Word: sadhu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Busmanship. The chief sadhu and founder of the Kaliaboda math was an octogenarian, self-styled Pagala Baba (mad monk), who had achieved fame when he told a gathering that he was, at the moment of addressing them, also making a divinely simultaneous appearance in a bus traveling from Cuttack to Calcutta. On the basis of this success he claimed to be a personal incarnation of the Hindu god Brahma, and frequently threatened to destroy the universe. His worshipful believers included many rich people from Cuttack and a maharaja or two. Even the police, before breaking into the Kaliaboda math, respectfully...
...arrows, swords, spears, piles of slings and sacks full of stones ready for use as slingshot. Near by was an archery practice range with a wooden target in the shape of a human figure, shot full of holes. Quantities of gold and boxes of jewels, gifts of the sadhu's wealthy admirers, were seized. In an underground dungeon they found eight recently abducted women, including an 18-year-old girl kidnaped on her wedding night...
...trustees of the Kaliaboda math, had persuaded him to appeal the sentence. He gave in, on the ground that the "high court is a little nearer God's justice than the lower court." But the people of Cuttack wanted no more of the mad monk. Said one: "Any sadhu who comes through here runs the risk of being stoned to death...
...Disturb us and you will be turned to ashes!" cried the officiating sadhu, a holy man, as Surana's men forced their way through the ring of rubbernecks. The cops attacked a pile of cement slabs with pickaxes and dragged a young Hindu out of a freshly dug grave. A 25-year-old laborer who had become the sadhus' "disciple" only two months before, he was barely alive. But dead or alive, his act of faith would have made the hill a profitable shrine for his masters who would later pass the hat to pilgrims coming there...
...Plank. Back in 1921 Brahmachari, like Nehru, came under the spell of Mahatma Gandhi, but Brahmachari became a sadhu, or holy man. He took vows of silence and celibacy, was jailed several times by the British (once along with Nehru), set up a camp on the banks of the River Ganges to study the Hindu epics, and wrote the first 60 volumes of a 180-volume biography of the Hindu god Krishna. One day last October he cried out: "He nath Narayan!" (meaning, "Oh, Lord God," the holy man's only departure from silence). An attendant brought...