Journey
Major dargahs
Thirty-six dargahs across the subcontinent, from the eleventh century to the nineteenth. The orders differ sharply — Chishtis refused courts and used music, Suhrawardis took state patronage, Qalandars refused everything — but the shrines converge on one practice: a tomb, a langar, an annual urs, and a crowd that does not sort itself by religion.
Stops (36)
- Data Darbār, Lahore · ʿAlī Hujwīrī — Lahore, the oldest of them
Data Darbār holds the eleventh-century Sufi who wrote the first Persian treatise on Sufism composed in the subcontinent. It is the earliest of the great South Asian dargahs and its langar feeds several thousand a day. Muʿīnuddīn Chishtī is said to have sat forty days here before going on to Ajmer.
- Ajmer Sharīf · Muʿīnuddīn Chishtī — Ajmer
The busiest shrine of its kind in the subcontinent. Akbar walked to it barefoot from Agra in 1570; its urs draws Hindus and Sikhs alongside Muslims, and the qawwali sung in its courtyard is the form's oldest continuous performance context anywhere.
- Qutb Sāhib, Mehrauli · Quṭbuddīn Bakhtiyār Kākī — Mehrauli
The Chishti who brought the order into Delhi, dying in 1235 reportedly in a state of ecstasy during samā. Sultans and emperors had themselves buried around him for six centuries, including an enclosure meant for Bahadur Shah Zafar that stands empty because he died in Rangoon.
- Pākpattan (Ajodhan) · Bābā Farīd — Pākpattan
Ajodhan on the Sutlej, where the order left the capital for a river crossing and its shaikh wrote in Punjabi. Once a year the Bahishtī Darwāza, the gate of paradise, is opened for the urs, and the crush of pilgrims passing through it has repeatedly killed people.
- Hazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi · Nizāmuddīn Auliyā — Delhi
Fifty years of a khānqāh in the sultanate's capital run by a man who attended no sultan's court, with a langar open to all comers. Amīr Khusrau lies at his feet. Qawwali has been sung here continuously for seven hundred years.
- Bahāuddin Zakariya & Rukn-e-Ālam · Bahāuddīn Zakariyā — Multan
The Suhrawardi centre from the 1220s, taking the opposite line to the Chishtis on every point: accept state patronage, hold property, keep the order solvent and close to power. Bahāuddīn Zakariyā died rich and the order stayed rich. Its domed brick tombs, Rukn-e-Alam's above all, set the pattern for shrine architecture across Sindh and the Punjab for four centuries.
- Uch Sharīf · Uch Sharīf — the Suhrawardi town
At the Chenab–Sutlej junction, a whole town of Suhrawardi shrines where the Jahāniyān Jahāngasht and Bībī Jawindī tombs stand half-collapsed in glazed blue tilework — several of them taken by a flood in 1817 that cut the river through the site. What is left is the finest surviving group of Multani-style tomb building anywhere, and it is still eroding.
- Sehwan Sharīf · Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar — Sehwan
On the Indus, where the dhamāl is danced to drums every evening and the crowd includes Hindu Sindhis who call him Jhūlelāl. The Qalandars were the antinomian wing of Sufism — wandering, unshaven, indifferent to law. A suicide bombing here in 2017 killed about ninety; the dhamāl resumed the next evening.
- Bhit Shah · Shāh Abdul Latīf — Bhit Shah
The shrine of Sindh's great poet, whose Shāh jo Risālo is organised into thirty surs named for musical modes and tells the province's tragic folk romances as Sufi allegory. Faqirs sing the Risālo at the shrine nightly, which is how most Sindhis know the text.
- Bulleh Shah, Kasur · Bulleh Shāh — Kasur
The Punjabi poet whose kāfīs are sung on both sides of the border by qawwals, folk singers and film composers. A Sayyid who took an Arain gardener as his master and was ostracised for it, he wrote against clerics and caste with unmatched contempt. The clerics refused him the main graveyard.
- Gulbarga / Kalaburagi · Gesūdarāz — Gulbarga
Bandanawāz moved south to the Bahmani capital in 1398 and his shrine became the spiritual anchor of Deccani Islam. He also wrote in Dakhni, giving the emerging language one of its first literary bodies — a Sufi shrine that is also a linguistic origin point.
- Khuldābād · Khuldābād — the tomb town
A Deccan Chishti burial town four kilometres from the Grishneshwar Jyotirlinga, holding Zainuddīn Shīrāzī, Burhānuddīn Gharīb and a dozen other shaikhs of the order that came south when the capital moved in the 1320s. Aurangzeb asked to be buried here at a saint's feet, in an open grave paid for from money he earned copying Qur'ans by hand.
- Fatehpur Sīkrī · Salīm Chishtī — Fatehpur Sīkrī
Akbar built an imperial capital around a hermitage after the saint predicted a son, and named the boy Salīm. The city was abandoned within twenty years for lack of water; the marble screen tomb inside it is still tied with threads by women asking for children.
- Pīrān Kaliyar Sharīf · Pīrān Kaliyar Sharīf
Alāuddīn Sābir, Bābā Farīd's nephew and successor, founded the Sabiri branch of the Chishti order here on the Ganga canal below Hardwar. It places a major Sufi shrine inside the Gangetic pilgrimage network, a few hours from Haridwar's ghats, and its urs draws Hindu pilgrims in numbers comparable to Muslim ones — which is the point people come to make about it.
- Charār-e-Sharīf · Nund Rishi — Charār-e-Sharīf
The shrine of Sheikh Nūruddīn Nūrānī, founder of the Kashmiri Rishi order, whose verse is in vernacular Kashmiri rather than Persian and whose tradition drew directly on Lal Ded, the Śaiva yogini of the previous generation. The wooden shrine burned during an army siege of militants in 1995 and has been rebuilt; the loss is still argued about.
- Bihar Sharīf · Sharafuddīn Manerī — Bihar Sharīf
The Firdausi shaikh's khānqāh sits a short distance from Nālandā's ruins — a Sufi centre growing on the ground of a fallen Buddhist university, in the same district and on the same roads. His letters, the Maktūbāt-i Sadī, are among the most widely copied Sufi texts produced in India and were read as far away as the Deccan.
- Maner Sharif, Patna district · Maner Sharīf — the Firdausi khānqāh
The elder seat of the Firdausi lineage west of Patna, with the Barī Dargāh of Makhdūm Yahyā Manerī and the Chhotī Dargāh, a Mughal-era domed tomb standing in a tank. The order stayed small and stayed put, unlike the Chishtis who spread.
- Phulwari Sharif, Patna · Phulwāri Sharīf — khānqāh and seminary
An eighteenth-century Patna khānqāh whose family also ran a madrasa, so a Sufi lineage and a teaching institution occupied the same compound for generations — the arrangement that most north Indian Islamic learning actually took, rather than the separate seminary. Its scholars were active in the Khilafat movement, and the khānqāh's library survives.
- Sarkhej Roza · Ahmad Khattū — Sarkhej Roza
Outside Ahmedabad, a shrine, tomb, palace and tank in one complex, built in the fifteenth century with no arches or ornament — trabeate stone in the Gujarati manner. Le Corbusier compared its proportions to the Acropolis, which is why architects come to a dargah.
- Haji Ali Dargah, Mumbai · Haji Ali — the causeway shrine
A tomb on an islet off Worli reached by a causeway that floods at high tide, so pilgrims are cut off twice a day. The saint was a Bukhara merchant who is said to have given away his wealth before sailing; the shrine is among the most visited in Mumbai by every community.
- Makhdoom Ali Mahaimi, Mahim · Makhdūm ʿAlī Māhimī — Mahim
A fourteenth-century Konkani Muslim scholar who wrote a Qur'anic commentary in Arabic and served as a qāzī. His annual urs is opened by the Mumbai police, who have presented the first chādar every year for decades — a shrine woven into the city's civic calendar.
- Nāgore Dargah · Shāhul Hamīd — Nāgore
A Coromandel coast dargah whose five minarets were funded in part by the Maratha raja of Thanjavur, and whose festival still includes a Hindu-sponsored procession. Tamil Muslim seafaring carried the saint outward: shrines to Shāhul Hamīd stand in Penang, Singapore, Kedah and Sri Lanka, built by the same trading families who built this one.
- Beemapally Dargah, Thiruvananthapuram · Beemapally — the shrine of a woman
Kerala's principal women-associated Islamic shrine, holding Sayyidunnisa Beema Beevi and her son. The ten-day Chandanakudam festival brings enormous crowds carrying earthen pots of sandalwood paste to the tomb, with firewalking and a fair; its participants are not all Muslim, and the shrine is one of the few in India whose principal saint is a woman.
- Cheraman Juma Masjid, Kodungallur · Cheramān Juma Masjid — Kodungallur
By local tradition the oldest mosque in India, founded in the seventh century by companions of the Prophet at the invitation of a Chera king said to have converted. The building was in Kerala temple form — tiled roof, lamp, no dome — until recent rebuilding replaced it.
- Hazrat Shāh Jalāl, Sylhet · Shāh Jalāl — Sylhet
The shrine that anchors the Islamisation of the Surma valley, holding a fourteenth-century saint who came with a band of followers whose descendants populate the region's Muslim genealogies. Ibn Battuta went out of his way to meet him and left a description.
- Furfura Sharif, Hooghly · Furfura Sharīf — the Bengal centre
The principal shrine of Bengal's Chishti community in Hooghly, whose pirzada families have carried political weight in West Bengal since the early twentieth century. Its urs draws several hundred thousand, and it is a working institution rather than a monument.
- Dewa Sharif, Barabanki · Dewa Sharīf — Hāji Wāris ʿAli Shāh
A nineteenth-century Barabanki saint who took disciples without asking their religion, refused to convert anyone, and travelled to Europe and the Hijaz. Ya Wāris appears on flags across eastern Uttar Pradesh wherever his followers are. The urs includes a throwing of colour much like Holi, which is the sort of thing that makes this shrine contested and popular at once.
- Ghazi Miyan, Bahraich · Ghāzī Miyān — Bahraich
The most contested dargah in the repository: a shrine to a warrior said to have died fighting in 1034, whose urs is attended overwhelmingly by lower-caste Hindus and which Hindu organisations have repeatedly tried to stop. Both the devotion and the objection are longstanding.
- Kachhauchha Sharif, Ambedkarnagar · Makhdūm Ashraf — Kachhauchha
A fourteenth-century shaikh said to have left a throne in Simnan, and the founder of the Chishti-Ashrafi branch. The shrine is a centre for healing and exorcism, which is a large part of what dargahs across north India actually do day to day.
- Hazrat Shah Turkman, Old Delhi · Shāh Turkmān — Old Delhi
A thirteenth-century saint of the quarter that takes its name from him — Turkman Gate, one of the old gates of Shahjahanabad. Razia Sultan's grave is a few minutes' walk away in the same lanes: the only woman to rule Delhi, lying in an unmarked enclosure squeezed between houses, which is most of what her reign got in the end.
- Matka Pir Dargah, New Delhi · Matka Pīr — New Delhi
A thirteenth-century dargah where devotees leave earthen pots, so the shrine stands in a landscape of thousands of matkas stacked in heaps against its walls. Its founder is said to have refused a merchant's offer of gold and asked for a pot of sugar instead, and the pots left since have been the memory of that refusal.
- Qadam Sharif, Old Delhi · Qadam Sharīf — Old Delhi
Firuz Shah Tughlaq built this for his son, around a stone said to bear the Prophet's footprint that he had acquired. A relic imported into Delhi became the centre of a tomb built for a prince who predeceased his father.
- Sarmad Shaheed Dargah, Old Delhi · Sarmad Shahīd — Old Delhi
An Armenian Jewish merchant who converted, fell in love with a Hindu boy in Sindh, gave up clothing and wrote Persian quatrains. Aurangzeb had him beheaded at the Jama Masjid steps in 1661 for heresy; his red-painted tomb is at the foot of them.
- Hazratbal Shrine, Srinagar · Hazratbal — the relic on the Dal
A white marble shrine on the Dal Lake holding a hair of the Prophet, displayed on holy days. Its theft in December 1963 shut Kashmir down and brought crowds into the streets for a week until the relic was recovered — the most consequential religious event in modern Kashmiri politics.
- Shah-e-Hamadan, Srinagar · Shāh-e-Hamadān — Srinagar
A wooden khānqāh on the Jhelum for Mīr Sayyid ʿAlī Hamadānī, the fourteenth-century Kubrawi who is credited with bringing shawl weaving, papier-mâché and carpet craft to Kashmir along with his order. Built without a nail, and burned and rebuilt more than once.
- Makhdoom Sahib, Srinagar · Makhdūm Sāhib — Hari Parbat
A sixteenth-century Suhrawardi buried on the hill above Srinagar, inside the Mughal fort wall, with a Hindu Sharika Devi temple on the same slope and a gurdwara at its foot. One hill carrying three traditions, in a valley where that is now remarked on.