In the case of Sai Baba, his perfect purity, asceticism, general benevolence, harmlessness, non-attachment, and other virtues evoked the respect of the saints like Devadas, Janakidas, Gangagir, Anandanath and Bidkar, that met him; and also of serious and noble minded men like Mahlsapathy and his friends Appa Bhil and Tukaram Darji.
Baba’s nature is well described as unattached and happily roaming about fearlessly and as a help to those in suffering and misery. So Mahlsapathy and his friends regarded Baba as a saint, an Acharya or Guru Deva, long before he exhibited any siddhi power.
However, so far as the general mass was concerned, it was the fact that he turned water into oil that provoked worship. And the worship took the usual form of offering flowers, fruits and scents.
Baba protested and tried to dissuade these worshippers. He asked them to go to their customary objects of worship such as the images they had in their temples and homes. But they would not listen. They felt that he was a saint, a samartha saint. The learned could quote Tukaram’s ‘Sant toch dev. Dev loch sant’ that is, ‘Saints are God. God is saints’.
The Villages told him “You are a Bolte Chalte Dev”, that is, a talking and walking God. The persistence of the mass idea that his siddhis were evidence of divine power, and therefore marked him out as a Guru Deva for worship, could not be combated or resisted.
So, alike in the case of the highly learned pandit, Sri Upasani Baba, as in the case of the uneducated rustics, the ladies of Shirdi, the chamatkars or lilas (play) are the first prompters to worship Sai as a manifestation of divinity. That is how worship begins and grows.
"I draw to Me, My man from far off or even across the seven Seas to Shirdi, like a sparrow with a string fastened to its feet"-Shirdi Sai Baba, Indian Spiritual Guru-God 