Shirdi Sai Baba’s Present: Routes, Repositories and Refabulations

 

 

In this talk, Srinivas poses the following question: What is the relationship between Shirdi Sai Baba’s images, their powers, ocular or otherwise, and their  disposition in urban --- rather than national --- space? Beginning with the exploration of four routes or trajectories for the memory and transmission of Shirdi Sai Baba’s charisma through various gurus and teachers to Indian and global publics after his passing in 1918, then the exploration of the spatial refabulations of Shirdi Sai Baba’s presence by focusing on Bangalore, a major metropolis and global city of 13 million people in southern India. On several roads and transport arteries, in public temples, roadside shrines, and markets, we see how architectural forms, rituals and worship, quotidian lives and corporeal practices of devotees come to be repositories of Shirdi Sai Baba’s urban presence in the present, as they connect the biographical with the material and spatiality with religiosity. To conclude, Srinivas will reflect on these processes of spatialization and associated constituencies and their significance for the (devotional) present.

 

 

Smriti Srinivas is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, USA. She explores regimes of spatial, somatic, and symbolic production, particularly in cities and Indian Ocean worlds. Her most recent books include the coedited Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence (2022); Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (2020, coedited); and A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia (2015).