Place · Sufi dargah · India
Hazrat Shah Turkman, Old Delhi
Also known as Hazrat Shah Turkman, Old Delhi, Shah Turkman Bayabani
The 13-century dargah of Hazrat Shah Turkman Bayabani (c.1200-1240), a Sufi saint from Central Asia (Turkmenistan — hence 'Turkman') at Turkman Gate in Old Delhi — one of the 13 original Mughal-era gates of Shahjahanabad (built 1648-1659 by Shah Jahan), named after the saint whose dargah was already there before Shahjahanabad was built. Shah Turkman was reportedly a Qalandari Sufi who lived in the Delhi plain before the Sultanate's foundation. The current dargah structure is 16-century with later Mughal additions. The 1976 Turkman Gate demolitions during the Emergency (Sanjay Gandhi's urban cleanup) were one of the most publicised state-vs-poor confrontations of the Emergency period, with Muslim residents' homes bulldozed next to the dargah. The gate itself survives but much of the surrounding area was rebuilt. The dargah remains an active Sufi shrine.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.647, 77.231
Connections (2)
- Companion in the same setMatka Pir Dargah, New Delhi
Matka Pīr and Shāh Turkmān are two thirteenth-century Delhi dargahs that survive inside the modern city rather than as monuments beside it — one buried in the lanes behind Turkman Gate, the other standing in heaps of earthen pots near the Purana Qila. Neither belongs to a famous silsila, and both show what the ordinary texture of Sufi Delhi looked like beneath Nizāmuddīn and Mehrauli.
- Site withinDelhi
Hazrat Shah Turkman, Old 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
Chishti tazkira literature; Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love (2002).
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