Sathya Sai Baba

• 1. Introduction

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  When Sathya Sai Baba was buried on the 27th of April 2011, an estimated 500,000 people attended. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi were among the mourners. Sathya Sai Baba was an Indian godman and philanthropist, born in a small village in the south of the country. His followers credited him with producing holy ash, rings, necklaces and watches out of nothing. They also spoke of healings, resurrections and clairvoyance. Critics accused him of sleight of hand, money laundering, fraud and even murder. He was never charged with any offence. How does a village boy become a figure honoured by crowds and national leaders? What did he build, and who paid for it? And what do scholars, skeptics and investigators make of the claims that followed him for decades?

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• 2. A Boy in Puttaparthi

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  Ratnakaram Sathyanarayana Raju was born on the 23rd of November 1926 in Puttaparthi, then part of the Madras Presidency of British India. His parents were Easwaramma, also called Namagiriamma, and Peddavenkama Raju Ratnakaram. They belonged to a Telugu-speaking Bhatraju family, a community of religious musicians and balladeers. He was the fourth of five children. His mother said his conception was miraculous. People described the child as unusually intelligent and charitable, though not especially interested in school. He showed real talent for devotional music, dance and drama.

  Almost everything known about his early life comes from stories that grew up among his devotees. By their account, on the 8th of March 1940 the 14-year-old Sathya was living with his elder brother Seshama Raju in Uravakonda when a scorpion stung him. He lost consciousness for several hours. In the days after, his behaviour changed. Witnesses described laughing and weeping, eloquence and silence. The story says he began singing Sanskrit verses, though he had never studied the language. Doctors decided it was hysteria.

  His worried parents took him home and then to priests, doctors and exorcists. At Kadiri, one exorcist shaved the boy's head, cut three crosses into his skull and poured acid into the wounds. His parents stopped the treatment there.

  On the 23rd of May 1940, Sathya called the household together and reportedly produced sugar candy and flowers. His furious father suspected that the boy was bewitched. Holding a stick, he demanded to know who his son really was. The boy answered calmly, "I am Sai Baba." He meant Sai Baba of Shirdi, a saint famous in Maharashtra who had died eight years before Sathya was born. From then on he was known as Sathya Sai Baba.

  On the 20th of October 1940, he told his parents he had come to re-establish Dharma, to motivate love for God and to encourage service to fellow man. In a letter to his brother dated the 25th of May 1947, he wrote, "I do not belong to any place. I am not attached to any name."

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• 3. Ashrams and Mandirs

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  Four years after that proclamation, in 1944, devotees built a mandir near Puttaparthi. People now call it the old mandir. Work on a larger ashram, Prasanthi Nilayam, began in 1948 and finished in 1950. It was inaugurated on the 23rd of November 1950, which was his 25th birthday. Its name means Abode of Highest Peace. The buildings are painted blue, yellow and pink. Blue stands for spirit, yellow for intellect and pink for the heart, and the harmony of the three is said to produce peace.

  The Poornachandra Auditorium opened in 1973. Its enclosed hall measures 60 by 40 metres and seats around 15,000 people. Plays, dance, music, conferences and the Dasara ceremonies take place there. His living quarters sat upstairs, above the stage. On the 9th of July 1995 he inaugurated Sai Kulwant Hall, which holds up to 20,000 people. He gave darshan there every day from then on, and his white marble Mahasamadhi shrine now stands in the same hall.

  The ashram works like a small town. It has a shopping centre, bookstores, a library and reading room, dormitories, banking and ATM facilities, and the Radio Sai studios. It also has a bakery, emergency medical services and three food courts serving North Indian, South Indian and Western food. The surrounding area holds a university complex, a planetarium, a railway station, a stadium and an airport. Two museums stand nearby. One is the Sanathana Samskruti, called the Museum of All Religions. The other is the Chaitanya Jyoti, devoted to his life and teachings, which has won international awards for its design. Official guests have included former president A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

  From 1968 to 1981 he also established three temples. They were Sathyam Mandir in Mumbai, Shivam Mandir in Hyderabad and Sundaram in Chennai. In April 1999 he inaugurated the Ananda Nilayam Mandir in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.

  On the 25th of June 1960 he established Brindavan Ashram in Kadugodi, near Whitefield and 24 kilometres from the centre of Bangalore. It covers around 50 acres and served as his summer home, where he spent about three months each year. Its features include Sai Ramesh Krishan Hall, his residence Trayee Brindavan, and a campus of the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning.

  High in the Palani Hills at Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu sits a third retreat, Sai Shruti Ashram. He visited for a few days in April and May. It has no accommodation and no extra facilities.

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• 4. Hospitals, Colleges and Water

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  In 1954, in the village of Puttaparthi, he founded a small free general hospital. A larger medical hospital followed inside the ashram in 1957. Over the next decades the projects grew steadily. In 1968 a college for girls opened in Anantapur, his first education project. The Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust began in 1972 as an umbrella for charitable work. A general hospital at Whitefield, outside Bangalore, was completed in 1976, and a boys' college opened in Puttaparthi in 1978. The Sri Sathya Sai University was inaugurated on the 22nd of November 1981. The Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences was finished in 1991. A second institute began operating in Bangalore, along with a super-speciality hospital in Whitefield, and in 2001 he set up another free super-speciality hospital there for poor patients. At the Whitefield hospitals, all services are still free.

  In March 1995 he started a project to bring drinking water to 1.2 million people in the drought-prone Rayalaseema region of Anantapur district. It was the first of many water projects. The Medak and Mahabubnagar projects followed in 2001 and the Chennai project in 2002. The East and West Godavari projects were completed in 2007.

  The Chennai work carried water from the River Krishna in Andhra Pradesh to the city. In January 2007 the Chennai Citizens' Conclave held an event at Chennai Nehru Stadium to thank him for what it called a 2 billion water project. Four chief ministers attended. The Indian postal department had already marked the water work with a stamp and a postal cover on the 23rd of November 1999. Another commemorative stamp appeared in November 2013 for what would have been his 88th birthday.

  Estimates of the net financial capital behind these schools, colleges and hospitals usually run to about 400 billion rupees, or 9 billion US dollars. Some estimates reach 1.4 trillion rupees, about 31.5 billion dollars. Writing years after his death, Vivek Kumar said Sai Baba provided free education, healthcare and water to people who had never dreamed of them.

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• 5. Devotion and Daily Practice

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  Two sayings summed up his message to devotees: "Love All, Serve All" and "Help Ever, Hurt Never." At Prashanti Nilayam, devotees sought the spiritual benefit of his darshan, held each morning and afternoon. He moved among people, accepted letters and called groups and individuals for interviews. Devotees counted a private interview as a great privilege. A person, group or family might be invited to ask for answers to spiritual questions or general guidance.

  Around the world, followers gather daily, or weekly on Sundays, Thursdays or both. They hold satsangs, which include spiritual discourses, devotional songs, prayer and meditation. They also perform community service, called Seva. Children take part in "Education in Human Values," known as Bal Vikas, meaning the blossoming of the child.

  He was a lacto-vegetarian for spiritual and moral reasons, and his followers have adopted the diet. He said that eating meat fosters animal qualities in man and drags him down to the demonic level. He also found it heart-rending to see cows slaughtered for food. He and many devotees have criticised factory farming as unethical.

  He is credited with 15 books known as Vahinis, meaning streams or rivers. He wrote them in Telugu, and Prof. Narayana Kasturi translated them into English. His public talks were gathered into the Sathya Sai Speaks series, which runs to 42 volumes from 1953 to 2010. Each summer from 1972 until 2002 he spoke to students at the Brindavan campus in Whitefield. Those talks became the 15-volume Summer Showers series. He also wrote and sang many bhajans, which are devotional songs.

  Filmmakers took notice. Richard Bock made Advent of the Avatar in 1973 and The Endless Stream in 1974, and kept making Sai Baba documentaries into the 1990s. Rod Serling, famous for The Twilight Zone, narrated and hosted The Man of Miracles in 1975. Victor J. Tognola of Switzerland made Who Is Sai Baba? in 1990. Even television fiction noticed him. In the 1995 X-Files episode "The Calusari," an invented character named Dr. Burk claims to have watched a guru called Sai Baba create a whole feast from thin air.

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• 6. Movement or Cult

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  The Sri Sathya Sai International Organization traces back to the 1960s, when he founded it under the name Sri Sathya Sai Seva Samithi. Its stated aim was to let members take up service as a path to spiritual advancement. In 2020 the Sri Satya Sai Central Trust received Special Consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The organization reports around 1,200 centres in 114 countries. Nobody knows how many active followers there are. Estimates run from 6 million to nearly 100 million. In 2002, Sai Baba himself said he had followers in 178 countries. In India, his followers came mostly from the urban upper-middle class.

  Scholars have argued over what to call the following. In 1972, Charles S. J. White of The American University in Washington observed that Sathya Sai Baba's teaching showed no discernible Muslim influence, unlike that of Sai Baba of Shirdi. Stephanie Tallings, writing in The Harvard International Review, noted that followers come from all religions, ethnicities and social classes.

  In the 1980s, Lawrence A. Babb of Amherst College called it a cult. He described it as deeply and authentically Hindu, and said its most striking feature was its heavy emphasis on the miraculous. A later scholarly review argued that Babb misapplied the word. Deborah A. Swallow of the University of Cambridge also used the word cult and called its ritual and theology distinctly Hindu. John D. Kelly, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, studied Hindu missions in Fiji. He found that the local Sathya Sai Organization rejected the label Hindu. Members saw their founder as a living synthesis of the world's religions and preferred to be called an interfaith movement.

  In a 2001 book, Tulasi Srinivas described a global civil religious movement that blends Hindu and Muslim practice with Buddhist, Christian and Zoroastrian influences and New Age-style rituals. Her appendix lists ten scholars in Europe and America who all call it a New Religious Movement. Eugene Gallagher, a professor of religious studies, notes that most academics now prefer that term because they see cult as pejorative.

  A secret Central Intelligence Agency report from the early 1990s took a wider view. It described a worldwide mass religious movement forming around Sai Baba. It argued that his picture of a harmonious, multi-religious India could counterbalance Hindu chauvinists and ethnic separatists. It predicted the movement would likely become another worldwide religion, helped by its wealth, assets and social contributions. It even compared the claim that he was the Kalki Avatar, the tenth avatar of Vishnu, with the expected return of Jesus Christ. Its author added a warning. The movement could collapse if Sai Baba were convincingly shown to be a fraud.

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• 7. Skeptics and Questions

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  In 1972, Abraham Kovoor made the first public criticism of Sathya Sai Baba. He investigated a devotee's story that Sai Baba had created a new model of Seiko watch, and he found the story untrue.

  In April 1976, Hossur Narasimhaiah, a physicist and rationalist who was then vice-chancellor of Bangalore University, founded a committee to investigate miracles scientifically. He wrote Sai Baba three widely publicised letters challenging him to perform miracles under controlled conditions. The letters were ignored. Sai Baba later explained that science can only study what the senses perceive, while spiritual power lies beyond them. Narasimhaiah took the silence as a sign that the miracles were fraudulent. The committee was dissolved in August 1977. Newspapers across India carried a public debate for several months.

  Basava Premanand, an Indian rationalist, began campaigning against Sai Baba in 1976. In 1986 he tried to sue him under the Gold Control Act, arguing that Sai Baba was producing gold necklaces from thin air without the required permission. The case was dismissed. On appeal, Premanand argued that claimed spiritual power is no defence in law, and that appeal failed too. In 1995, filmmaker Robert Eagle made a documentary for Britain's Channel 4, Guru Busters, which accused Sai Baba of faking his materialisations.

  Some claims were tested more closely. In 1971, Sai Baba was said to have resurrected an American devotee, Walter Cowan. British journalist Mick Brown discussed the claim in his 1998 book The Spiritual Tourist. Erlendur Haraldsson interviewed the doctors who treated Cowan. They said he had been dangerously ill but had not died. Brown also described sacred ash appearing from Sai Baba's pictures in London houses, and he did not believe it was trickery. Even so, he noted that sceptics had documented discrepancies between Sai Baba's readings of historical events and the established accounts. The Vancouver Sun reported in 2001 that Sai Baba told followers not to go on the internet, and to surf the "inner net" instead.

  The gravest charges arrived in January 2002. A Danish national broadcaster, Danmarks Radio, aired the documentary Seduced By Sai Baba. It analysed videos of his public manifestations and suggested sleight of hand. It also carried interviews with Alaya Rahm, a former devotee who alleged abuse by Sai Baba. As a result, the United Kingdom's parliament discussed the danger to male children of British families visiting the ashram for individual audiences. In 2004, the BBC's The Secret Swami, part of the series The World Uncovered, returned to Rahm's allegations. It also interviewed Mark Roche, who had spent 25 years in the movement from 1969 and made similar allegations. Premanand again said he believed Sai Baba faked his materialisations.

  Sai Baba rejected all allegations of misconduct. In a speech in December 2000 he compared his situation to that of Jesus and Judas Iscariot. He said there had been one Judas then, but there were thousands now. Out of jealousy, hate and fear, he said, many were being bought with money to say nasty things about him. Defenders spoke up, including Bill Aitken and Anil Kumar, the former principal of the Sathya Sai Educational Institute. In an open letter of December 2001, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Chief Justices P. N. Bhagwati and Ranganath Misra, Najma Heptulla and other members of parliament said they were deeply pained by what they called reckless and concocted allegations. They called him an embodiment of love and selfless service. In 2015, writer Paul William Roberts said he had never had reason to doubt that Sai Baba was what he claimed to be.

  New questions arose after his death, about how the organization's finances would be handled. Reports spoke of suitcases of cash or gold removed from his lodgings. On the 17th of June 2011, Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust officials opened his private residence, sealed since his death, in front of government, bank and tax officials. They inventoried 98 kilograms of gold ornaments, worth about 21 crore rupees or 4.7 million US dollars. They also found 307 kilograms of silver ornaments and 116 million rupees in cash. The cash went into the Trust's account at the State Bank of India, with government taxes paid. In July, authorities inventoried a further 7.7 million rupees in valuables in four more rooms. Thousands of silk sarees, dhotis and shirts were listed, along with 500 pairs of shoes, bottles of perfume, watches, precious stones and 750 saffron and white robes. A similar opening of his Bangalore-area ashram that July counted 6 kilograms of gold coins and jewellery, 245 kilograms of silver and 8 million rupees in cash. These items are believed to be religious gifts from devotees around the world.

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• 8. Final Years and Mourning

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  In 1963, it was asserted that Sai Baba suffered a stroke and four severe heart attacks, leaving him paralysed on one side. According to the account, he healed himself in front of thousands of people at Prashanthi Nilayam who were praying for his recovery. Afterward he declared himself Shiva-Sakthi. He said that Shiva had been born as Sai Baba of Shirdi, that both Shiva and Sakthi had now come as himself, and that Sakthi alone would return as a third Sai, Prema Sai Baba, in Mandya district of Karnataka. He also said he would be born again eight years after dying at the age of 96.

  From June to July 1968, he travelled to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It was the only time he left India. On the 6th of June 1993, four men who were devotees entered his residence, saying they had a telegram for him. According to the official account, they stabbed two of his assistants to death and injured two others when they were blocked. Police arrived. The four locked themselves in his living room and were shot when they opened the door and attacked the officers. He was unharmed. He later said there had been no attempt on his life, and many aspects of the event remain unsolved. On the 17th of January 2002, a man later identified as Somasundaram entered the Whitefield Ashram with an air pistol. Volunteers caught him and handed him to police.

  In 2003, he fractured his hip when a student standing on an iron stool slipped and fell onto him. Afterward he gave darshana from a car or a chair on wheels. After 2004 he used a wheelchair and made fewer public appearances. On the 28th of March 2011, he was admitted to the Sri Sathya Sai Super Speciality Hospital in Puttaparthi with giddiness and a slowing heartbeat. By the 4th of April his vital signs were reported near normal. Over the following weeks, multiple organ failures set in. He died on Sunday, the 24th of April 2011, at 7:40 IST, aged 84.

  He had predicted he would live to 96 in good health. Some devotees later suggested he meant lunar years, counted the Telugu Hindu way, and including the year to come in a person's age. Others spoke of his anticipated resurrection, reincarnation or awakening.

  His body lay in state for two days and was buried with full state honours. Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and Union Ministers S. M. Krishna and Ambika Soni attended. Tendulkar, whose birthday fell that day, cancelled his celebrations. Condolences came from Nepal's prime minister, Jhala Nath Khanal, and Sri Lanka's president, Mahinda Rajapaksa. Karnataka declared the 25th and the 26th of April days of mourning. Andhra Pradesh announced four days of state mourning. The Dalai Lama said he was saddened by the passing of the respected spiritual leader. Mata Amritanandamayi said his life was his message. Ravi Shankar, founder of the Art of Living Foundation, wrote that his message of "Satya Dharma Shanti Prema" had crossed barriers of caste and religion. The Hindu newspaper said his appeal rested on a commitment to communal harmony, encouragement of charity, and institutions meeting basic needs on a large scale.

  In November 2025, the Sathya Sai International Organization marked his 100th birthday celebrations with a specially designed logo, which it called a humble and sincere attempt to capture his uniqueness.

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