One of the most powerful holy men in India presides over the world’s biggest ashram, Prasanthi Nilayam, or Abode of Peace, in a remote town located in a barren corner of Andhra Pradesh, a desperately poor state in a desperately poor country. The town boasts a shiny planetarium, two hospitals that treat patients for free, a college, a music school and immaculate, colorful playgrounds. Luxury apartment buildings are springing up on land that just a few decades ago was covered with ramshackle mud huts. And there’s a brand-new airport to serve the wealthier devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, a 75-year-old south Indian man with a big bushy Afro and a warm smile.
Somewhere between 10 million and 50 million people worship Sai Baba as God incarnate, and they stream into Puttaparthi from six continents, sleeping in one of the ashram’s 10,000 beds or at one of the town’s many guesthouses. Meanwhile, the growing number of ex-devotees who decry their former master as a sexual harasser, a fraud and even a pedophile has hardly put a dent in his following, though their voices are getting louder.
“Sai Baba was my God — who dares to refuse God? He was free to do whatever he wanted to do with me; he had my trust, my faith, my love and my friendship; he had me in totality,” says Iranian-American former follower Said Khorramshahgol. What Sai Baba chose to do with him, Khorramshahgol says, was to repeatedly call him into private interviews and order him to drop his pants and massage his penis. Other former devotees contend Sai Baba did even more. No matter — in this part of the world, faith is absolute. Believers don’t refuse God, and they don’t question him.
