An early ethnographic study of the Sathya Sai Baba movement by Lawrence Babb (1986) focuses on miracles as central moments that make the world of the devotee seem like an enchanted place. Datt ātreya's "interreligious eclecticism" is found in the Sai Baba movement: Shirdi Sai Baba was believed by his devotees to be an incarnation of Datt ātreya, and Sathya Sai Baba has presented himself as an incarnation of the same figure (Rigopoulos, 1998, p.
305), and that on one occasion Shirdi Sai Baba stated that his "religion" was Kab īr. Rigopoulos points out that the "syncretistic quality of Kab īr's life and teachings" seems to have been Sai Baba's model (1993, p. In addition, Shirdi Sai Baba has been identified with certain Ṣ ūf ī orders in Maharashtra and Karnataka (Shepherd, 1985), the medieval figure of Kab īr (Rigopoulos, 1993), and the protean Indian deity, Datt ātreya (Rigopoulos, 1998).
While most of the available literature is hagiographical in nature, scholars have studied some aspects of the movement, including the figures of Shirdi Sai Baba and Sathya Sai Baba, the middle-class constituency of Sathya Sai Baba, and the movement's pedagogical innovations. 1926), the movement became a transnational phenomenon in the late twentieth century. Through one of the inheritors of his charisma, Sathya Sai Baba (b.
It owes its origin to Shirdi Sai Baba (d. The Sai Baba movement is perhaps the most popular modern South Asian religious movement.