Abstract
The Afterlife of Sai Baba fulfils a lacuna in the field by providing an in-depth account of the Indian guru, Shirdi Sai Baba (~late 1830s–1918). Shirdi Sai Baba has increased in notoriety because of Sathya Sai Baba’s (1926–2011) controversial claim to be his incarnation, but he is famous in his own right as a celebrated religious figure representing Hindu–Muslim syncretism. As an embodiment of the ideal of India’s religious pluralism, he has become an influential guru in Mumbai, in the modern religious landscape in India and among diasporic Indians. The ubiquitous image of him sitting cross-legged with his white headscarf and robes reveals neither a distinctive Hindu nor Muslim religious affiliation. He has been read as Hindu, as Muslim, as both Hindu and Muslim, and as neither Hindu nor Muslim. In her study, Karline McLain approaches Shirdi Sai Baba through his afterlife effects: she engages representations of Shirdi Sai Baba in hagiographies, in films and in scholarship. Through this approach, she critically engages the various ways that Shirdi Sai Baba has been manipulated to articulate his interlocutors’ aims. Her careful research does not attempt to uncover the ‘real’ Shirdi Sai Baba, but rather she uses the multiple interpretations of this polyvalent religious figure to insightfully analyse the contours of religious pluralism in modern India.
McLain’s research decentres Shirdi Sai Baba to focus on his multiple ‘afterlife interpretations’ (p. 6) and in so doing, she positions his own religious ambiguity as an embodiment of the ambiguity of religion inherent within globalisation. This ambiguity stems from the polarisation of religion in globalisation, wherein religion is both a civilising force and the progenitor of countless uncivil acts. In the Indic context, she locates this ambiguity in the tension between the local and the universal, and shows how this is reflected in the current divide between Hinduism as ‘an ethnic and caste-based bounded religion versus Hinduism as a universal and pluralistic religion’ (p. 210). She reveals how this ambiguity is articulated through interpretations of Shirdi Sai Baba wherein some interpreters aim to universalise his message and others aim to locate him more firmly within a narrow conception of Hinduism.
McLain notes that some scholars—such as Antonio and Rigopoulos and Marianne Warren—have lamented that Shirdi Sai Baba has been co-opted by Hindus who change his clothing to ochre, encapsulate him within Hindu ritual venerations, house his image within Hindu temples, and ignore his Sufi and Islamic teachings. But McLain views these developments in a different light. She argues, ‘[F]ar from setting out to “Hinduize” the once syncretic or Muslim figure of Shirdi Sai Baba, as Rigopoulos and Warren would have it, these temple founders have instead set out to liberalize Hinduism through the worship of Shirdi Sai Baba’ (p. 211). In this reading, Shirdi Sai Baba has been appropriated within the Hindu fold not to confine his syncretism to a narrow understanding of Hinduism, but rather to expand Hinduism to its most inclusivistic and universal form. Still, McLain is cautious about the promises of both the narrow and the expansive understandings of Hinduism and she invites readers to consider the on-the-ground realities of religious hybridity in the context of majoritarian politics, not only its utopian promises (p. 222).
McLain begins her study with a description of two encounters with Shirdi Sai Baba: one by Govind Rao Dabholkar who viewed him as a Hindu guru and god-man and the other by Abdul Baba who viewed him as a Muslim Sufi master and saint. She argues that of these two competing visions, Dabholkar’s Shri Sai Satcharita has been adopted as the authoritative scripture and has been centralised by the Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust. Through careful ethnographic research, she reveals the particularities of how the Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust, the organisation that manages the pilgrimage site in Shirdi today, exhibits a tension between inclusive pluralism and adherence to orthodox Hindu tradition (p. 41). The following two chapters are historical and account for the hagiographical production of Shirdi Sai Baba. The second chapter focuses on Das Ganu and the manner in which he used Shirdi Sai Baba to critique caste hierarchy, while maintaining Brahminical status. The third chapter focuses on B.V. Narasimhaswami and his attempt to unite Hinduism and Islam through a celebration of Shirdi Sai Baba’s ecumenism and syncretic religious teachings. McLain shows how even this celebration of religious hybridity was grounded in Hindu orthodoxy. The fourth chapter delves into the filmic interpretations of Shirdi Sai Baba, showing how the famed Amar Akbar Anthony and the less popular Shirdi Ke Sai Baba both promote the guru as a populist hero able to unite Hindus and Muslims. She argues that once again, both films affirm the centrality of Hindus and Hinduism despite their utopian visions of a pluralistic and syncretic Indian society. In the fifth chapter, McLain turns to the diasporic context with a detailed investigation into two Shirdi Sai Baba temples in the United States, revealing how both temples maintain Hindu liturgies, but offer alternative, pluralistic and liberal counter-narratives of Hindu religiosity.
The Afterlife of Sai Baba productively engages the multiple refractions of one of the most popular guru figures to emerge in modern India and invites readers to complicate facile rhetorical appeals to religious pluralism in light of the actualities of power relations between and within religious communities. McLain’s research can be used productively in undergraduate and graduate classrooms and as a useful methodological model for scholars to engage with polyvalent public figures and the multiplicity of interpretive lenses they incite.