Love All, Serve All and Decolonize All: Prime Minister Modi’s Embrace of Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s Message
- Life changes. The world changes. And yet, at the start of Sai Baba’s birth centenary year, his message inspires millions around the world.
Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s centenary celebrations have started in Puttaparthi with a galaxy of leaders and devotees in attendance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan, Sachin Tendulkar, and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan were among those who spoke on the occasion; right from the heart, and from the strength of personal associations and memories which have clearly left a mark on them.
As someone with such personal and familial memories of Baba myself, I felt a sense of gratitude and reverence, and indeed a sense of “being there” again even while watching the livestream from far away. I was just a teenager in the 1980s when my father and mother became his devotees. In 1986, on Baba’s birthday, my mother, Jamuna, staged a performance of the play Sri Krishna Tulabharam before an audience of hundreds of thousands of people in his presence (she was Satyabhama, naturally).
In the years that followed, my father, Professor J.V. Ramana Rao, a wildlife zoologist, was chosen to serve on the Academic Council of the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning. He would walk in his convocation regalia behind Baba each year. As for my mother, she had a special story of her own too; when she walked into the Lok Sabha in 1989 to take her oath of office, she wore a sari gifted to her by Baba (and it got prominently discussed in the New Delhi press the following day!).
My father had hoped that I would join Baba’s college. I hesitated, not wanting to give up the chance of a college experience in a real city rather than in an ashram. As if to please teens and parents alike, Baba told us he would see to my education anyway – in a big city at that. I jumped at the chance, not realizing college life involved not just fun and friends, but actual studying, slogging, and hard surviving too.
In two years, I realized I was a failure. I could not pass my exams, nor could I tell my parents, nor Baba. I quit. I drifted. I avoided Puttaparthi. But Baba would not go away. The thought somehow existed in my mind, even at rock bottom, that I had a father who walked by Baba’s side as an elder professor. And somehow, I made it through the second time around, in a new path very different from engineering.
I am now about as old as my father was when he became a devotee of Baba’s. I have seen, year after year, students come into college in different stages of understanding and preparation for life. I have talked with them and perhaps grown with them through years of uncertainty and change; the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war, the rise of Silicon Valley and the Indian American diaspora, the COVID 19 pandemic, the election and re-election of Donald Trump, and now, the years of strangeness and uncertainty in a sharply and loudly (even if mostly online for now) Indophobic America. In this time, the nature of the trips home had to change too, inevitably. There was no Baba to go to in person after 2011. My father in 2014. My mother in 2023.
Life changes. The world changes. And yet, those words I saw for the first time on a hopeful morning in 1986 still live and inspire millions around the world, do they not?
Love All, Serve All. Baba’s message. Expressed in a thousand different ways in the auspices of his “samsthaanam,” his legacy and his institutions. In the fire and smoke and sounds of traditional yajnas and Vedic chanting, Love All, Serve All. In the unforgettable concerts there by maestros like M.S. Subbulakshmi, Zakir Hussain, and Whistle Wizard Siva Prasad, Love All, Serve All.In the children’s plays celebrating saints and gods and teachers, Love All, Serve All. In the hospitals, water supply projects, medical camps, seva dal projects, Love All, Serve All. In the logo of the Sathya Sai organization with its cross, “Om,” and universal religious symbols, Love All, Serve All.
And for me, in my journey from engineering dropout to media studies teacher and writer, in my own way, I hope, Love All, Serve All, too.
On that note, it would be appropriate to offer one higher-education idea beyond just a personal tribute. If Prime Minister Modi believes, as I am sure those steeped in bhakthi and seva often do, that there are no coincidences in this world, he might pause to wonder how it was that the topic he addressed right before his Puttaparthi visit at the Ramnath Goenka Memorial Lecture was about Macaulay and decolonization.
All around the world, as pain and frustration at inequities and insanities rooted in colonial and postcolonial travesties grow, it has become almost a reflex to justify anything, even highly organized and destructive acts of violence as “decolonization.” As the term picks up steam in Indian political discourse, it is important to remember that even at the height of the anti-colonial struggle, the world looked to India and Gandhi for a view of decolonization that would take us beyond cycles of hate and revenge.
And even in the years that independent India fought its toughest postcolonial battles under the shadow of the Cold War, the world still looked to places like Prashanthi Nilayam, to people like Sri Sathya Sai Baba, for truth, peace, non-violence, love, dharma. If India, under Prime Minister Modi, starting in this centenary year of Baba’s birth, wishes to decisively decolonize, it will do well to look to Puttaparthi’s message and legacy. A new global program in decolonization studies there, anchored in its spirit of universal love, informed by the current initiatives in Indian Knowledge Systems education, and enriched with programs in creative and media arts, could give to many more young Indian (and foreign) students what one small peasant boy growing up in arid, rural Rayalaseema in colonial times managed to do, and apparently still manages to do even now. Sathyam gnyanam anantham brahma.
Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He is the author of “Becoming a Global Audience: Longing and Belonging in Indian Music Television” (Peter Lang, 2003), “The Mythologist: A Novel” (Penguin India, 2010), and “Bollywood Nation: India through its Cinema (Penguin India,” 2013), “Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence “ (BluOne Ink, 2024) and “The Guru Within” (in progress).