Place · Chishti dargah · India

Qutb Sāhib, Mehrauli

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Chishti silsila

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

28.521, 77.181

Connections (7)

• Silsila lineageAjmer Sharīf

  Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer and Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki at Delhi are the first two links of the Chishti chain in India, teacher and disciple. A silsila is a line of transmission, and on the ground it becomes a pilgrimage route running Ajmer, Delhi, Pakpattan, Delhi again — four tombs in four generations, each the destination of an annual urs, and the busiest devotional network in the subcontinent that is not a temple system.

• Silsila lineagePākpattan (Ajodhan)

  Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki at Mehrauli was the teacher of Baba Farid at Ajodhan, now Pakpattan in Pakistani Punjab — the second and third links of the Chishti chain in India. A silsila is a line of spiritual transmission, and on the ground it becomes a pilgrimage route: Ajmer to Delhi to Pakpattan to Delhi again at Nizamuddin, each tomb a station, the whole chain walkable and now cut by an international border.

• Site adjacencyHumayun's Tomb

  Mehrauli's Chishti shrine drew burials around it for six hundred years — Bahadur Shah I, Shah Alam II, and an empty enclosure meant for Bahadur Shah Zafar, who died in Rangoon. Wanting to lie near a saint who refused kings is a pattern Mughal Delhi repeated at Nizāmuddīn too. Humayun's own tomb a few kilometres away established the garden-tomb form the Taj Mahal later perfected, so Delhi's Mughal burials cluster around a Chishti saint and an imperial prototype at once.

• Silsila lineageHazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi

  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.

• Shared site withYogmaya, Delhi

  The Phoolwalon ki Sair, instituted by Akbar Shah II in the 1810s, takes flower offerings to the Yogmaya temple and to the Qutb Sahib dargah in the same procession, a few hundred metres apart at Mehrauli. It is still held. A Mughal emperor's festival is the reason Delhi's oldest surviving Hindu shrine and its oldest Sufi shrine are visited on one walk.

• Site withinDelhi

  Qutb Sāhib, Mehrauli lies within Delhi — the two sites sit about 11 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Qutb Sāhib, Mehrauli is one of the specific sites that give Delhi its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.

• Teaching lineageMuʿīnuddīn Chishtī

  Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti's spiritual lineage reached Delhi through his chief disciple Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki (1173-1235), who established the Chishti presence in the Delhi Sultanate's capital. Qutbuddin Kaki had met Moinuddin at Ajmer and received the formal Chishti khilafat (succession-authority); he then moved to Delhi under Iltutmish's patronage and established the khanqah at Mehrauli that would become the chain's second node after Ajmer. His own disciple Baba Farid at Pakpattan and Farid's disciple Nizamuddin Auliya at Ghiyaspur extended the Chishti silsila across the subcontinent. Delhi subsequently became one of the Chishti tradition's principal centres, creating a lasting spiritual connection between Ajmer and the Sultanate capital that continues through the Nizamuddin dargah's Thursday qawwali tradition to the present.

On these journeys

• Chishti silsila
• Major dargahs
• Delhi — the seven cities and beyond

Sources

Dargah Qutb Sahib, Mehrauli

• Wikipedia