Journey
Sant, Bhakti & Sufi Networks
Sufi shrines and bhagat shrines used by the same people, often on the same journey. The Chishti silsila, the Sant poets in the Guru Granth Sāhib, the Qādirī of Lahore and the Marathi sants belong to separate lineages and separate scriptures; the pilgrims crossing between them mostly did not notice the boundary.
Stops (10)
- Ajmer Sharīf · Ajmer Sharīf — Muʿīnuddīn Chishtī
The earliest and busiest of the subcontinent's great dargahs, holding the Chishti who arrived about 1192. Akbar walked from Agra to it. Its urs draws Hindu, Sikh and Muslim pilgrims together, and the qawwali sung there is the form's oldest continuous performance context.
- Hazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi · Nizāmuddīn — the shrine and the qawwali
Nizāmuddīn Auliyā's dargah in Delhi, with Amīr Khusrau buried at his feet — the disciple who gave qawwali its musical form and Hindavi its first literary use. The saint refused to attend any court in a lifetime in the sultanate's capital, which is most of why the shrine has the standing it has.
- Data Darbār, Lahore · Data Darbār — ʿAlī Hujwīrī
Lahore's shrine to the eleventh-century Sufi who wrote the Kashf al-Mahjūb, the first Persian treatise on Sufism composed in the subcontinent. It is the earliest of the great South Asian Sufi tombs, and the langar there has been feeding several thousand people a day for centuries.
- Miān Mīr · Miān Mīr — the Qādirī of Lahore
A Qādirī shaikh who refused Mughal patronage and is remembered in Sikh tradition as the man Guru Arjan asked to lay the foundation stone of the Harmandir Sāhib. Whether he did is debated; that the story is told by both traditions and denied by neither is the point.
- Harmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple) · Harmandir Sāhib — the book as guru
Built with steps down on all four sides and doors on all four faces, on the argument that it is open from every direction. Guru Arjan compiled the Ādi Granth here in 1604 and put in it the poems of Kabīr, Ravidās, Nāmdev and Farīd — Hindu and Muslim bhagats made scripture.
- Kabīr Chaurā, Varanasi · Kabīr Chaurā and Maghar
The weaver's workshop in Banāras and the town he went to die in because tradition said dying there forfeited liberation. His grave and his samādhi stand a few metres apart at Maghar, built by the two communities that both claimed him and neither of which he had much patience for.
- Shrī Guru Ravidās Janam Asthān · Ravidās — Begampura, the city with no sorrow
The birthplace shrine of the Banāras cobbler whose forty-one compositions are in the Guru Granth Sāhib. His Begampura is a city with no second or third class, no tax and no one who owns property — the earliest description in an Indian language of a society organised without caste.
- Eknāth · Eknāth — the Marathi end of the same argument
Paithan's Brahmin sant, censured for eating with untouchables and for writing bhārūds in the voices of Mahārs and washerwomen. The Marathi sants reached the same position as the northern bhagats by their own road, and the two traditions had almost no contact.
- Samarth Rāmdās · Samarth Rāmdās — devotion turned outward
The counter-case in the same century: a Rāma devotee who founded hundreds of maths across the Deccan, wrote the Dāsbodh on conduct and organisation, and is traditionally read as Shivāji's counsellor. Where the bhagats withdrew from power and wrote against its claims, Rāmdās addressed it directly and told it how to work.
- Maghar · Maghar — the tomb and the samādhi together
Kabir's burial place, chosen to refute the claim that where you die decides your salvation. The Muslim tomb and the Hindu samadhi are a few metres apart in the same enclosure and both communities maintain their half — the most literal monument anywhere to what the sant movements were arguing for.