McLain 2016 traces Shirdi Sai Baba’s rise from small village guru to global phenomenon, using a wide range of textual, material, and visual sources to investigate the different ways that Sai Baba has been understood and the reasons behind his skyrocketing popularity among Hindus in particular. Warren 2004 includes a valuable translation of the diary kept by Abdul Baba, a Muslim follower of Sai Baba in Shirdi, and draws upon that to present an interpretation of Sai Baba as a Muslim fakir who traveled the Sufi path. Rigopoulos 1993 is the first book-length academic study of Shirdi Sai Baba, which presents a biography of Sai Baba in the first half that draws upon Hindu-authored hagiographies and presents Sai Baba’s key teachings in the second half with an emphasis on interreligious tolerance.
White 1972 provided the first academic analysis of Shirdi Sai Baba, noting his growing popularity in western India and attributing it to the unifying bond created between Sai Baba’s devotees, a bond that crosses distinctions of caste, class, and social status. The academic study of Shirdi Sai Baba has emerged within the past several decades as scholars of religion in South Asia began to engage in a wide array of studies of popular saints and gurus, and as they observed the rapid growth in devotion to Shirdi Sai Baba in particular within the Indian subcontinent and, eventually, beyond India. Shirdi Sai Baba has now acquired a pan-Indian and increasingly global devotional following, and the village of Shirdi has transformed into one of India’s most popular pilgrimage destinations.
In the century since Sai Baba’s death, his following has only continued to grow. Some of his followers were drawn to his reputation for possessing miraculous powers, and others for his ability to help them progress down their individual spiritual paths. During the decades that he lived in Shirdi, Sai Baba gathered both Hindu and Muslim followers from the surrounding region. What is known with some historical certainty is that the man who came to be known as Shirdi Sai Baba arrived in Shirdi in the late 1850s, when he was a young man of approximately twenty years, and he died there in 1918.
Various hagiographies composed by his devotees provide different answers to some of these key questions. Sai Baba means “saintly faither,” and little is known with historical certainty of his early years, including where and when he was born, what his birth name was, and what religion he was born into. Sai Baba was an itinerant renouncer who settled down in the village of Shirdi in western India in the mid-nineteenth century.
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