Satya Sai Movement

The Satya Sai movement (also Sathya Sai movement) is a transnational, charismatic religious movement with its roots in a Hindu-Muslim syncretic faith of the Indian subcontinent. It was about 70 years old at the time of the death of its charismatic leader—Sri (honorific) Satya Sai Baba (1926–2011), called Bhagawan (“God”), Swami (“Lord”), or Baba (“Father”). He had a distinctive halo of hair and wore a long saffron robe; he was known to magically materialize healing vibhuti (“sacred ash”) and sacred gifts during a twice-daily darshan (“sacred audience”), where he received devotional petitions and seemingly effected cures.

Sai Baba's personal prefix Satya (“truth”) referred both to his given name of Satyanarayana and to the sacred truth he supposedly embodied, as when he stated (at age 14) that he was an incarnation of the Hindu god Shiva and his female consort Shakti. In the apostolic literature, his religious ancestry is ecumenical: a colonial Sufi Islamic mystical sect (Shirdi Sai Baba), Advaita Hindu philosophical discourses, and contemporary Hindu and Christian liturgical practices.

The news magazine India Today estimated Sai devotion at 20 million in 137 countries, with one half to one third of his followers being from India. The Sai movement earned approximately 881.8 million Indian rupees (approximately US million) in 2002 to 2003 and has a net worth of US$6 billion. Devotees come from the professional, technocratic middle classes. The spatial center of the movement is Prasanthi Nilayam (“Abode of Eternal Peace”) ashram in the village of Puttaparthi, South India, with subsidiary ashrams in Bangalore, Kodaikanal, and Mumbai.

The movement has a global institutional structure, active through various branches of the International Sai Organization (or ISO). The activities of the ISO are divided into three wings, all engaged in seva (“charitable work”): the educational, spiritual, and service wings, which distribute aid to the poor, establish educational institutions, and support medical facilities. The ISO also projects the Sai mission abroad, through a network of Sai Centers. The movement is globally mediated; audio/video sermons play on the radio (Sai Global Harmony) and on the Internet (Heart 2 Heart).

The rise of the movement has not been without critics. Accusations of corruption, pedophilia, and murder have been made by a group of disaffected “former devotees” self-titled “JuST”—Just Seekers for Truth—and have attracted global publicity, but Sai Baba himself has never been accused in an Indian court of law.