Place · Chishti dargah · India

Hazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi

Also known as Nizamuddin Dargah & Mehrauli

The shrine of Sheikh Nizamuddin Auliya (c.1238-1325), the greatest of the Delhi Chishti saints, in Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti, Delhi. The poet Amir Khusrau (c.1253-1325), Nizamuddin's lifelong disciple, is buried at the saint's feet — the only disciple so interred. The site is the originary ground of qawwali devotional music, Khusrau having compiled its forms. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq revered the saint, who in turn had a running baoli dispute with Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq ('Dilli dur ast' — Delhi is far away — the saint's reply when summoned by the Sultan became proverbial). The dargah's Thursday qawwali session has been running since the 14th century.

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Islamic & SufiMusic, dance & theatre

Function: Religious institution & practice
Tradition: Chishti silsila; qawwali tradition
Confidence: Established / referenced
Location: 28.591, 77.242

Connections (12)

Silsila lineageGulbarga / Kalaburagi
Gesudaraz left Delhi for the Deccan in 1398, as Timur approached, and settled at Gulbarga under Bahmani patronage — the point at which the Chishti order moved south and began producing devotional verse in Dakhni, the early form of Urdu. His shrine is the greatest Chishti centre outside the north, and the move took a Delhi-based order into a Persianate Deccan court world it then helped to shape.
Chishti SilsilaAjmer Sharīf
Muʿīnuddīn at Ajmer, Quṭbuddīn Bakhtiyār Kākī and Farīduddīn Ganj-i-Shakar, then Nizāmuddīn at Delhi: the Chishti succession runs through four generations and about four hundred kilometres, and each seat became a town's principal shrine. The order's rule against attending courts is what gave the shrines their independent standing. Nizāmuddīn refused to attend any of the seven sultans whose reigns he lived through, and the refusal is what the shrines' independence from the state has rested on ever since.
Companion in the same setData Darbār, Lahore
Data Darbār at Lahore and Nizāmuddīn at Delhi are the two oldest great Sufi shrines of the north-western plain, the one eleventh-century and Qādirī-claimed, the other fourteenth and Chishti. Both run langar at a scale no temple matches, and both sit inside cities that grew around them. Data Darbār's kitchen feeds several thousand people a day and has done so for centuries, which is why both shrines function as welfare institutions as much as places of prayer.
Chishti SilsilaPākpattan (Ajodhan)
Farīduddīn Ganj-i-Shakar at Pākpattan was Bakhtiyār Kākī's successor and Nizāmuddīn's master — the third and fourth links of the Chishti chain in the subcontinent. Bābā Farīd's Punjabi verses were later taken into the Guru Granth Sāhib, which is how a Chishti shaikh became Sikh scripture. Farīd also moved the order out of the imperial capital to a Sutlej river crossing, which is what allowed the Chishtis to stop being a court institution at all.
Chishti SilsilaChirag Dilli Dargah, New Delhi
Naṣīruddīn, called Chirāgh-i-Dehlī, the lamp of Delhi, was Nizāmuddīn's principal successor and the last of the great Delhi Chishtis. After him Muhammad bin Tughluq's forced transfer of the capital scattered the order south, which is how the Deccan acquired its Chishti shrines. Nasīruddīn refused to name a successor, saying the order should have no single head after him, which is why the Delhi Chishti line formally ends with his death in 1356.
Chishti SilsilaZainuddin Shirazi Dargah, Khuldabad
The Chishti order reached the Deccan through Nizāmuddīn's disciples when the Delhi court moved south in the 1320s. Zaynuddīn Shīrāzī at Khuldabad and Gesūdarāz at Gulbarga are the two principal seats it founded there, and both became the spiritual anchors of the sultanates that followed. Gesūdarāz wrote in Dakhni as well as Persian, giving the emerging Deccan language one of its first literary bodies, so the order's move south produced a literature as well as two shrines.
Disciple ofAmīr Khusrau
Amīr Khusrau was Nizāmuddīn's disciple for forty years and is buried at his feet, having died six months after him. He gave qawwali its musical form, wrote the earliest literary Hindavi, and served seven sultans without either man's standing suffering for it — the saint who refused courts, and the courtier who never left his.
Silsila lineageKākorī
Bhikhan of Kākorī is usually identified with a Sufi shaikh of the Chishti line, which would make two of the fifteen bhagats Chishtis. Kākorī is a small qasba near Lucknow and almost nothing else about him survives — the Granth preserves a voice its own century had already nearly lost.
Monastic foundationNizāmuddīn Auliyā
Nizāmuddīn's khānqāh at Ghiyaspur ran for about fifty years through seven sultans' reigns, and he attended none of their courts. The langar fed whoever came. That refusal, in the capital itself, is why the shrine has the independent standing it still has. Told that Ghiyasuddin Tughluq was marching back to deal with him, he is said to have answered Dillī dūr ast — Delhi is far off — and the sultan died before reaching it.
Craft tradition ofQawwālī
Nizāmuddīn's dargah is the working home of qawwālī, and the qawwāl bachche who sing there trace themselves to twelve singers trained by Amīr Khusrau. The sung assembly, the samāʿ, was itself contested — jurists argued for centuries over whether music before a shrine was lawful, and the Chishtis defended it while the Suhrawardis largely did not. Thursday evenings at the Delhi shrine are the continuous performance tradition that argument was about, still held a few metres from both tombs.
Silsila lineageQutb Sāhib, Mehrauli
Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki at Mehrauli and Nizamuddin Auliya at Ghiyaspur are the second and fourth Chishti masters in India, three generations and fifteen kilometres apart. Sultans built their cities near one shrine or the other, and both dargah quarters have been continuously inhabited longer than any of the seven walled cities have.
Site withinDelhi
Hazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi sits inside Delhi and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.

On these journeys

Sources

List of World Heritage Sites in India — Wikipedia

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