The Brahmin and the fakir: Suburban religiosity in the cult of Shirdi Sai baba

Shirdi Sai Baba (?‐1918), whose cult in Bangalore city, India, is the case study of this paper, was a Maharashtrian saint closely identified with both the Pandharpur tradition of Vaisnavite devotion and Sufi genealogies in the region. My thesis is that in the cult of Shirdi Sai Baba, the holy mendicant/saint (fakir/sant) paradigm was associated historically with non‐urban locations; the paradigm of the spiritual guide (guru,) and, in later years, the incarnation (avatar), is to be found associated with suburban and urban sites. The religious imagination of a cult is a behavioural, communicational and spatial model that creates particular kinds of topological domains in different historical and social milieus. It achieves its coherence within these contexts through certain ‘root paradigms’, cultural codes in the minds of carriers of traditions that shape relationships, practices, and life‐stances of individuals. While it is common to identify an urban location by certain social science variables, such as the size of a settlement, industrialisation or a sophisticated communication system, 1 will instead view the urban topos of Bangalore through the root paradigms of a religious cult.