Shirdi Sai Baba

About

Which Sai Baba, and what to look at Everything here is Shirdi Sai Baba, the fakir who lived at Shirdi in Maharashtra until 1918 and is shown seated with his right hand raised. He is not Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi, who died in 2011 and is shown standing in a saffron robe with a full head of hair. The two get confused often enough that it is worth checking before you buy. If the person you are buying for says Om Sai Ram and keeps Thursday, the Shirdi form is the one they mean. You will see the name written as Sai Baba, Saibaba, Sai Nath and Shirdi Sai, and the object called a murti, moorti, murthi or simply a statue. In Hindi and Marathi people ask for Sai Baba ki murti. They all mean the same seated figure. The posture is fixed, so judge the face and the hands Almost every Sai Baba murti made anywhere is the same seated form: one leg crossed over the other, the right hand raised, the left at rest. That is not a stylistic choice. It is how he sat at Dwarkamai, the old mosque he lived in for sixty years beside the dhuni he kept burning there, and it is the image every devotee already carries. The raised hand is abhaya mudra, the gesture of reassurance. Because the pose barely varies between makers, the pose tells you nothing about quality. What separates a good murti from a poor one is the face and the hands, and they are the first things a cheap process loses. The eyes should be open and level rather than smoothed shut, the beard and the folded cloth should hold their edges, and the fingers of the raised hand should be separated rather than fused into a mitten. Judge on the close photograph, not the wide one. What we make, and what we do not Three constructions, all at household scale. Solid brass from three to six inches, for a mandir shelf or a puja that involves water. Gold plated pocket temples, which are shrines that close, under two thousand. And a white and gold piece in marble dust, under ten thousand, for anyone who wants the marble look without a quarrie