Sai Baba Movement
SAI BABA MOVEMENT. The Sai Baba movement is perhaps the most popular modern South Asian religious movement. It owes its origin to Shirdi Sai Baba (d. 1918). Through one of the inheritors of his charisma, Sathya Sai Baba (b. 1926), the movement became a transnational phenomenon in the late twentieth century.
While most of the available literature is hagiographical in nature, scholars have studied some aspects of the movement, including the figures of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba, the middle-class constituency of Sathya Sai Baba, and the movement's pedagogical innovations. In addition, Shirdi Sai Baba has been identified with certain Ṣūfī orders in Maharashtra and Karnataka (Shepherd, 1985), the medieval figure of Kabīr (Rigopoulos, 1993), and the protean Indian deity, Dattātreya (Rigopoulos, 1998). Rigopoulos points out that the "syncretistic quality of Kabīr's life and teachings" seems to have been Sai Baba's model (1993, p. 305), and that on one occasion Shirdi Sai Baba stated that his "religion" was Kabīr. Dattātreya's "interreligious eclecticism" is found in the Sai Baba movement: Shirdi Sai Baba was believed by his devotees to be an incarnation of Dattātreya, and Sathya Sai Baba has presented himself as an incarnation of the same figure (Rigopoulos, 1998, p.
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