Place · Sufi dargah & hot springs · Pakistan
Manghopir, Karachi
A dargah on Karachi's northern edge where hot sulphur springs feed a pond of marsh crocodiles, and the crocodiles are part of the cult. They are treated as attendants of the saint, Haji Syed Sakhi Sultan Mangho, whose shrine is thirteenth-century by tradition, and pilgrims feed them meat. The Sheedi community — descendants of East African arrivals on the Makran and Sindh coast — holds its annual mela here, with drumming and dhamaal that is the clearest surviving African-descended ritual music on the subcontinent's shore.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.983, 67.033
Worth knowing
The oldest crocodile in the pond is given the title Mor Sahib and garlanded, so a Sufi shrine in Karachi has an incumbent reptile with a courtesy name.
Connections (4)
- Silsila lineagePākpattan (Ajodhan)
Manghopir's saint, Haji Syed Sakhi Sultan Mangho, is placed by shrine tradition in the circle around Bābā Farīd of Ajodhan, which makes the crocodile shrine on Karachi's edge a Chishti foundation at the far south-western end of that network. The claim is the usual one made by coastal Sindhi shrines, and it matters less as biography than as affiliation: Pakpattan is the node every Punjabi and Sindhi Chishti lineage traces itself back through, and a dargah without such a line has no standing.
- AnalogueSehwan Sharīf
The drumming is the link. Sehwan's dhamāl before Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar and the Sheedi mela at Manghopir are the two great percussive gatherings of Sindh, and the Sheedi — descendants of East Africans brought to the Makran and Sindh coast — are prominent at both, with their own drums and their own rhythms. What survives at Manghopir is the clearest African-descended ritual music on the subcontinent's shore, and it survives because a Sufi shrine had room for it when nothing else did.
- AnalogueA.C. Guards
The two surviving African-descended communities of the subcontinent that still hold institutions of their own, on opposite coasts. At Manghopir on Karachi's edge the Sheedi keep the annual mela at the crocodile shrine, with drumming that is the clearest African-descended ritual music left on these shores. At A.C. Guards the Siddis of Hyderabad keep the lines, the hockey club and the name of a regiment. Both are small, both descend from the Indian Ocean traffic in people, and neither is much noticed by the cities around them.
- Site withinKarachi
Manghopir — the crocodile-tank Sufi shrine on Karachi's northwest edge said to hold Baba Farid's disciples in retinue — sits within Karachi municipal limits and is one of the city's oldest continuous shrines. The thermal spring at the foot of the hill and the Sheedi Muslim community's annual Mela have continued through four centuries of Baloch, Talpur, British and Pakistani administration of the city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Manghopir”. Helene Basu, “Music and the Formation of Sidi Identity in Western India”; Sindh wildlife department records on the Manghopir crocodile population.
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