Shirdi Sai Baba (d. 1918) and Anandamayi Ma (1896–1982) were highly revered saints of the modern era who presented strikingly divergent socio-religious personas. Shirdi Sai Baba stands out for his interreligious ambiguity: his parentage was unknown and his religious origins were disputed, but he followed practices from both Hinduism and Islam, had devotees from both religions, and could be readily approached through Hindu and Islamic traditions. Anandamayi Ma, by contrast, was definitively a Brahmin, acculturated to orthodox ways even as she sometimes ignored them. If her behavior was often idiosyncratic and her spiritual presence was felt, like Sai Baba's, to transcend any religion, she nevertheless honored conservative traditions, with her ashrams running according to Brahminical rules that suited her many old, high-caste disciples—but which could alienate more ordinary devotees and the expanding number of foreign seekers who came to her.
The two saints, moreover, behaved differently as holy persons in...