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About the BookAbout the AuthorTable of Contents

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.

Smriti Srinivas (Ph.D in Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University) is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Mouths of People, the Voice of God: Buddhists and Muslims in a Frontier Community of Ladakh (1998), and Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s Hi-Tech City (2001). Her research interests are in urban cultures, social memory, cultures of the body, and religion.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements Note on Translation List of Abbreviations List of Figures, Maps, Tables, and Diagrams Introduction 1. The Mendicant of Shirdi 2. The Arrival of the Avatar 3. The Sense of the Presence 4. Healing, Service, and Character 5. The Ideal Polis 6. Producing Space in Bangalore 7. Somatic Regimes of Citizenship in Nairobi 8. Sites of Sociality in Atlanta Conclusion Appendix: Overseas Sai Centers and Groups Bibliography Index