by Raza Rumi
Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya was born around the year 1243 and lived for nearly eighty-two years. Originally from Badayun (located in north-central Uttar Pradesh), he moved to Delhi with his mother in 1274 for better education. However, once in Delhi, he moved from place to place for eleven years until he settled in Ghiyaspur which was later renamed Nizamuddin after him, situated outside the main city, where the messy basti stands today.
This settlement, Nizamuddin, grew organically around his khanqah and later his tomb. Ghiyaspur, at that time, a jungle on the banks of the Sitari, an offshoot of the Jamuna, was identified as a quiet place to meditate and continue with the tariqa. Initially, he lived in a hut with a thatched roof amid fisherfolk. Later, his devotees and some nobles helped build the khanqah for him which still exists. And subsequent kings continued to embellish and add to his tomb, creating the web of buildings and facilities that define his dargah today.
The Nizamuddin Basti presents the face of the quintessential Muslim ghetto of today’s India. Congested, unkempt and stinking in parts, it retains a medieval air. Here is a burqa-clad woman and there, shops selling meat with hundreds of flies buzzing around. But its architectural gems juxtaposed with rickshaw-walas, vendors and beggars make it an amazing amalgam of the old and the new with tradition refusing to leave the cultural canvas.
Trails of the old and infirm meet the eye as one walks towards the dargah. The narrow warren-like alleys are colourful; fresh desi rose petals and incense are sold in overcrowded stalls, and sometimes, hard to miss, the sewage hits you hard. The arches, steps and even some of the walls are old.
The basti, circumambulating like concentric circles around the dargah boasts several structures of historical and cultural significance. For instance, towards the west of it is the red sandstone Jamat Khana Mosque constructed in the fourteenth century. It is a composite structure of three domes over three bays, the central one being the largest. One cannot miss the marble lotus buds that fringe the mosque’s arches, which are designed in such a manner that the square bays appear octagonal.
The octagonal shape has a particular significance. In Islamic architecture, this shape is a symbol of ascent to heaven by the Prophet and by man. The octagonal structure is a step in the mathematical series going from a square (symbolizing fixity of the earthly manifestation) to a circle (symbolizing the perfection of heaven). Traditional baptismal fonts are also of this shape. However, in the tombs erected for saints, the lower part is square with an octagonal drum inserted as a transition between the cube and the dome, to symbolize the saint as the link between man and God. The octagonal structure of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock became the model for domed sanctuaries and saints’ tombs from Morocco to China.
Within the basti, there is a now filthy but lovingly designed baoli, now almost a septic tank, closed to the public. The young men of the settlement had used it as a communal swimming pool. It was built during the reign of Sultan Feroze Tughlaq. His predecessor Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq disliked the saint Hazrat Nizamuddin and had forbidden the construction of the baoli. But the medieval labour union, which was also working on Ghiyasuddin’s fort, chose to build the baoli at night using oil lamps for illumination. Oral records suggest that the Sultan was furious at this defiance and ordered that shops should not sell oil to the people of Ghiyaspur.
Legend speaks of a miracle connected to this decree. Hazrat Nizamuddin instructed one of his favourite disciples to use the water from the baoli to light the lamps and it is said that the water began to burn as oil. This disciple was no other than the one who is buried far from the basti in a locality that is now known as Chirag Dilli after his title of Hazrat Chiragh Dilli (Delhi’s Lamp).
I walk back from the dargah, halting at the Chaunsath Khambe (sixty-four pillars), another monument behind Ghalib’s mausoleum. This lonesome structure, built centuries after Hazrat Nizamuddin’s time, is Mirza Shamsuddin’s tomb. Shamsuddin was the brother of Mirza Aziz Kokantash and their mother was the foster mother of Emperor Akbar. The monument, simple and squarish in design, was built by Akbar. I am amazed at how a few hundred metres were turning into time-travel steps. Centuries are covered with one’s humdrum visual experience.
The wine-loving Ghalib’s mazar now faces the Indian Tableeghi Jamat’s markaz where you see Muslim brethren, drunk on piety, loitering about. Tableeghis have grown in numbers and influence both in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The markaz, as I discover during subsequent visits, is also a place with its own story. The site of this present-day centre of Islamic puritanism was once a garden named Baghicha-e-Anarkali. This garden with a stunning pavilion was built by two rich Delhi nobles, the brothers, Mir Taqi and Mir Naqi. Once upon a time, the Sitari stream, branching off from the Jamuna, would lazily flow and nurture this garden. This was also a place where riverine commerce took place and these brothers must have built the set-up for a few moments of leisure amidst their businesses. Known as bangla, this must have been a modern structure in the nineteenth century. Under the rule of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal, this place came under official control and a mosque known as ‘Banglewali Masjid’ was built.
And now, this structure hosts the offices and living quarters of pious and preachy Muslims who do not necessarily share the eclecticism offered by the Sufi environs. But then, Muslims are not homogenous as a community and nurture all shades of beliefs and cultural practices. Indeed, the basti houses a disparate community that, as a whole, appears to have withdrawn unto itself and is reeling under a psychological siege defying generalizations. Nizamuddin Basti seems to have closed its ranks to the outside world, including modernity and education.
The basti, however, awakens from its slumber during the urs celebrations of Hazrat Nizamuddin and Amir Khusrau. Known as Mahboob-e-llahi (Beloved of God), Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya’s pull has lasted for centuries. The basti is also the arena where the hallmark Indo-Muslim cuisine developed and Urdu or Hindustani as the lingua franca of Northern India originated and blossomed into what we speak and hear from Delhi to Lahore and from Karachi to Lucknow.
As I pass by the kulcha tandoor, I ponder over the culinary influences that central Asians and Turks brought to India and whether the global clientele of the ubiquitous ‘Indian’ restaurants is aware that the kababs and naans they just ordered once took birth in this dilapidated basti. In Nizamuddin, meat reigns supreme. And sweets—kulfis and jalebis among others—are the essential endings to a meal (I hear jalebis were invented in Nizamuddin too; however, many say that jalebis did exist in ancient India). Several dishes, now served in dhabas and makeshift restaurants, were once the secretly guarded intellectual property of the cooks of the Sultans and Mughals. Over the centuries, these recipes have reached commoners with the increasing availability and affordability of ingredients.
The music of the basti takes on myriad shapes—from Bollywood songs to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s global stardom and the self-conscious and increasingly popular South Asian Sufi music. The qawwal families living here have contributed to the meandering journey of Indian classical music, sometimes singing the melodies of Tansen of Akbar’s court and at others, the khayal.
The basti is a relic but neither abandoned nor ruined. It breathes with real people largely dependent on the cash economy generated by thousands of devotees across India. Dargah worship thus remains a source of livelihood for the basti; it is an unwitting continuation of a community and its culture, striking for its quaintness and heart-rending for its marginality.
Hazrat Nizamuddin’s dargah compound, encompassing years of Sufi tradition, open to all, irrespective of caste, creed, religion, or class, (though not always gender), twenty-four hours a day, continues to challenge Hindu and Muslim orthodoxies. It was deviant then and it is deviant now; a bit odd in today’s age of Islamism and Hindutva. In medieval Delhi, where dominant Hindu practices must have been defined by caste hierarchies and exclusion, Hazrat Nizamuddin was the refuge of the lowly. Even as the Muslim clergy with its supremacist and mainstream discourse was justifyin
g the Sultanate rule, Hazrat Nizamuddin and his circle of Chishti saints were creating a parallel history through their acceptance of people without labels and religious identities.
Ghiyaspur, the ancestral basti grew to be an alternative society. Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya maintained a noticeable distance from the power politics of the court. Demonstrating a simple lifestyle, his patronage of music and assimilation of local and foreign traditions took him closer to the people of Delhi and outside. Thus the khanqah, and later his shrine, assumed the status of a personal space for healing and fulfilment. This is why this sanctuary is still visited by thousands of ordinary and often, afflicted souls. My outsider-ness crumbles here as the magic of the place uncannily makes me feel at home.
However, the irony of the present cannot go unnoticed. The time-warped basti has unwittingly retained its ‘alternative’ status in the otherwise ‘shining’ Delhi. The more we ignore history the more it leaps at us. In due course, I meet several Delhi residents who have never been to the dargah, let alone the ghetto known as Nizamuddin Basti.
2
Realm of the Sufis
T
he Holy Quran states: ‘He loveth them and they love Him’ (5.59). This verse encapsulates Islamic mysticism known as Sufism. A confluence of two spiritual streams—the ascetic and devotional—took birth in Sufi thought and practice. By the twelfth century, multiple Sufi orders had emerged in the Islamic world. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, coinciding with the expansion of Muslim rule, five great Sufi orders migrated from Central Asia and Persia into north India. The Chishti, Suharwardi, Naqshbandi, Qadri and Firdausi schools flourished in what we now know as Indo-Pakistan.
The Chishti school of Sufism was immensely influential in northern India and dominated Delhi. Using the Quran and teachings of Prophet Mohammad as the guiding light, a small number of mystic manuals such as the Kashf-ul-Mahjoob (The Unveiling of the Veiled) by Sheikh Ali Hujwari, formed the ideological basis of Sufi practice. Hujwari, one of the early Sufis, travelled to Lahore during Mohammad Ghazni’s time and settled there. Through his teachings we learn about the intimate, personal experience of mystical elation. Sufism is about achieving an intensely personal relationship with the Divine based on realizing God’s attributes within oneself. It focuses on loving God through the service of mankind and establishing harmony with all of creation. Known as tasawwuf in Arabic1 Sufism, it teaches ways of achieving tazkiya, purification of the mind, body and soul.
Countless Sufi establishments or khanqahs dotting the Indian spiritual landscape with deeply entrenched pilgrimage networks were the major means that brought the masses into the fold of Islam. These khanqahs blended local tradition with Islamic values and provided a caste-less, monotheistic version of spirituality where the charisma and wisdom of the pir or his descendants served as powerful elements to attract the local population. Indeed, the formal rites at these locations were backed by the inner journeys2 of the Sufis that constitute the ultimate mystical experience. At the popular level, the pir was the face of spirituality and for the ‘initiated’, the gateway to inner peace.
In medieval India, the evolution of Sufism was not an isolated occurrence. Sufism in its diverse manifestations became the locus of potential religious syncretism. India was a fertile ground for the evolution of mystic practices, given that the people of India were already oriented towards mysticism. The Vedas and the Upanishads contained tenets for spiritual practices. For instance, the Rig Veda stated that divine reality was one and that poets had assigned different names to it. The Sufis sat under the same pipal trees that were already resonating to the chants from the Chandogya Upanishad that claimed that ‘variations’ were only issues of words and names.
The innate unity of all beings as expounded by the Advaita philosophy was re-scripted in another context by the Arab philosopher, Ibn-ul-Arabi. In India, following the Persian variant, this was to be known as hama-oost. As the Mughal Prince, Dara Shikoh, and many others were to document much later, Aham Brahmasmi of Advaita Vedanta and the Wahdatul Wajud—the inspiration for Chishti saints in particular—had much in common. For centuries, these postulations have continued to bedevil and challenge extremists and purists on both sides.
Sheikh Hamid-ud-din Nagauri, a distinguished disciple of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer, did not permit his disciples to use the categories of kafir and momin as the basis of any social discrimination. For instance, Sheikh Abdul Quddus of Gangoh, a renowned Chishti saint of the sixteenth century, thus admonished his disciples in a letter:
Why this meaningless talk about the believer,
the kafir, the obedient, the sinner,
the rightly guided, the misdirected, the Muslim,
the pious, the infidel, the fire worshipper?
All are like beads in a rosary.3
In this melting, rich milieu of medieval India, the Bhakti movement was to grow and spread as the religion of the people, away from the confines of narrow rituals and institutionalized obligations to God. The Sufis of medieval India explored Hindu thought processes and its ‘peculiar’ beliefs such as selfnegation that had survived centuries. Several Sufis and their followers concluded that Ram, Krishna and the Buddha were, in all probability, prophets who preached monotheism, for in the Quran, God assures that there was never a time when He did not send prophets to people of different nations in their own language. A south Indian Bhakti folk song thus echoes feelings of universal peace and brotherhood:
Into the bosom of the one great sea
Flow streams that come from hills on every side.
Their names are various as their springs,
And thus in every land do men bow down
To one great God, though known by many names.4
Chaitanya, Kabir and Guru Nanak were aware of Sufi thought and this dynamic cross-fertilization of spirituality led to the evolution of regional languages, cults and syncretic creeds. Eminent Indian historian, Romila Thapar, who has painstakingly researched on this issue, explores how Sufi and Bhakti thought and practice coalesced at different points of history. Both strands propagated the primal belief of uniting with God, and love was articulated as the basis of such a relationship with the Creator. Similarly, during the initial stages on the mystical path, both Sufi and Bhakti movements advocated the acceptance of a guru or a pir.
However, it has always been the intervention of the ruling classes that splintered common concerns and peoples’ faith in co-existence, turning tradition into a limiting device. Today, we are faced with militant and politicized forms of the reinvented tradition in public domains across South Asia. The communal vision is inward looking and exclusive and defeats the breadth of both Sufi and Bhakti traditions. Interestingly, Sufi practice interacted as well as challenged the sociology of Hinduism as it had evolved over the centuries. However, adherence to the Islamic creed was a personal, regional and local process and did not stem from a central control or strategy.
Sufis were often castigated by Muslim orthodoxy and their traditions like using music to achieve mystical states were branded as heresy.
As Romila Thapar writes:
India, with its earlier experience of asceticism, the philosophy of the Upanishads and the devotional cults, provided a sympathetic atmosphere for the Sufis. The Sufis in India dissociated themselves from the established centres of orthodoxy, often as a protest against what they believed to be a misinterpretation of the Quran by the Ulema. They believed that the Ulema, by combining religious with political policy and cooperating with the Sultanate, were deviating from the original democratic and egalitarian principles of the Quran. The Ulema denounced the Sufis for their liberal ideas and the Sufis accused the Ulema of having succumbed to temporal temptations. Sufis were never deeply committed to the idea of rebellion since they were both, in theory and practice, isolated from those conditions which they opposed. The existence of recluses living apart from their fellows was familiar in India and Sufis were thus part of an established tradition.5 It is not surpri
sing then that Sufi pirs were as much revered by the Hindus as were Hindu gurus and ascetics, all of them being regarded by Hindus as being of the same mould.
Around 1221, Khwaja Qutubuddin Bakhtiar Kaki established one of the early khanqahs in Delhi. Kaki had been sent to Delhi by Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti or Gharib Nawaz of Ajmer. Gharib Nawaz taught that the highest form of devotion to God was, ‘to develop a river-like generosity, sun-like bounty and earthlike hospitality’. Sultan Iltutmish’s Qutub Minar perpetuates his memory.
Khwaja Bakhtiar Kaki’s chief disciple was Baba Farid, the primal Sufi poet of Punjab, whose shrine is in Pakpattan (Pakistan). Baba Farid’s khalifa was Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, who witnessed three dynasties of seven Delhi sultans rise and fall. He remained an anti-establishment figure by being detached from the court and holding a parallel peoples’ assembly each day at his khanqah. Hazrat Nizamuddin preached that ‘bringing happiness to the human heart was the essence of religion’ and often said, ‘on the day of resurrection amongst those who will be favoured most by God are the ones who have tended to a broken heart’. His successor, Hazrat Nasiruddin Mahmood, who came to be known as Chiragh Dilli, furthered the teachings of the Chishti Sufi order.
The Chishti Sufis of Delhi were generally anti-establishment and had a troubled relationship with the Sultanate. Delhi Sufis were non-conformist, peoples’ leaders and rarely met the Sultans even though the official court always sought their allegiance for legitimacy. It was not just the urban population that was getting inspired by Sufism. In fact, the message of equality of all humans also brought them into contact with the rural masses. Thus, the Sufis became more effective religious leaders for peasants than the distant Ulema. In addition to its obvious attraction for the non-conformist elements in society, Sufi thought also inspired rationalist forces, since it differed from standard religious escapism. For instance, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya dabbled in an investigation on the ‘laws of movement’ in one of his texts that follows an uncanny line of empirical thought. But Sufis were not the pioneers of this trend. They were mere extensions of the deeper philosophical Indian traditions that had blossomed over the centuries.