Building Faith: Religious Pluralism, Pedagogical Urbanism, and Governance in the Sathya Sai Sacred City

Abstract

In November 2001, I stood outside the Ganesh Gate of Prasanthi Nilayam, the Sathya Sai Ashram (hermitage) in the town of Puttaparthi, in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. I had just fought my way down the Main Street, passing a tide of Sai devotees lining up for the afternoon darshan (sacred audience) of the charismatic guru and living god, Shri Sathya Sai Baba. The ashram was surrounded by high walls, and only the open gate gave a glimpse of the exciting world beyond; pastelcolored buildings in eggshell blue, pale pink and yellow, embellished with ornate pillars, lotus capitals, gold domes, painted ceilings, carved balconies, trellises, chejjas (window eaves) with painted garlands, and several brightly colored pavilions. But in the distance I saw a high, unadorned, grey wall that seemed incongruous in that pastel colored setting. It blocked my sightline further, and I wondered idly what was behind it. Prasanthi Nilayam (The Abode of Supreme Peace), Sathya Sai Baba’s one hundred-acre ashram, in the town of Puttaparthi, is thought to welcome roughly ten million Sai devotees annually. On the many occasions I visited I saw devotees present from all over India, as well as Chile, Germany, Taiwan, Australia, Hungary, The Netherlands, South Africa, Japan, and more (T. Srinivas 2002, 2010). It is a pilgrimage place, a gathering spot for people from different cultures, races, ethnicities and ways of being, a sacred “transnational space,” where “built forms and spatial transformations are produced” (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003: 25) and in which “Social actors forge connections between localities across national borders that increasingly sustain new modes of politics, economics and culture” (M. Smith 2005: 5). Examining Puttaparthi’s spaces of devotion allows us to capture “emergent social relations which are situated in particular places yet operate across geographical distances” (M. Smith 2005: 6) and to move us towards an understanding of the transnational Sai faith. The main concern of this paper, therefore, is a questioning of