Meher Baba

Merwan Sheriar Irani was born on February 25, 1894, in Pune, then part of British India, to Sheriar and Shireen Irani, Zoroastrians of Persian descent ^[1]. His father had spent years as a wandering dervish in Iran before settling in India, marrying, and running a tea shop, and something of that restless search for God passed to the son ^[2].

Merwan grew up an ordinary, sociable boy. He attended St. Vincent's High School in Pune and later Deccan College, where he read widely, wrote poetry, and enjoyed cricket and music ^[1]. Nothing in these years suggested a religious vocation. He belonged to a Zoroastrian household in a city thick with Hindu, Muslim, and Christian life, and he moved easily among all of them.

The turning point came in 1913. Cycling home from college one day, the nineteen year old passed Hazrat Babajan, an elderly Muslim woman regarded by many in Pune as a saint, who sat beneath a neem tree near his route. She beckoned him over and kissed him on the forehead. Merwan later described the months that followed as a period in which ordinary consciousness fell away and he lost interest in food, sleep, and study ^[2]. His alarmed family sought medical help, but doctors found nothing physically wrong.

Over the following seven years Merwan sought out the figures he would later name the five Perfect Masters of the age: Babajan, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Tajuddin Baba of Nagpur, Narayan Maharaj of Kedgaon, and Upasni Maharaj of Sakori ^[2]. His most sustained contact was with Upasni Maharaj, a Hindu ascetic who, according to the traditional accounts, greeted the young man in 1915 by throwing a stone that struck his forehead. Merwan spent long stretches at Sakori through 1921, and Upasni Maharaj eventually told his own followers that the young Irani had attained the highest spiritual state ^[3].

By 1922 disciples had begun to gather around him, and they gave him the name Meher Baba, meaning compassionate father. He established a first base, Manzil-e-Meem, in Bombay, where he set his early followers a demanding regime of obedience and communal discipline ^[3]. The next year he moved the group to a stretch of ground near Ahmednagar in the Deccan, a former military camp that became Meherabad ^[1].

Meherabad grew into the center of his early work. Through the 1920s it housed, at various times, a free school open to all castes, a dispensary, and shelters for the poor, with Meher Baba himself joining in tasks such as bathing lepers and cleaning latrines ^[4]. On July 10, 1925, he stopped speaking. What his followers expected to be a short observance became permanent: he never uttered another word for the remaining forty three and a half years of his life ^[1]. From 1927 he also gave up writing, communicating by pointing to letters on an alphabet board, and from 1954 he set the board aside and relied on a vocabulary of hand gestures interpreted by his close disciples, the mandali ^[4].

Any account of Meher Baba achievements has to begin with the paradox at their center: a silent man who produced a substantial body of teaching. Points he dictated by board and gesture were compiled into the Discourses, first published in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which treat topics such as karma, reincarnation, the role of a spiritual master, and selfless service ^[5]. His principal work, God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose, appeared in New York in 1955 and lays out an elaborate map of involution and evolution, describing how consciousness passes through stone, plant, and animal forms before reaching the human state and then ascends through inner planes to union with God ^[6].

In 1931 he sailed for England aboard the SS Rajputana, on which Mahatma Gandhi was also a passenger, and the two men met and talked during the voyage ^[3]. It was the first of many journeys to Europe, the United States, and Australia. Western newspapers, intrigued by a silent Indian teacher, covered his arrivals extensively, and he drew early Western disciples in England and America who organized centers for his work, including the Meher Spiritual Center founded at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in the 1940s ^[4].

A distinctive project occupied him through the 1940s: the search for masts, a term he used for individuals so absorbed in inner experience of God that they appeared mad to ordinary observers. Traveling across India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, often to remote places, he located hundreds of such people, bathed and fed them, and sat with them privately. His English disciple William Donkin, a physician, documented these journeys in The Wayfarers, published in 1948 ^[7]. In 1954, at gatherings in Ahmednagar district, Meher Baba openly declared himself the Avatar of the age, the same divine descent, in his account, that had previously appeared as Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad ^[3].

Meher Baba never married and lived without personal property, supported and surrounded by the mandali, a core group of men and women who had pledged him lifelong obedience ^[3]. Among the closest were his brothers Jal and Adi, the disciple Mehera Irani, whom he described as his chief woman disciple, and Adi K. Irani, who served as his secretary and managed correspondence with followers around the world ^[4].

His daily habits were austere but not gloomy. Accounts by disciples describe long working days, strict punctuality, frequent fasting, and games of cards or cricket with the mandali, along with a fondness for music and for the Persian poetry of Hafiz ^[2]. He asked his followers for love and honesty rather than ritual: he established no new ceremonies, appointed no priesthood, and discouraged organized religion, telling visitors that he had come not to teach but to awaken ^[5].

Two automobile accidents marked his later decades. In May 1952, near Prague, Oklahoma, the car carrying him during an American tour went off the road, breaking his leg and arm and injuring several disciples ^[4]. In December 1956, near Satara in India, a second crash fractured his hip and left him with pain and a marked limp for the rest of his life. He told followers that the accidents were part of his spiritual work, a suffering he had chosen to bear ^[3].

Between 1949 and 1952 Meher Baba entered the phase he called the New Life. Dissolving his ashram arrangements, he set out across India with a small company of companions who traveled by foot and bullock cart, begged for food, and were bound by conditions that included cheerfulness under hardship and freedom from anger ^[3]. He framed the New Life as a life of complete helplessness and hopelessness in reliance on God, and later said its effects would live on after him.

The last decades brought both seclusion and great public gatherings. He gave darshan, the traditional offering of a master's presence, to enormous crowds in India, including meetings at Meherabad in 1954 and a vast program in Pune in 1965 ^[4]. In 1962 he convened the East West Gathering in Pune, inviting his Western followers to meet their Indian counterparts, and thousands attended ^[4]. From the late 1950s he lived mainly at Meherazad, a quiet property north of Ahmednagar, where the mandali cared for him as his health declined.

In the 1960s he also addressed the drug culture then spreading among Western youth, sending messages that LSD and similar substances were harmful and spiritually useless. Several young Americans who had written to him about psychedelics abandoned them and became followers, and his statements circulated on university campuses ^[8]. During 1968 he told the mandali that his work was finished and done to his complete satisfaction. He died at Meherazad on January 31, 1969, at the age of 74 ^[1]. His body was interred at the tomb he had prepared decades earlier on Meherabad Hill, and the anniversary of his death, observed as Amartithi, draws tens of thousands of pilgrims each year ^[4].

Meher Baba left no successor and no formal organization of clergy, yet his following endured and spread. The Avatar Meher Baba Trust, which he chartered in 1959, maintains Meherabad and Meherazad, runs schools, clinics, and pilgrim facilities, and preserves his archives ^[4]. Groups of followers, often simply called Baba lovers, meet in India, the United States, Europe, Australia, and Iran, without ritual requirements beyond remembrance of him ^[5].

His imprint on Western popular culture is easy to trace. The rock musician Pete Townshend of The Who dedicated the 1969 album Tommy to him and drew the title of the song Baba O'Riley partly from his name ^[8]. One of Meher Baba's often repeated messages to correspondents, the phrase don't worry, be happy, gained a second life when Bobby McFerrin used it as the title of his 1988 song, which reached number one on the American charts ^[8].

For anyone weighing who was Meher Baba and what his life amounted to, the scale of the claim remains the central question: few modern figures have asserted divinity so plainly while living so modestly. Scholars of new religious movements treat him as a significant bridge between Indian mysticism and the twentieth century West, and his books remain in print in many languages ^[5]. The essential Meher Baba facts, a silence kept for decades, a body of dictated metaphysics, and a community sustained by affection rather than institution, continue to draw biographers, and any serious Meher Baba biography must reckon with a man who insisted that his real work was invisible ^[6].