A black and white photo taken during the funeral of Hindu seer Sri Ramana Maharshi has been falsely shared on Facebook as that of Sai Baba of Shirdi in Maharashtra.
The viral image shows devotees and other seers conducting the last rites of Ramana Maharishi whose body is propped up on a chair and covered in garlands.
The image also has been shared on a Facebook group dedicated to Shirdi Sai Baba and captioned as "ᴏᴍ ꜱᴀɪ ʀᴀᴍᴊɪ"
Click here to see the Facebook post.
Fact Check
BOOM ran a reverse image search on Yandex and found a tweet by a Twitter account named "@indiainpix" on November 8, 2017.
The tweet reads, "The final days of a sage: Henri Cartier-Bresson captured the last photographs of Ramana Maharshi and his subsequent funeral in #Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, in April of 1950. Cartier-Bresson also bore witness to a fireball that streaked across the sky during the moment of passing."
Taking cue from this, we found that the image shows funeral photo of Hindu seer Sri Ramana Maharshi who died on April 14, 1950. A TinEye search revealed that the image is licensed to the celebrated French Surrealist Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The same image was in an article from the 1993 March/April Newsletter on the website of Arunachala Ashrama, an abroad center that promotes Maharshi's thoughts. The image was also used in the August, 2014 Newsletter (Page 2) from the official site of Ramana Maharshi.
The New York Times also published a report on the funeral of Maharshi on April 16, 1950.
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