Devraha Baba

Devraha Baba (died 19 June 1990), also spelled Deoraha baba[2] was an Indian Siddha Yogi saint who lived beside the Yamuna river in Mathura. He was known as "ageless Yogi".

Devraha Baba
Devaha Baba
Personal
Born
Village- Umariya District - Basti UP
Died19 June 1990 [1]
Vrindavan, Uttar Pradesh
Resting placeVrindavan, Uttar Pradesh
ReligionSiddha Yogi saint (Hindu)
TempleDevararahi Mandir (Deoria), Sugriv Qila (Ayodhya)
Senior posting
Based inIndia
SuccessorSri Purushottamacharyaji, Devdasji (Bade Sarkar), Devraha Hans Baba

Life

Little is known about the early life of Devraha Baba, beyond that in the first half of the 20th century he visited Maiel, a town 20 km south west of Salempur, Uttar Pradesh. Here he started living atop a machan, a high platform made of wooden logs, situated 3 km from the town on the banks of Sarayu river. The place was near Dewar in Deoria district, thus local people started calling him Devraha Baba or Deoria Baba, with Baba being an honorific for saints or old men. Thereafter he shifted to Vrindavan, where again he lived atop a machan on the banks of Yamuna river for the rest of his years.[3][4]

Devraha Baba was a hermit from Vrindava.[5] He was considered to be a "spiritual guide to everyone from a pauper to the most powerful ... above narrow confines of caste and community."[6] Village people as well as important personalities waited for hours to have a glimpse or darshan of him.[7] He received visits from politicians seeking his blessings at the time of general elections, including Indira Gandhi, Buta Singh,[7] and Rajiv Gandhi.[8] Rajiv Gandhi and his wife Sonia Gandhi visited his ashram on the eve of the 1989 elections.[9] He used to bless the devotees with his feet.[10]

He lived on a 12-foot-high (3.7 m) wooden platform near the river and wore a small deerskin.[11] A barricade of wooden planks hid his semi-naked body from his devotees, and he came down only to bathe in the river.[12] Professor Biswajit (Bob) Ganguly, an Indian born Canadian Environmental Scientist was also blessed by Devraha Baba in the great Kumbha Mela in Allahabad, India in the year 1989.

Notes
  1. "Baba in the report who makes Congress squirm". The Indian Express. 8 December 2009. Retrieved 20 December 2012.
  2. Lutgendorf, Philip p. 296
  3. "Personalities: Devraha Baba". Deoria district official website. Retrieved 10 May 2014.
  4. Cohen, Lawrence, p. 284
  5. Jaffrelot, Christophe (2010). Religion, caste, and politics in India. New Delhi: Primus Books. p. 240. ISBN 9789380607047.
  6. "Devraha Baba's indictment enrages seers in Ayodhya". The Times of India. 2 December 2009. Retrieved 18 December 2012.
  7. Cohen Lawrence pp. 283–285
  8. Dasgupta, Swapan (11 December 2009). "Beyond the Old Books – Modern India and the discourse of faith". The Telegraph (Calcutta). Retrieved 19 December 2012.
  9. Kidwai, Rasheed (2003). Sonia, a biography. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. p. 131.
  10. Jaffrelot, Christophe (2012). Copeman, Jacob; Ikegame, Aya (eds.). The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York and Oxon: Routledge. p. 83. ISBN 9781136298066.
  11. Tully, Mark (2004). Moraes, Dom (ed.). The Penguin book of Indian journeys. New Delhi: Penguin India. pp. 101–105. ISBN 9780141007649.
  12. Crossette, Barbara (22 November 1989). "India to Begin Voting ; Today on Fate of the Nation and the House of Nehru". The New York Times.
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gollark: I guess.
gollark: No. You still only have one mean, which is going to be somewhere between the peaks.
gollark: Not *necessarily*, a distribution can have multiple peaks.
gollark: Equivalently, if you take a random person you know nothing about, the probability that their height is between, say, μ-3σ and μ-2σ (154cm to 164cm) is lower than the probability of it being between μ-2σ and μ-σ (164cm to 173cm).

References
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