Description
Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. Squaring The Circle by SMRITI SRINIVAS
The Sai Baba movement, centred on the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba (b.1926), today attracts a global following from Japan to South Africa. Regarded as a divine incarnation, Sathya Sai Baba traces his genealogy to Shirdi Sai Baba (d.1918), a mendicant in colonial India identified with various Sufi and devotional traditions. The movement, thus, has its “roots” in Shirdi Sai Baba. However, in the process of going global, it has developed conjunctions with other religious traditions, New Religious Movements, and New Age ideas. This book offers an account of the Sai Baba movement as a pathway for charting the varied cartographies, sensory formations, and cultural memories implicated in urbanization and globalization. It traverses the terrain between social theories for the study of religion and cities —themselves a product of modernity—and the radical, creative, and unexpected modernity of contemporary religious movements. It is based on ethnographic research carried out in India, Kenya, and the United States of America.