The spirit of Puttaparthi: How Sathya Sai Baba’s teachings shaped a town and touched millions

Puttaparthi

A light breeze sweeps across Puttaparthi, the headquarters of Sri Sathya Sai district that was carved out of semi-arid Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh three years ago. The town, about 150km northeast of Bengaluru, nestles against the rolling foothills of the Eastern Ghats, with the Chitravati river flowing quietly alongside.

Everywhere in Puttaparthi, one can feel the presence of Sathya Sai Baba, who was born here in 1926 and built free residential schools and colleges, free super speciality hospitals and massive drinking water systems. His words and images adorn the walls and shopfronts, and millions of people visit Puttaparthi every year. Millions more worship him as God. They speak of his love, how he transformed their hearts and lives, and how vibhuti (sacred ash) spontaneously appears on his photographs in their homes. Fourteen years after he breathed his last, he continues to draw seekers from around the globe—rich and poor, famous and unknown. Come November 23, Puttaparthi will resonate with the birth centenary celebrations of its beloved numen.

The heart of the town pulsates in the Prasanthi Nilayam ashram that Sathya Sai Baba built in 1950. Thousands gather in the Sai Kulwant Hall here every day to sit crosslegged and listen to devotional songs, and then stand quietly in neat queues to touch his samadhi with their foreheads — at the very same spot he had stood and taught about divinity in human life. He sauntered slowly through the hall, accepting letters from devotees, stopping to talk to them, blessing them, producing vibhuti for them from his open palm.

Men and women sit separately in the hall, a large screen on both sides displaying visuals of the singers and listeners. Bhajans are sung here for 30 minutes twice every day, after an hour of veda chanting by teachers and students from his schools and colleges. The bhajan sessions resemble music classes: the lead singer sings a melodious line, and the other singers and many in the audience repeat it after him. Most of the bhajans praise Baba and Hindu divinities. Many other songs extol Allah, Jesus, the Buddha, Nanak and Zoroaster.

The Sathya Sai emblem is truly secular. It carries five religious symbols around a pillar of light: the OM, the dharma chakra, the Zoroastrian fire, the cross, and the crescent and star. Baba never once asked his devotees to renounce their religions; instead he told them to hold on to their own faith and deepen it through love, service and devotion. Muslim devotees talk fondly of the mosque he built in Puttaparthi in 1978; it was the first mosque in the village. A large number of longtime devotees live in the ashram, many of them non-Hindus. They aver that they do not miss Baba as he still appears in their dreams.

A majestic university, a planetarium, an airport and a cricket stadium are among the marvels that greet visitors to Puttaparthi. The town was a tiny hamlet of a hundred people when Baba was born there in a thatched house and was named Ratnakaram Sathyanarayana Raju. The hamlet was so primitive that, as a child, he walked 4km to primary school and lived with his elder brother in a distant part of Anantapur while in secondary school.

No one believed him when he indicated at the age of 13 that he was the reincarnation of Saibaba of Shirdi, the saint-fakir whom both Hindus and Muslims revere. Raju took the name Sathya Sai Baba (meaning True Mother Father) and asked his father to worship him. The boy had been behaving strangely after recovering from a scorpion sting two months before. He had lost interest in his studies and daily routines, displayed prescience and was talking deliriously of divinity.

Raju’s relatives and neighbours grieved for the bright little boy who they thought had gone mad or had become possessed. They took him to medicine men and then to an exorcist who tortured mental cases. “I have seen the scars of torture on his head,” says the distinguished physicist G. Venkataraman, who was vice chancellor of the Sathya Sai university, in a video talk. The torture did not make the boy change his ways. In October 1940, a month before he turned 14, he quit school as well as home, and declared that he was an avatar of God. No one believed him.

Four years later, still in his teens, he built a small ashram near Puttaparthi. He frequently travelled in south India, staying at the homes of newfound devotees, and giving them rings and pendants taken out of thin air. “Miracles are my visiting cards,” he famously said years later. But his greatest miracle is the transformation of human hearts.

Early accounts of the miracles spread by word of mouth. Visitors trickled in from Bangalore and Madras, travelling by bullock-cart the last stretch of a stony mud path after wading across the Chitravati river. They looked upon him as a guru with supernatural powers, one who could heal their ailments, read their hearts and visit them in their dreams. A spiritual master who had no guru, had not learnt Sanskrit, yet could quote from the Upanishads and explain the essence of several religions.

Many of those devout disciples could not comprehend it when he said, “I am God. You are also God. Only, you have not realised it.” As he explained it, even a worm can turn God.

How does a human being turn God? Numerous people have asked him this question over the years. Simple, he replied: love all, serve all. As his ardent devotees elaborate, one has to energise with pure love every cell in one’s body and serve everyone selflessly. It makes one divine.

One of his followers in the 1940s was N. Kasturi from Tripunithura in Kerala, who taught history in a college in Mysore and served as Ramakrishna Mission secretary for many years. Kasturi was in his early fifties when he accepted 22-year-old Baba’s command to write his biography—Sathyam Sivam Sundaram, published 12 years later. Kasturi also became the English translator of Baba’s Telugu speeches and the editor of the ashram’s publication, Sanathana Sarathy. The editor had a famous assistant and successor—V.K. Narasimhan, who had been editor-in-chief of the Indian Express during the Emergency and had retreated to Puttaparthi after his retirement from journalism.

Another eminent early devotee was Suri Bhagavantam, who was director of the Indian Institute of Science and DRDO, and scientific adviser to the defence ministry. He was initially sceptical. One day in 1959, as they were on the dry river-bed, Bhagavantam mentioned to Baba that the scientist Robert Oppenheimer had recited a verse from the Gita as the nuclear bomb exploded in New Mexico in 1945. Do you want a copy of the Gita from me, Baba asked him. “I said yes, and he took a handful sand from the riverbed and put it into my own hands, and the sand turned into a text of the Gita,” Bhagavantam recounted to his family and friends, and much later in a Swiss documentary film. “It was the first shocking miracle I had seen, and it was beyond scientific explanation,” he said.

An Australian seeker, Howard Murphet, and his wife, Iris, were at the Theosophical Society in Adyar, Madras, in 1966 when they felt the urge to meet Baba. As they made it to Puttaparthi, Iris was indisposed and did not accompany Howard to a devotee’s house where Baba was staying. As he watched Baba create vibhuti, he suspected that it was the conjuring trick of a stage magician. Next day, Iris went with him.

Howard writes in his book Man of Miracles, published in 1968:

“Today his robe was old-gold in colour, but like the red one it fell from shoulder to floor in a simple line with no pockets, appendages or folds. All his robes are of this same style…. Under the robe he wears a dhoti and this has no pockets in it either. I now know these things for sure because, later on when we were staying at a guesthouse with Sai Baba, my wife used sometimes to iron his robes and dhotis in our room….

“From the doorway Baba pointed his finger at me and said, “Did you bring your wife?” I was pleased that he had remembered. He took us both into another room and talked to Iris about her health. He seemed to know just what was wrong with her and the basic causes of the trouble. He gave her much advice and then with his hand-wave produced from the air some medicinal ash for her to eat.

“I was, standing close by keenly watching the production because I still doubted that it was genuine magic. Now he turned to me, smiled, pulled his sleeve up to his elbow, and waved his hand under my nose. As he turned the palm up I expected to see the usual ash, but I was wrong. Lying in the middle of his hand was a little photograph of his head with the full address of his ashram. The photo had a freshly-glazed look as if it came straight from a photographic laboratory. He handed it to me saying: ‘You’ve been asking for my address. Here it is. Keep it in your wallet.’”

A professor from UCLA, John S. Hislop, had in his teens lived for two years with theosophists Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti in the USA. In 1958 he visited the Himalayas to identify the right spot for an ashram for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Hislop found it in Uttarkashi, but the government would not part with it. The Maharishi later founded his ashram in Rishikesh, which is popularly known as The Beatles ashram.

Hislop spent years practising Vipassana meditation in Burma before gravitating to Baba in 1968. The seeker had finally found his master. Baba manifested a crucifix for him and later corrected his wife’s misshapen foot which surgeons in America had declared as untreatable. Hislop wrote three books on Baba’s miracles and his philosophy, and published his conversations with Baba and the letters they exchanged.

They conversed and wrote letters in English, though Baba sometimes used interpreters. His devotees say he did not need interpreters. Yong Kongwhy, an oil and gas engineer and the Mandarin coordinator at Puttaparthi, is an ardent Buddhist. “I have known Baba since the late 1980s. He transcends place and country,” he said. “I once took my mother-in-law to meet him. She spoke to Baba in Mandarin, and he replied in English. Yet, they understood each other perfectly.” As we spoke, Kongwhy was overseeing a Mandarin recording session for his YouTube channel—a bhajan translated by him and sung in Mandarin by another devotee. He said the ashram turns red during Chinese New Year, when devotees from China gather to celebrate.

People have asked Baba how he could converse with people speaking alien languages. He said: “I speak the language of the heart.”

But there is a more mystical form of communication, too. Meeriya Hop, 80, born in the Netherlands, met Baba 33 years ago. Today, she works as a therapist in the podiatry department at the general hospital in Puttaparthi, which he opened in 1954. “I have seen him countless times in my dreams. We talk at length. I feel he is within me; we are one,” she said.

Klaus Lensson, 77, a retired teacher from Frankfurt, first saw Baba in a video in 1984. “I came to Puttaparthi soon after. He gave me prasad and a ring, which I still wear,” he said. “I keep coming here to seek truth.” Old devotees like him say you cannot leave Baba once he invites you into his fold.

Baba led a simple life, ate simple food, wore just an orange robe, sometimes white or yellow. He wore no ornaments, not even a rudraksha bead, nor any kind of thread seen on religious Hindu wrists. His devotees say he slept very little, responded to all letters he received, gave numerous discourses which became dozens of books, and kept no personal wealth. All the riches, cars, buildings and other assets of the ashram were in the name of the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust.

He studied every little detail in the institutions he built, choosing the right leaders to carry out work and setting clear, inviolable and almost impossible deadlines for the construction of buildings and their inauguration. Making everyone work hard, he stepped in to glide over hurdles that appeared. An unbelievably efficient CEO! Not the jet-setting kind. Baba visited many Indian towns and villages in his youth, but seldom travelled far in his later years. His only overseas visit was to Uganda, where he helped his devotees escape state repression. He never spoke ill of anyone, not even the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. “My life is my message,” he often said.

If thoughts are good, the mind becomes good, he said. He explained that anger arose from unfulfilled desires, and one moment of anger drained the energy earned from six months of good deeds. Put a ceiling on your desires and live frugal lives, he said, counselling people against splurging, smoking, intoxication and meat eating.

A reflection of his thoughts can be seen in the strict discipline enforced in Prasanthi Nilayam. No one speaks loudly, there is no maudlin display of emotion or devotion, no delirious dancing, no loud prayers at the small temples in the complex, no loitering at night—all the ashram gates remain firmly shut from 9:30pm to 4:30am. Men and women have separate cloakrooms and canteens, supervised by scarf-wearing volunteers, as well as regular staff of the ashram. They are polite but stern.

Like Baba, many of his close followers have been strict disciplinarians. Some had been IAS officers like K. Chakravarthy, the senior most in the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, or IPS officers like H.J. Dora, former DGP of Andhra Pradesh, who enlivened satsangs. They brought with them the rigour of their administrative experience.

Numerous people from the defence forces came seeking Baba’s blessing. Both the Field Marshals, K.M. Cariappa and Sam Manekshaw, were his devotees. Lt Generals M.L. Chibber and S.P. Malhotra worked closely with him. Admiral S.M. Nanda had a special meeting with Baba before the 1971 war. Air Chief Marshal N.C. Suri has written about how vibhuti poured from his home in Delhi.

Perhaps the military man closest to Baba was Brigadier Sisir Kumar Bose, who was the first director of IIT Bombay and then of IIT Kharagpur. He was in charge of the construction of the magnificent administrative building of Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, the Save Dharma Stupa and the Chaitanya Jyoti Museum. His son Col Jayanto Bose has in a video spoken of a miracle: during a bhajan session in Prasanthi Nilayam his father, who was in the audience, fell down and the doctors felt no heartbeat. After a few minutes, Baba walked up to him, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Bose, get up.” He did, immediately.

Rationalists who called him magician were aghast when Baba invited one of them, R.K. Karanjia, to interview him. Karanjia was a stormy petrel among journalists and had interviewed world leaders, most notably Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, Zhou Enlai of China and Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt. He published a lengthy interview with Baba in his tabloid magazine Blitz in September 1976, under the heading, ‘God is an Indian’.

Fearless, Karanjia shot bold questions at Baba. A sample: “What makes you so sure that you are Shirdi Baba incarnate?”

Baba replied: “The knowledge of my authentic experience, of course.... The very fact that I announced that I am Shirdi Baba 40 years ago, when I was only 14 and when nobody in this part of the south had known or even heard of Shirdi Baba, proves this fact.”

After responding to a question about materialisation of objects from thin air, Baba asked Karanjia: “Now coming to your question about a ring or watch with a distinct mark to prove that it is my own creation, would you like me to materialise something for you?”

Karanjia said, “Yes, Swamiji, I certainly would.”

Karanjia wrote: “Baba waved his hand in the air to produce a silver ring bearing the inscription OM in the centre, with Sai Ram marks on the sides, and held my right hand to gently put it on the third finger. It was an exact fit and it was precisely what I wanted from Baba.”

Another famous editor, the irreverent Khushwant Singh, wanted to interview Baba but was ignored. He later wrote that he could not understand why his friend, the jurist Nani Palkhivala, kept Baba’s photograph on his working desk in Bombay. Khushwant Singh also mentioned that the US ambassador Kenneth Keating “wears a ring which Sathya Sai Baba reduced to the right size by simply blowing through it.”

Ved Narayan, 58, from Kerala, leads the daily veda chanting at the Sai Kulwant Hall. An excellent speaker in several languages, like most other Sai alumni, he has daily communion with Baba. “He tells me what to do, what not to do,” Ved Narayan said. Five years ago Narayan was preparing to visit his brother in the USA. “Baba came in my dream and told me not to go,” he said. “I thought he would change his mind—but he repeated it. Soon after, Covid struck and travel shut down. Had I gone, I would have been stranded. Baba foresaw it.”

What impresses most visitors to Prasanthi Nilayam is that they cannot find there any hundi, the box for offering donations. One may offer flowers or break coconut at the Ganesha temple under a banyan tree inside the main gates. Most visitors are unaware that they can leave a cheque at the trust office. Or offer much more, like Ratan Tata did: he made TCS give technology for Baba’s Vidya Vahini education project.

The Sathya Sai Seva Organisation, run by volunteers known as Seva Dal, spread Baba’s message to the world outside. They organise bhajan, hold Bal Vikas classes, run homes for the elderly, and conduct medical camps in their own towns. Every year they arrive, in rotating batches, to serve at Prasanthi Nilayam and the hospitals. They spend from their own pockets for their food and room.

“During Onam, volunteers from Kerala come. April and May are hot, so those months are for devotees from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. July and August are for volunteers from Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Foreigners, too, have fixed rosters; in January, Chinese devotees paint much of the ashram red,” said Bisweswar Prusty of the media centre. Seva Dals do every kind work here; one can see college professors mopping the floor and cleaning toilets.

The Seva Dal scarves are colour-coded: men wear blue scarves, women yellow or saffron, all bearing the Sarva Dharma symbol and the motto—work is worship. Their emblem has a lotus with five petals symbolising truth, right conduct, peace, love and non-violence.

Interior designer Zuberat Sultanovh, from Dagestan in Russia, came to know Baba after her husband’s death in 2005. “A friend gave me his photograph. I placed it near a lamp and soon Baba began appearing in my dreams, guiding me,” she said. “I am a staunch Muslim. No one in my family has ever told me to stop praying to Baba.” She divides her time between Russia and Puttaparthi, often bringing her children along. “I remain a proud Muslim, but Baba is God for me, too,” she said.

Her friend Mariya Vrdoljak, a teacher from Moscow, visited Puttaparthi in 1997. “After returning, I experienced many miracles,” she said. “In 2006, I met my future husband here. Swami himself told me to marry him. He is from Croatia, and he too communicates with Baba. He intervenes and puts you on the right path. Problems I cannot solve, he solves for me.”

Seva Dal volunteers helped in Baba’s drinking water projects, too. In one project, water from the Tungbhadra was taken to 750 villages in Anantapur district through 2,500km of pipelines. Another project took water from the Godavari to Medak and Mahbubnagar districts. Naxalites guarded the workers from villagers who resisted pipe laying in certain places. Many Naxalites laid down their arms when they learnt of Baba’s work, especially feeding the poor. A third project took water from Andhra to quench Chennai’s thirst.

Compassion for fellow human beings is nurtured in Baba’s schools and colleges. Courses from class 1 to PhD are free for everyone, and value education is paramount here. Baba called it Educare. One of the first deemed universities in India, the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning at Puttaparthi, is designed to develop compassion, besides nurturing mind, body and spirit.

Oxford-educated Kannada writer and English scholar V.K. Gokak was its first vice chancellor. (He later received the Jnanpith award.) It was Gokak who shaped the university curriculum. Baba had told Bhagavantam in the 1960s that a university would come up in the tiny village. Bhagavantam, who had been at the IISc, said impossible. Baba told him: “People might be close to me, but they do not understand me, my mission and my determination.”

One of Gokak’s successors, the scientist G. Venkataraman, says Baba was the only university chancellor in the world who knew all his students personally and interacted with them closely. Baba himself conducted a residential summer course at Ooty for many years from 1971 for his students and other youth. It was intimate gurukula style.

In 2010 prime minister Manmohan Singh was the chief guest at the convocation at the institute. After delivering an inspiring speech, he broke protocol to stay on for a few more hours to listen to Baba’s discourse.

Two years ago B. Raghavendra Prasad took charge as the 12th vice chancellor. For him, it was a homecoming—his father was the first faculty member and he himself graduated from the institute 40 years ago. An accomplished scientist, Prasad has contributed to key defence projects at the IISc and to space science at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. Reflecting on the balance between his scientific career and spiritual roots, he said: “The line between science and spirituality is not fixed. When you go deep enough, there is no conflict—both are quests for truth. When we cannot explain something, we call it God.”

The university runs four campuses and currently has 1,600 students. “We maintain a teacher-student ratio of 1:8—the best in the country,” Prasad said. “We try to inculcate five dimensions—intellectual, service, physical, cultural and spiritual.”

In the school hostels, both male and female students learn cooking, plumbing, etc. In 1997 the trust hosted the first Unity Cup match at the Hill View cricket ground. The India XI, led by Sachin Tendulkar, prevailed over the World XI, led by Arjuna Ranatunga. “Life is a game,” Baba often told his devotees. “Play the game,” underlining the impermanence of the human condition.

Compassion is most visible in his super specialty hospitals: everything is free for the patients and their bystanders, even heart surgery.

Baba said hospitals for the poor must be as grand as royal palaces, and as well-equipped as the best in the world. “The grandeur was to instil confidence and pride in patients—so that healing happened through medicine and an uplifted spirit,” said Dr Anil Kumar Mulpur, cardio-thoracic surgeon at the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences in Puttaparthi. “Anyone can come here. You don’t need to believe in Sai Baba,” Mulpur said.

The building design took three months, says its chief architect Keith Critchlow of London, famous the world over for his sacred architecture concepts. The construction, by L&T, took only seven months. Baba had set a date for its inauguration before it was designed. Everyone was jittery—even Critchlow and the Hard Rock Cafe founder Isaac Tigris, who lived in Prasanthi Nilayam. But everything was ready on the appointed day in November 1991. Baba received prime minister Narasimha Rao and straightaway led him to the operation theatre door. Neither Baba nor Rao delivered any speech. Baba simply asked the doctors to do a heart operation. They did four, all successful.

Aksnine Khan, 15, from Birbhum, West Bengal, recently had a successful valve replacement here. “Baba is my God. He saved me,” Khan said. Dr Mulpur reassured him: “You will be back in school soon. Study well, become a doctor, and come back here to serve.”

Spread over 104 acres, the hospital has 90 doctors. While regular doctors are salaried, visiting surgeons serve free of cost. Many of them come from abroad. Spotless and airy, the hospital has high ceilings, and exudes the serenity seen on Baba’s face. A face that retained its composure even during a midnight attack in 1993 by four intruders who killed two persons in the ashram and were shot dead by the police.

The super-speciality hospital in Whitefield was completed in a year. “We worked at breakneck speed,” said D.V. Chandrasekhar, coordinator of its executive committee. “This was in 2000. As [the brigand] Veerappan had kidnapped [the Kannada actor] Rajkumar, there were tensions between Tamil and Kannada workers at construction site. It temporarily slowed down the pace of work. Yet, it was inaugurated as scheduled.”

He stressed its ethos, saying the hospital did not incentivise its doctors to push surgeries. “People come here for honest opinions,” he said.

The hospital design is K-shaped, signifying Karuna, compassion. Inaugurating it in 2001, prime minister A.B. Vajpayee said: “I have seen many hospitals and in some I have even been a patient. I can honestly say that I have rarely seen a hospital as grand, magnificent and breathtakingly beautiful as this one. When I first saw its photograph, I felt it was not a hospital at all, but a palace—a palace of healing, equally accessible to both the rich and the poor.”

Baba’s devotees hold dear eight simple words inscribed on his samadhi: Love all, Serve all. Help ever, Hurt never. The flame of his love burns in their hearts, reminding them of their divinity.