Journey
Chishti silsila
A silsila is a chain of teachers, and the Chishti chain became a chain of towns: Ajmer, Mehrauli, Ajodhan, Delhi again, Gulbarga. Each shaikh appointed a successor and each successor's grave became a shrine, so a lineage of authority is also a route you can walk. Five towns and seven generations, and every one of the graves is still visited on the saint's death anniversary.
Stops (11)
- Ajmer Sharīf · Muʿīnuddīn Chishtī at Ajmer — the first
He settled here about 1192 and set the order's rules: no attendance at courts, no property, an open langar, and samā — music as a means of devotion, which every other order disputed. It is now the busiest shrine of its kind in the subcontinent and draws Hindus and Sikhs as well as Muslims.
- Qutb Sāhib, Mehrauli · Quṭbuddīn Bakhtiyār Kākī at Mehrauli — the second
The successor who took the order into Delhi, dying in 1235 reportedly during a samā gathering. His shrine at Mehrauli sits among the tombs of sultans and emperors who wanted to be buried near him — including the last Mughal, whose intended grave there is empty because he died in Rangoon.
- Pākpattan (Ajodhan) · Bābā Farīd at Ajodhan — the third
Farīduddīn Ganj-i-Shakar moved the order out of the imperial capital to a Punjab river crossing, and wrote in Punjabi. His verses are the earliest substantial literature in the language and 134 of them are in the Guru Granth Sāhib, which is how a Chishti shaikh became Sikh scripture.
- Hazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi · Nizāmuddīn Auliyā at Delhi — the fourth
He ran his khānqāh at Ghiyaspur for about fifty years without once attending a court, through the reigns of seven sultans. Amīr Khusrau, his disciple, is buried at his feet and gave qawwali its musical form. The shrine is where that form has been performed continuously ever since.
- Chirag Dilli Dargah, New Delhi · Naṣīruddīn, the Lamp of Delhi — the fifth
Chirāgh-i-Dehlī was Nizāmuddīn's principal successor and the last great Delhi Chishti. After him the order's centre shifted: Muhammad bin Tughluq's forced transfer of the capital in the 1320s scattered the Delhi khānqāhs into the Deccan, which is where the chain goes next.
- Gulbarga / Kalaburagi · Gesūdarāz at Gulbarga — the Deccan
Bandanawāz Gesūdarāz moved south in 1398 and settled at the Bahmani capital, where his shrine became the spiritual anchor of the sultanate and of Deccani Islam generally. He also wrote in Dakhni, giving the emerging language one of its first literary bodies.
- Zainuddin Shirazi Dargah, Khuldabad · Zainuddīn Shīrāzī at Khuldābād — the Deccan again
A Chishti master of the Deccan whose shrine at Khuldābād drew the burials around it, including Aurangzeb's — the emperor asked to be buried near a saint's feet, under a plain open grave paid for by his own copying of Qur'ans. A Chishti tomb town four kilometres from a Jyotirlinga.
- Pīrān Kaliyar Sharīf · The Sabiri line at Pīrān Kaliyar
Alāuddīn Sābir Kaliyarī, Farīd's nephew and successor, founded the Sabiri branch of the order here on the Ganga canal below Hardwar. It places a major Chishti shrine inside the Gangetic pilgrimage network, and its urs draws Hindus in numbers comparable to Muslims.
- Kachhauchha Sharif, Ambedkarnagar · The Ashrafi line at Kachhauchha
Makhdūm Ashraf Jahāngīr Simnānī, a fourteenth-century shaikh said to have abandoned a throne in Persia, founded the Chishti-Ashrafi branch here in Awadh. The shrine is a centre for healing and exorcism, which is a large part of what many dargahs actually do.
- Fatehpur Sīkrī · Salīm Chishtī at Fatehpur Sīkrī — the emperor
Akbar walked to Ajmer and consulted the Chishti hermit Salīm at Sikri, and when a son was born he built an entire imperial capital around the hermitage and named the boy Salīm. The city was abandoned within twenty years; the saint's marble tomb inside it is still visited.
- Qawwālī · Qawwālī — the sung assembly
The music of these shrines rather than of any court: a party of singers with harmonium and dholak working Persian, Hindavi and Punjabi verse by repetition and rising pitch. Chishti shaikhs defended the samāʿ against jurists who held music unlawful, which is why the form belongs to this chain of tombs and not to the Suhrawardi one.