Some of
the strong assertions made by Sathya Sai Baba’s hagiographers, as
well as by the Sathya Sai Organisation and by spokespersons and devotees,
are highly controversial, in particular claims of SSB’s Divinity and
Avatarhood. Internet and other coverage of these controversies is already
substantial and easy to find. This short essay, which is addressed to
researchers and other open-minded readers, sheds light on two details
of the controversy surrounding his official biography (hagiography).
As stated
in my ‘Dossier 4’ and in earlier articles of mine, new evidence
offered by the (devotee) researchers who published Love is My Form,
Volume 1 in 2000 draws attention to the circumstantial uncertainties
surrounding Sathya Sai Baba’s official date of birth (1926) and the
date of his alleged Declaration of Mission – as “Sai Baba” (1940).
1. Date
of Birth
On the
first point, since the official biography, which gives SSB’s year
of birth as 1926, has always linked the two numbers ‘1940’ and ‘nearly
14’ to SSB’s first declarations that he was “Sai Baba”, the
strong recent LIMF evidence that leads to the inevitable conclusion
that these Declarations took place in 1943 shows that one of
these official figures (14 or 1926) must be incorrect. If SSB
was 14 in 1943, as is possible, then he was born in 1929; if he was
born in 1926, then he was nearly 17 at the time of the Declarations
in Uravakonda in 1943, which is also possible.
To my
knowledge, the Sathya Sai Organisation has never refuted (or even mentioned)
the LIMF evidence which points to 1943, or my Internet articles
about it. There has been no official adjustment to to SSB’s stated
age when he undertook his Mission nor to the date of that alleged event.
When the SSO does decide to address this question, there are other pieces
of information relating to his date of birth which they will need to
consider.
In
LIMF (pp.132-133) the 1943 Register pages (apparently from Uravakonda
High School) give Sathya Narayana’s date of birth as 4-10-39. This
is an obvious clerical error. However, the later correction to
“4-10-29”, with a signed clarification, “fourth October Nineteen
Twentynine” (dated, as far as the writing is legible, 11-8-76). (Note
that the same date of birth, in 1929, is also given – with
an intricate disclaimer caption (plausible but also defensive), which
needs to be taken into consideration – on the transfer certificate
from distant Kamalapuram School to neighbouring Bukkapatnam School,
in 1941, LIMF, p. 68.) However, before too much is made of the
1929 date ‘discrepancy’, we have been informed, in LIMF
(p. 68), and by other experts on Indian culture, that such errors were
quite common in rural India in those days. Equally relevant, therefore,
is the hypothesis that, in such a remote Indian village in the 1920s,
no one would have remembered the exact birth date and the date in the
register is an approximation. It is also possible, of course, that the
date of birth will never be proved one way or the other, but in the
light of demonstrable discrepancies, all the evidence should be considered.
Additional
Notes:
1.
On this document, the other boys in Sathya Narayana’s class have birthdates
ranging from 1933 to 1938, and leaving dates from 1946 and 1949. Sathya
Narayana’s early leaving date (suggesting a younger than usual termination
of studies), although not recorded, is assumed (according to the
LIMF evidence) to have been October 1943, when he made his second
Mission Declaration.
2.
Still to be investigated is the note by prominent SSB proselytiser,
M.N. Rao (A Story of God as Man, 1985, p. 28). It states that
after Sathya left, there was an entry in the Uravakonda High School
records to that effect. “In the fourth form (ninth class) attendance
register of 1940, the entry against the name Rathnakaram Sathyanarayanaraju
read as follows: “Discontinued – no T.C. claimed.”
A further
relevant consideration is that the 1926 date of birth is inextricably
linked with the claim by SSB and the SSO that Shirdi Sai Baba predicted
before his death (in 1918) that he would return in 8 years – a claim
not supported, as far as I am aware, by the official Shirdi Sai
Association literature. (The two Associations are totally separate.)
Equally dependent on the official 23rd of November 1926 date of birth
is the confident assertion by SSB writers and devotees that Sri Aurobindo’s
declaration on 24 November 1926 about the descent of Krishna into the
physical on the preceding day was really an acknowledgement of SSB’s
divine Advent. In other words, it is one of a series of unsupported
(and often demonstrably unconvincing) official (and devotee) claims
that SSB’s birth was foretold by many important sages and leaders.
This particular claim was never recognised by Aurobindo (who died in
1950) or by his followers. The latter have always interpreted this special
announcement as the arrival of the Divine spirit into Aurobindo’s
consciousness, for which he had prayed for years.
The voluminous
(partisan) literature on SSB offers a few further pieces of circumstantial
evidence for solving this biographical puzzle. First of all, innocent
quotations offered in veteran devotee Smt. Vijayakumari’s memoirs
seem to provide a degree of independent support for the possibility
that SSB’s date of birth may not have been in 1926 but in 1929. In
1945 the little girl’s cousins were strolling in the affluent Bangalore
suburb of Malleswaram when they heard bhajans being sung. They entered
the house to listen. Sai Baba, who was present there, invited them to
go to Puttaparthi (whose name they had never heard). When they returned
to their town of Kuppam (south-east of Bangalore, but in today’s Telugu-speaking
Andhra Pradesh), the cousins told the girl’s mother about their meeting.
The latter was keen for them all to go, but the idea was vetoed by the
father, who said: “You tell me He is sixteen years old and
claims to be a reincarnation of Shirdi Sai. This is all humbug” (Vijayakumari,
p. 12). That night the mother had a dream of SSB and they were immediately
given permission by the father to visit the ashram for three days. This
first visit allegedly took place during Dasara, in October 1945
(p.13). The family soon became very close to SSB and visited for long
periods.
However,
since the fortuitous assistance of the research behind LIMF
has enabled us to establish that SSB was (allegedly) nearly 17 when
he made his October 1943 Declaration, Vijayakumari’s words quoted
above indicate that, two years later, in 1945, SSB was not nearly 19,
as would be expected, but 16. If true, this would make his year
of birth 1929 (as indicated by the register entries in LIMF).
What is also interesting about this possibility is that at the time
of the (alleged) Mission Declarations of 1943, he would have been almost
14 years old – as he and his biographers have always claimed!
There
is another possible sliver of evidence of a post-1926 birth. Vijayakumari
later quotes from a story session by SSB to devotees assembled on the
Chitravati sand dunes in 1949 (pp. 216-218):
“Later,
for High School studies, I had to go to Uravakonda. ... ...” (p. 217)
“In my thirteenth year, coming to know that I had become a
‘Baba’ and had left home, one of my friends went mad ... Another
friend jumped into a well and died” (p. 218).
We now
know, from the documentary evidence offered by LIMF, that SSB
went to Uravakonda High School in early 1943, and left in October 1943
(when he was still, according to the official
chronology, a month away from his 17th birthday) to begin his
Mission after the second of his Declarations. So, according to the above
quoted statement, once more a 1929 date of birth seems at least possible,
although it must also be admitted that neither Vijayakumari’s nor
SSB’s memory have proved to be totally reliable for dates.
As further
typical examples of the generally vague and unreliable coverage of these
early years by SSB’s chroniclers, and their uncertainties or silences
over dates, we may take the following secondhand references to SSB’s
age as a child and youth by Kasturi, Ganapati and Purnaiya. It seems
possible (here as elsewhere) that their confusion or inaccuracy may
simply be due to their total reliance on what SSB himself told them.
(In these specific examples the errors may also be caused by following
the unverified official dogma that SSB made his Declaration when he
was nearly 14, and that this occurred in 1940, rather than in 1943).
After all, Kasturi and other biographers were not eye witnesses and
did not have the benefit of the commendable basic detective work carried
out in recent years by the LIMF
researchers. And yet, as we have seen, in spite of the vastly superior
biographical quality of LIMF, Vol 1, it is the ‘sacred’ Kasturi
style that the Sathya Sai Book Trust has chosen to perpetuate. (Still
to be investigated and explained is why the admirable LIMF biographical
project (staffed by devotees) collapsed soon after the publication of
the revelations of Volume 1.)
For example,
N. Kasturi (Sathyam …, Vol 1, p. 16) makes this wildly inaccurate
statement: “When he was eight, Sathya was declared ready to proceed
to the Higher Elementary School at Bukkapatnam, two and a half miles
from Puttaparthi.” [SSB was eight in either 1934 or 1937. According
to LIMF, he went to Bukkapatnam when he was either fourteen,
or eleven.]
Ra. Ganapati
(I:71) copies Kasturi: “Satya entered the Higher Elementary School
[at Bukkapatnam] at the age of eight.” Then, on p. 92, Ganapati informs
us: “In His twelfth year, Satyanarayana Raju had to join the High
School [in Uravakonda].” As if SSB went to Uravakonda in 1937
instead of 1943. So many inconsistencies!
Nagamani
Purnaiya, another early devotee, is even further from the truth: “Sathya’s
schooling at Bukkapatnam lasted till he was 10 years old and passed
the Vth Standard.” Then she tells us that his elder brother took him
to Uravakonda (p. 6). But SSB was 10 in either 1936 or 1939; he went
to Uravakonda in 1943.
Another
unreliable devotee witness:
In her
Lokanatha Sai (Madras, Sri Sathya Sai Mandali Trust, Guindy, Madras,
[n.d.] c. 1990) M. L. Mudaliar (1927-1999), an SSB devotee since her
youth, a science graduate and later University teacher, asserts on page
5 that in September 1943, SSB rescued her father from evil. (As
we shall see below, the date is inaccurate.) On p. 19 she relates that
her father, while under what seems to be a form of possession, was visited
in a vision by a young guru who cured him. She then goes on to state
quite clearly that on the next day she and her family saw SSB
visiting her father to check on his recovery from a case of an evil
eye or black magic curse. On p. 149-151 Mudaliar gives more details
of the alleged miracle healing and repeats the date, Dasara 1943.
LIMF
(p. 217) states quite clearly, in reference to the winter of 1944,
that Sathya Sai Baba stayed with a Madras family for twenty days and
that:
“M.L. Leela (1927-1999), a devotee from Madras would later say that
this was Baba’s first visit to Madras.” (No direct reference
was given in LIMF but the data possibly came from the interview
with Mudaliar recorded on 12 June 1998 by the LIMF team (a year
before her death).
The final
example of uncertainty and inconsistency regarding SSB’s biographical
dates comes from the work of SSB’s very close American associate (and
mentor), John Hislop, whose books and lectures had an incalculable influence
on non-Indian devotees of SSB and on the development of the overseas
branches of the SSO in the 1970s and 1980s. (Hislop had such prestige
and close contact with SSB that he was chosen by Jewish American devotees
to break the news to SSB that Jews and Christians belonged to different
religions.)
According
to Hislop’s Conversations with Sathya Sai Baba
(p.124), it was SSB himself who told him the following: “Baba underwent
torture at the hands of the village doctors when he first allowed his
divine powers to manifest on a fairly large scale. This was around the
age of 10. The doctors drilled holes in his head and stuck in
hot irons, cut open the skin and poured in burning fluids, buried him
in a trench with sand up to his neck and iron bars to keep him fixed
in position.” [According to the LIMF
evidence, Sathya was sixteen years old at the time [in early 1943] (and
even if he was born in 1929, he would have been thirteen.]
The fact
that SSB told this last story to an unquestioning and totally devoted
Hislop, always eager to pass on the Avatar’s every word to the world,
may be the most important clue of all for researchers to follow. As
I have shown elsewhere, at great length, in my investigations on SSB,
his basic storytelling method of preaching offers a wealth of inconsistencies
and errors, especially over the most elementary facts, like dates, ages
and names. Therefore, a simple, but unproven, explanation for the uncertainty
about his birth date could be that neither he nor his family remembered
for certain and that his unquestioning devotees have merely repeated
what he has said at different times, leaving the SSO, after its formation
in 1965, to decide on the most plausible or convenient date of birth
for their leader.
2.
Further corroborating evidence of the
LIMF revelations about 1940-1943
A quick
scan of the major SSB commentators shows that although they all accept
the official date of October 1940 as the beginning of SSB’s career
as a guru, there is a total dearth of mentions of the years 1941, 1942,
or 1943 (except perhaps the final months) in connection with SSB’s
early years in his position as independent guru. But for over 50 years
no one noticed anything odd in this apparent three year gap of inactivity
right at the alleged outset of SSB’s Mission. No guru tours around
the area, or middle-class devotees with cameras, in nearly three years?
However, as LIMF’s large collection shows, from 1944 there
would be a flood of photographs and accounts by adoring middle-class
devotees.
In those
very few cases where SSB writers do mention the years 1941-1943 in a
‘Mission’ context, the references must be scrutinised for plausibility,
given the nature of the documentary evidence at our disposal since the
year 2000.
No references
to 1941, 1942, or 1943 were found in the first volume of Professor N.
Kasturi’s 4-volume hagiography. Kasturi mentions the Declaration date
of 1940 on page 46. The next date given by Kasturi is 1945 (on page
68) for the planning of the first Mandir, which fits in with
accounts by LIMF and others. Then Kasturi mentions 1950 (the
second mandir) on page 90. But, in spite of Kasturi’s accounts of
lots of happenings on those intervening 44 pages, there is no specific
mention of the three missing years (1941-1943. The reliability of Kasturi’s
biography is thus challenged by the LIMF revelations.
LIMF
offers abundant photographic evidence of SSB and devotees from 1944
onward. Apart from a few photographs from late 1943, LIMF also offers
one (on p. 46) captioned ‘1940’. This is a photo of SSB, allegedly
the first ever taken of him, in 1940, at the Pushpagiri Festival (near
Kamalapuram). It is a head shot of a schoolboy, showing a strong and
handsome face and short straight hair. The boy looks far more grown
up than the stylised skinny and ‘cute’ child-like Sathya Narayana
portrayed in the many specially commissioned pastel drawings by a foreign
devotee which accompany these early (photo-less) chapters of LIMF.
It also bears some similarity to other early ones from (late) 1943:
in Uravakonda (pages 124 and 154) and Hospet (p. 142). Whether the 1940
photograph is correctly captioned or not, according to LIMF,
as we have seen, there are no other photographs of SSB before the end
of 1943 (just after his Declaration) but, subsequently, there is an
avalanche of photos taken by his new (camera-owning) benefactors and
devotees in 1944 and 1945, his first two years of Mission in and around
newly explored Bangalore.
This sudden
appearance of photographic evidence of the young guru and his followers
and benefactors in the years 1943-1945 can be taken as further proof
(if it is needed) that SSB’s Mission began in 1943, not in 1940.
In
Bhaktodharaka Sri Sathya Sai (published by the SSB Books and Publications
Trust, undated, like most of the official SSB books), a short volume
about SSB’s Mission, N. Lakshmi Devamma (another early close devotee
and schoolteacher) cites other people’s experiences and her own. She
says that her own experiences date from a darshan when SSB was 15, but
she gives no date. (Her introduction to SSB was through her worship
of Shirdi Sai in Penukonda, possibly at the house of SSB’s sister,
Parvathamma.)
“Swami
was then 15 years old. He was wearing a white dhoti and a white shirt.
Bala Baba had a thick, black, beautiful crop, a golden complexion, luminous
eyes that were large and full of compassion, and red smiling lips”
(p. 36).
One of
a series of end photos of SSB in sepia colour in Devamma’s book is
captioned: “When I first saw Swami – 1941”. (We do not know whether
the caption was supplied by the author, an editor, or the publisher.)
However, the same photo (in a far superior reproduction) is included
in Love is My Form, Vol. 1 (on page 232) and it is clearly labelled,
“Baba at Bangalore, 1945”. With the evidence we now have, this later
date seems correct, and Devamma’s description of SSB’s face also
corresponds to photographs in LIMF from late 1943 on (which were
the first sequential photos taken of him). Another photo reproduced
in Devamma’s book has the caption “Swami declared his avatar at
Uravakonda on 20-10-1940” (either written by the author, an editor,
or by the publisher). The same photo is in LIMF (p. 150), where it is
claimed to be the first photo taken after his Declaration at Uravakonda
(which LIMF’s clear chronological account has shown to have
taken place in October 1943). The caption for this photo adds more identifying
detail: “Young Sai Baba seated on Sai Baba Gundu in Anjaneyulu’s
house (photographer V.V. Ramulu)”.
The 3
year gap in the accounts of SSB’s many chroniclers is understandable:
it simply corroborates the LIMF evidence that, rather than preaching
his Mission, Sathya Narayana was still at school for most of the time
between 1940 and October 1943. (This further underlines an inherent
weakness in much of the SSB literature: the unquestioning copying of
what others have written or said.)
Footnote:
As an
example of Sathya Sai Baba’s compulsive biographical storytelling
and boasting, he (echoed by his current major spokesperson, Professor
Anil Kumar, on 10 March 2002) has recounted how, at the tender age of
nine, he received his driving licence and proceeded to smash
the record by driving from Puttaparthi to Madras (in the 1930s and on
rural roads) in 4 and a half hours instead of the usual eight hours.
The fact that no one has ever questioned this boast exemplifies the
nature and power of the Sathya Sai Baba myth.
Major
References:
- Devamma, N. Lakshmi,
Bhakthodhaaraka Sri Sathya Sai, Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications
Trust, [n.d.]
- Kasturi, N., Sathyam Sivam Sundaram.
The Life of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, 4 vols, Sri Sathya Sai Books and
Publications Trust, 1961-1980.
- Mudeliar, M. L., Lokanatha Sai (Madras, Sri Sathya Sai Mandali
Trust, Guindy, Madras, [n.d.] c. 1990)
Padmanaban, R. et al , Love is My Form. Vol. 1 The Advent (1926-1950).
Prasanthi Nilayam, Sai Towers, 2000. [Often referred to as LIMF]
- Vijayakumari, Smt., Anyatha Saranam Nasthi. Other than You Refuge
is There None, Chennai, [n.p.], 1999. [Available from the Sri Sathya
Sai Books and Publications Trust]
For an
introduction to the alleged forecasts of Sathya Sai Baba’s birth and
their prominence in the official promotion of SSB, see: Counter-Evidence
to the Sathya Sai Baba Divinity Myth and Related Topics. A Basic Source
Guide.
Other
research articles on Sathya Sai Baba’s divine claims are available
on Brian Steel’s Sathya Sai Baba Page.
|