In the Presence of Sai Baba ─ Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement

Srinivas (anthropology, U. of California-Davis) traces the transformation of Indian religious figure Shirdi Sai Baba (d. 1918) from a mendicant to a guru during his lifetime, and his continuing posthumous transformation into a divine incarnation by the global Sathya Sai Baba (b. 1926) movement, one of several that inherited or claimed his charismatic legacy in post-colonial times. She examines what she calls the Sai Baba movement, which fuses the two figures, in the cities of India and in Nairobi and Atlanta. The moral and somatic economy of the movement, she finds, struggles to transcend or transmute a de-divinized world and create new sensibilities and practices of space, citizenship, and sociality. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Smriti Srinivas, Ph.D. in Sociology (Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University), is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Davis. She is the author ofThe Mouths of People, the Voice of God: Buddhists and Muslims in a Frontier Community of Ladakh (1998), andLandscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-Tech City (2001). Her research interests are urban cultures, memory, cultures of the body/performance, and religion.