Smriti Srinivas

The Brahmin and the fakir: Suburban religiosity in the cult of Shirdi Sai baba

Abstract Shirdi Sai Baba (?‐1918), whose cult in Bangalore city, India, is the case study of this paper, was a Maharashtrian saint closely identified with both the Pandharpur tradition of Vaisnavite devotion and Sufi genealogies in the region. My thesis is that in the cult of Shirdi Sai Baba, the holy mendicant/saint (fakir/sant) paradigm was associated historically with non‐urban locations; the paradigm of the spiritual guide (guru,) and, in later years, the incarnation (avatar), is to be found associated with suburban and urban sites. The religious imagination of a cult is a behavioural, communicational and spatial model that creates particular kinds of topological domains in different historical and social milieus. It achieves its coherence within these contexts through certain ‘root paradigms’, cultural codes in the minds of carriers of traditions that shape relationships, practices, and life‐stances of individuals. While it is common to identify an urban location by certain social science variables, ...

Sai Baba: The Double Utilization of Written and Oral Traditions in a Modern South Asian Religious Movement

The Sai Baba movement, one of the most widespread and popular modern South Asian religious movements, owes its origin to a saint, Sai Baba of Shirdi (d.1918), who was probably born around 1838. Through his successor, Sathya Sai Baba (b.1926), the movement has become a transnational phenomenon in the late twentieth century and has also expanded the main centers of its charisma, including today Shirdi town in the Indian state of Maharashtra and Puttaparthi town in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. While most of the available literature is hagiographical in nature, some aspects of the movement have been studied the figures of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba, the middle-class constituency of the Sathya Sai Baba movement, role of miracles, and the pedagogical role of movement, for instances These studies are part of a growing interest in new religious and reformist movements in South Asia in the past century, their impacts on civil society and its institutions, and their relationships to the nation-state. This article examines the interplay of the oral and the written, of revelation and memory, in the Sai Baba movement, while situating this relationship sociologically rather than according to a strictly textual enterprise. It is a part of work in progress on different aspects of the cult of Sai Baba, including its urban following, the reconstruction of tradition in it and its lines of the transmission of charisma.2 Accordingly, this article will be divided into four sections. This introductory section will examine briefly the categories of revelation and memory and their parallels in Islam and Hinduism in the South Asian context. I will suggest that in looking at the relationship between written and oral traditions in modern South Asian religious movements, we need to move to an understanding of social memory. The next two sections will situate the figures of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba biographically, sociologically and historically, and the role of the written and the oral tradition in their lives and messages. The concluding section will build on the claim made in the introduction that the category of social memory that incorporates the written and the oral is a useful heuristic device for the study of new religious movements such as the Sai Baba movement.

Hot Bodies and Cooling Substances Rituals of Sport in a Science City

In the city of Bangalore, India, the main annual festival of the Karaga draws its ritual personnel from a network of wrestling houses, where concepts of the conservation and channeling of bodily fluids underlie training. These concepts are, in turn, linked to an older model of urban planning in which artificial water bodies and gardening were integral components of the built environment. As the city’s population has grown and its economy shifted toward manufacturing and high technology, a different model of planning has slowly destroyed the older ecological system while inserting large sports complexes as important urban nodes. There is a simultaneous movement to link sports, beauty contests, and media as entertainment, with a concomitant redefinition of the body.

Roadside Shrines, Storefront Saints, and Twenty-First Century Lifestyles: The Cultural and Spatial Thresholds of Indian Urbanism

In India’s high-tech global city of Bangalore, two developments over the last decade have had a profound impact on the experience of urban life: the creation of a concentric beltway system since the 1990s (called the ring roads) and the construction of a rapid transit system that began once the final government approval was obtained in 2006. To participant-observers, such as myself, of the religious terrain of the city, two spatial trends become visible: on the one hand, religious landmarks—whether old village temples or hermitages of gurus such as Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011)—once on the city’s boundaries are now enfolded within patterns of exurban and suburban habitation for new middle classes that include high-rise apartment living, gated communities, or “farmhouses” within easy-driving distance to special economic zones, informational technology hubs, the international airport, hospitals, or schools. On the other hand, within older neighborhoods lying directly on the metro route, new pathways re-formed by the ever-expanding transportation systems alter existing routines of religiosity at sites such as the Kempamma Devi temple in Ulsoor. All of these emerging regimes still need to be adequately deciphered. My chapter, exploring older neighborhoods such as Ulsoor-Indiranagar (which lies in the nexus between the Inner Ring Road and Reach 1 of the East-West Namma Metro corridor) and their regimes of religiosity, unfolds within in my long-term research on Bangalore, a city of about 8 million people and within the nexus between urban studies and studies of contemporary religion in (South) Asia.