Objects, Value, Satia Sai Baba

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Articles of Faith: Material Piety,

Devotional Aesthetics and the
Construction of a Moral Economy in the
Transnational Sathya Sai Movement
Tulasi Srinivas
Published online: 19 Jul 2012.
To cite this article: Tulasi Srinivas (2012) Articles of Faith: Material Piety, Devotional Aesthetics
and the Construction of a Moral Economy in the Transnational Sathya Sai Movement, Visual
Anthropology: Published in cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology, 25:4, 270-302,
DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2012.687959
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DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2012.687959
Articles of Faith: Material Piety, Devotional

Aesthetics and the Construction of a Moral
Economy in the Transnational Sathya Sai
Movement
Tulasi Srinivas
Downloaded by [New York University] at 15:33 15 January 2014
Despite a broad and growing devotee base for the transnational Sathya Sai
Movement, little research exists on Sai sacred objects: their meanings, their patterns
of circulation and their production and exchange in the world of Sai devotion. This
article offers a meditation on these Sai sacred artifacts, their visuality, their modes of
acquisition by devotees and their multiple biographies in various realms. I analyze
the hermeneutics of quiddity to demonstrate how ideas of transcendence and trans-
formation are embedded within and shaped around the Sai objects, thereby creating
a language and disciplined practice of material piety that shapes the ontology of
Sai devotion. I examine how the sacred objects act, and are acted upon, to shape a
‘‘politics of visual materiality’’ in three ways: (1) as iconic magical devices to legit-
imate Sai Baba’s long-distance charismatic authority for the transnational devotee
base, through innovative ‘‘strategies of affiliation,’’ (2) as desirable objects that devo-
tees cherish for their beauty and scopophilic value, creating a normative ‘‘devotional
aesthetic,’’ and (3) as symbols of devotional status signifying ‘‘value’’ based on their
mode of acquisition, engaging a ‘‘narrative of affect.’’ These maneuvers and devices
invest the objects with a ‘‘strategic ambiguity’’ aiding in the construction of a global
moral economy. The article is part of a larger project on the expansion of constructed
religious experience in emergent transnational religious movements.
I give you what you want so that you may want what I want to give you.
— Sathya Sai Baba
Now these pictures of Bhagawan are available in America. Even in London also and
Dubai. That is what everyone tells. Maybe even in your town in America you get them . . ..
Then here we will all be no business.
— Khader, a trader in Sai objects in Puttaparthi
TULASI SRINIVAS is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emerson College, Boston.

She is the author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Religious Pluralism and Globalization through
the Sathya Sai Movement [New York: Columbia University Press 2010] and is currently working
on a monograph titled Forging Faith: Ambivalent Globalization and Innovative Religion in
Hindu Temple Publics of Bangalore City [forthcoming 2013]. E-mail: Tulasi_Srinivas
@emerson.edu
270
Articles of Faith 271
TOWARD A POLITICS OF VISUAL MATERIALITY: GLOBALIZATION,

CONSUMPTION AND RELIGIOUS ARTIFACTS
When I arrived in Puttaparthi in 2001—a small town in rural South India known
as the home of the Sathya Sai ashram (hermitage)—I was tracing the well-worn
path that many Sai devotees had taken. I found to my surprise that I had arrived
in a consumer paradise; countless shop fronts on Chitravathi Road, the main
street, overflowed with all manner of sacred objects for sale, all of them bearing
the image and imprint of the charismatic guru and godman Shri (honorific) Sathya
Sai Baba.1 Photographs of Sai Baba in various poses and at various stages of his life
[Figure 1], holographic images and photographs of other holy men and women,
saints and religious leaders overlaid with Sai images, auditory goods in the form
of cassettes of bhajans (hymns) and recordings of Sai discourses over the years,
jewelry bearing Sai images, containers of sacred vibhuti (healing ash), lamps
and magnets with pictures of Sai Baba, plastic statuettes of him, kumkum (ver-
milion) boxes with the emblem of the Movement, packets of Sai incense, Sai amu-
lets, snow globes showing Sathya Sai Baba’s figure within, calendars with
photographs of Sathya Sai Baba, and innumerable other paraphernalia2 of Sai
Figure 1 Shri Sathya Sai Baba as a young man. (Archival photo, from the author’s collection)
272 T. Srinivas
devotion that I could not distinguish amongst at the time, littered the stalls. But
later, in talking to devotees, I realized that these objects for sale were in lieu of
the ‘‘real’’ thing; a materialized, magical sacred gift from the charismatic Sathya
Sai Baba himself. Devotees spoke with emotion about being gifted a ‘‘special’’ ring
which bore Sathya Sai Baba’s likeness, or a healing gemstone pendant that was
their ‘‘favorite,’’ or a watch with his face on the dial that they ‘‘treasured’’ during
devotional interactions with him.
This bonanza of Sai artifacts that devotees referred to—both as gifts from the
godman and as commodities to be purchased—suggests that we need to attend
to the consumption of mass-mediated sacred objects in an era of ‘‘millennial capit-
alism’’ [Comaroff and Comaroff 2000] and recognize the signifying politics of
these forms; a central concern in postmodernity. So here I offer a meditation on
Sai sacred quiddity that revisits a larger question that has bothered social theorists
since the time of Marx: how are relations among people shaped by relations
between people and things? And the corollary question: what of the meanings
and the emotional value attributed to these things? Anthropologists of material
culture [Appadurai 1988; Baudrillard 1975; Bourdieu 1977; Douglas 1996] all agree
that objects are meaningful not only in individual relations between people and
things but also in a frame of collective consumption; and so in the following pages
I examine critically the circulation, consumption, visuality and meaning of materi-
ality in and for the transnational Sathya Sai devotional movement, while attempt-
ing to address two interrelated questions, one pragmatic and the other affective:
the various meanings of the sacred objects and the emergent pathways of their
consumption occurring due to the globalization of the Sai Movement; and the
devotee’s anxiety over the method of transaction and concordant ‘‘value’’ of the
object, and the emotions that this engenders. So this article is about an emergent
politics of visual materiality3 and the complex embedded and often overlooked
connections between seeing, feeling and the ‘‘powerful discourses of collective
agency, community and authority’’ [Hirschkind 2006: 6].
The social significance of commodity exchange as a value assigned to an object
rather than an inherent value of the object has led to the concept that commodi-
ties are imbued with differential and constructed meaning [Baudrillard 1988,
1994; Bourdieu 1984]. Two differing bodies of literature—political economy
and symbolic anthropology—are both concerned with things and their meanings
[Godelier 1999; Gregory 1995, 1997; Munn 1986; Starrett 1995; Taussig 1980] and
derive their interpretive accounts from earlier works by Mauss [1954] and Marx
[1977]. Marx argued that people were in fact ‘‘alienated’’ from things [Spyer
1998] due to the dynamics of the capitalist marketplace. So for Marx objects often
act as equivalents to people because they merely substitute for self and other
[Marx 1977: 117], leading to inequality, loss of identity and alienation [ibid.:
116–119; Stallybrass 1998]. But Mauss argued that the ‘‘spirit’’ of the thing that
lies within it (hau, ‘‘the spirit of the gift’’ in Maori), and it was this spirit that
‘‘called for reciprocity leading to social relationships between individuals within
a community’’ [Godelier 1999]. Gregory Starrett [2002] developed Mauss’s theory
to suggest that consumers imagine themselves into objects, making them ‘‘pos-
sessions’’ [Carrier 1990], some of which are ‘‘inalienable possessions’’ [Weiner
1992] because the owners’ spirit (mana) is believed to reside and remain within
the objects. Further, Gregory [1997] suggested that sacred objects in particular are
and must be kept by owners due to their sacredness, and are categorized as
‘‘inalienable keepsakes’’; this ‘‘keeping’’ distinguishes the process of possessing,
whether through gift or monetary transaction [Weiner 1992]. Thus for sacred
objects which are also inalienable possessions like the Sai artifacts, the method
of transaction and acquisition is significant in determining value [Myers 2001],
as the process of possession of the object is descriptive not only of the exchange
but of the social relations of donor and recipient, of divinity and devotee tracing
and retracing worlds of mythos and logos in their transactions.
As I trace the various ‘‘contours of meaning and desire’’ [Starrett 1995; Straight
2002] between Sai Baba himself, his devotees, officials, traders and skeptics, I sug-
gest that the Sai devotee enjoys the pleasure of agency in finding the ‘‘correct’’
context for the objects, assigning meaning and value to them based on various
tropes including, but not limited to, the scopophilic value and aesthetic pleasur-
ability of an object, the magical theater of its creation, its appropriateness to the
context of its transaction, desire for it, proximity, and therefore its evidence of
status, the method of transaction, the perceived index of devotion, and many
other subtle and agentive factors.
Phenomenologically for the Sai devotees, Sai Baba and the miraculous objects or
artifacts he creates, materializes and gifts, are the point of focus in the world, both
visual and symbolic. Acquisition, display and worship of the Sai religious objects
is an essential part of Sai belief and bears within them what Charles Hirschkind
calls an ‘‘ethical practice,’’ which he describes as an ‘‘affective-volitional
response’’ involving the whole sensory body and the habitus linking the subjective
experience and the objective structures of reality which, as he notes, ‘‘impact and
alter’’ the conditions of the habitus [Hirschkind 2001: 625]. What is attained in the
complex transaction is related in a sometimes ambiguous, paradoxical or invisible
manner to the thing itself and its quiddity, thereby making it an object of meaning
and of value for the devotee; but it is nonetheless altering, both of the lives and life
worlds of devotees. The ‘‘transmutation of valency’’ [Baudrillard 1994] of the
objects from mere material to something transcendent for devotees is not only, I
argue, evidence of Sai Baba’s magical power, but also of the changing transects
of meaning and power that expose different narratives of desire that operate from
‘‘several focal points’’ [Owens 2000] within differing imaginations.
But while the original gifts are believed to confer closeness, friendship and a
recognition of ‘‘true’’ devotion, they are still only available to the few elite devo-
tees. The value of the original gifted magical materialized Sai object has led to a
global market in secondary Sai objects that locate their value in the secret possi-
bility of having been an inalienable gift by Sai Baba to a true devotee. All devotees
who buy Sai goods in shops hope that ‘‘their’’ picture or statue will drip amritham
(sacred nectar) or blow out clouds of vibhuti (sacred ash). For example, a typical
claim that one received a charismatic object from the hand of the godman contains
the implied assertion that not all devotees get such an object. The politics of ident-
ity that play out through the darshan with him reveal the specific assertion of
identity in contestation with others for that particular subject. Contestations over
the meaning and power of commodities that are representations of the godman
are enacted. Borrowing from Owens’ analytical framework, I use the term
274 T. Srinivas
contestation in a Bakhtian sense so that often assertions and interpretations are in

contestations even though authors do not directly challenge one another [Owens
2000, quoting Bakhtin 1981]. The various accounts I use are told from various
points of view situating each subject within a context. By situating the various
accounts of these subjects and persons, we can see that meanings are constantly
shifting within the framework both for subjects and objects. The only static, undis-
puted consensus within this matrix of variants is the power of Sai Baba himself—
an essential component of Sai devotion and ex-devotion.
When dealing with mundane objects in a global landscape anthropologists have
rightly concerned themselves with the role of the imaginaire in the diffusion of
goods, describing a world of ‘‘scapes’’ [Appadurai 1996] where cultural influ-
ences and power travel quickly and efficiently [Howes 1996]. In this world objects
have ‘‘social lives’’ in which a memory of their transactional history constructs
value. Sai religious objects are gifted, traded and exchanged through the transna-
tional world of Sai devotion [Figure 2; Graeber 1996]. While the biggest market-
place for these objects is the South Indian town of Puttaparthi, home of the Sai
ashram, they are also transported by rail, flight and mail to Sai bookstores and tem-
ples in urban India and towns and markets in 137 countries of the globe where
they are available, creating marketing and production networks of international
skill and complexity [Babb and Wadley 1995; Kim 2007]. But when such sacred
commodities cross cultural borders, as they do in rapidly globalizing sects, the
meanings located within and around the commodity become ever more complex.
Kopytoff’s work on African commodity exchange argues that reconnections and
Figure 2 Street in Puttaparthi, with Sai shop in foreground. (Photo courtesy of the author; color
figure available online)
reconfigurations of trade occur through global trade networks, and that these in
turn affect the imagination surrounding the commodity. Kopytoff argues for a
‘‘cultural biography of things’’ which traces ‘‘life narratives’’ of objects [Kopytoff
1988: 69–95], a particularly useful analytical paradigm for Sai religious objects,
descriptive not only of the relational contexts of exchange, the essences of the
‘‘giver and receiver,’’ but also of transactional spaces both ‘‘imagined and real’’
[Straight 2002].
And so, in a Foucauldian genealogical stance, I ask how the Sai religious arti-
facts [Geary 1988] can shed light on both the structural question of the underlying
networks of global trade (the circulation dynamic) and the interpretive one, that of
meaning-making acts surrounding these globally exchanged religious objects (the
semiotic dynamic) that, à la Peirce, is an iterative attempt to create or appropriate
an icon to make it into an index (make it portable) and then into a symbol (reva-
lorize it with new meanings). While this article is not the place to make a greater
argument about cultural globalization,4 suffice it to say that globalization and
millennial capitalist imperatives and narratives [Comaroff and Comaroff 2000]
provide the dynamic background against which this study sets itself.
Exploring critically the blurry hermeneutics of Sai religious objects, globaliza-
tion and affect, I focus upon both the aesthetics and the politics of knowledge
dimension—How do these objects carry meaning? Who decides what meanings
are appropriate?—and are there resistances to those meanings? Thus I examine
how the sacred objects act, and are acted upon, in three ways; first, as desirable
objects that devotees cherish for their beauty and scopophilic value,5 creating a
normative ‘‘devotional aesthetic’’; second, as iconic magical devices to legitimate
Sai Baba’s long-distance charismatic authority for the transnational devotee base,
through innovative ‘‘strategies of affiliation’’; and third, as symbols of devotional
status signifying ‘‘value’’ based on their mode of acquisition engaging a ‘‘narra-
tive of affect.’’ I argue that these maneuvers and devices invest the objects with
what I call a ‘‘strategic ambiguity’’ aiding not only in the construction of the
Sai devotional ontology but also in creating the apparatus of a global moral
economy.
The fieldwork for this article is based on a nine-year study of the global Sathya
Sai Movement, part of a larger project rethinking current theories of globalization
and religion. The participant observation for this ethnography began in mid-1998
in the Sai ashram in Whitefield, just outside Bangalore city. In 2000 I returned to
Boston and met Sai devotees, traders in Sai goods and officials of the international
SSSO (Sathya Sai Seva Organization) from Toronto, Hamburg, Cincinnati,
Moscow, Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore and Tustin, California, and interviewed them
both formally and casually. I also encountered several former devotees of Sai
Baba. I spent significant time observing the way devotees and ex-devotees
handled, transacted, talked about, and worshiped the Sai artifacts from 2000 to
2009, in short bursts of participant observation. Sathya Sai Baba himself left this
world on April 24, 2011, at the age of 85, and was interred at the very spot where
he always gave darshan.
Part of this project was to begin to understand how these Sai objects6 were
thought of in light of the diversity among the Sai devotees themselves [Jain
2007]. Their difference is animated not only by their being of different nationalities
276 T. Srinivas
and cultures, but also by coming from different religions; since Sai Baba insisted
on Sai devotees retaining the faith that they were born into, and adding Sai belief
onto their existing religion. Differential access to power and status within the
Sathya Sai Movement7 creates further divergences in accounts about the objects.
In discussing materiality with Sai devotees I learnt it is their belief that they are
part and parcel of what Sai Baba is—as well as part and parcel of his growth,
transnationalization and circulation—or, in other words, as central to the very
problem the article poses.
In the following pages I start with a brief discussion of the historical back-
ground of the Sathya Sai Movement, rapidly moving on to an exploration of the
various forms of the images and objects and the various sacred ‘‘affiliative’’
frames that the Sai objects engage, toward examining the central ‘‘aesthetics of
devotion’’ at play that leads to a strategic ambiguity. Subsequently I examine
the social history of the global trade in Sai goods both in Puttaparthi and in loca-
tions outside India, suggesting that the devotees and the Sai ashram authorities
enable the objects’ plasticity. Next, the devotees’ construction of an unarticulated
hierarchy of objects, based on the method of acquisition is discussed, where I sug-
gest that the objects construct and engage ‘‘narratives of affect’’; and I conclude
with the suggestion that these Sai objects and the networks of trade and meanings
they inhabit anticipate and perhaps give useful answers to some of the problems
of cultural globalization through the creation of an apparatus of a moral economy
[Kim 2009].
THE SATHYA SAI MOVEMENT, SAI ARTIFACTS AND GLOBAL DEVOTION
In the past two decades the Sai ashram in Puttaparthi has witnessed a remarkable
growth in Sathya Sai devotion. Estimates of the total number of Sai Baba devotees
around the world vary between 10 and a self-reported 70 million; in 2002 the news
magazine India Today estimated their strength at 20 million in 137 countries and
their net worth at approximately 6 billion U.S. dollars.8 Unlike other transnational,
charismatic, civil religious movements emerging from India, the Sai following is
not confined to the Indian diaspora [Babb 1983, 1986; Klass 1991] but extends into
the cosmopolitan and professional middle classes of many different countries and
cultures; what the sociologist Smriti Srinivas calls, in her illuminating discussion
of the Sathya Sai Movement, an ‘‘urban following’’ [2008] of what Weiss aptly
calls ‘‘a prophet of the jet-set more than he is a guru of peasants’’ [2005: 7]. The
many times I visited the Sai ashram I saw several thousand devotees present,
coming from places as far away as Chile, Germany, Taiwan, Australia, Hungary,
the Netherlands, and elsewhere [T. Srinivas 2010a: 301, 2010b: 191].9
Sathya Sai Baba (1926–2011), the charismatic leader of the Movement, is
believed to have declared his divinity at the age of thirteen: ‘‘I am Sai, I belong
to Apasthamba Suthra (aphorism for the Brahma Sutras), I am of the Bharadwaja
Gothra (lineal descent from the Hindu sage Bharadwaja]; I am Sai Baba; I have
come to ward off all your troubles; and to keep your houses clean and pure’’
[Kasturi 1962: 39]; thereby claiming affiliation with the revered Sufi fakir (or holy
man), Shirdi Sai Baba, who died in 1918,10 and creating an Indic, syncretic
religious tradition that is now classified as ‘‘neo-Hindu’’ [Kent 2004a, 2004b;

Palmer 2005: 97–100] or ‘‘new age.’’ Sai Baba is believed to be Bhagawan (God)
by his devotees, and is referred to by this name. He is also fondly called ‘‘Baba’’
or Swami (the lord). He was thought by some to be a charismatic guru (a teacher)
and by others to be a seer, a saint, a fakir (Muslim holy man) or, as many believe,
an avatar (incarnation) of God [S. Srinivas 2008: 50–60; T. Srinivas 2010b: 55–70].
The value of the Sai religious objects lies in the community of Sai devotees
accepting the belief that Sai Baba was a semi-divine being such as a saint, a guru
or god himself, that the representations of Sai Baba act as magical portals through
which he could project his power (siddhi) and his grace (anugraha) upon them, and
trusting that the representations themselves, though they may be of divinities that
devotees are familiar with, are in fact authentic representations of him as well. As
Babb notes, the items and substances materialized and gifted [Figure 3] are to be
conceived as media for their donors’ actual presence, and they form an existential
link between the donor and the devotee [1983: 120]. The presence of Sai Baba in
these magical objects appears to be the common denominator in all the objects.
What this suggests is that ‘‘the power carried and manifested by the substances
and objects he gives to others are [sic] not simply an impersonal force of some
kind, but arises in the context of interactions and relations’’ between Sathya Sai
Baba and the devotee [idem].
While the materialized objects are transformed through their contact with or
emergence from the sacred being of Sai Baba, and are symbolic of his relationship
with individual devotees, the objects themselves are believed to carry this magical
Figure 3 Shri Sathya Sai Baba at darshan with devotees. (Photo courtesy of Kekie Mistry; color
278 T. Srinivas
transformative power within them and be inherently transformative of space and

time. For example, Anil Kumar, a teacher in the Sathya Sai educational facilities,
suggests that many of the jewels materialized across time, coming from ancient
Hindu mythic figures such as King Rama and his wife Sita, the hero of the epic
Ramayana, who is also believed to be a historical figure; ‘‘Bhagavan crosses all time
barriers when He materialises certain things. I know Sir, one year He materialised
the ring worn by Lord Rama that was presented to Him by His father
Dasaratha.’’11 In other stories of materializations, the objects cross space. For
example, the oft-told story of Sai Baba procuring a watch in South Africa while
its owner sat in front of him in Puttaparthi is a tale that embraces two kinds of mir-
acle—teleportation and materialization—and the object created is believed by
devotees to be doubly endowed. Because of its association with Sai Baba the object
has the ability to transform the selves and habitus of devotees [Csordas 1994a, b]; some
are considered transformative in a biophysical sense, others are talismanic, pro-

tection devices that are transformative in a metaphysical sense. Devotees therefore
find all the visual representations of Sai Baba hypnotic in their visuality and
symbolically significant as transformative agents.
Prof. S. S. Sivakumar, a retired professor of economics at Madras University and
a Sai devotee, read an initial draft of my work and said critically, ‘‘I am having a
hard time reading this chapter because you call the products of Bhagawan’s leelas
[cosmogenetic magical play] ‘commodities’ or ‘objects.’ They are not ‘commodi-
ties’ or ‘objects’ to me, or to the hundreds of thousands of devotees. They are maya-
vada [material of divine illusion] . . . you know, Baudrillard understood them as
simulacra. To call them commodities, objects, and so on . . . is reductive’’ [inter-
view, January 20, 2006]. Prof. Sivakumar points to an important discernment that
we have noted, that for the devotee these objects have value above and beyond,
located in the meta-narrative of transcendence based on the potentiality of trans-
formation of subject and object, and as such are unique. Prof. Sivakumar rightly
refers to the sacred objects as simulacra because, by Baudrillard’s definition, the
simulacra represent no reality, rather they are self-referential. Baudrillard states:
‘‘Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the con-
cept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It
is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’’ [1994:
1]. This hyperreality is, for the devotees, the transcendent reality of Sathya Sai
Baba, which has no referent but itself. Thus the object is both referring to a tran-
scendent subject and the transcendent object in and of itself.
But as Baudrillard pertinently asks, ‘‘What becomes of the divinity when it
reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the
supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it
volatilized into simulacra where the visible machinery of icons is substituted
for the pure and intelligible idea of God?’’ [Baudrillard 1988: 166–184]. He points
to the fact that as the object gets deconstructed it engages new narratives of mean-
ing to give it context and value. So devotees, traders and the Sathya Sai organiza-
tion—the distributive network of globalization—become restorative agents as
they attempt to reconstruct the narrative of transcendence through their material
interactions and the ensuing interpretations of the objects. The Sai objects are
interpreted and reinterpreted, wrapped in layers of meaning to be made plastic,
polysemic and portable, enabling them to recreate some portion of the meta-
narrative of transcendence. The re-inscription and re-ordering of objects is based
on the emotion located in the transaction, whether in reality or in the imagination,
enhancing its strategic ambiguity: in short, how the practices and ideas about and
around these objects form the actions of things as well as their materiality.
SAI OCULARITY, PROXEMIC DESIRE AND THE AESTHETICS OF DEVOTION
Darshan of Sai Baba (viewing or witnessing God), where most devotees saw and
possibly interacted with Sai Baba, was the central goal of all devotees, though
ideally the ‘‘private darshan’’ where sacred and magical objects were gifted by
Sai Baba to devotees during personal interaction was the exemplary experience
for most devotees. Darshan (Sanskrit, ‘‘to see’’) [Eck 1981] is an act of viewing that
encourages and trains devotees in ocular and tactile appreciation [Plate 2002];
radically different from the modern and clinical gaze of the Foucauldian subject.
But as the film theorist Laura Mulvey argues, viewing leads to an appreciation of
visual pleasure located in the aesthetics of the object that is seen: ‘‘there are cir-
cumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse
formation, there is pleasure in being looked at’’ [1975: 6–7]. Sai devotees found
pleasure in looking at and seeing Sai Baba and they evaluated the darshan—
whether ordinary or private—on how close they got to the magical center as well
as on how ‘‘well’’ they could ‘‘see’’ Sai Baba. They described Sai Baba in aesthetic
and pleasurable terms; how he was graceful (kripa), his beauty (lakshya) and power
(shakthi), his compassion=mercy (karuna=daya) and his love (prema). Devotees com-
mented on his physicality—the ‘‘blackness’’ of his hair despite his advanced age,
his ‘‘slender’’ body, his ‘‘gliding’’ walk, his ‘‘beautiful’’ face, his ‘‘humor’’-filled
expression, his ‘‘mesmeric’’ eyes [T. Srinivas 2010b: 208–210]—and they would
lean forward, push others out of the way, crane their necks or squint their eyes
to see him clearly during darshan—all gestures of love and devotion [Herzfeld
2009] loaded with the politics of affect. As Alexandra Kent notes in her study of
darshan in the Sathya Sai Movement: ‘‘Seeing here is an act of seduction’’ (as it
is in European myths of ‘‘love at first sight’’) but the love is of a devotional bhakti
nature [Kent 2005: 46].
The ocular training led to anticipatory intelligence as devotees knew where to
look when the moment of his arrival was imminent. Devotees would signal to
one another with their eyes indicating the exact moment of Sai Baba’s entry to
the darshan to get the full ocular experience of his divine presence. Ocular training
predisposed devotees to ‘‘see’’ differently than others, and they observed Sai Baba
very carefully; the moving of his robes, his hair, the movement of his eyes toward
or away from them, and the curl of his smile were all taken note of, commented
upon and imbued with special meanings. The scopophilic desire [Mulvey 1975]
that the visuality of Sai Baba invoked is a direct outcome of this ocular training,
the need to ‘‘see’’ him in his entirety and repeatedly is the focus of this desire.
‘‘Good’’ darshan implied a physical closeness to Sai Baba, enhancing proximity
and the desire for closeness, and a good view of him. Long-time devotees became
ocular experts—Sai scopophiliacs—minutely observing him and the interactions
280 T. Srinivas
around him to draw conclusions about his health, his mood, and extrapolating
their chances of getting private darshan.
The ocular training of darshan enabled devotees to gaze upon Sai Baba and feel
intensely his presence emotionally [Haraldsson 1987]. Devotees talked about their
‘‘excitement’’ and ‘‘joy’’ on seeing him and being seen by him, a type of ‘‘aesthet-
ics of experience’’ reminiscent of Desjarlais’ usage of aesthetics as not merely
‘‘overt artistry of performance’’ but ‘‘everyday’’ aesthetics that ‘‘grasp (and tie
together) the tacit leitmotifs that shape cultural constructions of bodily and social
interactions’’ that ‘‘lend specific styles, configurations and felt qualities’’ to
devotional experiences [1992: 65]. And while these experiences may have different
feel to different actors they are, as Desjarlais notes, constructed and seen as ‘‘pre-
cultural, exquisitely natural, the Esperanto of lived experience’’ [ibid.: 37]. These
aesthetics and the feelings surrounding them form the grammar of the everyday
experience for the Sai devotee, where, to deliberately misquote Desjarlais, the gaze
serves as a vehicle for our reflections on devotional ontologies and linked politics
of knowledge and value.
Unpacking the Sai darshan gaze in a Lacanian sense where it refers to the
uncanny notion that the object of our glance is somehow looking back at us leads
us to further understandings of ocular perception. This uncanny feeling of being
gazed at by the object of our gaze affects us, underscoring our lack of control over
our gaze and being gazed at. So any feeling of scopophilic power is always
undone by the fact that the materiality of existence (the Real) always exceeds
and undercuts the meaning structures of the symbolic order. Sai devotees were
well aware that Sai Baba gazed back at them and any sign of his acknowledgement
of their presence either as a group or as individuals was greeted with high excite-
ment and ecstatic behaviors of weeping and fainting. Devotees sought his trans-
forming and to them healing gaze, falling at his feet in a typical South Asian,
Hindu act of supplication, holding out their hands imploringly, handing him let-
ters mutely that they believed he read, and attracting his gaze toward them in any
way possible [T. Srinivas 2010b: 160–161]. According to Lacan, due to the mutual
constitution of the subjectivity of gaze and gazer, and the mutual desire posited as
the one being gazed at, desiring the gaze works to fashion the self as what the
gazer desires, and in the form of the gazer; a reciprocal relationship. For Eck
[1985], the devotional gaze of darshan in Hinduism is transforming not only for
the gazer but of that which is gazed upon. Divine images and presumably divinity
itself ‘‘gives’’ of itself during darshan in a familiar reciprocal form of touching and
knowing, and in doing so is further animated. If we think more with Eck’s work
on darshan as gazing upon the divine—a mutually transformative act of visual and
sensory attention—the issue of the gaze gets even more complicated. Whether Sai
Baba himself was transformed by the repeated and growing gaze of his devotees
is unknown and unfathomable. But when I asked devotees about this, they echoed
Eck, replying almost in unison that Sai Baba was a poornavatar (ultimate avatar)
who was capable of being seen only when He willed it in whatever form He chose.
For devotees the form of Sai Baba veils his ‘‘true’’ divinity, allowing only the faith-
ful to glimpse the awesome power of his reality [T. Srinivas 2010b: 210].
So devotees are animated by the visual politics of darshan gazing to what I have
called elsewhere ‘‘proxemic desire’’—the need to be close to Sai Baba in order to
see him. Since devotees spend most of their time away from the Sai ashram they
construct their lives as being of spiritual exile away from the center, and therefore
geographic and ocular closeness to this center becomes a ‘‘longing’’ that they seek
to fulfill. The ‘‘proxemic desire’’ works both affectively and pragmatically: the
emotion of being close to Sai Baba made devotees weep and laugh uncontrollably
in ecstasy as they queued for long hours for the privilege of ‘‘being first in line’’
and spatially and visually close to him. The Sathya Sai official website and devo-
tees’ websites also traded on this ocular training and proxemic desire, affording
devotees photographs from daily darshan and pictures of Sai Baba to peruse at
leisure in order to ‘‘feel close’’ to him, when in reality they were thousands of
miles away.
It is useful here to distinguish between affect and emotion toward a greater clari-
fication of the feelings that surround these objects. Brian Massumi defines affect as
‘‘the myriad emotional movements within the body occurring beneath or outside
of consciousness, the vast sea of emotionally charged perceptual responses that tra-
verse the body without being assimilated as subjective content,’’ a ‘‘presubjective
interface of the body with the sensory world’’ where ‘‘a linkage is registered at
the level of the visceral,’’ whereas emotion is ‘‘culturally qualified affect’’ that is
‘‘codified’’ [Massumi 2002: 27–28]. But as William Mazzarella argues (drawing
on Deleuze’s thinking) with illuminating clarity, that affect is often blurry in itself,
hinting at interest in intimacy, a way of ‘‘apprehending social life that does not
start with a bounded, intentional subject while . . . foregrounding embodiment
and sensual life’’ [2006: 291]. He agrees with Hirschkind [2006: 82] that affect
and emotion are not synonymous but rather of two registers which he draws from
Massumi, one affective and the other symbolic, linking them in a strangling duality
with the program of rational modernity. He suggests that in modernity affect
becomes a ‘‘social pharmakon,’’ as ‘‘constitutive and corrosive of life’’ [Mazzarella
2006: 296] where public articulation, vocal and visual, becomes both a means to
mediation and to occlusion; that the only way out of the double bind is through
‘‘perversion’’ [2006: 304], where a recognition that the ‘‘creativity or difference of
the local’’ is in fact only ‘‘separable in discourse’’ and that distinctions between ’’
the evanescent forms’’ of affect and ‘‘the all encompassing form’’ of qualification
are only valid in thought, and that social life is far more indeterminate and fuzzily
vital. What is true for Hirschkind’s Islamic cassette sermon-listeners is also true of
Sai devotees, that the devotional seeing of Sai Baba and the discriminatory viewing
of the Sai objects invests the bodies of devotees with ‘‘affective intensity,’’ which
while fuzzily vital and embodied, sediments into a moral and ethical ontology.
The devotee’s emotional affiliation with the charismatic form of Sai Baba
through the darshan gaze was transferred onto a representational object as a
central part of the relationship between the transnational Sai devotee and Sai Baba
himself. Most of the objects Sai Baba materialized and gave to devotees have had
his likeness or image on them. At work here is the defined passage from gaze qua
point of symbolic identification (Sai Baba himself) to gaze qua object (sacred image
or object), a transformative passage not only of the gaze but of the gazer. The gift-
ing of the materialized objects to the faithful is the key element of transformative
interaction between deity and devotee, as it is believed to be the material form of
the much hoped-for transference of the divinity’s grace and power as a blessing to
282 T. Srinivas
the devotee. But the transference of the gift is also a transaction indicating trust
and reciprocity for it is believed to unearth the bhaktirasa (devotional emotion)
of the devotee, transforming him from mere devotee to one that ‘‘gives of the
heart,’’ where emotion and affect lead the devotee toward true and unrestrained
love of God. An object given by Sai Baba and=or with his image is critical in estab-
lishing, maintaining and reinforcing the emotional bond between devotee and
living God as a transformative relationship. Devotees then reciprocally become
ideal devotees trusting in Sai Baba’s vision and power. Thus the objects create
an embedded and affective relationship of trust and obligation.
But the objects in themselves are pleasurable to view as well, and devotees’ nar-
ratives about them demonstrate an inherent scopophilic desire; and an ability to
discern between objects of desire, ‘‘so lovely this one is . . . see, with gold paint,’’
‘‘I like this picture of Swami when he is young . . . so sweet and innocent He
looks,’’ ‘‘this photo of Bhagawan is the one I want . . . I can see His eyes clearly’’
and ‘‘this one is nice—life-size almost—I know it will look nice and it will be like
I am having Swami’s darshan everyday,’’ and so on. Aesthetics and notions of taste
are, according to Michael Herzfeld, ‘‘an opaque area of anthropological inquiry,’’
though recently more in focus than ever before; so to discuss sacred objects as
desirable and aesthetic is a timely and much needed exercise [2001: 278].
Devotees seem to visually ‘‘devour’’ images of Sai Baba with their eyes, feasting
on them with pleasure and discussing them as objects of desire. Devotees often
commented on the pleasure factor of viewing the images, commenting upon his
beauty, the mercy in his eyes, his full head of hair or his beautiful feet; conflating
the image with the reality of Sai Baba himself. In keeping with the Hindu tradition
of revering and worshipping the feet (pada darshan) of divinity, images of Sai
Baba’s feet being washed and surrounded with flowers are sold and distributed.
Thus the scopophilic desire can replicate and inform the trained modern gaze
[Mulvey 1975: 12], breaking down the body into parts and creating a dismember-
ing gaze12 that is linked to emergent Sai traditions and popular Hindu traditions
of devotional optics. Virtuosi in gazing ‘‘correctly’’ are valued within the com-
munity, and I found less-skilled devotees would seek their advice, both on where
to sit in the darshan hall so as to have the ‘‘best’’ view of Sai Baba, as well as where
and what to buy as a representational object from the Sai shops [Figure 4]. I over-
heard comments such as when a Sai virtuoso told an inexperienced gazer and
consumer, ‘‘You see they (the traders in objects) cheated you. In this pendant
see you cannot see his eyes at all. There is a scratch there. What use is that?’’
The notion of the symbolic order as being separated by the fragility of the
material world that Lacan posits is restructured when dealing with Sai sacred
objects. The images seem to approximate the proxemic and immediate ocular
desire of devotees at darshan. By viewing images and objects repeatedly, and often,
whether real or virtual (on the Internet), they ‘‘feel close’’ to Sai Baba. The viewing
and discerning between images—‘‘See, in this one his hair is blacker’’ or ‘‘I like the
one where he is smiling’’—creates a visual narrative for devotees that encourages
learned behaviors of ocularity and scopophilia. So Sai scopophilic desire is rep-
resentative of the idealized relationship of Swami–bhakta (divinity–devotee)—
of the devotional desire to be united with the sacredness—and this desire is
transposed upon the sacred objects. Capitalizing on this ocular training seems to
Figure 4 Interior of shop selling Sai ephemera, Puttaparthi. (Photo courtesy of the author; color
Figure 5 Detail of Sai ephemera. (Photo courtesy of the author; color figure available online)
284 T. Srinivas
be one of the logics=aesthetics by which people understand gifts and objects

[Figure 5]. Seeing and learning to see differently when it comes to these objects
are a key nuance of the ways the Sai objects both are seen and are done through
a cultivated manner akin to seeing the divine, but yet not outside the millennial
capitalist frameworks; another example of strategic ambiguity, this time between
neoliberal capitalist frameworks and religious ways of seeing.
In Oct. 2003 I visited the home of a devotee13 in Bethesda, Maryland, an upper-
class suburb of Washington. There in an upper middle-class home I saw one of
the largest private Sai meditation rooms I have seen. The room was the entire
basement of the four-bedroom home. In one corner was a wooden throne with
a red velvet seat and footstool on which was placed a photo of Sai Baba’s feet cov-
ered with jasmine blossoms. Behind it the entire wall (which ran for fifty feet)
was covered with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. In the center there hung a life-sized
photo of Sai Baba. The other wall held a series of locked glass cabinets housing
several hundred images, pictures, and sculptures of Sathya Sai Baba mixed in
with other images and pictures of other Hindu deities.
The representative sacred objects fall into two broad categories or frames;14 one
of an accessible, messianic, magus figure—a reincarnated godman=saint or guru
derived from various religious traditions within India and abroad; and another
of a cosmic avatar of God, a mythological divine or semi-divine figure, who
removes darkness in a terrible age of evil (kāli yūga) to bring back a golden age
of righteousness [S. Srinivas 2008: 45–79]. Both of these frames serve to ‘‘construct
a tradition’’ within the Movement and are based on events and declarations by Sai
Baba himself. The visual surfeit that I felt in apprehending the Bethesda basement
shrine was not unique to me alone. Several devotees commented on how it had
induced in them a ‘‘feeling of giddiness’’ or ‘‘delight’’ [T. Srinivas 2010b: 211],
since the assumption of devotion suggests that the greater the number of images
and visuals the greater the scopophilic potential and the delight from potential
interaction with divinity.
The earliest claim and apparently one of the most popular is the claim of
reincarnated Muslim sainthood. The hagiography records that when Sai Baba
announced his divinity in 1940 he claimed that he was the reincarnation of a
Muslim fakir and saint Shirdi Sai Baba (died 1918) from the town of Shirdi in
Maharashtra, a fakir and mystic who was often compared to the historic Muslim
poet and song-writer Kabir. Not only did Sathya Sai Baba claim affiliation with
Shirdi Sai Baba orally in his early discourses between 1950 and 1960, but there
was a whole range of symbols associated with Shirdi Sai Baba that he adopted
as his own: the vibhuti that Sathya Sai Baba produces is said to be the curative
oodhi that Shirdi Sai Baba produced from his ever-burning fire in the mosque,
Sathya Sai Baba’s robe is believed to be a variation on the kafni (shift) worn by
Shirdi Sai Baba, and so on. Religious objects that relate to the Shirdi theme show
Sathya Sai Baba dressed as a Muslim fakir in a kafni and headcloth, rather
than Sathya Sai Baba’s usual saffron15 robe seated in a posture that Shirdi Baba
often adopted. Metal medallions of Sathya Sai Baba often have Shirdi Sai Baba’s
image etched on the reverse side.
Sai Baba then proclaimed his link to Saint Bharadwaja in 1940 as he announced
his divinity as a rebirth in one of the lineages of one of the Seven Sages of ancient
India, believed to be the ancestors of all Hindus. He expanded this Hindu represen-
tation with a direct link with Krishna and Rama, the two most powerful and
pervasive incarnate representations of the Hindu god Vishnu. Sai Baba claimed
affiliation with Rama and Krishna in 1961 when he declared: ‘‘Rama was the first
embodiment of Sathya (truth) and Dharma (duty), Krishna of Santhi (peace) and
Prema (love). Now, when skill is outstripped by self control, when science laughs
at Sadhana (austerity); when hate and fear have darkened the heart of man, I have
come to embody all the four—Sathya, Dharma, Santhi and Prema’’ [Gokak 1983:
304]. By linking himself to the myths of Krishna and Rama, Sai Baba became, to
his devotees, the living embodiment of the cowherd god (Krishna) and the king
god (Rama), thus overcoming both caste and class boundaries. Further, he was
linked irrevocably both to the Great Tradition of Hinduism and to popular under-
standing of Hinduism. Pictures and posters show Sai Baba dressed as Gopala
Krishna, the Hindu cowherd deity with peacock feathers in his hair and a flute in
his hand, claiming affiliation with Krishna or as Krishna in his most significant form
as the author of the Bhagavad Gita—the locus classicus of Hinduism—on the battle-
field of the Hindu epic Mahabharata. Alternatively, though less popularly, images
show Sai Baba as Rama wearing a kiritam (crown) and seated on a golden throne.
But then, on July 6, 1963, Sathya Sai Baba stated:
I am Siva-Sakti, born in the Gothra of Bharadwaja according to a boon won by the sage
from Siva and Sakti. Sakti herself was born in the Gothra16 of the sage, as Sai Baba of
Shirdi; Siva and Sakti have incarnated as myself in this gothra now, Siva alone will incar-
nate as the third Sai in the same gothra in Mysore state. [Gokak 1983: 305]
Sai Baba thus claimed that he was the middle incarnation and that he therefore
combined the roles of both male and female. The Shiva–Shakti myths are asso-
ciated with a plethora of images that devotees engage with at various levels.
The most popular is an image where Sai Baba appears with a crescent moon
in his hair and seated on a tiger skin (all symbols of the Hindu god Shiva), an
image that first appeared in 1970 and is still current today; or alternatively an
androgynous image of Ardhanarishwaran (the god Shiva combined with the
female form of Shakti). Images from the early 1990s show Sathya Sai Baba cen-
trally in a frame with images of Prema Sai Baba and Shirdi Sai Baba on either
side, in a visual triumvirate echoing the Great Tradition of the Hindu male tri-
umvirate of Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, thus linking Sai Baba into the larger
mythological structure of the Great Tradition of Hinduism. Shirdi Sai Baba
and Prema Sai Baba became the continuation of the tradition of Sathya Sai Baba,
an ‘‘institutionalization of his charisma’’ [Weber 1968; Lindholm 1993]. Nearly
every devotee’s account includes some details of Prema Sai (the future incar-
nation of Sai Baba). In The Sai Trinity, by Dr. S. P. Ruhela [(1994)2001], the author
states that Sai Baba has been disclosing small amounts of information to close
devotees to the effect that Prema Sai Baba will be born about eight years after
Sai Baba ‘‘leaves this body.’’ Images of Prema Sai Baba materialized for devotees
are considered very valuable, for they represent a glimpse into the future of the
Movement. The images show a slight but beautiful and bejeweled young man
usually dressed in blue and yellow. They are set against expansive images of
286 T. Srinivas
the sea or sky denoting infinity and the ‘‘possibility of arrival from another
world’’ [Stephen, interview, November 18, 2005].
The most contested representation is that of Jesus. A devotee, John Hislop,
claimed that he was privy to a miracle (mahima) where Sai Baba was able to pro-
duce an image of Christ. In his book titled, My Baba and I, Hislop states:
As we passed a bush Baba broke off two twigs, placed them together and asked me ‘‘What
is this, Hislop?’’ ‘‘Well Swami, it is a cross,’’ I answered. Baba then closed his fingers over
the twigs and directed three somewhat slow breaths into his fist, between thumb and fore-
finger. Then he opened his hand to reveal a Christ figure crucified on a cross, and he gave it
to me. He said, ‘‘This shows Christ as he really was at the time he left his body, not as artists
have imagined him or historians have told about him. His stomach is pulled in and his ribs
are all showing. He has had no food for eight days.’’ I looked at the crucifix but found no
words. Then Baba continued, ‘‘The cross is wood from the actual cross on which Christ was
crucified.’’ [Hislop 1985: 19]
More recent claims have been made where Sai Baba either produced images
of the risen Christ, the shroud of Turin, images of Christ on the cross, or lastly
pictures of himself. Devotees cite the ‘‘yesu mahima’’ (Jesus miracle) as evidence
of Sai Baba’s ability to emerge as an avatar who crosses religions. Devotees have
argued about whether Sai Baba is stating that he is Christ or merely indicating
an affinity for Jesus; but Sai-Jesus images which are readily available enlarge on
this subliminal connection in the devotees’ minds and make them concrete. For
example, the most popular poster and image of Sai Baba among Italian Catholic
devotees is a holographic image where the image appears to be one of Sai Baba,
but when titled slightly the image is of Jesus Christ in a white and blue robe with
his hands outstretched in a gesture of welcome. I have also seen Sai posters
include a holographic image of Christ holding a dove, superimposed with the fig-
ure of Baba. In talking to Ravi, a seller of ephemera on Chitravathi Road, he said,
‘‘I always keep the Shiva and Vishnu posters for Indian bhaktas (devotees) and the
Jesus posters for the foreigners. They sell very well.’’
As we see, the sacred personhood of Sai Baba constructs itself through a
narrative of unity in multiplicity (amanesis) that collapses several ontological
and epistemological frames upon one another through clever etymological play
with linguistic, visual, morphological and syntactic forms familiar to the scholars
of theological discourses in the subcontinent (from medieval commentary on the
Vedic sacred texts to popular culture). This collapsing of many divine forms is a
mechanism that removes the problem of perfidy from devotees’ minds, allowing
them to see Theosophy, Christianity, the Sathya Sai Movement, and Islamic Suf-
ism as various ‘‘spiritualisms’’ that are interwoven within the sacred charismatic
form of Sai Baba. The extended affiliation mechanism enables the divinity of Sai
Baba to engage and engulf strategically what might be seen as ‘‘oppositional
figures’’ of divinity, and to incorporate them within his own divinity.17 This in
turn enables both a productive ambiguity (is he Christ or is he affiliated with
Christ?) that allows both for devotees of various faiths to be attracted to him
without feeling the tensions of disloyal choice, and enabling the argument that
in the end it is divinity (and presumably for the devotee Sai Baba’s divinity) that
is significant. The representation is both specific and ambiguous, leading to devo-

tees’ agency in picking the image that they connect with in various ways.
MATERIAL PIETY, NARRATIVES OF TRANSFORMATION AND AFFECT

Sai devotees claim that in the early days of the Sathya Sai Movement, between
1940 and 1955, the only way to possess a Sai object was if Sai Baba gifted it to
you. One of his earliest devotees and his devout chronicler, Kasturi, writes of
Sai Baba’s magical materializations of objects in November 1950: ‘‘He [Sai Baba]
dug His Fingers into the sands and, lo, there was a fine picture in His Hand, which
He showed to everyone present as the authentic portrait representing Sai Baba as
He really looked! He gave it to one of the devotees present for Puja (worship)’’
[Kasturi 1962: 27].

Visual and written evidence points to the fact that early sacred objects were in
fact fairly modest—a painting or a picture of Sai Baba, or a small silver figurine
dependent upon seasonality, festival, the favored god, aesthetic of the area, and
so on. For example, Kasturi states that in 1950 on Shivaratri18 day Sai Baba pro-
duced a series of Sivalingam19 from his mouth as gifts for devotees who had
gathered at Puttaparthi.
Following the work of noted anthropologists, the gifted object can be seen as a
basis for trade, where a hidden moral economy can be brought to light [Strathern
1997], based on tacit codes of obligation, honor and reciprocity [Mauss 1954].
According to Alexandra Kent, the divine gifts that Sai Baba gives devotees
develop a quasi-contractual relationship between them, where the gift retains
some measure of Sai Baba’s magic. As she notes, the gifts are mostly to be ‘‘worn
on the body,’’ or consumed, whereby Sai Baba’s ‘‘imperceptible presence becomes
physically contiguous with the recipient’’ [Kent 2004a: 48], a significant claim for a
serious devotee. As the Sathya Sai Movement grew, the gifts became more impor-
tant, as a tool of devotion and proselytization, and the literature focused on them.
They also seemed to become more particular to the habits and preferences of the
devotee and to become more inherently valuable in themselves. The divine gifts
that Sai Baba gave to devotees historically during darshan have been recorded in
the apologetic literature [Kent 2004a: 47], and they cover a wide range, each of
which they believe is coded to the recipient’s needs and all of which have sym-
bolic value to the devotee. N. Kasturi writes that ‘‘sandalwood images, silver
icons, silver sandals, ivory figures, idols in the sacred alloy of the five metals,
emblems of Siva in green or blue topaz, and sapphire have all been given. He
has also given gem sets and lockets of different varieties as the need and the mood
of the moment dictates’’ [1980: 150]. The devotee-author Murphet notes that gifts
are specific to the receiver:
Taking a green betel leaf he cut a small disc from it which he marked with a symbol.
Passing the leaf to me he asked me what the symbol was—I really had no idea. Without
enlightening me he took it back and placed it on the youth’s palm—and when he took his
fingers away in the boy’s palm lay another disc of about the same size but this one had an
enamel front that bore the picture of Vishnu—the boy’s favorite deity. [(1971)1973: 97]
288 T. Srinivas
As the story demonstrates, the object may be inherently valuable and have
symbolic value that is believed to denote the value of the devotee to Sai Baba
[Veblen (1899)1953: 35–38].
The presence of Sai Baba in these magical objects appears as the common
denominator in all the objects. What this suggests is that ‘‘the power carried
and manifested by the substances and objects he gives to others are not simply
an impersonal force of some kind, but arises in the context of interactions and rela-
tions,’’ between Sai Baba and the devotee [Babb 1983: 120]. The gifts create and
sustain a relationship between devotee and divinity of mutual obligation and
reciprocity: the devotee gives his=her sincere devotion and the divinity acknowl-
edges that devotion and makes all well. Sai Baba’s image is a sacred ‘‘trademark’’
conveying a branded image in the commercial world of sacred images [Coombe
1996: 203], but it is a brand that denotes to devotees and some ex-devotees the
powerful force and presence of Sai Baba within it.

But sacred gifts are in some senses unknowable by the devotee. As Babb
suggests, the devotee gets a gift that appeals to her, but she cannot really know
the parameters that shape the decision. But Sai Baba does know [Babb 1983:
122–123], and so though the gift is transferred the ‘‘real’’ meaning of the gift is
obscure to the devotee. The obscuration of the devotee’s gift implicates both
human ignorance and divine omniscience. Not knowing the true meaning of
the gifts, devotees are free to see them as objects that create and engage emotion,
which enables their own piety. So the gifts become lenses by which devotees are
made aware of their moral and noumenal selves (to use Kant’s term), which go
beyond the everyday, rational world. This awareness marks the point at which
the devotee becomes a person with faith and love (sraddha) toward Sai Baba; a
pious devotee.
This affective and transformative power of the gift is underlined by former
devotees’ inability to reject the objects of faith. In the BBC documentary, The
Secret Swami, a former disaffected devotee Alaya Rahm (who sued the Sathya
Sai organization for sexual abuse and named Sai Baba in the suit) is followed
by the filmmaker to a small shed near his house where he keeps the objects that
Sai Baba materialized for him. Interestingly, the producer of the documentary,
Tanya Dutta, did not ask him why he kept so many items of the faith in spite
of the betrayal that he so obviously felt. His example proves the affective power
of these objects even over those devotees who have rejected Sai Baba.
Because of the nature of the gift and the affect encased within, the possibility of
a hinterland of production of the magical objects created during a miracle cannot
be investigated without seeming to question the faith of devotees and the divinity
of Sai Baba. Devotees are sensitive about the materializations because the magical-
ity of their production has been the subject of so much debate among the secular
press and skeptics in India since the 1970s. When I asked about their production
(where the objects were made) devotees would look reproachful: ‘‘but Bhagawan
gave it to me,’’ suggesting that he had made it out of his energy. Yet there are other
views on the materializations that have influenced the discussion of their
production. In the past thirty years former devotees and Indian skeptics have
addressed the economy of production as a weak spot in the materialization thesis,
and they contend that Sai Baba is a fraud who merely palms off manufactured
goods along with Internet stories cited about the watches produced by Sai Baba
having serial production numbers on them.20 Disaffected devotees have often
used the fact that the gifts given by Sai Baba are manufactured, and sometimes
poorly, to argue that Sai Baba in fact had no special powers.21 So while former
devotees have suggested that objects in the marketplace in Puttaparthi are ‘‘the
same’’ as those produced by Sai Baba, and might have the same producer, to
the devotee they are markedly different because objects produced by Sai Baba22
are magical and created out of his divine energy. To indicate that there is a system
of production is to reveal oneself to be a skeptic about the divinity of Sai Baba.
Babb argues that the most important part of Sai Baba’s miraculous production
of these gifts is not what he materialized but what he did with it; ‘‘for almost
invariably he gives it to someone which suggests that what matters most is not
the thing itself but the way it connects him with others—in short its significance
as a vehicle for a relationship’’ [White 1972: 874]. Seen in this light, it is clear that
the passage of materialized objects and substances from Sai Baba to his followers
mobilized familiar patterns in Hindu devotional worship. The important take-
away is that the objects construct and engage a series of narratives of affect, of
desire, want, pleasure, devotion and reciprocity [Figure 6].
Figure 6 Smaller shop selling Sai ephemera, Puttaparthi. (Photo courtesy of the author; color
290 T. Srinivas
MATERIAL PIETY, TRADE AND INDICES OF DEVOTION
Occasionally the gifts were believed to appear magically (swayambhu) with no

explanation, and devotees assumed that the gift was a response to devotional
merit or karmic logic. These objects and artifacts appeared in devotees’ lives magi-
cally during times of trouble. In fact many when interviewed said that at the time
the photo or image came into their lives they did not know who the person in the
photograph was. The devotee Connie Shaw tells in her book [2002: 253] about
visiting a small shrine to Baba in Karnataka, where pictures of Sai Baba oozed
amritam all day long. Sai Baba referred to the materialized gifts or the magical nat-
ure of them as leela (divine play that is cosmogenetic), indicating its randomness;
but there is a widespread belief among Sai devotees that nothing he did was ran-
dom; therefore only pious and worthy devotees got materialized gifts. Until his
death devotees waited with bated breath to see who got a gift. The reception of
a materialized object raised one’s standing among the community of devotees

instantly as it was read as a sign of divine favor and a lexical index of one’s active
piety. Among my informants about one-tenth claimed that they had received div-
ine favors from Sai Baba, though the proportion increased to over half of devotees
among the officials and upper echelons of devotees. Consequently devotees felt
blessed and happy when they received a gift from Sai Baba but felt rejected and
often unworthy when they did not.
In my interviews over 70 percent of devotees had failed to have an intimate,
private interaction with Sai Baba or to obtain sacred gifts from him, which led
in part to the emergence of a global distributive network of Sai goods that locate
their value in the assumed possibility of having been an inalienable gift from Sai
Baba to a true devotee. Initially these secondary objects were not seen as magical,
and in fact even today most are not seen as such. In the mid-1960s when devotees
first started coming to the ashram, small traders began setting up shops near it
to sell images and pictures of Sai Baba, to take ‘‘back home.’’23 In the 1970s
Puttaparthi saw the start of commodification, as several shops [Figure 7] sprang
up devoted to creating and marketing these religious objects to devotees who
came there; but it was by no means organized. There were some small traders
who operated outside the Sai ashram largely ignored by the Sai organization. In
the 1980s the Sai devotional base grew still further. The concordant growth of
the nearby city of Bangalore into a worldwide info-tech hub and the growth of
the airport infrastructure led to a captive market being brought to the traders’
doorstep24 [T. Srinivas 2010a: 303–304]. Five-star hotels in urban centers in India
began stocking their bookshops discreetly with Sai paraphernalia, as did airport
bookshops [T. Srinivas 2010a: 304–306]. During the 1990s the opening up of the
Indian economy to the global market led to the free entry of every kind of currency
into the Indian market. Currency exchange centers breathed new life into the
shops of Chitravathi Road in Puttaparthi. According to Government of India
information for the year 2002, the Sathya Sai organization (SSSO) was the largest
religious foreign exchange earner25 in India, totaling some 75 million Indian
rupees.26 As many anthropologists have pointed out, global culture flows in many
directions at once [Appadurai 1996; Bestor 2001; Hannerz 1993, 2002; T. Srinivas
2010b], as politics, economics and international trade make for competition.
Figure 7 Detail of Sai ‘‘playing cards,’’ Puttaparthi. (Photo courtesy of the author; color figure
available online)
Figure 8 Cart selling Sai ephemera, Puttaparthi. (Photo courtesy of the author; color figure
available online)
292 T. Srinivas
By the late 1990s the Sathya Sai organization and the Sai ashram began to sound
warning notes about the shops. When I visited Puttaparthi in 1999 every volunteer
at the Sai ashram made it a point to tell me, ‘‘Don’t buy anything from outside the
ashram unless you cannot get it inside,’’ thus creating the potential for a future con-
flict in which traders of Chitravathi Road are pitted against the Sai Organization.
But while these petty traders rely on devotional traffic to Puttaparthi and on the
largesse of the ashram, the Sathya Sai organization runs a global network of Sai
shops that operate by mail order, onsite and Internet buying, for what they call
‘‘ashram certified’’ objects, which are more prized by devotees because not only
are they ‘‘branded’’ by the ashram but they are evidence of proximity: another
form of proxemic desire [Figure 8]. Called Sai bookstores or book centers, they
act as shops and distribution centers for Sai images, books, cassettes and other
devotional items in nearly all of the 137 centers. The largest in North America
is the Sathya Sai book center of America in Tustin, California,27 which seems to
function as a center for worship, a meditation center and a distribution center

for the sale of Sai objects.
HIERARCHIES OF DEVOTION AND THE VALUE OF OBJECTS

Sai devotees prize the religious objects enough to purchase them outside the
ashram gates, yet do not consume them uncritically. They give value to the artifacts
by attaching meanings to them that appear to be their own, and are informed by
their own values and world views28 [Appadurai 1988; Hannerz 1993], ‘‘reshaping
the commodities and giving them new meaning’’ [Munn 1986]. I draw this idea of
a meaning-making practice from Lakshmi Srinivas’s ethnographic work on film
audiences in India, which argues that Indian film audiences reconstruct the mean-
ing of the movie text creatively, through their ‘‘active viewing’’ [L. Srinivas 1998,
2002], practices that allow them to view the film as they want and make meaning
in their viewing. Sai devotees appear to do the same thing with Sai objects. They
discriminate amongst religious objects, dividing them into a hierarchy based on the
nature of their transaction into two large groups, sacra and ephemera. Sacra and
ephemera and the distinctions between them underline the ‘‘value’’ of proximity
for Sai subjects and objects.
Sacra are the ‘‘special’’ objects, often jewelry, imbued with magical curative
properties, gifted by Sai Baba himself to ‘‘close’’ devotees. Sacra are valuable
because of their authenticity and their symbolic representation of the bond
between Sai Baba and particular devotees. Ephemera, i.e., those commodities
available for sale in Puttaparthi, are less valuable because they are available for
purchase. All devotees desire the sacra for the closeness to Sai Baba that they sig-
nify, but most have to make do with buying ephemera.
The hierarchy and power of the sacra appear to be organized by geographic dis-
tance from the charismatic center of the Movement, until recently to Sai Baba him-
self. Objects that were given by him or touched by him are believed to have greater
power than those acquired from a distance, whether through middlemen or
bought at shops [T. Srinivas 2010a: 315–316]. Frazer’s concept of magic through
contagion [(1922)1995: 9] operates in a similar manner. In interviews, devotees
told endless stories about the trouble they had gone through to obtain sacra from
Sai Baba himself during face to face ‘‘private darshan.’’ They see the sacra as mul-
ti-stranded—having them in one’s possession demonstrates one’s closeness to
Baba and one’s total dedication to him—which gives the owner status and prestige
among devotees. But the sacra themselves are powerful in their inherent ability to
solve one’s problems, heal illnesses, give material wealth, protect the devotee and
his=her family, etc. Further, the provenance of the object is important. When inter-
viewed, devotees said that jewelry given to a devotee personally top the hierarchy
of images: they were ‘‘priceless.’’ Photographs of Baba accompanied by sacred
vibhuti materialized in front of the devotee during darshan are also highly prized.
But with increasing distance from Sai Baba, or where provenance cannot be
established, the objects are progressively less powerful and desirable [Hawkins
1999].
Ephemera bought in a shop in Puttaparthi but which are officially ‘‘blessed’’ by

Sai Baba top the list of non-sacra as ‘‘ashram-certified’’ objects. Some merchandise
even carries the ‘‘official’’ logo of the Sai Movement, which merchants in
Puttaparthi claim is the ‘‘registration’’ of official blessing by Baba himself. So
the ephemera bought there at roadside shops are quite desirable from most
international devotees’ viewpoints. Ephemera available outside Puttaparthi are
less valuable. Mr. Shankar, manager of Shankar’s bookstore in the Bangalore
airport, told me that he did a brisk business in guidebooks and maps to Prasanthi
Nilayam, but not in the Sai medallions, books, images and bracelets he stocked.29
Devotees see the possession of ephemera or sacra as part of their evolution as
devotees—the assumption is that a ‘‘true’’ devotee who believes with total faith
in Sai Baba would be gifted sacra. Their possession indicates not only Baba’s
favor but also ‘‘true’’ devotion and self-awareness. But paradoxically there is
an overturning of this rigid hierarchy of religious commodities when it comes
to ‘‘magical’’ ephemera that emerge voluntarily or have ‘‘special’’ powers. This
miracle was apparently a common phenomenon for devotees. Thus Susila from
Madras said:
I was moving house and I found this photograph of Sai Baba’s in a big frame in one of the
boxes when I unpacked them. Now I know that I did not pack the photo because I did not
believe in him. Anyway, I added it to the puja room pictures because my neighbor said I
should not throw it out, and I lit the lamp in front of it every morning. By the third month I
noticed that there was a trail of ants going to the picture. I kept wiping them off and killing
them. They were going to the face of Baba and taking something from the face in their
mouths. So I touched the spot and put my finger in my mouth. It was sweet! Later I real-
ized that Sai Baba had been giving me amritam.30
All devotees hope their ephemera will someday act as a portal to manifesta-
tions of Sai Baba’s divine power and concrete evidence of his grace upon them
[Figure 9]. This is why devotees buy ephemera.31 They discriminate amongst
the religious objects based on the method of acquisition, but the ready availability
of material objects for consumption allows for their desire to obtain the object to
create an economy of affect that both emphasizes status [Veblen (1899)1953:
35–37] and encourages hope.
294 T. Srinivas
Figure 9 Sai holographic card showing Sathya Sai Baba with Shiva-Shakti and Shirdi Sai Baba.
(Photo from the author’s collection; color figure available online)
CONCLUSION: TOWARD A MORAL ECONOMY

I have explored how these Sai sacred objects and their modes of acquisition by
devotees—their multiple biographies in various realms—demonstrate how ideas
of transcendence and transformation are embedded and shaped around them,
thereby creating a language of material piety and a politics of visual materiality:
this is what I have attempted to examine. As iconic magical devices to legitimate
Sai Baba’s long-distance charismatic authority for the transnational devotee base,
through innovative ‘‘strategies of affiliation,’’ I have suggested that divinity,
devotee and artifact are not so easily distinguishable, as lines between the sub-
jects and objects are often made blurry by devotional symbolism, affect and
the perceived value of the objects. The Sai objects are valuable as being magical
for their transformative powers of self and habitus in the world of the devotee
who is converting from being a spiritual seeker to pious devotee and thereby
creating a reciprocity between devotee and divinity [Figures 10 and 11].
Thus the Sai devotee has the pleasure of agency in finding the context, assigning
meaning and value, thereby creating an emergent ‘‘moral economy.’’ In sum, I
have argued that Sai objects are multivalent (based on value acquired in the trans-
action of gift or purchase), multifocal (based on the position of the speaker, devo-
tee, trader, etc.), and polytropic (by which they contain and create tropes of
meaning for devotees)—enabling a productive plasticity and discourse of stra-
tegic ambiguity around them. They occupy moral, magical, and mundane spheres
Figure 10 Devotee’s home shrine with photograph of Sathya Sai Baba. (Photo courtesy of Krishna
Chidambi; color figure available online)
Figure 11 Close-up of photograph. (Photo courtesy of Krishna Chidambi; color figure available
online)
296 T. Srinivas
simultaneously and give the devotee the pleasure of agency in finding the context,
assigning meaning and value to them, so creating an emergent ‘‘moral economy’’
based on engendered networks of trust, obligation and reciprocity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply indebted to Andy McDowell (Harvard University) for his generosity in reading and criticizing this
piece. His well thought-out comments made working on this article a rare joy. Many thanks also to my editor
Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press and the Sai devotees and others for their support. I would like to
thank Rukka Srinivas for her time and care in reading this article and her valuable suggestions.
NOTES
1. Here I refer to him as Sathya Sai Baba, referring both to his given name of Sathyanar-
ayana Raju and to the Sanskrit satya (‘‘truth’’). He is however usually called Sai Baba,
and I will refer to him by this name in the article. There is more detail on the Sathya Sai
Movement and problems with this naming and framing exercise in my larger work
[T. Srinivas 2010b].
2. http://sss.vn.ua/photos.htm (accessed June 20, 2005).
3. My thanks to Hanna Kim for her many illuminating thoughts, discussions and skillful
presentations on visual materiality in the BAPS Swaminarayan movement.
4. See T. Srinivas [2010b] for the larger argument about cultural globalization, cosmopo-
litanism and religious pluralism.
5. I am indebted to Jeremy R. Carrette (University of Kent, Canterbury) for bringing the
inherent scopophilic nature of guru images to my attention [personal communications,
August 30, 2010–September 10, 2010].
6. I will use the terms ‘‘objects’’ and ‘‘artifacts’’ to describe the variety of Sai religious
items that circulate through the devotional sphere—to alert the reader that the method
of creation of the items is disputable, based on the faith of the speaker. Thus both
objects and artifacts describe the many- stranded world of Sai items.
7. I use the term Sathya Sai Movement rather than Sai Movement to distinguish between
the Sathya Sai Movement and the Shirdi Sai Movement. Some scholars have conflated
the two Movements [Babb 1986; S. Srinivas 2008], citing the claim of Sathya Sai devo-
tees that Sathya Sai Baba is a reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba, a Muslim fakir from
Maharashtra who died in 1918. However, one should note that Shirdi Sai devotees
often reject this claim of conflation.
8. In 1993 Rigopoulos reported there were close to 10 million devotees. Today there
are 1,200 Sai Baba Centers for promoting the religion, in 137 different countries;
but another source says that there are over 6,500 Sai Baba Centers in various coun-
tries. During the 1970s the pace of the Movement grew, and Melton reports expan-
sion in North America, especially the United States. In addition, Sai Baba’s group
formed a S.A.I. Foundation in California, and they also publish a Sathya Sai
Newsletter there.
9. Estimates state that over a million people attended Sai Baba’s 70th birthday celebra-
tions in 1995. And some 2,500,000 people from 175 countries attended his 80th birth-
day celebrations in 2005.
On April 24, 2011, as I was copyediting this article Shri Sathya Sai Baba passed
away, at 7:40 am IST at the Sathya Sai Seva Institute for Higher Medical Sciences in
Puttaparthi, leaving devotees all over the world ‘‘bereft.’’ How the sacred objects will
be construed by devotees and others in the months and years to come is a fascinating
question.
10. Shirdi Sai Baba was originally from Shirdi, a town in Maharashtra, and at the time of
his death had a large following among the Indian middle classes.
11. See http://www.saibaba.ws/miracles/ramatime.htm. From an Interview with
Prof. Anil Kumar, Radio Sai E-Magazine, February 15, 2004, Radio Sai Website: http://
www.radiosai.org/Journals/Vol_02/04Feb15/05_Moments_Memories/memories.htm
(accessed January 2, 2011).
12. The question following Eck’s logic of darshan is whether Sai Baba’s feet get
transformed by the visual attention they receive. Images of his feet show them being
washed in a silver bowl and worshipped with flowers or anointed with fragrant oils.
13. Names of some devotees and former devotees have been changed at their request.
14. The sociologist Smriti Srinivas identifies two recurring motifs in the representation
of Sai Baba—that of the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba and the other of the avatara
[S. Srinivas 2008].
15. Saffron is the color of renunciation in Hinduism, and Sathya Sai Baba always wore a
saffron robe. Only on his birthday did he wear a white one.
16. Hindu mythological lineage descendant from the Seven Sages.
17. Reinhart Hummel has been director of the Evangelische Zentralstelle für
Weltanschauungsfragen in Stuttgart since 1981. He had previously served as a pastor
in Schleswig-Holstein, as principal of a theological college in Kotapad, India, and
researcher on guru movements and Eastern religions at Heidelberg University. Dr.
Hummel visited the Sai Baba center in Bombay in 1981.
18. Shivaratri (night of Shiva worship) is sacred to Shaivites all over India. It usually falls
on the 13th (or 14th) day of the dark half of Phalgun (February–March). Devotees
spend the day fasting and the night singing songs of praise for Shiva and his consort
Parvati. The Shiva lingam is in the form of a phallic stone symbolizing Shiva and the
creative force of the Universe.
19. Lingam (also Linga, Sanskrit, meaning ‘‘gender’’ in general, and also ‘‘phallus’’ in
particular) is used as a symbol for the worship of Shiva.
20. The apostolic literature, following a story told by Dr. Bhagavantham (Sathya Sai
Baba’s translator from the 1970s to the late 1980s), stated that Sai Baba gifted the proto-
type of a Seiko watch to the CEO of the Seiko company, a watch that the manufacturer
had kept in a safe in Japan before traveling to India. According to the literature, the
CEO became an ‘‘ardent’’ devotee. Since Dr. Bhagavantam was not forthcoming with
details Dr. Kovoor, a skeptic, made inquiries with Shoji Hattori, President of the Seiko
Watch Company in Tokyo, to verify the facts. According to Mr. Kavoor, Mr. Hattori
wrote back ’’. . . . I am in no way able to further your knowledge as regards the man
mentioned in your letter, Mr. Sai Baba. Neither I, nor any members of my staff have
ever made the acquaintance of this individual. I am sure that these reports are
completely unfounded.’’ This story about production was quoted by Sai devotees to
show the disrespect of the skeptics and their need to ‘‘bring down’’ Sathya Sai Baba;
and by former devotees to argue that Sai Baba was merely a traditional illusionist.
21. See http://home.no.net/anir/Sai/enigma/RingExposed.htm (accessed January 2, 2011).
22. Former devotees claim that the producers are silent out of fear of retribution by power-
ful officials of the Sathya Sai Movement. Even a former devotee who started a success-
ful import-export business for ‘‘spiritual statues’’ (JBL Enterprises) would not name
his producers.
23. Interview with Kalyani, June 20, 2000; interview with Shanti, January 3 & 15, 2001.
24. In the late 1980s Bangalore became the center for electronic technology in India, attract-
ing the new software companies and their employees. Today it is a center for all those
298 T. Srinivas
interested in engineering, software technology, chip building, information technology

and related fields, who poured into the city, and the population of Bangalore has grown
from 3,400,000 in 1985 to 8,474,000 in 2011 [Census of India 2011; Heitzman 2004].
25. Rediff.com news agency reported, August 16, 2003: ‘‘The largest recipient of foreign con-
tribution was Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, Rs 88.18 crore (Rs 881.8 million),’’ http://
www.rediff.com/money/2003/aug/16donations.htm (accessed January 2, 2011).
26. It is very difficult to estimate the direct financial assets of the Sai organization, since the
SSS Trust is not required to reveal publicly their internal accounting or net worth.
Conservative calculations put the current total figure much higher than two billion
and closer to US $6 billion. The news magazine India Today also estimated the net worth
of the Sai organization to be US $6 billion in 2004. However, the recent obituary of Sathya
Sai Baba [Daily Telegraph, April 2011] suggested a net worth of the SSS Trust to be about
US $8.9 billion. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/
8471134/Sathya-Sai-Babas-death-triggers-fight-for-his-5.5-billion-empire.html (accessed
June 12, 2011).
27. http://www.sathyasaibooksusa.org (accessed November 28, 2010).

28. http://www.saibabalinks.org/articles.htm (accessed June 12, 2011).
29. http://groups.msn.com/SriSathyaSaiBabaVirtualCommunity/general.msnw (accessed
June 12, 2011).
30. Interview, January 15, 1999.
31. Murphet states: ‘‘on the subtle plane of being, interpenetrating our physical plane of
existence there may be classes of entities for whom our physical space would actually
be non existent: our ‘here’ and ‘there’ would be all one to them. The ancient wisdom tea-
ches that there are such beings. It also teaches that the physical object can be disinte-
grated into a subtler substance or ‘energy system,’ which can be moved by some
agency at near light speed, and reintegrated to form the original object’’ [(1971)1973: 84].
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FILMOGRAPHY
The Secret Swami. Reporter, Tanya Datta; Producer=director: Eamon Hardy; Editor: Karen O’Connor.
Hour-long news program broadcast in the UK on 17 June, 2004, at 2100 BST on BBC Two.

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This article was downloaded by: [New York University]

On: 15 January 2014, At: 15:33

Visual Anthropology: Published in

Articles of Faith: Material Piety,

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2012.687959

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Articles of Faith: Material Piety, Devotional

TULASI SRINIVAS is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emerson College, Boston.

TOWARD A POLITICS OF VISUAL MATERIALITY: GLOBALIZATION,

contestation in a Bakhtian sense so that often assertions and interpretations are in

THE SATHYA SAI MOVEMENT, SAI ARTIFACTS AND GLOBAL DEVOTION

religious tradition that is now classified as ‘‘neo-Hindu’’ [Kent 2004a, 2004b;

transformative power within them and be inherently transformative of space and

are considered transformative in a biophysical sense, others are talismanic, pro-

SAI OCULARITY, PROXEMIC DESIRE AND THE AESTHETICS OF DEVOTION

be one of the logics=aesthetics by which people understand gifts and objects

crucified.’’ [Hislop 1985: 19]

is significant. The representation is both specific and ambiguous, leading to devo-

MATERIAL PIETY, NARRATIVES OF TRANSFORMATION AND AFFECT

[Kasturi 1962: 27].

powerful force and presence of Sai Baba within it.

MATERIAL PIETY, TRADE AND INDICES OF DEVOTION

Occasionally the gifts were believed to appear magically (swayambhu) with no

a materialized object raised one’s standing among the community of devotees

function as a center for worship, a meditation center and a distribution center

HIERARCHIES OF DEVOTION AND THE VALUE OF OBJECTS

Ephemera bought in a shop in Puttaparthi but which are officially ‘‘blessed’’ by

CONCLUSION: TOWARD A MORAL ECONOMY

interested in engineering, software technology, chip building, information technology

27. http://www.sathyasaibooksusa.org (accessed November 28, 2010).

University of Pennsylvania Press.

Myers, Fred R. (ed.)

Spyer, Patricia (ed.)

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