Place · Qalandar dargah · Pakistan

Sehwan Sharīf

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Qalandari tradition; Guru Granth Sahib bhagat bani

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

26.423, 67.860

Connections (7)

• River adjacencySindhu Darshan, Leh

  Sehwan Sharif stands on the Indus, and the Indus is the Sindhu of the seven rivers — the one whose Hindu pilgrimage life largely ended with Partition and whose shrines are now Sufi. The dhamal danced nightly at Lal Shahbaz Qalandar's tomb is the river's busiest devotional occasion. The Sindhu Darshan festival instituted at Leh in 1997 is a deliberate answer to that: a new Indian ghat on the one stretch of the river India still holds.

• Scriptural inclusion inHarmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple)

  Sadhnā, by tradition a butcher of Sehwan in Sindh, contributes one hymn and marks the Granth's western limit. The fifteen bhagats reach from the Indus to Bengal and from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, gathered into one book by an editor in the Punjab. Sehwan is now better known for Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar's shrine and its nightly dhamāl; one hymn in a Punjabi book is what remains of its other saint.

• Monastic foundationLāl Shahbāz Qalandar

  Lāl Shahbāz settled at Sehwan on the Indus in the thirteenth century and the shrine that grew over him is the largest the Qalandari tradition left anywhere. Hindu Sindhis worship him as Jhūlelāl, the river deity, and have done so continuously through partition and after it. The dhamāl danced there at sunset is open to whoever turns up, which is not true of most shrines and is the whole point of this one.

• AnalogueBāul

  Baul practice sits between Vaishnava Sahajiya and the Sufi fakir traditions of Bengal, and the same refusal — of caste, of scripture, of the distinction between Hindu and Muslim — turns up at Sehwan and the other Sindhi shrines, where the malangs are equally outside both communities and equally tolerated. The songs share the vocabulary of the body as the only temple, and the shrines share a clientele who would fail any religious census.

• Shared site withHinglāj Mātā

  Hinglaj in the Makran and Sehwan on the Indus are the two most plural major shrines in Pakistan, and both are attended across the line that is supposed to divide them: Muslims call the goddess's cave Nani Mandir, and Hindus dance the dhamal at the Qalandar's courtyard. Sindh and Balochistan kept an older arrangement that the frontier of 1947 did not abolish.

• AnalogueOdero Lal

  Two Sindhi shrines whose congregations refuse the categories the state uses. At Sehwan the dhamāl before Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar's tomb is danced by Hindus and Muslims together and the saint is addressed by both. At Odero Lal the sharing is structural rather than customary: one walled compound holds a mihrab and an eternal lamp, the keepers are Muslim, most pilgrims are Hindu, and the figure inside is Jhulelal to one and Shaikh Tahir to the other. Neither site has ever been partitioned, through 1947 and since.

• AnalogueManghopir, Karachi

  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.

On these journeys

• Places of the Granth's bhagats
• Major dargahs
• The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush
• Sindh — the Indus and its saints

Sources

Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Sehwan; Bhagat Sadhana — Wikipedia

• Wikipedia