Particularizing Global Gods: The Sathya Sai Baba Movement in Singapore

Abstract

This study examines the religious and spiritual experiences of devotees of the Sathya Sai Baba Movement in several ethnographic sites in Singapore. This work is primarily based on ethnographic accounts and observations of the devotee's everyday experiences in the Sai community, and provides a comparative analysis of the different Sai religious communities. In fact, the increasing level of popularity of particular NRMs in certain social contexts but not others is the result of structural conditions as well as the changing patterns of individual subjective needs. Thus, this study attempts to account for and examines the popularity and growth of the Sai Baba Movement by examining the structural and subjective variations within a given society. This thesis raises several interesting questions: Why do non-Hindus and non-Indians join the religious movement? How, and under what conditions, and to what degree has the b universalb movement successfully spread in non-Indian cultures?