Soham Baba

In January, on hearing of a news conference called by a naga sanyasi, one expected beards and dreadlocks, ash-smeared barren bodies, martial bearings and wisps of smoke from chillums. Instead on view was a black Mercedes, security guards from foreign shores and a lot of silver plating, from the throne to the umbrella, from the hand-rest to kamandalu (water pot). The sadhu was clad in glamorous saffron robes.

Soham Baba, born in Bengal, became a naga sanyasi and later left for Holland, where he is now based. He was in town again recently. He had put up at a devotee’s apartment in Golf Green with his chelas where he performed an abhishek.

Lounging in the air-conditioned room after the ritual, the sanyasi, a tall, robust, handsome man with a tonsured head who seemed to be in his 40s, said he did not believe in physical age. “We have to do our sradh before we are initiated, or reborn.” Mantra, koupin (loincloth), kanthi, chutki and bibhuti (ash) are the five things an initiate is handed. He shows another picture of himself in the Himalayas with a frail naga sadhu, one of his 21 gurus who, he says, stood with his right hand raised for 56 years. “Two of his fingers wore off.”

But why is he clothed? “Bill Clinton, Gorbachev, Putin… they are all my disciples. This is a matter of status,” he explains. Soham Baba Mission, he says, has centres in 127 countries. It is headquartered in Waalwijk, Holland. “But I had to set up two regional centres in Miami, US, and Kawasaki, Japan.”

The head of the Miami office, Charita Ramnathsingh, is travelling with him. She is very pretty. As was his “bhairavi” Aparna Giri. Baba’s eyes are wistful, turning over the pages of books with their pictures together. “She died a few years ago. Since then, my work pressure has doubled.”

He is the mahamandalesvara of Juna akhada, the 1008 Shri Shri Soham Babaji. “No one can become a naga sadhu unless I announce it,” says the soft-spoken Bengali sadhu.

He visits seven caves, five in glacial terrains. But he walks not the Himalayas so much as he jets across the globe. His activities are photographed and published as books at his own printing facility.

Though the Clintons or Gorbachevs are not there, he is seen in Masai Mara jungle with cannibals, with orphans in Bosnia, in Egypt with scavenger kids, in Brazil with child prostitutes…. Baba pauses at pictures of men coming out of a hole. “In Ceausescu’s time in Romania, people hid underground. They would come out on hearing I had come with food.” Ceausescu’s rule ended in 1989.

Baba’s work with acid burn victims in Turkey, Balochistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, he says, has earned him a threat from fundamentalists. “I get Z category security,” he says, though his name is not on the list of Calcutta police’s Special Branch that offers Z-category security here.

He has worked for Aila victims in the Sunderbans too.

What little is known of his “purbashram” (life before turning a sage) had to be culled from devotees. He was born in Rasulpur, Burdwan, of a schoolteacher father. “His father died a few years ago and he came and did a huge yajna. (Actress) Madhabi Mukherjee and (singer) Anuradha Paudwal had come,” one says. He was introduced as a surgeon in Town Hall. It is known that he went south before travelling abroad but he would not give out details of his medical accomplishments. “These things don’t go down well in the world of sadhus,” he says.