities, and Nature. He is beyond everything. He is the Eternal Witness”. (Sanathana Sarathi, February 1998: 48)

He has offered several conflicting reasons, some instrumental and some philosophical, for the creation, materialization, and necessity of the objects. But most significantly for our purposes, Sai Baba often melded the two seemingly dialogical explanations of rationality and divine magic into one seamless explanation, transgressing both the canon and logic of scientific rationalism and of magic, arguing that while what he does is magic, the magic (chamatkar) is only a pathway to the true divinity within him obscured from devotees by the illusion (maya) of life.

So we have here the doubling of both participation in the drama of magic and the causality, and this leads us to the questioning of determinism of the scientific endeavor and the skepticism that informs it. Rationality itself is relative and it operates within a contained “philosophical context” and it cannot be: “properly detached from this context” (Trevor Rope in Tambiah, 1990: 89) that leads us to conclude obviously that reality is never simply given, but is interpreted based on the philosophical system one adopts. Sai Baba’s defense of his magic was a strategic appropriation of the dominant discourse of techno-scientific rationality to explain the seemingly irrational. In that he explodes new understandings of dominance and subversion, overturning and transgressing accepted hierarchies of power. The structuring relations of neo-liberal techno science with a focus on rationality are upended and reordered. By bringing divinity into the equation and holding scientific discourse as explanation, Sai Baba subordinates the dominant discourse and validates itself through the “unseen presence” of divinity (James, 2002 [1902] : 46–65) transgressing established boundaries between the discourses. What is the place of transgression in understanding Sai Baba’s analysis of his own magic? According to Foucault (in Urban, 2003):

Transgression opens into a scintillating and constantly affirmed world … without the serpentine ‘no’ that bites into fruits and lodges contradictions at their core. It is the solar inversion of the satanic denial … [It] opens the space where the divine functions. (Foucault A Preface to Transgression in Urban, 2003: 270)

As Michael Puett notes in his thought provoking work on ancient Chinese ritual, transgression is part and parcel of: “ambivalent creation … the creation of a new order requires a transgressive action, yet that transgression is intrinsically in opposition to the order that the figure is trying to create” (Puett, 2002: 210). Sai Baba often transgresses both the rationalist discourse and the magical discourse in his explication of his magic, allowing us to develop a critical framework for our understanding of magic, and requiring us to understand the value and the privation of such exchanges.

Sai Baba’s magic becomes the site of resistance, because it seeks to reconfigure the dialogic between science and belief as not dialogical. In such a world magic becomes the bridge that allows for belief while demolishing the isolating anomie and political economy of the scientific and technology complex. It is the unmanageability of Sai Baba magic and the ambiguity of his performance, combined with the transgressions of his explanations, that make for a dynamic productive space.

So while the structures of society and meaning might exist, strategic ambiguity and plastic ontologies enable difference and vibrancy to coexist lending new and different meanings to what are established praxes. Herzfeld (2005) has evocatively dubbed this plastic ability “social poetics” where difference animates everyday ways of living. Social poetics, according to Herzfeld, are mundane ways of being that are performative and persuasive that: “in their very ordinariness seem extraordinary” (Herzfeld, 2005: 183), that resist any essentialisms and help to break and remold established patterns of meaning, and so speaks to both definitions and boundaries.

Applying this idea to culture, we can argue for a cultural poetics that enables strategic ambiguity to be: “conceived as an action-oriented rather than a referential theory of meaning” and as such it “acquires flexibility” (Herzfeld, 2005: 190); the very plasticity that it deploys to make many meanings where previously only one was thought to exist. As: “moral values seem to denote where social boundaries are” (Herzfeld, 2005: 81), in reconstructing social boundaries it aids in rethinking and reinterpreting (Kleinman 2006) codes as well. Poetics as an ontological index and logic allows for a negotiation of both culture and identity through: “deployment, deformation and transformation” of form and meaning (Herzfeld, 2005: 190) while still allowing participants the comfort of a “prefabricated” cultural reality, but simultaneously enabling a: “compromising of purity” (Herzfeld, 2005: 157) to get to the heart of the plastic iterative interaction that occurs in what Herzfeld (2005) brilliantly terms “cultural intimacy”.

As Jones (2010) notes of French colonial aspirations and tactics of domination in mid-19th-century Algiers, the deployment of magic and its meanings, foregrounds and dramatizes the separation of knowledge and valorization differentials between the supposed superiority of Western thought (Taussig, 1991) and the Orientalist images of the naïve native as irrational and gullible, a moment that scholars expect has passed due to the dominance of contemporary politically correct narratives (Jones, 2010: 67). Yet, as the contemporary contestation over Sai Baba’s magic shows, rhetoric around magic is still deployed to that very same purpose, though in a post-colonial world the critique comes from both within and without and takes on a layered and intriguing complexity. The seizure and embrace of capitalist discourses, advanced here, is meant to reveal its contradiction and its limits. This is the strategy of re-enchanting the disenchantment to a point at which it is, arguably, beyond neo-liberalism or, at least, in excess of it. It challenges the nihilistic impulse of neo-liberal discourses and rejects philosophies and practices that subject devotees to endless subjugation of capitalism.

But the debate about magic points to the fact that the practice of debunking and its poetics emerges, not only as: “a powerful symbol of progress” (Jones, 2010: 69) in the West but also as a symbol of rational, progressive and westernized thought in the non-West. Anyone who is thought to believe in magic is seen as naïve, foolish, perhaps uneducated, and most certainly gullible and uncritical. This narrative of Western progressivism and scientific rationality is hegemonic and suggests traditional forms of native magic are seen as retrograde and charlatanism is linked to superstition and fear; this is evident in Narasimhaiah’s claim. Thus the debunking of Sai Baba’s magic was not merely taking on one supposed saint, godman, or mystical fakir, but was a broader attempt to pull the whole culture of the country out of a seemingly backward, unscientific, superstitious morass of faith and into the rational modernity of the 20th century. It points to an understanding of secular, scientific rationale as cognitively and structurally superior to the alleged fraudulent magic tricks of the native mystic. As Jones (2010) notes, this separation is a powerful marker of “cultural difference” and the politics of knowledge valorizations, particularly in post-colonial India where a middle class desires to be perceived as modern and equal to the West, is both widespread and seen as legitimate, both at an individual level and that of the wider nation-state, linking it in complex ways to discourses of nationalism at one end and therapeutic self-betterment at the other.

Conclusions: magical rationality and rational magicality

We have argued that the event-space of debunking has become centrally important to anti-superstition campaigners and other actors seeking to promote a progressive sense of a national identity. This is because of the understanding that it is in the domain of magic and godmen that one can find a: “concentration of super-charged superstition” (Copeman, 2009: 28). The assumption that if one dislodges those taboos which obstruct scientific thinking, much progress will follow. We see the mediatized moral dramas of the poesis of the public debunking as critical to understanding the emergent concept of fraudulence. The project of modernization is not held hostage here, rather it is attempted to be pushed forward though it encounters significant non-state-based resistance in the very encounter with the magical materialization and the rhetoric around it that it seeks to overturn. We see through the internet and media contests that Sai Baba becomes a positive exemplar of one who resists the forces of Western-style domination and neo-liberalism, while simultaneously being seen as retrograde, backward, and encouraging a negative possibility of change. The case of Sai magical materializations highlights the imbrications and interweaving of threaded responses to seemingly democratic impulses of transparency in reflectively elaborated contexts of neo-liberalism. They point, on the one hand, to domains of political praxis located: “neither within the constitutional limits of the state nor in the orderly transactions of bourgeois civil society” (Chatterjee, 1999: 117); and on the other hand, to the processes by which such domains are claimed by seeking to definitively determine what the praxis of magic is, and therefore what it is worth—an unerring and contested reach for a redemptive neo-liberalism.

The concept of fraudulence and how that is judged points to two valuable indexes in studying the magical—what constitutes “reality” as we know it, and how this is measured and understood. In order to understand what is fraudulent one must have an understanding of the authentic—the real as opposed to the illusory. Siegel (1991), in his treatise on Indian street magicians, hints that the problem of fraud, and by inversion that of legitimate authenticity, is located in how truth and illusion are perceived. In one of his narrations of Hindu myth one of the characters when asked to “tell the truth” about her identity says that “the game” is “to make the truth a lie, to make reality a sweet illusion” inverting the accepted categories just as magic inverts our accepted understandings of reality, thus evoking surprise, awe, and wonder (Siegel, 1991: 368). It is clear both from Sai Baba’s own discourse about the materializations and anthropological writings about magic that central to the unveiling of how magic functions, is the evoking of emotion.

Through the manipulation of the rhetoric around the materializations, Sai Baba and his devotees hope to achieve transgression not only of the bounds of secrecy regarding them but also to the ambivalence surrounding their (Puett, 2002). The inversion maneuver returning to nativistic explanations of maya allow for a problematizing of the Western scientific discourse that in turn attracts many devotees disenchanted with the materiality of (Glucklich 1997). He gestures to the breaking of the boundaries of what constitutes dialogic discourse as well as what constitutes belief in him. In these explicit rhetorical acts of transgression of the canons of contestatory position, Sai Baba weaves back and forth across the discursive plain, sometimes arguing that the magical materializations are indeed “magic” merely performed to attract potential devotees and supplicants who find much greater rewards at the end, and sometimes suggesting that the materializations are unfathomable acts of divinity transforming and transformative energy that derived from him as a divine source, creating a “strategically ambiguous” explanation (Srinivas, 2010). This weaving posits the materializations as acts and objects that have meaning in our contemporary disenchanted world as opposed to merely historical artifacts, while also striving to avoid some kind of neo-imperialism that would simply fashion these figures in the Western scientific discourse.

So, the multiple possible interpretations of the porous intersections enable an escape from the stifling dialectics of a unitary understanding of magic toward both “ontological complexity” where the ontology becomes moldable and plastic and “semiotic complexity” (our understandings of these complexities and the signs we use to denote them) where semiotics becomes fluid and non-oppositional. In the Sai movement symbols, metaphors, and tropes (oral, sensual, textual, and visual) act as accessible, complex, and ambiguous vehicles for meanings, emotions, and experiences that can be infinitely interconnected, leading to different meanings; where the original meaning can be detoured, deflected, or displaced to create a new one.

Returning to the place where I started, as T. S. Eliot (1943)exhorts us to do, and hopefully enabling us to know it for the first time, post-modern moment magic is a plastic discourse encompassing the notion of reflexivity of the divine magician and the devoted audience, the culpability of the innocent, and the meaning of fraudulence and authenticity. All these fluid meanings gesture to the dialogic building of meaning between magician and audience, spiritual master and devotee. That dialogic contributions become essential for the creation of this overarching matrix, what I have argued is a plastic ontological stance—a “strategic ambiguity”—that enables ever greater expansion of meaning.

Strategic ambiguity enables the same praxis to be understood differently in different times and contexts without posing the expected problems of text and translation. It enables the culture to remain open ended and plastic, whereby it can allow for many significations within the same apparent praxis and so paradoxes and seeming oppositions cease to be significant. It is because of this strategically ambiguous model that devotees accept that the argument made by ex-devotees and skeptics seems inordinately simplistic and downright wrong to them. Just because it is stage magic does not mean it could not also be divine magical will that can fulfill any desire, spiritual or material. Sai magic has, to devotees, a messianic power, the power to create a new dawn of a new era.