THE STANDING BABAS
The Standing Babas really exist!

The Standing Babas

The Standing Babas - They really exist! The Standing Babas are some of the most memorable characters in the novel Shantaram. These are the men in Bombay who have taken a vow never to sit or lye down for the rest of the their lives. They stand for years and sleep suspended. According to the novel, the Standing Babas live in constant pain because their legs never get a rest. In the first five to ten years, their legs swell out of proportion and become deformed. Later on, their legs become thinner and thinner until it seems that only the bones are there. The intriguing question for me is whether the Standing Babas are fictional characters or not. Do these holy men really exist in Bombay or were they only part of the writer's imagination? Searching for the Standing Babas on the web brought up surprisingly little relevant material. Those few results are almost all connected with the publicity the book Shantaram has received. If this is really a group of people who exist in India, then Roberts has certainly been the one who introduced them to the world. I imagine that people now travel to Bombay and look around looking for the Standing Babas.

Having found almost nothing on them on the web, I asked around some of the friends from South India. Some of them, not all though, have indeed heard of these holy man. They said that the Standing Babas actually just stand all day long, meditating in a standing position. They never sit down and sleep standing. This information came to me as a surprise because I was beginning to think that the Standing Babas were a fiction. But having heard this from several people, none of whom ever read Shantaram made me a believer. So now I wonder what the real Standing Babas thought of the novel. After all, they lived their lives in relative peace until a foreigner came and made them into celebrities. Obviouslly, this will be much worse (or better, depending on how the Standing Babas view their new-found fame themselves) after the movie comes out with Johnny Depp as the lead character. Stephen Bekes -- 2005 If you know something substantial about the Standing Babas, please let us know and we will put it up here. You may submit an entire article and we will post it here. You can see comments already posted by our visitors at our The Standing Babas - Reader's Comments page. Shantaram - the novel Standing Babas - reader's comments Shantaram - the website Book Reviews - Shantaram The Da Vinci Code - the novel Books on Chinese Calligraphy: The Upright Brush