Shirdi Sai Baba was an Urdu speaker. He adapted to Marathi, but his basic linguistic and cultural affiliations reveal him as a Muslim, and more specifically as a Sufi of the liberal and unorthodox variety.
One of his early Muslim disciples kept a notebook in Urdu which has permitted a strong insight into the Sufi orientation of the Shirdi Sai Baba
The Muslim disciple Abdul Baba was a close servitor of the Shirdi Sai Baba for almost thirty years until the latter’s death. Thus, we know that the Sufism exposited by Shirdi Sai was in evidence from 1889 until his last years. Abdul would read the Quran in the presence of the Sai Baba, and at the latter’s behest. Sai Baba would make diverse utterances, and these were recorded in the notebook. Abdul’s Urdu manuscript was unpublished until very recently. The basic and underlying significances had passed into oblivion.
Dr. Marianne Warren observed that:
“the manuscript largely pertains to Muslim and Sufi material in Deccani Urdu; there are a number of quotations in Arabic included from the Quran and hadith [traditions of the Prophet]…. the fact that the manuscript’s Islamic nature does not fit in with the accepted Hindu interpretation and presentation of Sai Baba may explain why it has remained unpublished.”
The major devotional biography, written in Marathi, likewise confirms the Muslim background. Unfortunately for popular assimilation, this book by Govind R. Dabholkar (alias Hemadpant) gained a very misleading English adaptation that seems to have been more widely read than the original.
The Marathi biography, entitled Shri Sai Satcharita, was composed by an early brahman devotee who repeatedly acknowledged and indicated the Muslim faqir identity. Yet the English adaptation by N. V. Gunaji involved an attempt to omit the Muslim context, instead of improvising a Vedantic complexion to the subject. For instance, Gunaji ignored the frequent use of Urdu by Shirdi Sai, and omitted sections of Dabholkar that referred to Muslims, Muslim practices, and Sufi teachings. Gunaji deleted reference to the Islamic ritual of goat slaughter (takkya). However, Dabholkar duly reported that Sai Baba would occasionally undertake this ritual so abhorrent to Hindus.
The name (or rather title) of Sai Baba is evocative of Muslim origins. The word Sai appears to be derived from the Arabic sa’ih – a term used to designate itinerant ascetics in the Islamic world. The word Baba is sometimes given a Hindu context, but that is only partially correct. Baba is a common Marathi expression meaning “father,” though it was also employed in the medieval Indian Sufi tradition. Baba is a Turkish word that referred to diverse preachers and shaikhs, having an origin in the itinerant babas from Central Asia.
The Shirdi Sufi was later believed to possess an intimate knowledge of the Sanskrit language, which was the medium for Hindu scriptures. The attribution was based on his explanation of a verse in the Bhagavad-Gita, a classic text associated with Vedanta. That explanation was imparted to a Hindu devotee. Subsequent analysis has strongly contested the “Sanskrit” attribution, favored by B. V. Narasimhaswami, who was writing many years after Sai Baba’s death. “That interpretation was followed by other writers, and served to strengthen the tendency to portray Sai Baba in a Hinduized manner.”
Sai Baba’s explanation of the Gita verse has been described as “totally different” from the version of Shankara and other canonical Hindu commentators. According to recent scholarship, the dialogue does not in fact prove that Sai Baba knew the Gita or even Sanskrit, his emphasis being Sufistic. The very convincing version of Dr. Marianne Warren stresses that he gave a unique interpretation, and did not need to know the text at all, as the verse was read out to him along with a statement of grammatical meanings. This was done at his own request. “Sai Baba had all the raw material of the verse given to him, so there is no basis to the supposition that he in fact ‘knew’ Sanskrit or even the Bhagavad-Gita.”
During his lifetime, Sai Baba was generally regarded as a Muslim faqir, with Sufi associations not in general well understood. His white robe (kafni) and headgear were clearly Muslim. He used the Islamic name for God, and repeated Islamic sacred phrases, not Hindu mantras. He even had a habit of referring to God as the Faqir.
The influx of urban Hindus from Bombay in the last years of Sai Baba made the Hindus a clear majority in his following, and tendencies to Hinduization appeared in the later reports culled from devotees who were interviewed by Narasimhaswami in 1936. Nearly eighty devotees were then interviewed, though only 51 have a clear religious identity. No less than 43 of those were Hindu, and 26 of that contingent were members of the elite Brahman caste. Only four were Muslims, and there were also two Parsi Zoroastrians and two Christians.
A revealing factor emerges. Narasimhaswami asked all the devotees he interviewed a rather pointed question. Did they think that Sai Baba taught Vedanta? “In all cases, they said he did not.” It, therefore, seems the more anomalous that Narasimhaswami improvised his theme of the Sanskrit expert. In the 1940s, Gunaji was giving an erroneous impression via his Vedantic interpretations of Shirdi Sai Baba, which cannot be found in the original work by Dabholkar that Gunaji was rendering.
Narasimhaswami had never met Sai Baba and arrived at Shirdi nearly twenty years after his demise. He was not familiar with either Marathi or Urdu. Yet his books on the subject became very influential amongst Hindus. He rather reluctantly referred to Sai Baba as a Muslim, and one whose teachings were indistinguishable from Sufism. He nevertheless admitted to knowing little about Sufism, and himself clearly preferred the bhakti (devotion) approach of Hinduism. Narasimhaswami constantly tended to project that conceptualism onto Shirdi Sai Baba. He had initially been repelled by the Muslim identity, and it is evident that this writer would never have become enthusiastic about the subject without the latitude for Hindu associations in reports he edited.
Narasimhaswami could reason that Sai Baba was apparently a Muslim because he lived in a mosque, although the former was very partial to one report (of Mhalsapati) which claimed that he was a Brahman by birth. The Narasimhaswami version basically wishes to regard the subject as a Hindu, not as a Muslim.
The influential testimonies provided by Narasimhaswami were strongly in the direction of hagiology. That enthusiastic promoter of the “Shirdi revival” produced a work entitled Devotees’ Experiences of Sai Baba (1942). This has been described by a recent assessor as:
“a detailed presentation of alleged miraculous phenomena…. the intent of the work is clearly hagiographic, aiming at the expansion of Sai Baba’s popularity among the public at large.”
Discrepancies in reporting apply to many stories as the alleged wrestling match of Sai Baba in Shirdi with Mohidden Tamboli, evidently a Muslim. According to Gunaji, Sai Baba lost this contest, and thereafter changed his apparel to the kafni of faqirs. The dating is obscure. It has been pointed out that this report is in contradiction to Gunaji’s own statement that Sai Baba had been wearing faqir garb from the outset of his arrival at Shirdi. Furthermore, the Hindu informant Ramgiri Bua emphasized that Sai Baba did not wrestle, but instead had a disagreement with the son-in-law of Tamboli, as a consequence of which he retreated to the nearby jungle. This obscure episode has been tentatively dated to the 1880s.
The popular theme that Sai Baba was a miracle worker may be regarded as a devotional distraction culminating in the Shirdi revival of the 1930s. He did not perform “miracle” stunts and was merely in the habit of giving sacred ash (udi) from his dhuni fire as a token of blessing. The ash became credited with healing properties. Devotees like Dabholkar did strongly credit him with miracles, generally of the minor variety, a major preoccupation being the birth of a child.
Writers who followed in the wake of Gunaji and Narasimhaswami produced diversions. They were strongly influenced by the Hinduization tendency. A Parsi writer composed a chapter entitled “What the Master Taught.” There is not a single reference to Sufism, but instead many to Hindu bhakti, and also one or two that can be interpreted in terms of a simplified Vedanta. Furthermore, another chapter includes the statement:
“The saint of Shirdi baffled his admirers! No one knew whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim. He dressed like a Muslim and bore the caste marks of a Hindu !”
The equivocal theme of “Hindu or Muslim” had replaced the earlier awareness that the revered entity was a faqir, meaning an alien to Hinduism. The reference to caste marks is superficial, arising from hagiological tendencies.
What did Sai Baba actually teach? The original Hindu devotees like Dabholkar testify that he was constantly uttering Islamic sacred phrases such as “Allah malik” (God is the only ruler). Vedanta is not here evident, but rather a version of the Sufi theme tauhid (unity, oneness of God). There were also many parables and enigmatic statements, plus gnostic assertions in the radical Sufi idiom.
These subjects are not the easiest to penetrate, and certainly cannot be brought under any simplified heading such as bhakti or devotion. However, that is what too many writers have done with the mutated legacy of a radical Muslim Sufi.
Strong tendencies to Hinduize the subject influenced writers like Arthur Osborne into making Shirdi Sai Baba a subject of equivocal affiliation. According to Osborne, Sai Baba “did not fully conform to either” religion, meaning Islam and Hinduism. The primary reasons given for this rather deceptive view are that Sai Baba was a vegetarian and was worshipped in Hindu fashion. The vegetarian theory has since been exposed as a myth, one which inadvertently sides with the Gunaji excision of Dabholkar’s reference to the Islamic ritual involving goat slaughter. The fact of Hindu worship, in the unusual circumstances prevailing (in a rural mosque), in no way proves an offsetting Hindu identity.
It is relevant to focus here upon the first major account of Sai Baba, and one that has an elite reputation amongst Hindu devotees. I have referred above to Hemadpant, which was the name bestowed by Sai Baba upon his brahman devotee Govind Raghunath Dabholkar. The contact of Dabholkar with Ssi Baba commenced in 1910 and resulted in the devotional biography known as Sri Sai Satcharita. This was written in Marathi verse, and published in 1929. Dabholkar was here following a long Hindu tradition of writing saintly biographies in verse format.
Dabholkar was concerned to describe miracles, and the hagiological tendency is evident. Legendary details and actual events have been discerned to overlap, requiring careful analysis. Another realistic assessment about the verse of Dabholkar is that “when he did not understand the enigmatic mystic, he would rationalize sayings and events in conformity with his own religious background.”
Dabholkar’s poetic biography assimilated the devotional tendency to identify Sai Baba with the god Dattatreya, who is often depicted as an ascetic or yogi. This Hindu deity is associated with the syncretism of Hinduism and Islamic Sufism that has been traced in Maharashtra. The association is said to date back to the fourteenth century and was revived in the case of Sai Baba circa 1910. Various Hindu gurus gained repute in the nineteenth century as incarnations of the ascetic deity Dattatreya, and most of these figures (and likewise Sai Baba) were reticent about revealing their personal histories.
A well-known instance of Dattatreya association is Swami Samarth of Akalkot (d.1878), who was in affinity with Muslims. A subsequent “Dattatreya guru” representing a Hindu context was Narayan Maharaj of Kedgaon (1885-1945), an ascetic who favored an opulent lifestyle in his later years while acting as a patron of Dattatreya worship at his ashram.
At the beginning of each chapter, Dabholkar extols Sai Baba. The purpose was evidently to link the Shirdi entity with the Maharashtrian Hindu bhakti tradition of saints who also figure as poets. It is obvious that Dabholkar “tried to accommodate the Muslim Sai Baba within the Maharashtrian Hindu milieu for his readers.”
The reported statement of Sai Baba that “I am of the Muslim caste” is significant. Yet in passing from Dabholkar to the adaptation of Gunaji, we here find a serious case of contraction and omission. Gunaji neglected to include the statement about the Muslim caste. He even attempted to deny the possibility Sai Baba could have been a Muslim. In a controversial passage, Gunaji poses the question: if Sai Baba was a Muslim, how could he keep a dhuni fire burning in his mosque, and how could he keep a sacred tulsi plant in the yard outside, and how could he permit Hindu music, and how could he have pierced ears, and how could he have donated money to repair Hindu temples? This is more or less the credo of the “Hindu identity” suggestion that became widespread.
The insular thinking can be contradicted. The sacred fires known as dhuni were also favored by Muslim faqirs. The tolerance of Sai Baba in relation to Hindu ceremonial adjuncts should not be made antithetical to his own excised statement that he was a Muslim. The issue of pierced ears is not definitive. Many Hindus gained pierced ears at birth. Hindu biographers have urged that he had pierced ears. Against this must be set an assertion of the Hindu devotee Das Ganu, in a well-known poem which states that Sai Baba can be called a Muslim because of such characteristics as his ears not being pierced. Das Ganu added his own conclusion that Sai Baba was a Hindu, adducing the dhuni fire as support. Dabholkar is also contradictory, favoring pierced ears but indicating that Sai Baba was circumcised.
The sectarian attitude frequently contradicts a due perspective. In 1930, a foreword was added to the Dabholkar book in Marathi by Hari Sitaram Dixit. This was the same prominent Hindu devotee who had ousted Abdul Baba from the role of tomb custodian nearly a decade before. Dixit always referred to Sai Baba as Sai Maharaj, that title conveying a distinctly Hindu flavor. Dixit had evolved an interpretation of Sai Baba that is considered idiosyncratic in some sectors. He now declared Sai Baba to have been born ayoniya, which literally means without a womb, i.e., without a human mother.
This new concept avoided the issue of whether he was born a Muslim or a Hindu. Yet the innovation was closely linked to an interpretation of divine incarnations in the Hindu tradition, entities who were all considered to be the products of a virgin birth. The Shirdi Sufi had now effectively become a divine incarnation of Hindu association.