Pilgrim's India

by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  Then if you’re looking for some evidence of Sri Aurobindo’s metaphysical rigour or J. Krishnamurti’s strenuous intellectualism or Osho’s hypnotic oratory, there is none. Shirdi Sai Baba is not the average jnana margi’s fix. He gave no discourses, wrote no mystical verse, authored no path-breaking text, formulated no doctrine. He attached little importance to scripture of any kind, though he often gave startling evidence of his understanding of Hindu and Islamic sacred literature when dealing with devotees with a penchant for punditry.

  There’s actually very little about the Sai Baba phenomenon that can be accommodated within the rationalist’s comfort zone. And then there is the unsettling fact that he had until not so long ago, another self-proclaimed contemporary avatar—Sathya Sai Baba (too larger-than-life and too recently alive for those who prefer their spiritual mentors to be decorously low-profile or anciently entombed).

  On the other hand, if you are willing to put down some of the patrician seeker’s cargo, you discover that it is actually quite easy to belong to Sai Baba—at least the Shirdi version. The fact is he asks so little of you. His promise is pretty unequivocal: ‘If you look to me, I look to you.’ In a world riven by conditionality, this is comforting. And when you are seized by the spiritual seeker’s ravenous need for reassurance, it is desperately comforting. Sai Baba is known to keep up his side of the bargain.

  So I plunged into a reading of Sai literature—from Arthur Osborne’s elegant biography to the absorbing but syntactically hysterical Sai Satcharita, and numerous chronicles in between. And slowly I began to discover just what it is about the man that attracts believers from over the country, even the globe, more than ninety years after his death. On one level, his life reads like a catalogue of miracles. Reading them can induce awe or downright discomfort if you like your gurus more dignified—as I thought I did.

  But gradually, it was this very quality that began to seem attractive—this warm, almost bear-like spirit of inclusiveness. You see it in his refusal to divulge any details about his birth, leaving everyone confounded over whether he was Hindu or Muslim. If orthodox Hindu disciples drew comfort from the fact that he encouraged Ram Navami celebrations, they still had to deal with the fact that he lived in a mosque and unabashedly cooked and ate meat and fish. If the Muslim conservatives found reassurance in the fact that he donned the traditional apparel of a Pir and frequently punctuated his conversations with ‘Allah malik’, they were disconcerted by his sacred fire and his blithe description of the mosque as ‘Dwarkamayi’. Volatile, quirky, contradictory, Sai Baba seemed to take delight in flouting every certitude people around him nursed about the state of self-realization.

  Things haven’t changed much. Even if you consider yourself a diehard liberal, Sai Baba compels you to extend those parameters. Religious distinctions may mean little to me, but I confess he still makes demands on my reasonably catholic self-image. He questions my notions about how enlightened human beings should behave. (His raging tempers seem picturesque at this distance, but I’m not sure how I would have handled his beatings had I been a Shirdi resident in his lifetime.) He challenges my personal inclination towards more non-dualist philosophies. He forces me to examine the insidious brands of spiritual snobbery that creep into my seeking. He helps me acknowledge the levels of the quest—rational and flagrantly irrational, intellectual and visceral—that I live all at once. Accepting all the roiling contradictions isn’t always easy.

  But then there’s always that melting promise about looking to you if you look to him.

  And then, he addresses problems of every kind, material or metaphysical, with a remarkable lack of discrimination. You don’t have to approach him with a politically correct wish list. You can feel free to share with him—as people did in his time—the desire for male offspring or success in shady business deals. His guile, it is believed, lies in the imperceptible process of purification he initiates in you. The strategy is to artfully keep granting you what you seek (or at least lull you into that delusion), until you begin asking for what he desires you to seek. No mean psychology, this.

  Very little is actually known about him. Theories abound. But he himself refused to encourage any discussion on the subject of his background. On being asked his caste and community by a local magistrate, he replied, ‘Parvardigar’. His creed, he declared (with equally confounding Sufi logic) was ‘Kabir’. (Many believe he was a reincarnation of the mystic iconoclast of medieval India.) His age? Lakhs of years! The magistrate probably threw up his hands and gave up at this point.

  The life story of Sai Baba, as documented by his many disciples, is so spectacular that it is difficult to know where biography ends and apocrypha begins. But, as believers stoutly counter, the lives of saints are meant to stretch the limits of our rational understanding. The result is that there’s precious little about the man’s life that hasn’t been colonized by the fabulist’s imagination.

  His date of birth, according to the Sai Satcharita (a devotional work composed by one of his prime disciples) is 1838. Baba first appeared in Shirdi at around the age of sixteen and is remembered as a contemplative young man, radiant of complexion. However, he inexplicably vanished soon after and just as mysteriously, returned four years later. At this point, he moved into a ramshackle mosque and never moved out again. Shirdi was to be his home for the next sixty years until his death on 15 October 1918. In those sixty years, he kept a sacred fire burning in his masjid (the ash of which is still believed to have healing properties), performed flamboyant miracles with a throwaway air, resolutely held that there was only one God (‘Sabka malik ek’), preached faith and patience, urged inter-faith harmony, lived out a strikingly composite spiritual life himself, and attracted thousands of devotees from all over the country.

  He was known to be unpredictable, loved and feared at the same time. He spent much of his day hunched over his chillum, capable of immense humour and compassion on some occasions and flaming tempers on others. He attached no importance to scholarship, but spoke with affection of his own guru. ‘He looked after me,’ he said, ‘as a tortoise looks after her young on the yonder bank by a mere gaze, and I never felt that I was separated from him.’ Believed to be a Sufi fakir, the identity of his guru remains a matter of speculation.

  Although he initially begged for alms, Baba’s fame grew in later years to such an extent that an abundance of food and money poured into the masjid. His great appeal, however, lay in the fact that he remained a simple fakir to the very end, dressed in a tattered unwashed robe, asking for dakshina from one devotee only to liberally give it away to another. Birds and animals, men and women of all castes and faiths ate freely from his alms bowl. It is a moving testimony to his life of frugality that at the time of his death he had just enough money to cover his own funeral expenses.

  Then there are the miracles—little ones, big ones, slender ones, fat ones, inexhaustible, fabulous, extravagant ones. There are countless accounts of him curing illnesses—from cholera, typhoid, epilepsy and tuberculosis to snake bites, infertility to the bubonic plague—with his sacred ash. At other times, all that was required to accomplish the healing was a single word or a mere glance. The sacred fire burns in the mosque to this day and the ash is still offered gratis to pilgrims who line up for it. (I confess I have often found myself extending a sweaty palm for this benediction.)

  There are fantastic tales of his turning water into oil when the stingy Shirdi grocers refused to supply him with oil for his dhuni and of his disengaging his limbs from his body and reassembling them in a casual display of yogic virtuosity. The most vivid story is of him plunging his hand into the sacred fire one day. His disciples pulled him back and chided him for his recklessness. But Baba explained that a blacksmith’s child many miles away had accidentally fallen into a furnace. By scorching his own hand, said Baba, he had saved the child. Another story tells of how Baba materialized a horse carriage and driver to transport a disciple to Jamner to assist another devotee in need.

 
; One gentleman, deeply averse to idolatry, was adamant about not bowing down before Baba. But his friends were shocked to find him suddenly placing his head at Baba’s feet. Apparently, the visitor had heard Baba speak in a voice that bore an uncanny resemblance to his dead father’s.

  An important belief that endures to this day is that no devotee can visit Shirdi or leave it without Baba’s permission. Sai lore offers innumerable tales of those who disregarded his words of caution and tried to leave, only to find either their trains cancelled or their carriages meeting with accidents. On the other hand, those meant to visit Shirdi couldn’t be kept away on any account. Devotees often found friends urging them to make the trip or even mysterious passengers paying for their train tickets. Even if a true devotee is thousands of miles away, Sai Baba is said to have remarked, I will draw him irresistibly to Shirdi like a sparrow with a thread tied to its feet.

  It is 2004. I am on my tenth (or perhaps my eleventh) visit to Shirdi, and I find myself thinking about those sparrows. I am waiting to enter the Samadhi Mandir. And I am in a queue—or what would be a queue if it weren’t constituted by a cheerfully lawless gaggle of women from Surat, headed by a pugnacious matron with an enormous nose ring. Theirs is an old guerrilla strategy—to surge ahead in a whirl of saris, bangles, screaming babes and breathless chatter, using sheer decibel volume and a trail of mangled feet to silence all protest.

  This is the cue for that old barrage of cosmic questions to begin. Why am I here? Nothing seems to have changed: the queues are still anarchic, the temple aesthetic kitschy, the rituals in the Samadhi shrine unapologetically Hindu (giving little indication of Sai Baba’s own amorphous religious identity).

  A conversation with a couple of friends from Bombay starts up in my head. The look they give me is incredulous. The first proceeds to remind me of my critique of organized religion—its oppressive hierarchies, its gender politics, its alienating grammar, the fuss, bother and tedium, the coconuts and burning eyes, the vulgar display of holy bureaucracy.

  I agree.

  The other reminds me of my personal preference for Buddhism, my mistrust of gurus, my need for egalitarian relationships.

  I agree.

  They point out how there is little evidence of syncretism in the flagrantly Hindu makeover of Sai Baba—from his saffron robes to the aarti-and-bhajan now associated with his worship.

  I agree.

  Then why, for god’s sake, they ask. And I know exactly what they mean. What I don’t know is how to begin explaining the other part. The sparrow part. The way in which this bondage to a strange old man with a white beard and dirty robe seems to be linked to my freedom. Perhaps it is an old kindergarten impulse to hold on to an omniscient adult finger. But I admit that I do on occasion see the deep sense of a straightforward theism. And I do see the need—sometimes wavering—to believe that truth is not just a certain inner climate or a place in the heart, but also (or at least until I am truly ready for an alternative) a person. Preferably a historic person. An ishta devta with the endearing baggage of humanness.

  And how do I explain what it means to feel connected to someone who doesn’t seem to give a damn about my levels of readiness or attainment? Someone who seems to care about the commonplace and the trivial—the disappearance of a pet cat, the fear of the dark or a turbulent airline flight, a petty jealousy, a small display of temper, a minor social embarrassment, a personal terror of extinction? Somehow it feels right that the quest for freedom should entail, at least as an interim phase, being tied by a thread to someone who seems comfortingly distant and yet recent enough to be a sepia-toned memory. Someone fearless and kind. Someone who shared his meal with stray dogs, lived in a mosque and gave it the disarming name of Dwarkamayi.

  Someone capable of looking wry.

  The queue turns the corner. I catch sight of a familiar silhouette at the far end of the hall. And there is an old-fashioned lurch of heart.

  Familiar.

  That word comes the closest. I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the way, Sai Baba of Shirdi started looking like family.

  And I know it will be the journey of a lifetime to accept that the woman with the nose ring feels exactly the same way about him. Which makes her, of course, infuriatingly, disturbingly, but unavoidably, a relative too.

  (February 2004)

  Postscript (May 2011): This essay was written before a redefining moment in my life—my discovery of a living guide, which substantially altered the way I look at the notion of a guru. Interestingly, however, gurus—unlike the gods of old—aren’t a jealous species. There has been no conflict of allegiance and my aspiring sparrow status remains, I believe, unchanged.

  51.

  The New Mystics

  Aubrey Menen

  She is Dutch. She has the broad features of that race, and the subdued manner. She was born and bred in Holland and, till the revolution in her life, had never been outside its borders, nor had she any wish to go. She married a Colonial, and it was a mild union, in the Dutch manner. He had no interests outside his profession, which was that of a chemical engineer, while she had no interests outside her house and family. She was not religious, she did not read books, she had no hobbies or cultural interests. She had a kind heart, and broad shoulders for the children to cry on. They had three, all girls. It would have needed the brush of Vermeer to find anything romantic in her.

  She had two sisters, who turned to her in their troubles, and they both had plenty. One had made a marriage which ended unhappily. The other was widowed and left with no money. Both came to live with her, with their respective offspring. Her father-in-law had a cancerous condition, and he came to live with her, too. In all there were, at one time, eleven people living under her roof. She did not resent this, but plainly she had no time which she could call her own. If at times she felt a weariness of her fate, she put that down to a chronic anaemia from which she suffered.

  When she was in her forties, one of her relatives brought an Indian swami to the house. He liked the place and added himself to the family. Lily (for that was her name) cooked for him along with the others but without the same easy affection. He was, in the first place, fussy about his food; she had to clear up after the audiences he gave to the curious; and in the third place, he had the brazenness to ask her if she could type. She said she could, so, with his blessings, he gave her a pile of secretarial work. With all this, it is not surprising that she took a poor view of Indian mysticism.

  But she thought about it. The swami’s discourses were above her head, and he knew it. He made no attempt to draw her into his following, except as an unpaid cook-housekeeper-typist. Yet something of that wind of freedom that is found in the Upanishads became to play upon her mind. She meditated.

  Then one day she announced to an astounded household that she had decided what she was going to do. She was going to become a sannyasi, one, that is, who renounces the usual things of the world and goes out in search of the truth. Vivekananda was a sannyasi when he went on his first tour of India.

  If the swami-in-residence thought that he had made a useful disciple, he was soon disillusioned. Lily said she had no intention of staying in the house. She was going to India.

  It would be fine and dramatic if I could say that she forthwith donned the saffron robe and walked out of the house. But Mrs Lily Eversdijk-Smulders was a real woman. She faced a storming family row. She was told she mustn’t do it, she couldn’t do it, and what would they do without her? She meditated anew and came up smilingly with an answer. They must do the best they could. Father-in-law was now dragged into the fray. He was a very sick man. She had nursed him for a long time. How could she leave him in his extremity? This gave her pause. Her practical chemical engineering husband came in with a clincher. To go to India she would need at least a thousand dollars. Where was the money coming from?

  She stayed. She did her duty as a wife, mother, sister and daughter-in-law, and typist. She had always done it. But now (she admits) sh
e did it with a neutral detachment. She was, in a word, following the advice of the sages of the Upanishads and the Gita, though she knew little about the texts of either. Meditation—amateur meditation, if you will—had led her to this point.

  The father-in-law duly died of his cancer. Lily had obeyed what is perhaps the supreme, the ineluctable imperative—to comfort the dying. Freed from this bond, she felt freed from all the lesser ones. She repeated her decision to go, and friends, awed by her constancy, raised the money in dribs and drabs.

  The swami-in-residence, stoically facing the loss of a cook-secretary, bestirred himself. Lily did not know India: the swami did. He was certain that Lily would not be able to look after herself there. He advised her to take her teenaged daughter with her as a companion. She agreed. She bought the air-tickets. She went to the airport. The whole household was there to see her off. What happened there must be described in her own words.

  ‘They were weeping. I felt sad that they were weeping, but I did not weep myself. I only knew I was going. I did not know what I was going to, but it did not matter. I loved them all as much as I had ever done, but that did not matter either. I really knew nothing about the world outside Holland and my home, so I was not afraid of anything. It was all just a bit comic. I was so ignorant that I thought that the air-conditioning in the plane was just ordinary air. When I stepped out of the cabin into the heat of Delhi airport, I was shocked. I thought I was walking into an oven. No, I didn’t think, “This is India, at last!” I had no emotions about India at all. The swami had written to some people to meet me. There they were, and very soon I knew they thought the way I did, though nobody said anything very much. So I stayed in India. That was six years ago, and here I still am.’

  The husband who had been thus so strangely deserted, behaved in the pragmatic manner to be expected of a chemical engineer. He did not reprove her or ask her to come back. After a due interval he sent her papers for divorce, which she duly signed. They were divorced. He married again.