Place · samadhi shrine · India
Shirdi
The samadhi town in Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra, holding the shrine of Sai Baba of Shirdi (c.1838-1918) — the mystic of unknown origin and uncertain religious affiliation (Hindu, Muslim or both) who taught at Shirdi for sixty years and became one of the most widely venerated 20th-century subcontinental saints. The 1917 Dwarkamai mosque where he lived and the Samadhi Mandir (1922) built over his grave are the pilgrim centres. The temple trust is the second-wealthiest in India after Tirupati, with offerings of several hundred crores annually. Shirdi's trans-sectarian pilgrimage traffic — Hindu and Muslim equally — is the most clearly working survival of the composite Deccan devotional culture.
- Function
- Burial and funerary
- Tradition
- Sai tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.766, 74.477
Worth knowing
Sai Baba's origins — his birth, name, religion — are genuinely unknown, and he seems to have kept them so deliberately. He lived in a disused mosque he called Dwarkamai and was buried in a Hindu temple.
Connections (2)
- PilgrimageTryambaka / Trimbakeshwar
Trimbakeshwar and Shirdi are routinely combined in Maharashtra pilgrimage packages although they belong to quite different streams: one an orthodox Shaiva jyotirlinga at a river source, the other the samadhi of a twentieth-century figure whom Hindus and Muslims both claim and whose own religion is unknown. Their pairing is a fair description of Maharashtra's actual devotional geography, in which the two kinds of shrine have always shared the same pilgrims and the same roads.
- Samadhi atSāī Bābā of Shirdi
Sāī Bābā died in 1918 and was buried in an unfinished temple a devotee had built for a Krishna image, which is how a faqir came to lie under a Hindu shrine. The dhuni he lit in the mosque across the lane has been kept burning since the 1850s, and its ash is still the prasād.
On these journeys
Sources
Hindu pilgrimage sites in India — Wikipedia
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