Sai’s 10 avatars

Sathya Sai Baba selected Prof. N. Kasturi  as his official biographer – a highly impressionable spiritual seeker and college history teacher, who also had a radio chat-show and some reputation as a comic doggerel poet. Kasturi wrote four very florid biographical volumes (‘Sathyam, Sivam, Sundaram’ or ‘Truth, Goodness, Beauty’). The authenticity of these accounts that he naively retells there from uncheckable and clearly most impressionable devotee sources must be seriously questioned. He relied largely on very poor villagers’s stories or beneficiaries of Sai Baba’s grace to become residents within his ashram. By the time they recalled events decades later, no doubt some of them were only to willing to embroider and even invent so that they might benefit from being quoted and recognised by Kasturi and the all-powerful Bhagavan Baba who ruled their village. Here are two examples of such ‘stories’, which are believed by many Sai followers to this day.”A devotee from Kamalapuram was asking Baba to show him some miracle and one day, Baba called him and the members of his family, his mother and the rest, and offered to show them the ten Dasavatharas, the Ten Incarnations of Vishnu! Matsya (the fish), Kurma (the tortoise) and Varaha (the boar) passed off without any incident but, when the terrible form of Narasimha appeared, they shrieked and yelled with fright, fearing that the house might collapse on their heads. They clamoured “Enough,” “Enough,” and Baba calmed down after Mangalarathi (worship of him with a flame) was performed, by persons, who, though they were there, did not see the Forms, because the Vision was not intended for them!” (Sathyam, Sivam, Sundaram Vol. 1 by Prof. N. Kasturi, page 65)

” … the Purohit of a family whose guest Baba was at Mysore was granted, quite unexpectedly, a Vision of Narasimha, and the Srivaishnava Brahmin swooned and did not recover consciousness for several hours.” (Prof. N. Kasturi in Sathyam, Sivam, Sunderam Vol. 1, page 64f.)

Ra. Ganapati adds his shot too: “The Dasavathara Forms were vouchsafed to another gentleman now deceased, a relative of the Karnam family. As a matter of fact, he passed away, because his physical frame was too weak to contain the joy of the Vision. Baba took him to the river and asked him to watch the reflection, His own reflection, in the water. The man announced later that he saw at first Sathya Sai Baba Himself, then, only the halo of hair that surrounds His head, and then all the ten avathars in the order in which they are mentioned in the Puranas; the Kalki avathar on horseback had the form or Baba Himself!” (Baba: Sathya Sai by Ra. Ganapati, p. 81)

Among guru-grovelling writers, few can exceed N. Kasturi or Ra. Ganapati, unless it be Smt. Vijayamma, who knew Sathya Sai as a teenager and has some most disturbing events about her guru to relate, amid some of the wildest worshipful hyperbole on record. More on her later…