Anand Taneja Saintly Visions Precolonial Texts

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DOI: 10.1177/0019464612463843

2012 49: 557Indian Economic Social History ReviewAnand Vivek Taneja

DelhiSaintly visions: Other histories and history's others in the medieval ruins of

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Saintly visions: Other histories

and historys others in the

medieval ruins of Delhi

Anand Vivek Taneja

Columbia University

This article is centrally concerned with understanding the perceived presence of Muslim saintly

figures at various medieval ruins in contemporary Delhi. I explore how popular relationships

with these ruins, centred on the presence of the saint-figures, are not historical, but still indi-

cate meaningful connections to the medieval past. To understand these connections, this article

explores the epistemological and ontological privileging of the imaginal (manifesting as dreams

and visions) in Islamicate thought and everyday life, arising from the influence of Ibn Arabi,by looking at both contemporary popular practices and beliefs around these ruins, as well as

the significance of these ruins in Urdu antiquarian and literary texts from the early twentieth

century. I argue that the ontological primacy of the imaginal is also inextricably connected to

an ethics of diversity and non-sectarian ideals of justice. The imaginal becomes increasingly

important for connecting to the past in the aftermath of colonial and post-colonial state violence,

not only because of the destruction of the usual (discursive) modes of historical memory, but

also because it poses a moral vision of the pre-modern past against the violence of the modern

(state). This article ends by suggesting that the rituals around these ruins create a sensory and

affective archive of the citys history that needs to be explored further.

Keywords:Delhi, everyday life, history, Ibn Arabi, ruins, Urdu literature

Acknowledgements:This article is based on research funded by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from

the Wenner-Gren Foundation, as well as by research funding from the Graduate School of Arts

and Sciences, Columbia University. I would like to thank Partha Chatterjee, Michael Taussig, Zoe

Crossland, Severin Fowles, Frances Pritchett, Shahid Amin, Seema Golestaneh and Dwaipayan

Banerjee for their constructive and critical engagement with earlier drafts of this article. I would also

like to thank Ravi Sundaram and Amiel Melnick for generously providing me with opportunities

to present earlier versions of this work to scholarly audiences, and for the very valuable ensuing

discussions. Raghu Karnads curiosity about the mysteries of Begampur and Manan Ahmeds original

The Indian Economic and Social History Review,49, 4 (2012): 55790SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC

DOI:10.1177/0019464612463843

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558/ ANANDVIVEKTANEJA

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 4 (2012): 55790

call for papers were the genesis for this article, and I would like to thank both of them as well as

Sunil Kumar, without whose enthusiasm and continual encouragement the Madison panel wouldnot have become this special issue. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their

insightful, enormously helpful and remarkably prompt comments.

But the Santal with his statement I did as my God told me toalso faces us with

a way of being in this world, and we could ask ourselves: is that a way of being

a possibility for our own lives and what we define as our present?

Dipesh Chakrabarty1

My work in Delhi has been centrally concerned with contemporary ritual practicesaround medieval ruins. Delhi is a rapidly modernising city with an extremely

violent and disrupted past, where its elite mourns the lack of historical sense

among common people. Yet people in the thousands regularly come to the ruins of

Delhis past, and often form deep affective bonds with them. For many, the ruins

are experienced not as locations of history as past, but of presence. By presence

here I am invoking the multi-valence of the HindiUrdu termsHazratand hzir,derived from the Arabic arah2. Hazrat, literally presence, is the honorific usedfor saintly Muslim figures, including the spirit figures said to dwell in many ruins in

Delhi. The supplicants also make themselves present to the saint through hzir,

or attendance. Paradoxically, many of these now-sacred ruins are what we couldconsider secular, being the remnants of dams and palaces and hunting lodges not

originally built as places of worship.

I do not wish to prove those who mourn the lack of historical sense wrong.

Peoples relations to these ruins (of the sort that I am interested in) are nothistori-

calthey are certainly not linked to the academic discipline of history, nor can

they be understood as memory in any straightforward way. Following the work

of Jennifer Cole,3I do not see history and memory as fundamentally dissimilar.

1

Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe,p. 108.2To minimise the use of diacritics, in this article I use the ALA-LC Romanisation Tables for Hindi

to represent both Indic and Arabo-Persian words which I encountered primarily in speech. However I

use the n from Urdu romanisation to represent nasalisation in speech, to avoid the complexities of the

anusvara/anunasika distinctions, not obvious in everyday speech. When reproducing excerpts from

Urdu texts, I use the ALA-LC romanisation for Urdu. I also apply Urdu romanisation to the Persian

phrases and verses that are often part of these texts to reflect their seamless integration into the Urdu

texts (as well as Indic pronunciations of Persian). When referring to Arabic theological terms, which

occur quite sparingly, I use the ALA-LC romanisation for Arabic, as in the above sentence. The names

of texts, authors, people and places are given without diacritics.3The (often) binary opposition between history and memory, especially following the influential work

of Pierre Nora (Les Lieux de Memoire) seems to suggest that one marks a modern and a critical faculty,

and the other marks something both more organic, and less concerned with either fact or criticality.

Jennifer Cole, working among the Betisimisaraka in Madagascar, critiques Nora for suggesting that

collective remembering ever happened naturallythat even among traditional societies, the links

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Other histories and historys others in the medieval ruins of Delhi/ 559


Both history and collective memory are fundamentally linked to discourse, to nar-

rative, and what one sees in the relationships people have with these ruins is a lackof concern with both facticity (the concern of history) and narrative (the concern

of history and memory). And yet, as I hope to demonstrate in this essay, peoples

relationships with these monuments are a sign of a meaningful relationship to the

medieval (what I, still living within history,4think of as the) past. To understand

these relationships, I argue, needs a fundamental shift in both our ontological

and epistemological frames.5 In this article, I explore the alternate epistemolo-

gies and ontology opened up to us by paying close attention to the work of the

medieval Muslim philosopher and theologian Ibn Arabi (and the larger body of

thought associated with him), and his widespread infl

uence on Islamicate thoughtand everyday life. Rather than positing the usual binaries between history and

memory, or between written and oral transmission, I am positing here a different kind

of binaryone between discursive ways of knowing (including both oral and

written discourse), and the imaginal6, the realm of experience and knowledge

linked to dreams and visions. I also investigate how the imaginal becomes increas-

ingly important for connecting to the past in the aftermath of colonial and post-

colonial state violence, and the resultant disruption of the usual modes historical

memory.

to the past are considered fragile, and have to be constantly worked on and worked with, lest they be

forgotten (Cole,Forget Colonialism?p.108). If history and memory (beyond individual memory) are

both not given but constantly worked and reworked, then what analytical purchase remains in keeping

the two separate?4Here I am gesturing towards Ashis Nandys argument that millions of people in the world still live

outside historyThey do have theories of the past; they do believe that the past is important and shapes

the present and the future, but they also recognize, confront, and live with a past different from that

constructed by historians and historical consciousness (Nandy, Historys Forgotten Doubles, p. 44.)5There has been a recent turn within anthropology towards ontological difference and multiple

ontologies as a way of coming to terms with the radical alterity of belief and practice so central to the

anthropological encounter. I find Martin Holbraads statements in support of multiple ontologies tobe richly suggestiveWhat do you do as an anthropologist when the people you study say that a stone

is a person, or have performed sacrifices to maintain the supremacy of their king, or engage in any

other activity or discourse that during an unguarded moment you would be tempted to call irrational?

Ontologys answer is that if these things appear irrational, it is because we have misunderstood them.

If people say that a stone is a person, it is because they are talking about something different from what

we talk about when we say that it is notif the problem when people say that stones are persons is to

understand what they are actually saying (as opposed to why they may be saying such a silly thing), then

the onus is on me as an anthropologist to reconceptualize a whole host of notions that are involved in

such a statement. I have to literally rethink what a stone and what a person might be for the equation of

one with the other to even make sense (Holbraad in Alberti et al., Worlds Otherwise, pp. 902903).6Imaginal, as Willam Chittick explains it, is a term bequeathed to us by the late Henry Corbin. As

Corbin has explained in his works, the imaginal word or mundus imaginalispossesses an independent

ontological status and must be clearly differentiated from the imaginary world, which is no more than

our individual fantasies (Chittick, SufiPath of Knowledge, p. ix).



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Facing the Conundrum: Hardam Khayali ki Dargah, Begampur Village

What do I mean when I say that peoples relationships with these ruins are not

historical? Let me illustrate with an examplea venerated grave (Hardam Khayali

ki dargah) in the ruins of a large fourteenth century complex, known as the Bijay

Mandal. Bijay Mandal is located now between the urban village of Begampur and

the modern residential enclave of Sarvapriya Vihar, in the institutional and elite

heart of south Delhi, a stones throw away from the Indian Institute of Technol-

ogy. This part of Delhi has been rapidly urbanised and developed in the last five

decades or so, before which it was a landscape of agricultural fields, small villages,

and masses of ruins from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the fourteenth

century, during the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq (r. 13251351), Bijay Mandal

was probably the administrative centre of the Delhi of his time. The slope-walled

tower near the southern end of the ruins provides one of the best views to be had

of south Delhi. Just to the south are the many dark symmetrical domes around

the vast courtyard of the Begampuri Masjid, once the central congregational mosque

of the Tughlaq city of Jahanpanah. To the southwest, a few kilometres away, the

Qutab Minar rises tall, marking the site of Qila Rai Pithora, the first city of Delhi.

To the north is the bulbous Asiad Tower built in 1982, and buried underneath it, the

thirteenth century city of Siri. It is a stunning visual confirmation of the vastness of

fourteenth century Delhi. Muhammad bin Tughlaqs Jahanpanah stretched betweenQila Rai Pithora and Siri and encompassed them both. This walled conurbation

had 30 gates leading out of it.

Ibn Batuta probably had his first audience with Tughlaq here at Bijay Mandal,

in theHazr Sutn,the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, of which all that remains aresome scattered stone pillar-bases, overgrown with weeds. In the long aftermath of

the thirteenth century Mongol attacks and the subsequent migrations from Central

Asia to Delhi, this really wasjahn panh, refuge to the world. However, accord-ing to Syed Ahmad Khan, this city was desolate (vrn) by the time of Sher ShahSuri, circa 1541.7By the early-twentieth century all that remained of the centre

of Jahanpanah was Begampur village, small enough to fit inside the BegampuriMasjid. The village was removed from inside the mosque in 1928 by the Public

Works Department,8and the villagers were given land around the mosque to settle

in, and here today is urban village of Begampur, a rural settlement exempt from

the zoning laws that define the city that surrounds it. Though many migrants now

live here, Begampur retains a core of people with ties to the village going back

several generations, unlike the surrounding modernist middle class residential

colonies built upon its agricultural land.

7

Syed Ahmad Khan,Asar us-Sanadid (2nd

Edition), p. 89.8Lewis,Delhis Historic Villages, p. 36. Lewis also mentions here that when the villagers petitioned

against the acquisition of their homes in 1927, they claimed that they were very poor people who had

been residing in the village for about 300 years.



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In the northern part of the ruins there are some graves under a tree, with a recently

added green pennant that readspr bbin Hindi, the generic north Indian term for(usually) Muslim saints. Beyond that generic term, not much seems to be known

about the bababuried here, even by those who come here to venerate him. I became

interested in the site after a friend who lives nearby went to visit the grave, and

asked about the history of the baba, and came away completely unsatisfied.Yih to

bbhain was the standard response he got. He is a baba, a statement supposedto be self-explanatory. These days a man known as Hafiz Sahib sits at the mazron Thursdays, and says he has been coming here for 25 years, called by the baba

in a dream.9He is from near Aligarh in western Uttar Pradesh, but has been liv-

ing in Sangam Vihar, a vast unauthorised working class migrant colony about 10kilometres to the south of Begampur since the 1970s. I went on a Thursday and

asked him what he knew about the baba. This is Tahir Husain Hardam Khayali

Baba, he said. Yih sab kkhayl rakhte hain.He takes care of everyone. Beyondthat, Hafiz Sahib seemed to know nothing of the history of the babaor his resting

place. When I asked why the babachose to live in the ruins of a Sultans palace,

he said all this was built by thebaba and belonged to him. The Begampuri Masjid,

he said, was built by the babas begam (wife) for 50 years after his death, hence

the name of Begampur. As we talked, a small stream of visitors, mostly women,

mostly Hindu,10mostly from Begampur village, arrived and made offerings at the

grave. I asked about some of the more recent structures, built close to the mazr,and was told that they were memorials to his deceased devoteesbbksevkarne vlon kydgr hain. These memorials, squat little domed structures on tinysquare platforms, with a square opening for the placement of lamps and offerings,

are reminiscent of the bhayn/bhomiy11shrines, memorials to deified male herofigures, found in Jat and Gujjar villages in the Delhi area. On one of the Thursdays

I was present, two women who had come to the mazrpointed out one of the littlememorial structures as being that of their deceased father-in-law.

For those who come to venerate the pir baba, it seems that the narrative of

his life does not matter. His history, or memory, as we would understand it, is

9The theme of being called by the figure of a saint/babain a dream to begin taking care of a formerly

derelict site is a common theme for Muslim graves and shrines in post-Partition Delhi. See also Kumar,

Pirs barakatand Servitors Ardour.10My use of the term Hindu is a problematic one. While most of those who I have clumped under

the broad rubric of Hindu would recognise themselves as such today, my descriptive use of the term

actually elides the variety ofqaums(qaum/kaum or community being the term used in Delhi for what

sociologists would recognise asjatior caste) who have traditionally lived in Begampur and who continue

to come to visit the shrine, including Jats, Brahmins, and the untouchable castes of sweepers and

leatherworkers, Bhangis and Chamars (now often collectively spoken of as Dalits), whose inclusion

into the Hindu fold is relatively recent (see Prashad, Untouchable Freedom).11 Etymologically the term bhomiya is closely related to bhumi, land, and denotes this local

deitys special connection to the land he defendedBhomiyais also refered to asDadosaHonoured

Grandfather. Cort, Devotees, Families and Tourists, pp. 17273.



7/35



nearly forgotten here, apart from a name. But he is still venerated, whereas Sultan

Muhammad bin Tughlaq, who built this palace, is completely forgotten. And thisplace of forgetting is paradoxically a site of remembrance, where people from

Begampur light lamps to their ancestors, and where by coming in groups every

Thursday, they reaffirm community and continuity in the midst of a vast and rapidly

metamorphosing city.

This paradox becomes even more puzzling with the realisation that the babas

history and biographical details are not lost, or hard to find, but available in rela-

tively popular Urdu books still in print and circulation. In his Asar al-Sanadid,

Syed Ahmad Khan writes, In the time of Sultan Sikandar Lodi (14891517),

Shaikh Hasan Tahir used to live in this very tower. The graves near this tower arethose of him and his children. He passed away in 150312I found Shaikh Hasan

Tahir in an Urdu translation of Abd al-Haq Muhaddis DihlvisAkhbar al-Akhyar,

his seventeenth century Persian compendium of the biographies of Indian Muslim

saints. Hasan Tahir has a large and comprehensive entry, with many details from

his life, and a summary of his major theological writings.13

From the age of his youth the pain of the quest for truth had grabbed him and

hence he stayed only in the company of dervishes, Abd al-Haq writes. It is related

that at this time he obtainedFusus al-Hikamfrom an elder, but his father was an

opponent of the Fusus... Twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Arabis Fusus

al-Hikam (The Ringstones of Wisdom), has a long history of being considered atroublesome text in India. The text and its commentarial tradition were considered

foundational of the doctrine of wadah al-wujd(the unity of all being, wadatal-wujdin Persian and Urdu), and Muzaffar Alam gives us two examples in hisLanguages of Political Islamof the book being proscribed. Shaikh Nizam al-Din

of Amethi (d. 1517) is said to have snatched the book away from a student of

his, and advised him to limit his readings to recognised theological and orthodox

Sufitreatises.14In the seventeenth century, Aurangzeb (r. 16581707) took grave

exception to the contents of Shah Muhibb-AllahsRisala-i Taswiyya, seeing it as

a restatement of Ibn Arabis Fusus al-Hikam, and demanded an explanation15.

But a young Hasan Tahir, according to theAkhbar, managed to convince his father

of the theological soundness of theFusus. Later in life Hasan Tahir moved from

12Syed Ahmad Khan,Asar(2 edn.), 91. However, it should be noted that in the first edition of the

Asar(1847), which is radically different from the second edition (1854) (see Naim, Syed Ahmad and

his Two Books called Asar-al-Sanadid), Khan does not mention Shaikh Hasan Tahir or the grave of

Hardam Khayali at all. In the second edition, which is much more textual and historically correct,

he seems to be quoting directly from theAkhbaras a historical text, which mentions the graves being

close to the Bijay Mandal. Given that in the first edition, which is much fuller of participant observatory

details than the second, Khan never mentions Hardam Khayali or Shaikh Hasan Tahir, he does not seem

to have made the connection between the dargahand the structure of Bijay Mandal.13Abd al-Haq Muhaddis Dehlvi,Akhbar al-Akhyar,pp. 417420.14AlamLanguages of Political Islam,p.153.15Ibid., p. 170.



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Jaunpur to Agra to Delhi, and became one of the most prominent Sufis of Delhi. At

a time when the intercessions of theshaikhwere crucial to claims of sovereignty,he resolutely refused to use his influence. A brother of Sikandar Lodis, who was

a disciple of Hasan Tahir, wanted to become the Sultan and asked the shaikh to

pray for him. Theshaikhtold him that God had already given the kingdom to his

brother, and he should not oppose Gods will. When news of this reached the Sultan,

he immediately came into Shaikh Hasan Tahirs presence. The Sultans gratitude

explains how he came to live in Bijay Mandal, the former royal palace. But the

Jahanpanah in which Shaikh Hasan Tahir made his final home was a city in decline.

In 1503, the year Shaikh Hasan Tahir died, Sikandar Lodi moved the capital to Agra.

How do we understand this vast gap between the (fairly easily) availablebiographical record and contemporary recollection? I assumed initially that this

knowledge gap was symptomatic of the many tragic disruptions that have char-

acterised Delhis recent history. The Muslims of Begampur, like those of surround-

ing villages, must have left during the upheavals of Partition, and with them left

the memory, the biographical stories of the saint. This also conveniently explained

the presence of Hafiz Sahib, coming from faraway Sangam Vihar, rather than a

member of the local community.16None of the Hindu devotees could find the true

story of the saint because virtually no one reads Urdu now, especially amongst

the non-Muslims of Delhi. And Hafiz Sahibs lack of knowledge of saintly literature

reflected the intellectual (and often very real) poverty of madarsaheducation inmodern India. While all of the above may well be true, what we are confronted

by at the site of Shaikh Hasan Tahirs venerated grave is not (only) a disrupted

inheritance, but a much wider aporiaone between two different ways of knowing

and relating to the past.

This became clear to me when I was reading Bashiruddin Ahmads Waqiat-i

Darulhukumat Dihli on the monuments of Begampur. Bashiruddin Ahmads three-

volume compendium on Delhis history and monuments was written in the 1910s

(the three volumes of the Waqiat were first published in 1919), nearly a century

ago. Amad belonged to one of the most learned and literary families of Delhi,

and his book, despite occasional wholesale borrowings from Syed Ahmad Khans

Asar,is a model of scrupulous and painstaking research. And yet his account of the

history of the saint is even sparser than current recollection, and as unconcerned

with either narrative or facticity.

The Dargah of Hardam KhayaliThe people of the village call this ko(fort) and some merely maqm(location, station, eminence) and some peoplecall it Hardam Khayalis dargah. In short, there is as much talk as there are

mouths (Gharaz jitne munh utnbten). Whether Hardam Khayali is merely

16 There is actually a sizable community of Muslims, largely from Western Uttar Pradesh, now

settled in Begampur. Also, not all the original Muslim inhabitants left the village. Among those who

left, some also came back from Pakistan.



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an imaginary (khayl) name or whether it has some real basis, of this we have

no information.17

Ahmad then gives a detailed physical description, with accurate measurements,

of the buildings upon the site and its current condition, including thePltrees thatgave (and still give) welcome shade to the graves. Two things stand out for me

in his account of the site. First, he separates his account of the dargahof Hardam

Khayali from his account of the Bijay Mandal, whereas the two are quite clearly

part of the same complex for a modern visitor. Second, he quotes extensively from

theAkhbar al-Akhyarin his account of Bijay Mandal, but never makes the con-

nection between Hardam Khayali and Shaikh Hasan Tahir.

Shah Abd al-Haq Sahib Muhaddis Dihlvi, writer of theAkhbar al-Akhyar, who

was a famous elder of piety in the times of Akbar and Jahangir and who passed

away in 1052/1642, describes this building as a tower of Jahanpanah and says that

in the time of Sikandar Lodi being sultan, an elder by the name of Husain Tahir

came to Delhi and by royal decree he was made to stay in this palace. He passed

away in 909/1503 and was buried outside this dwelling. Accordingly, the other

graves at this place are of his near and dear ones. 18

And yet, Bashiruddin Ahmad does not make the connection. Hardam Khaylmihiz khaylnm hai yiskkuch alt bhhai hamehabar nahn, he wrote

(Whether Hardam Khayali is merely an imaginary name or whether it has some realbasis, of this we have no information).In treating Bijay Mandal and Hardam Khayalis

dargah as two separate structures, he was obviously following local precedentthe

two sites were considered separate by the local populace despite being close together.

Part of this separation was probably physical. The area between the tower and Hasan

Tahirs grave was (and during the monsoons still is) wild and overgrown. It was only

in excavations in 193031 that it became clear that this area was once a large pillared

hall19, stretching north from the tower to the graves. But I believe that considering

these two structures as separate was not merely a physical divide for the villagers,

and for Bashiruddin Ahmad, but also a conceptual one. This is reflected in his radi-

cally differing narratives of the two sites, manifestly historical for Bijay Mandal,associated with the sultans, and plainly ahistoric in writing of Hardam Khayalis

dargah, the site of the saint. How do we begin to understand this difference? One of

my interlocutors at another sacred ruin in Delhi suggested a possibility.

Epistemological Aporia: Pir Ghaib

The structure that is known as Pir Ghaib is all that remains of a fourteenth century

hunting lodge built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq. It stands on the crest of the hilly Ridge,

17Bashiruddin Ahmad, Waqiat Dar al Hukumat Dehli, Vol. 3, p. 149.18ibid., pp. 15152.19Lewis,Delhis Historical Villages, p. 40.



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and would have been to the north west of the city of Firozabad. Today, it stands

within the residential quarters of the Hindu Rao Hospital, and despite now beingsurrounded by buildings on three sides it still gives commanding views over much

of North and West Delhi. The name of this place given in the chronicles becomes

immediately understandable from atop the roof of the buildingKushk-i JahnNum, The Palace of World Viewing. In the early-nineteenth century, it was usedas a measuring base for the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, which left a

mysterious cylindrical hole in the roof.20Since at least the early 1820s, when it is

mentioned in passing in Mirza Sangin Begs Sair al-Manazil21, and possibly long

before, this has been the venerated shrine ofpr ghaib, the invisible saint22. While

the care-takers of the shrine have been from an Alavi Muslim family from the BeriWala Bagh locality in the Sabzi Mandi area (and previously from Paharganj) for the

past four or five generations, this shrine has historically been special for the people

of the nearby village of Chandrawal, like the shrine of Hardam Khayali is special

to the people of Begampur. The idea of the Sufiwilyah/wilyat, the territory overwhich a particular saint has/had spiritual authority seems to be in operation at these

shrines even if never mentioned explicitly.

Chandrawal is a predominantly Gujjar village, now surrounded by the

post-Partition expansion of Kamala Nagar and Delhi University.23In Chandrawal

I met Vijindar Khari, the son of the honorary pradhn of the village. Khari is

active in the real estate business and state-level politics in Delhi, and is asurprisingly thoughtful and eloquent man. When I asked him about the history

of Pir Ghaib, he seemed perplexed to begin with. The history is written on the

board in front of the building24, he said. Have you read it, he asked me. What does

it say?

I told him that I knew the history written on the board, that this monument was

built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq and that a saint came to inhabit the building and mys-

teriously vanished while praying, hence the building is now known as Pir Ghaib.

But, I continued, I wanted to know more about the history of the relationship of the

people of Chandrawal to thepir. Khari said that what I was asking was contradic-

tory. There are two different things, he said. One is the history of buildings, how

they are built and who built them, and the ASI deals with that from a conservation

20Bashiruddin Ahmad, Waqiat, Vol. 2, pp. 488, 490.21Mirza Sangin Beg, Sair al-Manazil, p. 46 (Persian), p. 191 (Urdu).22 True to form, in the three full pages Bashiruddin Ahmad writes on the Kushk-i Jahan Numa

(vol. 2, pp. 48790), he spends two lines on the saint, almost incidentally. Here, to the right side adjoining

the stairs, on a 2 foot high platform, there is a solid sepulchre 6 ft 8 in long, 3 ft wide and 1 ft 7 in high

of some elder that people call the dargah of Pir Ghaib. (Bashiruddin Ahmad, Waqiat, vol. 2, 489).23Amin, Past Remains.24

There are sandstone informational slabs erected by the Archaeological Survey close to all themajor protected monuments in Delhi. The slabs are inscribed primarily in English, and usually full of

mind-numbing architectural detail rather than local stories or beliefs about the structures. On the slab

at Pir Ghaib, the legend of the saint is also briefly narrated.



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(saraksha) point of view. Then there is the other thingpeoples mnyat, what

they believe in, the things that happen in their own experience that they could writeabout, but then who would believe them?

He then told me about his own experience of thepir. He was about to lose a

finger. It was infected and had turned black and the doctor had suggested amputa-

tion, and Vijindar had agreed to it. But that night his father had a dream. The baba

came in his dream and brought out a finger from hisjhol(bag) but it was too bigto replace the one on Vijindars hand. The babaaddressed Vijindar affectionately

in his fathers dream and brought out another finger but this one did not fit either.

And then he brought out a third finger and this time it fit perfectly. In the morning,

his father told Vijindar that he should not get hisfi

nger amputated, because the babahad come to him in his dream and told him that his sons finger would be saved.

The next day Vijindar went to see a new doctor at a public hospital in Shahdara, in

east Delhi across the river, despite his own misgivings about travelling from the

relatively posh and upmarket VIP North Delhi area to impoverished and dirty

Shahdara. When the doctor met him, he kept working on his finger for half an

hour and Khari did not even notice because the doctor kept talking to him. Within

three changes of dressings (corresponding to the three fingers in the dream), the

doctor cured my finger completely, he said. He held his index finger up. It did not

look like anything had ever happened to it, not the least sign of scarring or discol-

oration. So this is my experience (tajurbah), he said, and everyone in Chandrawaland the surrounding areas has similar experiences, and we believe in the baba,

so this is why even the board up there had to include the babain the history they

chose to tell.

Vijindar Khari sees it as exceptional that Pir Ghaib became part of the his-

torical narrative of Firoz Shah Tughlaqs hunting lodge. This is not only because

he sees peoples experiences as incommensurate with the stuff of history; how

and why buildings were built and who built them. It is also because peoples expe-

riences and beliefs linked to these ruins, including his own, are not about history

as past, but are suffused with the presence of the babawith whom they have

a deep personal bond. By presence, I am trying here to illustrate a form of percep-

tion or relationship which is manifestly ahistoricalfor this relationship/perception

is based not on a knowledge of the baba as a historical figure, not as person

turned to past tense narrative; it is based on the intimate presence of the saint

in dream, imagination and reverie, an immanent relationship to the sacred as

opposed to a historical relationship, in which the object of study is irrevocably in

the past.

At Begampur, Hafiz Sahib told me that those who live close to the ruins say

that if you ever lose the way home, the babacomes himself to show you the way.

He is seen like I can be seen sitting here. (Aise dikhte hain jaise main yahbaihedikhthn).Not only did the image of the babaseem substantial and real to people,the babaalso looked similar to Hafiz Sahib, a grey bearded man, dressed in white,



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marked as a Muslim saint figure.25Hafiz Sahib told me of an incident one May

afternoon. A l(a hot wind) was blowing, and he was sitting with his eyes closed,doing tasbh. When he opened his eyes, a lady was standing in front of him, asking,Bb, did you come to my house to call me?

At Firoz Shah Kotla, where I have done extensive fieldwork since 2007, there are

hundreds of such stories. Firoz Shah Kotla is a fourteenth century palace complex

built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq which is now near the centre of the city. People here

venerate babas who share many characteristics with other saints of Delhi except

that they are not human beings, butjinn. The presence of the babas is felt by the

congregants among the ruins, most characteristically in the raising of gooseflesh,

but also often as the appearance and sudden disappearance of handsome, butindistinct white-clad figures. The babas also appear in peoples dreams, which they

call bashrat,a word that usually refers to prophetic dreams. One of my Hinduinterlocutors at Firoz Shah Kotla, Mohan Lal, once said to me he had learned the

Musalmn zubn, his highly Persianate theological vocabulary, by listening tothe babawho appeared regularly in his dreams. The appearance of the babain a

dream or reverie, white-robed, bearded, unmistakably Islamicate, almost invariably

presages the successful resolution of some conflict or crisis for the dreamer. One

time at Firoz Shah Kotla, an employee of the ASI, someone who has been posted

on duty to many of Delhis medieval monuments in rotation told me that in all

the old monuments of Delhi, not just here, in all the forts, (including the KashmiriGate of the seventeenth century city wall of Old Delhi) there are buzurgon ke

sye, the shades of the elders/great ones. You see them not just at night but also inthe day. Then he proceeded to tell me stories of two women workers of the ASI,

who had disrespected the buzurgby urinating inside the forts, and how just before

they were struck by mysterious illnesses as retribution, they had seen thebuzurg,

dressed in white clothes and wearing white turbans. But, he said, if you do not

disrespect them, by serving at the sites, there is no harm to anyone. ASI officials

are happy and prosperous and in no trouble with the courts or the police, and that

in itself is a big thing these days. The buzurgbless those who serve at the forts. All

these fortifications and palaces, places of war and soldiery and royal courts, now

under the jurisdiction of the secular ASI, are haunted by the images, by the mostly

beneficial presence of Muslim holy figures.

25Katherine Ewing writes, The typicalPir is readily recognizable: he is middle-aged or older; he

has silver or white hair and a neatly trimmed beard; he dresses completely in white and wears a white

turban as well The importance of the detail of the appearance as part of the embodiment of the concept

of thePir (saint) is revealed in the dreams of the followers and others, in which the narrator knows he

has dreamed of a saint because of the appearance of the stranger in his dream. Ewing, The Sufias

Saint, Curer, and Exorcist in Modern Pakistan, p. 107.



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Ontological Aporia: Ibn Arabi and the World of the Imagination

How do we begin to understand these dreams and visions? To understand these

dreams and visions, I turned to the work and legacy of the Andalusian mystic

and philosopher Ibn Arabi, (11651240; who Shaikh Hasan Tahir a.k.a. Hardam

Khayali Baba, was reading from the days of his youth) and his emphasis on the

imagination as both a form and medium of knowledge. I turned to Ibn Arabi because

rather than turning to psychoanalysis, I wanted to understand these dreams and

visions through an understanding native to the Islamicate tradition.

William Chittick did a comprehensive survey of Arabic, Persian and Urdu

manuscript sources in various libraries in India to come to the conclusion that,

The received wisdom is correct in telling us that Ibn al-Arabwas widely known

in the subcontinent.26However, Chittick adds a caveat

By investigating theoretical works that tend by their nature towards an elite rather

than a popular expression of Sufiteachings, I could make little attempt to judge

the extent to which the this influence may have filtered down to the Muslim

masses who made up the bulk of the membership of the Sufiordersa thorough

assessment of Ibn al-Arabs influence must take into account a wide variety

of sources, including what he calls second-rate literature, meaning elementary

manuals for beginners, regional chronicles, collections of qasaidused in Sufimeetings, the mawalidscomposed in honour of local saints, and the ijazas and

thesilsilas of localshaykhsMy general impression was that Urdu plays an

important role in disseminating Ibn al-Arabs teachings on the more popular

level through poetry...27

While I am not aware of any thorough assessment of Ibn Arabis influence

through a perusal of the secondary literature, I was struck, when beginning to read

Ibn Arabi for the first time, of how much of the work was, in a sense, already

familiar to me, through my limited exposure to the corpus of qawwaland Urdu

poetry. For example

Uskmukh ik jot hai, ghnghahai sansrGhnghamevoh chup gaymukh par cal r28

His face is a light, and the world a veil.

He has hidden in the veil, drawing its edge across his face.

26Chittick, The Influence of Ibn al-Arabi,p. 221.27

Ibid., p. 219.28These lines are sung by Abida Parveen in the albumRaqs e Bismil (2001). They serve as a prelude

to a song Zahid Ne, whose lyrics are by the poet Asghar Gondvi, but I am unaware of the author of

these lines.



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Here, in simple Indic imagery (the bridal veil/ghngha) and language, we

have Ibn Arabis concept of existence being a set of veils or secondary causesbetween God and our comprehension of God as the prime causes of existence.29

I could come up with innumerable other examples, but just two more for now

When we are stuck at a traffic light behind a car with an image of Sai Baba (a

Muslimfaqirnow treated as a Hindu deity) on the back window andSabkMlikEk (Everyones Lord is One) is written underneath it, are we not we face to face, in

however bizarrely transmitted and distorted a fashion, with the doctrine of wadatal-wujd, the unity of all beings, closely associated with Ibn Arabi? When sittingin the same car, at the same traffic light, listening to Jagjit Singh singing Ghalib

on the CD player

te hain ghaib se yih mazamin khayl men

Ghlibarr-e khmah nav-e sarosh hai

They come into the mind, these themes, from the invisible world

Ghalib, the scratching of the pen is the voice of an angel30

are we not we confronted with the idea, first comprehensively expounded by

Ibn Arabi, of an autonomous realm of the Imagination, outside of the psyche of

the author, from which poetic images and inspiration come?

Muzaffar Alam, in hisLanguages of Political Islam, has shown how the influ-

ence of Ibn Arabi was a dominant element in the political theology, as it were,

of both Muslim rule and intellectual and spiritual life for several centuries, well

into the nineteenth century. Based on my fieldwork experience, I would say that

Ibn Arabis influence continues to be pervasive in Islamicate (as opposed to

exclusively Islamic) South Asianot only in the rarefied realms of theology and

philosophy but in the realm of everyday life, in as much as everyday life was, and

continues to be, deeply affected by theology and philosophy. Here, I am arguing

not for a genealogy of discursive transmission of Sufiideas (the theoretical worksthat Chittick tracked down, for example) but rather for a tradition of valuation of

the imaginal, of seeing dreams and visions as their own inherently meaningful

form of knowledge.

Khayl, or imagination, was central to the thought and mysticism of Ibn Arabi.According to William Chittick, Probably the most distinctive characteristic of

Ibn al-Arabis teaching is the stress he places upon imagination[he gives]

imagination a grounding in objective reality.31The world of images is not purely

29For a more detailed explanation, see Chittick,SufiPath of Knowledge, pp. 4445.30

In Frances Pritchetts online schematisation of Ghalibs divan, this is sher13 of Ghazal169. Ihave used her translation of theghazal, with only a minor change. See http://www.columbia.edu/itc/

mealac/pritchett/00ghalib/169/169_13.html?31Chittick,Imaginal Worlds, p. 11.



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subjective, but an objective reality out there, from which images and inspiration

are available, as for example in Ghalibs sher. This world belongs to the realmof theghaib, invisible to our usual senses, but which we can perceive through the

inward, spiritual faculty called by such names as insight (bashr), unveiling(kashf), and tasting (dhawq orzauq).32In (not just) Islamic understanding, it is

the heart (qalb) that is the organ for these higher senses. According to Chittick,

Ibn Arabis, use ofKhayl accords with its everyday meaning, which is closerto image than imagination. It was employed to designate mirror images, shadows,

scarecrows, and everything that appears in dreams and visions33

I do not wish to dwell on Ibn Arabis cosmology of the imagination, as has

been done so productively by William Chittick and Henry Corbin, among others.Rather, I want to explore briefly the possibilities that the idea of the imagination as

something external to the subjectrather than being purely subjective and inter-

nalopens up to us. In this, I am deeply influenced by sociologist Avery Gordons

radical reworking of Freuds ideas about the unconscious, the part(s) of our selves

that, according to Western psychology, are said to manifest in dreams and visions.

Gordon rejects the Freudian psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious as being

purely subjective, the individuals repression of socially unacceptable (often

primitive) wishes and ideas, traumatic memories and painful emotions that are

entirely subjective. She also draws attention to Freudsinventionof the idea of the

unconscious

the Freudian unconscious he is inventing, the self-contained closed system,

inaccessible to worldly consciousness, accessible only to a certain kind of analy-

sis competent in treating its symptoms Freuds science will try, once and for

all, to rid itself of all the vestiges of animism by making all the spirits or the

hauntings come from the unconscious, from inside the troubled individual, an

individual, we might note, who had become increasingly taken with the anima-

tion of the commodity world Freud will try to demystify our holdover beliefs

in the power of the world at large, hoping to convince us that everything that

seems to be coming at us from outside is really coming from this now shrunkeninside, tormented by its own immortality.34

Against the Freudian idea of the unconscious, Gordon then poses the idea of the

social unconscious, an unconscious that is not a closed, self-contained system, but

is formed by the constant interaction of the subject with the world around her

The unconscious is inconceivable outside of the worldly relations that structure

the encounter between myself and another and that bring that encounter inside

32Chittick,Imaginal Worlds, p. 56.33Chittick, Ibn Arabi.34Gordon, Ghostly Matters, pp. 4749.



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as my own otherness I cannot explain without knowing something of the life

world from which the other camethe unconscious derives its characteristicforce from its role as the place where all the others out there in the world and

their life come inside me and unhinge my sense of self as they make me what

I am, as they live within me35

Having redefined the unconscious, Gordon proceeds to redefine the Freudian

notion of the Uncanny, which she sees not as the structure of feeling arising out

of being reminded of our own repressed impulses, but rather, Uncanny experi-

ences are where the unconscious rejoins its animistic and social roots, where we

are reminded that what lies between society and psyche is hardly an inert empty

space.36The Uncanny is the return, in psychoanalytic terms, of what the concept

of the Unconscious represses: the reality of being haunted by worldly contacts.37

Rather than trying to explain and elaborate on Gordons theories, I turn now

to a story of dreams and visions and their relationship to everyday life told to me

by Mohan Lal, who has been coming to Firoz Shah Kotla for over two decades. I

turn to these stories because they illustrate both the valuation and the persistence

of the imaginal as an integral part of the texture of everyday life in Delhi, and the

social nature of the uncanny, the engagement with others at the heart of the self

made strange, theorised by Gordon.

Mohan Lal lives in East Delhi, across the river, but was born in a historic suburbof Shahjahanabad/Old Delhiin Paharganj, in the locality of Nabi Karim, in an

area not far from the fourteenth century shrine of Qadam Sharif. His wifes family

is from Sitaram Bazar in Old Delhi. His father-in-law was a devotee of Firoz Shah

Kotla, and Manohar Lal started coming to Firoz Shah Kotla in a time of financial

trouble, shortly after his father in laws death, when he had a series of dreams.

On a Wednesday night/Thursday morning, at a quarter to five in the morning, just

before the aznfrom the nearby mosque, he had a visionary dream, in which thebabaappeared to him and said, Son, come to us in the Kotla, we will see about

your matter. SomeMullJ(Muslim preacher, a term often used disparagingly by

both Hindus and Sufi-inclined Muslims) is speaking some nonsense, Mohan Lalthought, and ignored the dream. He ignored the same dream a second time as well.

The third time, the babaappeared in his dream, very, very angry. I have never seen

anyone as thick and shameless as you, the babasaid to him in his dream. I have

been telling you to come to Kotla; that I will solve your problems, but you do not

come. This time Mohan Lal did not ignore the dream. He woke up and washed his

face and when he came back to bed, the dawn aznhad begun, and his wife wasawake. He told his wife about the dreams he had been having, every Wednesday

night, in which an old Mulla, wearing a cap and with his back bent with age, kept

35Ibid.,pp. 4748.36Ibid., p. 49.37Ibid., p. 55.



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telling him to come to the Kotla, that he would solve his problems. As soon as

she heard this, his wife told him that this was their babaof the Kotla, and he wasshowing his kindness to Manohar Lal, so why did he not go?

Mohan Lals fortunes improved after he started visiting Firoz Shah Kotla regu-

larly. Then Mohan Lal told me the story of the time his son died and was brought

back to life. It was his youngest son, who was onlyfive or six years old at the time.

As he was still very young, he still slept between his parents in their cramped apart-

ment. Very early one morning, before dawn, Mohan Lals wife shook him awake.

Piyush had white foam on his mouth, and his eyes had rolled up into his head.

When Mohan Lal picked him up in his arms, he found that the child had emptied his

bowels, and he folded like cloth in his fathers arms. He was dead, Mohan Lal said,finished. They had gone to bed on a Wednesday night, so it was Thursday now, the

babas day.38He died on your day,Baba, you are responsible for this, Mohan Lal

screamed and cried. I will no longer believe in you or serve you. Mohan Lal was in

shock and could barely stand anymore. He woke up his younger brother, who lived

next door, and the brother took Piyushs body from him to take it to GTB Hospital,

the nearest big government hospital. They had no conveyance at the time, so the

brother stopped two policemen on patrol on a scooter, and one of them dropped

the brother, holding Piyush in his arms, to the gate of the hospital. This is what the

brother sawas they stopped at the gate an angel (farisht) descended from the

air, hovering atop the gate. Black blanket, afakrkaor(a faqirs begging bowl)and a stick. The figure extended his hand, and a noose of light came out and caught

the boy, and he started breathing. When Mohan Lal got to the hospital, Piyush

was sitting up in bed as if nothing had happened, laughing at his fatherPapa, I

am fine, nothings wrong with me, why did we come to the hospital? Mohan Lal

started crying. His son had died, he had seen and carried his lifeless body, and here

he was, alive again. In the morning, the doctor discharged him, and when they

were on their way back from the hospital, his brother told Mohan Lal what he had

seen at the hospital gate that night. For over a month after this, the young child

performed the gestures of wu/waz , the ablutions that Muslims perform beforeprayer. And ever since then, the child, now a young man, has had a preference for

eating chicken, traditionally associated with Muslims, rather than goat (sacrificed

to the goddess Kali, and traditionally eaten by Hindus).

I have recounted Mohan Lals story here in some detail not because it is excep-

tional, but because it is particularly representative of the stories I heard at Firoz Shah

Kotla, and other such dargahsites in Delhi, distinguished only by its eloquence.

Many of the elements in his story are those found in other stories told of the baba.

First, the baba serves as a loving father-figure (in this case, standing in for the

absent father in law). Second, the image and presence of the babaare deeply linked

38Jummerat, Thursday evening, the eve of theJummah, the day of congregational midday prayers,

is traditionally the day to visit the graves of saints.



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to Islam. The babaappears in a dream, bearded like a Mulla, always just before

the call to prayer for thefajr (dawn)namz. Mohan Lal describes these dreams asbashrat, a specifically Islamic term for a dream that brings good tidings. Whenhis child gets better after his near-death experience, he performs the bodily gestures

of preparing for Muslim congregational prayer every time he washes, and starts

eating like a Muslim, in his preference for chicken over goat. And the figure that

Mohan Lals brother saw bringing his nephew back to life wore a black blanket,

just like the Prophet Muhammad, known affectionately asKlKamblWle.39

When he was telling me his story, a very cursory and abbreviated version of

which I have reproduced above, Mohan Lal asked me rhetorically, but not without

an undertow of wonder in his voice, do people of our (Hindu) mazhab (religion) dowaj? The wonder was in what he left unstated. If we do not do those bodily ges-tures in our religion, then how did my son know how to do them after his recovery?

Less uncannily, but with no less of a sense of wonder, we could ask how is it, that

despite not doing these things in our mazhab, non-Muslims at Firoz Shah Kotla,

like Mohan Lal, often have very Islamicate bodily deportments40while praying to

the babas, and how their speech, and their letters written to the babas, are replete

with Islamic theology and linguistic elements. How do we understand the power

to heal misfortune and affliction that these Muslim figures present in dreams and

images have for people across confessional divides? How do we understand the pres-

ence of gestures and language metonymic of Islam in the practices of non-Muslims?None of the above makes any sense if we understand Islam solely as a discur-

sive tradition, following Talal Asad. Asad has argued that if one wants to write

an anthropology of Islam, one should begin, as Muslims do, from the concept of

a discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts.41Asad

formulated his influential idea specifically in opposition to an earlier mode of anthro-

pology, exemplified for him by the work of Clifford Geertz and Ernest Gellner:

Yet for Geertz, as for Gellner, the schematization of Islam as a drama of religi-

osity expressing power is obtained by omitting indigenous discourses, and by

turning all Islamic behavior into readable gesture.42

39Muhammad is referred to as the as the Kali Kambli Wale(The One with the Black Blanket) in

Indian Muslim devotional poetry, and songs. The Prophets cloak is also celebrated in the famous

Qasida al-Burda in which the thirteenth century Egyptian SufiAl-Busiri praises the Prophet, who had

revealed himself to him in a dream, and put his own cloak on Al-Busiris shoulders. Al-Busiri woke up

from this dream able to walk after being crippled by a stroke.40Most characteristically, in the way people bring their hands together, cupped along the edges, like

Muslims do fordua, rather than the way one would join hands with both palms together, in front of the

image of a Hindu deity. Non-Muslims also bow towards the qibla, touching their heads to the ground,in abbreviated versions of the rakatof Muslim ritual prayer.

41Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,p. 14.42Ibid.,p. 9.



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Asad, on the other hand, wishes to see the gestures, the bodily practices of

Muslims, as already (and only) legible through the texts that come prior to them(and of disagreements between texts as to the correct form of practice), through

the discursive tradition that he sees as a field of power and authorisation. While I

find the idea of Islam as tradition valuable and vital, I find Asads idea of Islamic

tradition as solely and primarily discursive, and the explicit hierarchy between

discourse and practice to be limiting. If Islamic traditions are to be understood only

as limited to Muslims (as they are by Asad), and contingent upon the authorised

transmission of discourse in and as a field structured by power, how do we under-

stand the presence of gestures and language metonymic of Islam in the practices

of non-Muslims, who are normatively outside thefi

eld of authorised practice anddiscursive authority? How do we understand, in other words, the visions of Mohan

Lal, and the bodily gestures of his son performing the gestures of wu/wazwhenwashing up, in the days after his seemingly miraculous return to life?

While the above questions may be ultimately unanswerable, my experiences

and conversations during fieldwork lead me to suggest thisto understand Islam

as solely a discursive tradition is a limiting move. We need to broaden the idea of

tradition to include dreams and visions, bodily movements and senses, ethical

dispositions, and modes of affect. The contents of this broadened idea of tradition

are not in a subservient relationship to discourse understood to be always prior

and antecedent to them. (Rather, I would suggest, we need to overturn the priorityof discourse, by considering, for example, the dreams and waking-visions of the

Prophet Muhammad himself, without which there would be no Quran, and no

discursive tradition to speak of.) We also need to be open to the idea of the trans-

mission of tradition outside the over-determining structures of power and authority

and (linked to these) identity, and consider other ways in which tradition can be

transmitteddreams and visions, for example.

We do not need to subscribe to Ibn Arabis elaborate cosmology to realise that

being open to dreams and visions as valid forms of knowledge and experience can

change our ways of being and acting in the world. Take Mohan Lal, for example.

When he speaks of his experiences of Muslims outside of the space of Firoz Shah

Kotla, he is full of contempt and vitriol. After all, discursive knowledge of the

history and presence of Islam and Muslims in India has been subject to violent

rewriting and erasures over the past two centuries, so much so that casual, every-

day hate-speech against Muslims is a pretty common fact in north India, including

among people like Mohan Lal, non-Muslims who frequent Muslim shrines. But in

his dreams and visions, a Muslim figure, a Mulla who he was initially unwilling to

listen to, brought him counsel and good fortune. The vision of a black blanketed

Muslimfigure akin to the Prophet Muhammad brought his son back to life. Through

his dreams, the Musalmnzubnspoken by the baba, not so different perhapsfrom the Urdu that he probably heard every day in the streets of Nabi Karim or

in Dilshad Garden but could not acknowledge discursively, publicly as anything



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related to him, becomes an integral part of his theological vocabulary, his way of

understanding his self in relation to the world. Being open to dreams and visions,thinking that these bring fundamental truths, leaves us open to surprise and won-

derment, to possible selves and beliefs and knowledges and actions that we might

not consciously have been open to.

To open ourselves to the idea of Islam as a visionary tradition is to broaden both

the content of the tradition and its receivers. It is to open ourselves to the idea of

tradition (and hence of history) not just as a linear continuum, but inclusive of all the

breaks and the strange byways of inspiration, all the ways in which the unconscious

work of dreams confounds and challenges the assumptions of our waking selves. It

is to open our idea of tradition to a deep interpellation with the trance like qualityof everyday life, and the everyday as the site of engagement with the life of the

other43in other words, to a conception of history in which dreams and the invis-

ible, so much a part of everyday Islamicate life, are given their proper due. 44It is

to open ourselves to the possibility of disciplines that allow, in Foucaults words,

The double articulation of the history of individuals upon the unconscious of cul-

ture, and of the historicity of those cultures upon the unconscious of individuals.45

The Hearts Two Eyes

He [Ibn Arab] frequently criticizes philosophers and theologians for theirfailure to acknowledge its [the imaginations] cognitive significance. In hisview, aql or reason, a word that derives from the same root as iql, fetter, canonly delimit, define, and analyze... According to Ibn Arab, the heart has twoeyes, reason and imagination, and the dominance of either distorts perception

and awareness. The rational path of philosophers and theologians needs to be

complemented by the mystical intuition of the Sufis, the unveiling (kashf) that

allows for imaginalnot imaginaryvision...

William Chittick46

Are there experiences of the past that cannot be captured by the methods of thediscipline, or which at least show the limits of the discipline?

Dipesh Chakrabarty47

43Here I am drawing my inspiration from the recent work of anthropologists Das (Life and Words;

Engaging the Life of the Other) and Khan (Of Children and Jinn). Their work on urban life in South

Asia is marked by a sense of the everyday as a site of trance, illusion and danger. Through their work

one also gets a sense of dreams and visions being an integral part of the work of everyday life, especially

in negotiating the dangers and attractions of sectarian and religious others.44See also Aquil, Sufism, Culture and Politicsand Digby, The Dreams and Reminiscences of Dattu

Sarwani.45Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 79.46Chittick, Ibn Arabi.47Chakrabarty,Provincializing Europe, p. 107.



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In Ibn Arabis view, rational and imaginal knowledges were not opposed to

one another, but complementary. Each of these ways of knowing would be incom-plete without the other. On the other hand, as Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, the

discipline of history has its own limits, and these are defined by rationality and

narrative possibilities

Any account of the past can be absorbed intothe mainstream of historical

discourse so long as two questions are answered in the affirmative: Can the story

be told/crafted? And does it allow for a rationally defensible point of view or

position from which to tell the story?48

But the dreams and visions of saints amidst these ruins, the primary experiential

modes through which devotees access these saints, allow neither for rationality

nor for narrative. Is this why Bashiruddin Ahmad, an inheritor both of the modern

British traditions of writing history and of Islamic philosophy, refrained from

writing history when it came to the saints among the ruins, present in dreams and

images to the simple believers who flock to their shrines? Knowing perhaps that

a rational, historical investigation into the true antecedents and origins of the saint

was in a sense antithetical to their imaginal, presence for their believers? The mode

in which he writes around(as opposed to about) the dargahs present among these

ruins is in the self-consciously disenchanted mode of the positivist historian, full ofmeasurements and proofs and sources and dates. This is, however, not a mode that

predominates in his writing, as it does in Syed Ahmad Khans writings on Delhi.

Even Bashiruddin Ahmads driest, most factual accounts are usually preceded by

a poetic epigraph, often mystical, to set the mood for the readers reception of

the monument. His accounts of known saints, such as Nizamuddin Auliya, have

separate sections on the kashf o karmat (visions and miracles) of the saint.49

Bashiruddin Ahmads text, while being in many ways similar to the first edition

of Syed Ahmad KhansAsar al-Sanadid (and self-consciously trying to update and

replace the latter) is in many ways a very different text. Written in an early twenti-

eth century Delhi still haunted by the violence and destruction of 1857, and awareof a world changing all too suddenly with the building of a new capital at Delhi,

Bashiruddin Ahmads text privileges the imagination at many points, as the only

way to connect to the lost Mughal past. Consider his writing about Qudsia Bagh,

a Mughal garden to the north of Kashmiri Gate which was devastated during the

Siege of Delhi in 1857, and by British town planning afterwards.

Now it is not a garden, it would be more appropriate to call it a jungle. No

big building has survived, nor has any flowerbed. Now there is no palace and

no pavilion. Yes, but in some places there are mounds of the rubble of broken

48Ibid., p. 98.49Bashiruddin Ahmad, Waqiat, vol. 2, pp. 77276.



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So in this transient world (lam-i fn) if there is any permanence to anyones

memory its face is precisely the reconstruction of these buildings, mosquesand graves etc. which are mentioned in this book and thanks to which till now

their dear names are engraved as if on stone on our hearts and minds, and by

repeatedly seeing which we gain perspective on the past, and whose seductive

views are the whip to our negligence and from our mouths the sounds of praise

[for the past] grow loud and strong.

Dsh baql dar sukhan bdamKashf shd bar dilam shlcunadGuftam amyih hamah dnishDram al-aq batsawlcunad52

Last night I was conversing with my intellect;

A few covers were uncovered to my heart.

I said, Source of all wisdom!

In truth, I have a few questions for you53

The punctuation of Bashiruddin Ahmads prose by this ghazal is telling in

its bringing together of elements usually held apart, such as the intellect and the

heart. The deployment of a couplet which uses the word kashf, the unveiling

that allows for imaginal vision among the Sufis, to punctuate and emphasise

Bashiruddin Ahmads reasons for writing what is supposedly a rational antiquarian

history is significant. It tells us that in post-1857 Delhi, imaginal vision, which had

hitherto largely been restricted to essentially theological contexts (visions of ones

pir, visions of God), was now being deployed in what we could consider historical

contexts as well. Or, to put it another way, the spiritual vision which had earlier

only turned to God now also gazed upon the pre-colonial ruins of Delhi. The ima-

ginal was privileged as the only way to connect to a past now irretrievably lost to

the usual forms of memory. Bashiruddin Ahmad was not alone in this. There aremany examples from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Delhi, when

those attempting to write about 1857 or pre-1857 Delhi show a particularly vexed

relationship to discourse and a privileging of imaginal vision. As a prelude to his

vivid description of the happenings of thePhlwlokSair(The Procession ofFlower sellers, one of the most prominent fairs/festivals of late Mughal Delhi)

Faratullah Beg writes

52Bashiruddin Ahmad, Waqi at, Vol. 2, p. 7. The paraphrasing from the Introduction is from pp. 37.53I am grateful to Pasha Mohamad Khan and Manan Ahmed for help with translating the Persian

shers.



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In the age of Bahadur Shah it [the fair] had such vigour that it was outside [the

powers of] description. If you want to see what the Procession of Flower Sellerswas like in that time, then close your eyes and I will show you.54

It is a puzzling request to be asked to close the eyes in the very act of reading.

Of course, one could argue that in a city with high level of illiteracy and a strong

oral tradition, much of the work was meant to be read out rather than read. But

this momentary demand for the blindness of the reader (or listener) is prefaced

by the statement that discursive description (bayn) is incapable of capturingwhat thePhlwlokSairwas like, and the reader/listener needs to exercise thegift of imagination, of insight rather than sight, without which merely reading (or

hearing) the text would be ineffectual.

In one of his essays lamenting a vanished Delhi, Rashid ul-Khairi wrote a paean

the persistence of memory even within a landscape of ruins, where the eye that

merely sees the apparent (chashm-ihir bn) has nothing to hold its gaze.

The garden of love has been ruined and the colorful flowers of civility and

politeness have burned to ashes but Shahjahanabad still hides within its breast

those bones which in the countries of life made flow such rivers of humanity that

they irrigated the world. When finding some free time from the apparent dignity

of the Abode of Government [British New Delhi] the traveler enters these ruinswhere he is greeted as a guest by the cooing of the dove and the silence of the

fruitless trees, then first of all the grief of the ruin shakes hands with him, gusts

of sorrow-fated wind embrace him. And those few scattered and broken bricks

that still identify the graves of the praise-worthy dead call out their welcome

at his reception. There is nothing here to relieve the eye that sees appearances.

Those eyes are needed here which see with contemplation and read with silence.

Every leaf of this jungle, every brick of these graves, every atom of this dust is

a book, a history, a lesson. This is not a meeting of the living, but a gathering

of those who once shone in life with the radiance of the full moon.55

In the aftermath of destruction, the past becomes present for Rashid ul-Khairi

among its ruins, through the inner eye, the eye of the imagination. He was known

as muavir-i gham, the painter of sorrow, and he turned his grief at the destructionof Delhis lifeworlds into a nostalgic theory of knowledgea way of making the

lost past present to oneself by standing amongst its ruins.

The privileging of imaginal vision amidst the ruins of post-1857 Delhi did not

happen only among the literati of Delhi. After both 1857 and the end of Emergency

in 1977, we have the growing veneration of saints among fourteenth century ruins

(Pir Ghaib and Firoz Shah Kotla respectively), and the presence of these saints

54Baig,Bahadur Shah aur Phul Walon ki Sair,p. 8.55Rashid ul-Khairi,Dilli ki Akhri Bahar,pp. 6263.



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in dreams and visions. I believe that the growth of an imaginal relationship with

the pre-colonial past (as embodied by the ruins) is not just (in common with thetexts of the literati) a counter to the disruption of the usual modes and locations of

memory-work, but also the posing of a certain moral vision56of the past against the

injustices and cruelties of the present. The saints are the imaginal form (or if you

prefer, the embodiment) of this moral vision that becomes increasingly important

with the exponential growth of violence that marks the relationship of the poor

to the colonial and post-colonial state. This moral vision of the past becomes

anchored to medieval Islamic ruins because of their link to a certain normative

idea of justice linked to a particular historical experience of the presence of Islam

in India. I willfi

rst explore a possible genealogy of this moral vision, and then turnto the specific moments and sites of the emergence of this vision in the aftermath

of trauma and disruption.

Moral Vision: The Afterlives of Wahdat-ul-Wujud

The first time I asked Hafiz Sahib about Bijay Mandal, he said that this is a kacahr,an adlat(an office, a court of justice),prDillkadlat(a court of justice for allof Delhi). In this characterisation as a court of justice, this place is similar to other

sacralised medieval ruins in Delhi linked topir babasall of which are considered

courts of justice. This is also a characterisation shared with other dargahs andmazars across the subcontinent, as they are part of a larger ritual vocabulary that

Carla Bellamy refers to as dargahculture, the unique culture of shrines identified

as Muslim holy places, which (unlike mosques) are open to non-Muslims for

prayer and supplication. Such shrines are usually (but not always) built around the

grave of a Muslim holy man, revered by Muslims and Hindus. Justice, in Bellamys

analysis, is central to the understanding of the ritual and efficacy of Muslim holy

places. As her work on the shrine of Husain Tekri Sharif shows, the legitimacy

of Muslim shrines continues to derive from their use of court symbols and legal

language; pilgrims (non-Muslim and Muslim) are still healed in the modalities of

justice, by bearing witness to what has been done to them, and their testimony iswitnessed by both fellow victims and saints; and dargahs continue to offer pilgrims

a means to seek justice and judgement with real world consequences. 57

This unique culture is linked to what Muzaffar Alam has called the Sufiinterven-

tion in the politics of the pre-modern Indian Muslim states.58To radically simplify

Alams thesis, the Islamic polities of pre-modern India dealt with the problem

of having a largely non-Muslim population by following political theory which

56Here I draw inspiration from Ashis Nandys idea of mythology as remembering a moral past.

Mythologization is also moralization; it involves a refusal to separate the remembered past from itsethical meaning in the present (Nandy, Historys Forgotten Doubles, p. 47).

57Bellamy, The Powerful Ephemeral.58Alam,Languages.



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broadened the scope of what was understood as sharia to be more expansive

than legalist Islamic law, and thus being inclusive of the laws and life ways ofother communities. This political theory came out of the philosophy of the unity

of all beings (wadat al-wujd), a philosophy usually traced back to Ibn Arab;and the Sufis who believed and practiced this doctrine (which made them stand in

opposition to narrower definitions of Islam) also made a deliberate intervention

in politics from the thirteenth century onwards, giving an ethical direction to the

state, orienting it to a justice beyond the narrowly legalist definition of sharia.

Alams thesis is the most elegant historical explanation for why the ritual and built

forms of dargahs are so similar to those of pre-modern royal courts, and why, as

Bellamy notes, the healing power of dargahs is (still) linked to ideas of justiceand judgement, even for non-Muslims. An anecdote reproduced by Muzaffar Alam

from theAhlq-i Jahngr, a treatise on ethics for rulers written in the time of theseventeenth century Mughal emperor Jahnagir, illustrates this perfectly:

Dular, the eunuch, the kim (governor) of Panipat, had imprisoned a Hinduon the pretext of a crime then released him on payment of a huge sum. But the

kim...pressed for more money. The Hindu then fled and took shelter in thehospice of the Shaikh [Sharaf al-Din]. When Dular heard about this, he insisted

that the shaikh hand over the fugitive and threatened him with dire consequences

... The shaikh did not budge. Subsequently, the kimdecided to ride to the hos-pice. But no sooner did he enter the threshold of the hospice that the kimwasthrown from his horses back...and instantly killed....The shaikh did not touch

him; he had simply hit the wall with his prayer carpet when he noticed Dular

entering...And then he wrote to the Sultan: Brother Ala al- Din Khalji, keeper

(shana) of Delhi territory, accept greetings from Sharaf of Panipat, and thennote that I have slapped Dular and sent him up to the sky. He had turned insane

and had begun giving trouble to the people of God. Send another person here as

soon as you get this letter or else theshanaof Delhi will also be dismissed.59

The khanqahs and dargahs of the Sufis were,60 and continue to be, open toeveryone irrespective of their faith or their caste. One of the recurrent refrains I

hear from non-Muslims at Firoz Shah Kotla about the babas is that despite being

Muslim, Yih HindMusalmn ka farak (farq) nahn dekhte, sab se muhabbat kartehain (They do not discriminate between Hindus and Muslims, they love every-

body). In the malft (collections of sayings) of the early Chishti saints, thereis often mention of Tantric Jogis, and of spiritual competitions with them, which

59Ibid.pp. 7374.60

This is a broad generalisation, but the khanqahsof the Chishtiyya tariqa were certainly opento non-Muslims from at least the early-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, following the evidence of

the malfuzatliterature. See Digby, Wonder Tales of South Asia, pp. 22133, and Siddiqui, The Early

Chisti Dargahs.



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the Jogis would invariably lose.61While much has been written about these sp

Documents

Anand Taneja Saintly Visions Precolonial Texts