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Making a “Muslim” Saint: Writing CustomaryReligion in an Indian Princely State

Nile Green

Printing the Saints: Muslim Hagiography in Colonial India

W hile scholars have long drawn attention to the “classic” medieval Persian hagiogra-phies of the Sufi saints written by authors such as Farid al-Din ‘Attar and ‘Abdal-Rahman Jami, the continued survival of the genre through to the twentieth

century has been largely ignored by scholarship. There seems to be a curiously inverse re-lationship between the focus of scholars on a small number of medieval “classics” and theneglect of the later examples of the genre whose numbers have grown voluminously witheach passing century.1 The undoubted popularity of the genre of the Persian, and laterUrdu, Sufi hagiography scarcely declined with the onset of modernity in India, and the his-tory of printing in India is replete with examples of editions of both new and old hagio-graphical texts. As catalogs of early Indian printed works show, the need for tales of thesaints was felt by members of all of India’s religious communities as the nineteenth cen-tury progressed and the twentieth century began. As a consequence of the long-standingneglect of postmedieval Sufi literature, early Urdu printed hagiographical texts have re-ceived scant attention from the arbiters of literary taste in both the East and West. Thisis perhaps reasonable enough, given their often meager literary merits. While some Urduhagiographies do possess claims to literary craftsmanship, in many cases the readership atwhich such texts aimed led to their composition in a regional or otherwise simplified id-iom. Yet when stylistic considerations are put aside, we may well approach the importanceof the Urdu hagiography from the standpoint of its popularity. Lithographic editions of ha-giographic texts—dealing with non-Indian as well as Indian Sufi saints—appeared in largenumbers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these texts, suchas the Hadiqat al-awliya, by Ghulam Sarwar Lahawri (d. AH 1307/1890), became well knownthrough large parts of India and ran into several editions.2 Maqasid al-salihin, Muhammad‘Abd al-Rahman of Kanpur’s Urdu translation of the Persian hagiographical text Hikayatal-salihin, similarly ran through numerous North Indian editions during the 1870s and

An earlier version of this article was presented in May 2004 atthe “Texts and Their Historical Contexts in South Asia”workshopat St. Antony’s College, Oxford. I am grateful to Sanjay Subrah-manyam, Frank Clooney, and David Washbrook for their invita-tion.

1. See C. W. Ernst and B. B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: TheChishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (Basingstoke, England:Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1–9.

2. Ghulam Sarwar Lahawri, Hadiqat al-awliya (The EnclosedGarden of the Saints) (Lahore, India: Matba’a-ye Khwurshid-e‘Alam, 1875; reprinted Lucknow, India: Munshi Nawal Kishawr,1877; Kanpur, India: n.p., 1889).

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afterward.3 This great expansion in hagiograph-ical printing encompassed most of the lan-guages with which South Asian Muslims were fa-miliar, from Bengali to Punjabi, Sindi, Gujarati,and Tamil. In the case of Gujarati and Urduin particular, many early hagiographical workswere printed in Bombay. Bombay’s lithographicprinting industry also helped uphold the use ofPersian in India by printing considerable num-bers of classic Sufi texts.4 The North Indianbook market was similarly greedy for printededitions of Sufi classics in Persian during thelate nineteenth century. The Rashahat-e-‘ayn al-hayat (Sprinklings from the Springs of Life) of Wa‘izKashifı (d. AH 910/1504) is a case in point,running through at least nine editions fromKanpur and Lucknow between 1890 and 1911.5

The popularity of such texts may be understoodin a number of different ways, alternatively as asign of an emergent bourgeois religiosity or aspart of a continuum with pre-reformist Muslimpiety. What is clear, however, is that such textsplay an important role in book as well as literaryhistory in India.

While the importance of these texts maybe accepted, it might be argued that the mostsuccessful of them are in many respects theleast rewarding. The great saintly compendia(tazkirat) of the nineteenth century are by theirnature formulaic and often repetitive in theextreme.6 All too often, they also representan emergent reformist model of the saint aspreacher and instructor rather than miracleworker. Amid this expansive literature, however,there may be found numerous examples of ha-giographies that continue to present the Sufisaint as miracle worker in a way that was com-

patible with both medieval Persian precedents(in which morality often came in a poor secondto the exercise of miraculous power) and ongo-ing forms of popular religiosity whose practiceoften cut across religious boundaries. Of purelylocal reference and out of step with both literaryfashion and reformist religious “progress,” andconsequently marginalized from both withinand without their own discursive tradition ofhagiographical writing, such works may be re-garded as the subaltern texts of early religiouspublishing in India.

The development of printed hagiogra-phies in many ways mirrored the developmentof printing itself in India.7 As lithographic print-ing spread after its introduction to India duringthe 1820s, the growing number of lithographicpresses, and the suitability of lithographicpresses for producing inexpensive editions insmall print runs, made printing an increasinglyviable option. By the 1860s, popular cheapprint chapbooks and other short works werebecoming increasingly common in numerouslanguages/scripts.8 The popularity of lithogra-phy over typesetting was in this way particularlywell suited to the swift emergence of popularprinted genres; restricted literacy was overcomethrough the widespread practice of readingtexts aloud to an early Indian equivalent of thereading group. In this way, lithographic print-ing brought the written word into the sphereof subaltern as well as elite cultures. As in thegradual rise of legitimate vernaculars throughthe history European printing, this process alsomeant that texts of purely local linguistic aswell as geographical and cultural referencecould emerge.9 In this way, the rise of printing

3. ‘Usman ibn ‘Usman Kahf, Maqasid al-salihin (TheUndertakings of the Pious Ones), trans. Muham-mad ‘Abd al-Rahman (Kanpur, India: n.p., 1868; repr.,Lahore, India: n.p., 1871; Kanpur: n.p., 1875; Kanpur:Matba’a-ye Nizami, 1878).

4. See O. Scheglova, “Lithographic Versions of Per-sian Manuscripts of Indian Manufacture in the Nine-teenth Century,” Manuscripta Orientalia 5 (1999):12–22. The scale of Persian printing in nineteenth-cen-tury India is made clear in the bibliographic listingscontained in K. Mushar, Fihrist-e-kitabha-ye-chapi-ye-farsi az aghaz ta akhar-e-sal-e-1345 (Catalog ofPersian Printed Books from the Beginning to the Endof 1345 SH [1966]) (Tehran: Bungah-e-Tarjuma vaNashr-e-Kitab, 1352 SH/1973).

5. See B. Abu Manneh, “A Note on ‘Rashahat-i ‘Ain al-Hayat’ in the Nineteenth Century,” in Naqshbandis inWestern and Central Asia, ed. E. Ozdalga (Istanbul:Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 1999), 61–66.

6. See M. K. Hermansen, “Religious Literature and theInscription of Identity: The Sufi Tazkira Tradition inMuslim South Asia,” Muslim World 87 (1997): 315–29; and M. K. Hermansen and B. B. Lawrence, “Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications,” inBeyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identi-ties in Islamicate South Asia, ed. D. Gilmartin and B.B. Lawrence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,2000), 149–75.

7. See B. S. Kesavan, History of Printing and Publish-ing in India: A Story of Cultural Re-awakening, 3 vols.(Delhi: National Book Trust, 1985).

8. Cf. A. Ghosh, “Cheap Books, ‘Bad’ Books: Contest-ing Print Cultures in Colonial Bengal,” in Print Areas:Book History in India, ed. A. Gupta and S. Chakravorty(Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 169–96.

9. See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflec-tions on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Lon-don: Verso, 1991).

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6 1 9resulted in two contradictory trajectories. Onewitnessed the spread of normative religioustexts in larger numbers than ever, renderingpossible the creation of new or revived “imag-ined communities” of “Hindu,” “Muslim,” or in-deed “Zoroastrian” readers.10 The other trajec-tory, generally less well documented, was thepromotion of localized traditions of customaryreligiosity, with cheap print technology allowingrelatively minor religious institutions and im-pecunious local movements means of publicityand textual expression.

It is of course no coincidence that the riseof printing in Asia as a whole occurred simul-taneously with the rise of new or renewed no-tions of collective religious identity, from pan-Islamism and (neo) Hinduism to a reawakeningof collective identities among dispersed reli-gious groups such as the Zoroastrians andIsma‘ilis. From the first publication of the writ-ings of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. AH 1314/1897) in Hyderabad to the large-scale exportof Parsi theological books from Bombay toIran, the Indian lithographic publishing indus-try played a central role in this transition tomodernist transregional identities.11 While thisphenomenon has been well examined over thepast decade, less attention has been paid tothe role of printing in the converse process ofthe upholding and in some cases invention oflocal religious identities. For as I have noted,the inexpensive nature of lithographic print-ing also brought the written world into thehands of social groups previously inhabiting aneffectively oral ecumene. The powerful tradi-tions of manuscript learning in both Hindu and

Muslim India that printing quickly supersededduring the nineteenth century possessed a no-tably transregional orientation.12 Islamic reli-gious learning gave prominence to the studyof Arabic, such that Indian Muslim scholarswere still found teaching in Mecca throughoutmuch of the nineteenth century; Brahmaniclearning similarly fostered a Pan-Indian San-skritic culture.13 Outside of the formally reli-gious realm, the imperial/state sponsorship ofPersian learning fostered a similarly transre-gional culture that, like Arabic and Sanskritlearning, was incapable of trickling down thesocial scale with the coming of printing.14 It isno coincidence that Urdu prose writing came ofage with printing; the later transition of Urdufrom vernacular into the transregional linguafranca of South Asian Muslims is another mat-ter. Other vernacular or local languages un-derwent a similar promotion with the spreadof cheap print, in the process opening up theworld of writing to both popular and regionalreligious traditions through granting access tothe written word to a whole new class of writ-ers and readers/listeners.15 By the turn of thetwentieth century, the evolution of local print-ing industries in regional cities and towns inIndia further enhanced this trend toward local-ization. Local religion, and the customary char-acter it had adopted through centuries of de-velopment, was in this way no less favored bythe spread of printing than transregional andreformist religious trends.16

This relationship between the spread anddecentralization of printing and the break-through of local religious forms into print is

10. With relation to Islam in India, see F. C. R. Robin-son, “Technology and Religious Change: Islam andthe Impact of Print,”Modern Asian Studies 27 (1993):229–51; more generally, see J. R. I. Cole, “Printingand Urban Islam in the Mediterranean World, 1890–1920,” in Modernity and Culture: From the Mediter-ranean to the Indian Ocean, ed. L. Tarazi Fawaz and C.A. Bayly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002),344–64.

11. See Anon., “Jamaluddin Afghani’s Activities,” inFreedom Struggle in Hyderabad (1857–1885) (Hy-derabad, India: Hyderabad State Committee, 1956),2:278–84; and J. R. Hinnells, “Bombay Parsis and theDiaspora in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Cen-turies,” in A Zoroastrian Tapestry: Art, Religion, andCulture, ed. P. J. Godrej and F. P. Mistree (Ahmadabad,India: Mapin, 2002), 458–77.

12. On the impact of manuscript and printing tech-nology in the Islamic world, cf. J. Bloom, Paper beforePrint: The History and Impact of Paper in the IslamicWorld (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001);and D. F. Eickelman, “Print, Writing, and the Politics ofReligious Identity in the Middle East,” Anthropologi-cal Quarterly 68 (1995): 133–38.

13. On such issues in Sanskritic literary culture, seeS. Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,”Public Culture 12 (2000): 591–625; and Pollock, “San-skrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out,” in LiteraryCultures in History, ed. Pollock (Berkeley and Los An-geles: University of California Press, 2003), 39–130.

14. Cf. M. Alam, “The Pursuit of Persian: Languagesin Mughal Politics,” Modern Asian Studies 32 (1998):317–49.

15. On Pashto cheap print works, see W. Heston,“Pashto Chapbooks, Gendered Imagery and Cross-Cultural Contact,” in The Other Print Tradition: Essayson Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera,ed. C. L. Preston andM. J. Preston (New York: Garland,1995), 144–60.

16. See also K. Pemberton, “Islamic and IslamizingDiscourses: Ritual Performance, Didactic Texts, andthe Reformist Challenge in the South Asian Sufi Mi-lieu,” Annual of Urdu Studies 17 (2002): 55–83.

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also seen from what is currently known ofthe evolution of printing in Afghanistan. Theestablishment of the first lithographic press,imported to Kabul from India under royal com-mand during the early 1870s, led to the publica-tion of a series of historical and religious worksaimed unequivocally at cementing the fragilenew nation together.17 While a collective his-torical identity, and political condition betweentwo Christian imperial powers, was empha-sized in historical works, religious works seemto have emphasized a form of religiosity thatwas broadly reformist and scripturalist in na-ture. From current inventories of early Afghanprinted works, the earliest expressions of re-gional religiosity seem only to have appearedduring the late 1920s. It was then that the ear-liest known Afghan hagiographical publicationappeared, devoted to the Sufi shrines and saintsof Herat that had for centuries formed the focusof the city’s religious activities.18

The evolution of the Urdu saintly hagiog-raphy mirrored these wider trends both withinIndia and beyond its borders. As the multi-ple editions of popular Urdu hagiographies bypublishers such as Nawal Kishawr demonstrate,such works could be produced for profit. Butat the same time, there seems to have beena relationship between content and popularitywith such texts. Transregional hagiographiesdescribing the lives of saints from larger ratherthan smaller regions would naturally attract awider readership than texts dealing only withthe saints of a given town. Saintly content inthis way served as a mirror for the target read-ership of the texts in question. For this rea-son, the most widespread genres of early hagio-graphic publications seem to have been devotedto works dealing with either non-Indian saintsor saints of large regions (often in the denselypopulated Muslim regions of North India).With his almost universal veneration by IndianMuslims, ‘Abd al-Qadir Jilani of Baghdad (d.

AH 561/1166) proved an emblematic saint inprint; at least as popular as such saintly hagi-ographies were accounts of the lives of the Mus-lim prophets (anbiya), which could by defini-tion be marketed to all Muslims. The evolutionof the local hagiography was therefore a reflec-tion of the spread of printing and the possi-bility of producing short-run editions for localreaderships. The role of self-financed publish-ing, still a hallmark of Urdu publishing today,should also be reckoned in this process, for,as argued below, printed hagiographies playedthe role of accolades and offerings that couldbe used to enhance the status of given saintlycults in competition with local or distant rivals.Yet despite the multiple client communities thatwere typically attached to the shrines of the Sufisaints in India, the coming of print played animportant role in the gradual wearing away ofthe often opaque and multiple religious per-sonae of such saints. It is this process that is ex-plored in some detail in the remainder of thisarticle, for with the increasing politicization oflanguage that was coeval with the rise of Indianprinting, it seems important to try to explorethe relationship between the power of printingand the communalization of customary religionin India. It appears that it was in part throughthe politics of language that the assistance in-expensive printing lent to customary religionwas in varying degrees neutralized. While de-scribing traditions of local religiosity that oftentranscended formal religious boundaries, suchtexts—whether in Muslim-Bengali or Urdu—came to be regarded as “Muslim” texts throughtheir use of the Arabo-Persian script and, ingreater or lesser degree, a vocabulary of learnedArabic religious terms unfamiliar to non-Mus-lim (and in many cases Muslim) audiences.Writing, and its normalization through print,was in this way closely involved in the separa-tion of religious communities and the narrowdefining of both Sufi saints and the religious

17. See Wasil Noor, “Chronological Survey of the DariBooks Published in Afghanistan,” Central Asia: Jour-nal of Area Study (University of Peshhawar, AreaStudy Centre) 1 (1980). I am grateful to R. D. McChes-ney for supplying me with his bibliography of earlyAfghan printed works.

18. Amir Sayyid ‘Abd Allah Husayni Wa’iz’s Risala-ye-mazarat-harat: Tazkira-ye-‘ulama wa masha’ikh(Treatise on the Shrines of Herat: A BiographicalCompendium of LearnedMen and Shaykhs)was pub-lished in Afghanistan in 1929. Another account of theSufi shrines ofHerat, ‘AbdAllahQandahari’sMazarat-e-harat (Shrines of Herat) was published in India(presumably on order from Afghanistan) slightly ear-lier, in AH 1346/1927–28.

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6 2 1activities connected to them in communalterms. This article therefore examines in detailone such hagiographical text along with its con-texts as a means to explore the often contradic-tory forces at work in the written expression ofcustomary religiosity in early-twentieth-centuryIndia.

Hagiographical Strategies in A‘zam al-karamatThe hagiographical text under discussion inthis article, A‘zam al-karamat, describes the lifeand deeds of the early-twentieth-century holyman Banne Miyan (d. AH 1339/1921). As sug-gested in his saintly moniker, with its meaningof “the noble bridegroom,” his cultic identityand subsequently his constituency of devoteeswere not defined in clear religious or com-munal terms. While the use of the honorificmiyan was suggestive of a male Muslim, thesaint’s nominal presentation as a bridegroomreflected popular religious customs (such asthe celebration of the ‘urs or “wedding” of thesaints) in which Muslims and Hindus alike par-ticipated. Banne Miyan was born into a Pun-jabi Muslim family in the military service ofthe Nizam of Hyderabad; his given name wasMuhammad A‘zam Khan. His cultic persona,however, most clearly mirrors that of the Islami-cate faqir (“spiritually poor man”); he is a mira-cle worker who is accessible to all and is in nosense a teacher of religious doctrine. His ha-giography, A‘zam al-karamat, seems to have beenwritten either shortly before or shortly after hisdeath. While his death is not mentioned in thetext, it seems likely that the work was composedas part of the process of transforming the cachetof a living holy man into that of a dead saint.The text was therefore published around AH1339/1921.19 It was published in Aurangabad,the second city of the Nizam’s State of Hyder-abad, a city that though far away from the morefamous centers of Urdu publishing (Lucknow,Delhi, Hyderabad, and Kanpur) was only oneof many cities to develop a local publishing in-

dustry at this time. A‘zam al-karamat is in thissense a product of the localization of publish-ing described earlier. During the previous twodecades Aurangabad had enjoyed a consider-able growth in Urdu publishing that was cer-tainly helped via state sponsorship in the formof the opening of a branch of the Anjuman-e-taraqqi-ye-Urdu (Society for the Promotion ofUrdu) in AH 1321/1903. For much of the pe-riod in question, the anjuman was supervisedby the great scholar of Urdu Mawlwi ‘Abd al-Haqq (d. AH 1381/1961), who in addition tohis works in the service of Urdu also made animportant contribution to the Sufi traditions ofthe region through the writing and publicationof his Urdu ki ibtida’i nashu wa numa men sufiyaekaram ka kam (Work of the Sufis in the Early Devel-opment of Urdu) in Aurangabad in 1933.20

Isma‘il Khan, the author of the hagio-graphical A‘zam al-karamat on the life of his un-cle Banne Miyan, was not a trained literary styl-ist; it is this naive quality that gives his text thevivid qualities that social historians value highly.A‘zam al-karamat contains many colloquialisms,as well as vignettes that provide great insightinto provincial social life in Aurangabad. Butof particular interest is the text’s representa-tion of the value system of customary religiositythat was under threat during this period froma growing and increasingly bourgeois discourseof Muslim reform. This is seen in the way inwhich A‘zam al-karamat manages to bring suchsaintly activities as the regular consumption ofcannabis together with more familiar ways ofexpressing Muslim piety, such as formal prayer(namaz). As a document that vividly reflects thefoundation of a saintly cult, A‘zam al-karamathas a great deal in common with the earlierMalfuzat-e-Naqshbandiyya written in Aurangabadin the decades before AH 1164/1750 on thelives of the late Mughal Sufis Shah Musafir(d. AH 1126/1715) and Shah Palangposh (d.AH 1110/1699).21 The latter text was firstpublished as a lithograph in Hyderabad in AH

19. Muhammad Isma‘il Shah Qadiri, A‘zam al-Karamat (Greatest of Miracles) (Aurangabad, India:Mu‘in Press, n.d. [ca. AH 1340/1921]), henceforth AK.

20. Mawlwi ‘Abd al-Haqq, Urdu ki ibtida’i nashu wanuma men sufiyae karam ka kam (Aurangabad, In-dia: Matba‘a-ye Anjoman-e-Tarraqi-ye-Urdu, 1933).

21. See Shah Mahmud Awrangabadi, Malfuzat-e-Naqshbandiyya: Halat-e-Hazrat Baba Shah MusafirSahib [Persian] (The Words of the Naqshbandis: TheSpiritual States of His Holiness ShahMusafir) (Hyder-abad, India: Nizamat-e-‘Umur-e-Mazhabi-ye-Sarkar-e-‘Ali, AH 1358/1939–40); translated by S. Digby, Su-fis and Soldiers in Aurangzeb’s Deccan (Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001).

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1358/1939–40, though it had to wait morethan another half century before appearing inUrdu translation by sponsors in Aurangabad; di-rect influence of one text on the other is there-fore probably unlikely.22

However, there are important similaritiesbetween the two texts. Both were written by thefirst spiritual successors (sajjada nashins) to in-herit the charisma of their respective foundersaints, authors who also played important rolesin overseeing the management and expansionof the shrines of the saints they eulogized intheir writings. It also seems that the composi-tion of both texts was a singular act of author-ship rather than part of a wider literary career;no further books are known to have been writ-ten by either author. Like many other hagiogra-phies, there is an important sense in whichboth the Malfuzat-e-Naqshbandiyya and A‘zam al-karamat should be seen as examples of writingin the service of a cult.23 The purpose of A‘zamal-karamat, and its composition during the pe-riod in which Banne Miyan’s cult was being es-tablished, is certainly suggestive of a text com-posed to fulfill the proper criteria of sainthoodin the Indian Sufi tradition. A noted saint in-variably possessed both a shrine and at leastone hagiography, often, perforce, written by aclose relative. In this way, there is an importantsense in which A‘zam al-karamat was an exampleof a kind of hagiographical vanity publishing,for given the norms of Urdu publishing dur-ing this period we can be almost certain thatthe costs of publication were met by the author.Since no other copies of the text have been lo-cated, the scale of both publication and reader-ship seem likely to have been limited; this wasa subaltern text in more ways than one. A use-ful comparison may perhaps be made betweenA‘zam al-karamat and the Muslim-Bengali cheapprint books popular in Bengal during the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whichsimilarly reflected customary traditions of re-ligiosity over and above the more narrowly Is-

lamic learning typical of madrassa and reformistliterature.24

One of the most interesting compara-tive aspects of A‘zam al-karamat and Malfuzat-e-Naqshbandiyya is the broad similarity in the kindof miracles that they describe, miracles thatseem to operate more within a framework of thedemonstration of saintly power than within anyclearly moral ensemble. Such texts reveal a sideto Islamicate devotional religion that is con-cerned with basic questions of power: the powerto live through droughts and epidemics, or tosecure employment and marriage on favorableterms. Here the saint is defined primarily by hispossession of powers that his clients themselveslack but desire. As a narrative no less than socialconstruction, he is in this sense the personifi-cation of his clients’ needs and desires. As su-pernatural tabulae rasae, holy fools like BanneMiyan seem particularly well suited to such pur-poses, with their own lack of a clearly articulatedpersona allowing space for the projection ontothem of others’ desires in the way that silent butbeautiful women have often served as mirrorsfor the fantasies of poets.

The model of the nature of religious pow-er that A‘zam al-karamat presents requires thetext to make certain primary definitions aboutthe nature of this power and its diffusion onearth that rely on well-established (if by this pe-riod also contested) models of the Muslim uni-verse that explain the nature of sainthood. How-ever, the price of relying on these models orprototypes of sainthood is that the saint is castin a firm role: that of the Muslim saint (wali).There are several important dimensions to thisquestion of religious definition that relate tothe direct social contexts of the text’s composi-tion in early-twentieth-century Hyderabad Stateand to wider questions of the drawing of reli-gious boundaries and the role of writing withinthis. Such questions of definition play a centralrole in the strategies of the text, which explic-itly define Banne Miyan as a Muslim saint within

22. Shah Mahmud Awrangabadi, Malfuzat-e-Naqsh-bandiyya, trans. Muhammad Muhib Allah Faruqi(Nagpur, India: Noori, 1999).

23. On the processes involved in the creation of Sufisaint cults in South Asia, see J. Frembgen, “FromDervish to Saint: Constructing Charisma in Contem-

porary Pakistani Sufism,” Muslim World 94 (2004):245–57; andD.Matringe, “La Creation d’un saint et sesenjeux dans le Panjab Pakistanais” (“Issues at Play inthe Creation of a Saint in Pakistani Punjab”), JournalAsiatique 288 (2000): 137–52.

24. See Ghosh, “Cheap Books, ‘Bad’ Books.”

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6 2 3a line of earlier Muslim saints who are ex-plained with reference to normative models ofsainthood established in earlier Muslim tradi-tion. Banne Miyan had a great many followersdrawn from among the city’s Hindu (and possi-bly Christian) as well as its Muslim community.Given that he could in this way stand astrideexclusive models of religious affiliation in prac-tice, the question arises as to why this was notreflected in his hagiography. The answer to thisimportant problem seems to have two dimen-sions. The first of these dimensions is more spe-cific and local, relating to the society withinwhich A‘zam al-karamat was composed; the sec-ond dimension, which to some degree also im-pinges on the first, relates to the nature of writ-ing more generally.

Early on in A‘zam al-karamat, there areapprobations of the great Sufi saints of theChishtiyya and a long quotation from an un-named malfuzat of Mu‘in al-Din Chishti (d.AH 633/1236). A short section in Arabic alsostresses the importance of performing the hajjto Mecca and ritual prayers, a stress on norma-tive Muslim practice notably lacking in the bi-ographical details provided on Banne Miyan’slife itself. This introduction serves to locate thetext within a wider body of pious writings andtraditions of the Chishti saints. In the secondsection (bab) of the text, the somewhat disor-derly introduction is followed by an account ofBanne Miyan’s family lineage and his childhoodinitiation into the Chishti, Qadiri, and Rifa‘iSufi orders at the hands of his master, AfzalShah Biyabani (d. AH 1273/1856). The authorIsma‘il Khan is careful to ensure that his read-ers (many of whom would have been person-ally familiar with Banne Miyan and his disrep-utable lifestyle) are able to grasp that the saint’santinomian ways and ecstatic manner are seenas signs of sainthood rather than disqualifica-tions from it. In a section outlining the differentkinds of Muslim saint, Banne Miyan is carefullycategorized within the classic terminology of ec-

stasy in Islam as a majzub (“ecstatic, holy fool”).25

The place of jazb (“ecstasy, passion, craving”)in Islam is validated by Isma‘il Khan through apurported Arabic quotation on the subject byImam Shafi‘i (d. AH 204/820). In an interest-ing aside, the author assures his readers thatnothing is forbidden to the disciples of such asaint so long as their master remains in a stateof communion (wasl) with God.

Having provided the technical proofs ofBanne Miyan’s status, the text goes on to pro-vide what we might term authorized proofsthrough accounts of Banne Miyan’s affirmationby two well-known Hyderabadi saints of this pe-riod. The first of these was his own master, AfzalShah Biyabani (d. AH 1273/1856), who in clas-sic Sufi form is described as recognizing hisprotege’s greatness when he first sees BanneMiyan as a child and as predicting that BanneMiyan would become the perfect master of hisage.26 Reflecting the importance of living fig-ures of Sufi authority in the mediation and con-ference of sainthood, the text cites Afzal Shah’ssajjada nashin at Warangal as having declaredBanne Miyan to be one of the “lords of spe-cial blessings” (arbab-e-fayzan-e-khas) and a “mas-ter of miracles” (sahib-e-karamat).27 The secondfigure to affirm the saint’s status is Habib al-‘Aydarus (d. 1347/AD 1928?), a member of theinfluential ‘Aydarus clan of Hadrami scholarsand Sufis long resident in the Deccan, who wassaid to have visited Banne Miyan in Aurangabadand spent an evening in meditation with him inhis retreat (hujra).28 Aside from these two mas-ters, the text is careful in its presentation of thereligious figures with whom Banne Miyan dealt,most of them being drawn from the circle ofAfzal Shah’s followers.

Yet despite the imagery and activitiesthrough which Banne Miyan is described, fromits opening pages A‘zam al-karamat was also care-ful to categorize Banne Miyan within an un-ambiguously Islamic framework of identity thatlinked him both with the social norms of a

25. Hagiographies ofmajzub saintswere by nomeansnew; on the Persian hagiography of an earlier IndianSufi ecstatic, see S. Digby, “Anecdotes of a ProvincialSufi of the Delhi Sultanate, Khwaja Gurg of Kara,”Iran 32 (1994): 99–109.

26. AK, 16. On a well-known similar story relating toNizam al-Din Awrangabadi (d. AH 1142/1729) thatmaywell have been known to Isma‘il Khan, see GhulamSarwar Lahawri, Khazinat al-Asfiya [Urdu] (TheTrea-sury of the Pure) (Kanpur, India: n.p., AH 1312/1894),1:464.

27. AK, 14.

28. Ibid. On the presence of suchHadramis in the Dec-can during this period, see O. Khalidi, “The HadhramiRole in the Politics and Society of Colonial India,1750s–1950s,” in Hadhrami Traders, Scholars, andStatesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s, ed. U.Freitag and W. G. Clarence-Smith (Leiden: E. J. Brill,1997), 67–81.

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Muslim princely state and with the typologi-cal norms of Islamic doctrines of sainthood(walayat). As the guardian (and in anothersense creator) of Banne Miyan’s posthumoustradition, his heir and biographer Isma‘il Khanpreserved the memory of the saint in a textthat placed him squarely amid a grand traditionof Indo-Muslim saints dating back to Mu‘in al-Din Chishti of Ajmer. The penning of a suitablehagiography, or tazkira, for a saint was consid-ered an act of piety and the generic traditionsand stylistic norms of tazkira composition thatunderlay such acts of learned piety demandedattention to genealogical and spiritual defini-tions of a saint’s identity.29 As a text writtenin early-twentieth-century Hyderabad State, it isunsurprising to find that the author of A‘zamal-karamat drew (however erratically) on earlierArabic and Persian works that made up Hyder-abad’s wider Muslim world of learning. Hyder-abad remained an important center of Arabicand Persian scholarship and publishing duringthis period, and Urdu writers were often ea-ger to display their knowledge of this earlierheritage. Urdu by this time had become the of-ficial language of the state, and literary produc-tion in Urdu was patronized by a variety of in-stitutions at a state and local level, including, aswe have seen, a local branch of the Anjuman-e-taraqi-ye-urdu. It is worth noting that A‘zamal-karamat was the first hagiography of any ofthe Sufi saints of Aurangabad known to havebeen published in Aurangabad and so markedan important local moment in the shift frommanuscript production to printing that was re-flected at the same time in the writings of suchDeccani hagiographers as ‘Abd al-Jabbar Malka-puri (fl. AH 1331/1912).30

At the same time, the style and contents ofA‘zam al-karamat reflected those of the hagiog-raphy of Banne Miyan’s spiritual master, AfzalShah Biyabani. Afzal Shah’s miraculous deedshad earlier been described in a tazkira com-pleted in AH 1331/1913 titled Afzal al-karamat,

a title that was echoed in Isma‘il Khan’s A‘zam al-karamat.31 Afzal al-karamat was written by Muhyial-Din Darwesh Qadiri (d. AH 1362/1943), theson-in-law of Afzal Shah’s successor Sarwar Biya-bani (b. AH 1258/1843) and descendant ofthe earlier Hyderabadi Sufi Musa Qadiri (d. un-known). A lawyer at the High Court in Hyder-abad, Muhyi al-Din visited Aurangabad on nu-merous occasions in the early decades of thetwentieth century.32 It seems likely that Isma‘ilKhan and Muhyi al-Din were acquainted, sinceIsma‘il Khan was clearly familiar with Muhyi al-Din’s Afzal al-karamat. In his A‘zam al-karamat,Isma‘il Khan cited several miracles of Afzal Shahthat were drawn from Afzal al-karamat, while rec-ommending the reader to peruse the latter textfor more information on Banne Miyan’s spiri-tual master.33 Almost a decade before the com-position of A‘zam al-karamat, Banne Miyan wasdescribed in AH 1331/1913 in Afzal al-karamatas a majzub, foreshadowing his presentation inA‘zam al-karamat.34 This intertextual quality sug-gests that Banne Miyan’s Muslim identity inA‘zam al-karamat was also influenced by the factthat his hagiography belonged to a local tex-tual tradition whose normative models servedto mold definitions of sainthood in line with anearlier Arabo-Persian tradition of hagiographi-cal writings that had originally developed out-side India. As Banne Miyan was the spiritual off-spring of Afzal Shah, so was A‘zam al-karamatthe literary heir to Afzal al-karamat, lineages ofpeople in this way finding echo in lineages oftexts in a reflection of the organization of writ-ing throughout Islamic tradition.

In speaking of this local textual ecumene,we should not forget the influence of the imag-ined readership of A‘zam al-karamat in the shap-ing of its contents. While Urdu had by no meansbeen abandoned by non-Muslim readers in Hy-derabad State by the early twentieth century, theMaratha nationalist movement and its active lit-erary wing had begun to have a strong impacton the sociolinguistics of reading. Given the

29. On the conventions of the classical Sufi hagio-graphic genre, see J. A. Mojadeddi, The Biographi-cal Tradition in Sufism: The Tabaqat Genre from al-Sulami to Jami (London: Curzon, 2001).

30. ‘Abd al-Jabbar Khan Malkapuri, Tazkira-ye-Awliya-ye-Dakan [Urdu] (Biographical Compendiumof the Saints of the Deccan) (Hyderabad, India:Hasan, AH 1331/1912–13).

31. Sayyid Shah Darwish Muhyi al-Din Qadiri, Afzalal-karamat (The Most Excellent of Miracles) (Hyder-abad, India: Barakat, AH 1402/1981 [AH 1331/1913]).

32. I am grateful to Syed Shujathullah of the shrine ofAfzal Shah atWarangal for details on the life ofMuhyial-Din Darwesh.

33. AK, 10.

34. Afzal al-karamat, 77.

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6 2 5social status of Isma‘il Khan as heir to a re-ligious figure recognized by state officials, itseems likely that the readership he conceivedfor A‘zam al-karamat consisted mainly of Hyder-abad’s small literate Muslim middle class, alongwith those Hindus who regarded the Deccan’sIslamicate traditions (including the readingand writing of Urdu) as part of their own her-itage. Such a readership was mirrored by thedramatis personae who enter the text. Most ofthe figures who come to Banne Miyan for assis-tance in A‘zam al-karamat are Muslims of pre-cisely this class: merchants, foot soldiers, low-ranking officers in the Hyderabad Contingent,or minor civil servants. In other words, they be-longed to the small but growing class in Au-rangabad that was literate in Urdu; it is notablein this respect that between AH 1298/1881 andAH 1350/1931 the Muslim literacy rate dou-bled in Hyderabad State, especially with regardto literacy in Urdu.35 In this way, the writtenworld of A‘zam al-karamat reflected the localworld of its imagined readership, the world ofthe Hyderabad subaltern.

Looking beyond Islam:Customary Religion in A‘zam al-karamatUnder such conditions, it is unsurprising thatone narrative in A‘zam al-karamat described thepeople of Aurangabad worrying about an epi-demic affecting the town and sending some-one to Banne Miyan to ask for help.36 His re-sponse is interesting, however, in delegating themiraculous task by sending the messenger tospend the night in vigil on the platform (chabu-tra) in a stream running beside the shrine ofthe late Mughal Sufi, Shah Nur Hammami (d.AH 1104/1692). This platform was also fea-tured in the oral hagiographical tradition ofShah Nur, as a revered site (maqam) associatedwith Shah Nur’s miracles, hinting at the debt ofBanne Miyan and his biographer to a preexist-ing local sacred geography associated with ear-

lier dervish figures and the oral historical tra-ditions connected to them.37 While it was leftdeliberately unclear in A‘zam al-karamat whichsaint was ultimately responsible for banishingall talk of disease from the town the next day,Banne Miyan modestly put the disappearanceof the epidemic down to the efforts of the mes-senger. The story in this way gives its own read-ing of how miracles occur, through showingthem as a two-way process involving not onlythe power of the saint but also the faith of thedevotee and his willingness to follow the com-mands of his preceptor. Here we are clearlyin a realm of the devotional religion that, inthe language of bhakti, was familiar to a muchwider audience in the Aurangabad region thanMuslims alone.38 The interplay between BanneMiyan and the older saints of the region is alsoseen in two other episodes in A‘zam al-karamat.In the first of these, a local soldier from theContingent walked the sixteen miles from Au-rangabad to Khuldabad on pilgrimage (ziyarat)to its famous Sufi shrines, but after becominglost and exhausted on the way back was rescuedthrough Banne Miyan’s intercession.39 In thesecond narrative, Banne Miyan’s influence isclaimed to have stretched to the descendantsof another of Aurangabad’s late Mughal Sufis,Shah Musafir (d. AH 1126/1715), for A‘zam al-karamat attested that the brother-in-law of thesajjada nashin of Shah Musafir’s shrine was afirm believer in Banne Miyan’s powers.40 Here,the prestige of the local religious aristocraciesthat such sajjada nashins lineages representedwas rhetorically co-opted to authorize the mer-its of a saintly newcomer to the city. As we seebelow, this process was replicated in a docu-ment appointing the author of A‘zam al-karamat,Isma‘il Khan, as Banne Miyan’s deputy (khalifa).

Such narratives provide great insight intothe social and cultural contexts into which theolder Persianate traditions of the Sufis hadpassed by the turn of the twentieth century and

35. Ramar Char, “Education in Hyderabad,” ModernReview 66 (1939).

36. AK, 45.

37. On the role of this platform in the oral traditionof the shrine, see N. S. Green, “Oral Competition Nar-ratives of Muslim and Hindu Saints in the Deccan,”Asian Folklore Studies 63 (2004): 221–42.

38. On the interface between Islam and bhakti, seeP. Gaeffke, “How a Muslim Looks at Hindu Bhakti,”80–88; and F. Mallison, “Muslim Devotional Litera-ture in Gujarati: Islam and Bhakti,” in DevotionalLiterature in South Asia, ed. R. S. McGregor (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 89–100;and Dominique-Sila Khan, “The Prannathis of Ra-jasthan: Bhakti and Irfan,” inMultiple Histories: Cul-

ture and Society in the Study of Rajasthan, ed. L. A.Babb, V. Joshi, and M. Meister (Jaipur, India: Rawat,2002), 209–31.

39. AK, 67. On the Khuldabad shrines, see C. W. Ernst,Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at aSouth Asian Sufi Center (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1992).

40. AK, 148–49.

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the ways in which dervishes continued to playimportant roles in their communities despitethe influence of British colonial power on theone hand and movements of Muslim and Hindusocioreligious reform on the other. Such a de-termined emphasis on the intervention of thesaintly miracle struck a firmly antimodernist re-buke against the reformist Islam that was mak-ing its influence felt strongly across South Asiaduring this period and that had by AH 1335/1916 entered Aurangabad’s own Sufi traditionthrough the teachings of Mu‘in Allah Shah (d.AH 1345/1926), the reformist missionary Sufiof Aurangabad.41 For Banne Miyan was effec-tively a miracle worker rather than a religiousinstructor of any kind, and the sole episodesin which Banne Miyan does provide a specifi-cally mystical experience to his followers occurthrough the power of his grace ( fazl) ratherthan through instructing disciples in the per-formance of zikr or other religious exercises.Such acts of saintly grace are represented inA‘zam al-karamat as being a conscious alterna-tive to the effort involved in the performanceof spiritual exercises. When one devotee cameto Banne Miyan after having spent twenty-fiveyears performing the loud repetitive chant (zikr-e-ashghal) that he had been taught by a Naqsh-bandi Sufi master, instead of teaching him an-other meditative exercise Banne Miyan gavehim a gift of a prayer rug. After performing theMuslim ritual prayer on this rug, the devoteeimmediately experienced a level of mystical ex-perience that he had previously never even ap-proached through the chanting of zikr.42 A sim-ilar story in the text describes a soldier from theContingent coming to visit Banne Miyan, whothen fed him and gently closed his mouth withhis hands, a touching image that is repeatedelsewhere in the text of the saint behaving asa mother to his childlike devotees. The imme-diate result of this feeding session was that thesoldier underwent a mystical experience with-

out making any spiritual effort (riyazat) on hisown part.43 Here we are probably dealing with acompound of religious imagery that should notbe exclusively placed within either an Indic orIslamicate tradition. For while the scene carriesechoes of the receipt of blessed food (prasad)within a Hindu milieu, it is no less a reflectionof the similar consumption of blessed morsels(tabarruk) within Islamic contexts both withinIndia and beyond it. Indeed, it is not uncom-mon for the Arabic- and Sanskrit-derived termsof tabarruk and prasad to be used interchange-ably in Indian Sufi shrines to this day, suggest-ing that such acts of linguistic equivalence wereconscious and deliberate attempts to suggesta shared metaphysical and symbolic universein which Muslim and Hindu concepts were tosome degree interchangeable.44

Banne Miyan demonstrates the ways inwhich Sufism had become absorbed into thepluralistic religious landscape of the Deccan, aregion in which miracle-working Sufis or Yogismight be equally resorted to by Muslims andHindus. While there is certainly a long tra-dition of this in many regions of India, thispragmatic approach to miraculous power hada particularly strong following in the Marath-wada region in which Aurangabad was situated.In Aurangabad, for example, the cult of theaforementioned Shah Nur Hammami had overtime become intertwined with that of the fa-mous Sadhu, Manpuri Parshad, based at nearbyDaulatabad; Shah Nur’s dargah (mausoleum)and Manpuri’s math (Sadhu lodge) both pos-sessed mixed constituencies of Hindus andMuslims.45 For his part, Banne Miyan repre-sented an outgrowth of this same style of reli-giosity. Despite the clear presentation of BanneMiyan in A‘zam al-karamat in the guise of aspecifically Muslim saint, the forms of BanneMiyan’s religious expression and the associa-tions that he made with fellow mystics and devo-tees from what might be too easily classified as

41. See N. S. Green, “Mystical Missionaries in Hyder-abad State: Mu‘ın Allah Shah and his Sufi ReformMovement,” Indian Economic and Social History Re-view 41 (2005): 45–70.

42. AK, 32–33.

43. Ibid., 73.

44. On this approach to “cross-cultural” exchange inSouth Asia, see T. K. Stewart, “In Search of Equiv-alence: Conceiving the Muslim-Hindu Encounterthrough Translation Theory,” History of Religions 40(2001): 260–87.

45. On the alternatively competitive and coopera-tive relationships between such saints, see Green,“Oral Competition Narratives”; and H. van Skyhawk,“Nasiruddin and Adinath, Nizamuddin and Kaniph-nath: Hindu-Muslim Religious Syncretism in the FolkLiterature of the Deccan,” in Flags of Fame: Studiesof South Asian Folk Culture, ed. H. Bruckner, L. Lutze,and A. Malik (Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 445–68.

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6 2 7other religious traditions show him as part ofthe pluralistic religious landscape of Marath-wada. Indeed, the introduction to A‘zam al-karamat stressed that Banne Miyan had follow-ers who were Hindus, Parsis, and even Britons(ingrez). This cosmopolitan following placesBanne Miyan in a cognate position to the mostfamous saint of the region during this period,Sai Baba (ca. 1838–1918) of Shirdi, to the southof Aurangabad. To an even greater degree thanBanne Miyan, Sai Baba had large numbers ofdevotees drawn from each of the region’s reli-gious traditions and over time also gained Euro-pean followers. But Sai Baba’s subsequent famewas bought at a price, and his prominence hasmeant that his formal religious identity quicklybecame a matter of dispute after his death, forhe has been claimed as both (and neither) aSufi and a Sadhu.46 Yet like Banne Miyan, SaiBaba more accurately represented the lived ex-pression of a religious imagination that haddeveloped outside the formal categories of re-ligious identification that often exist more com-fortably in written lives than in lived ones.

Given the fact that Banne Miyan and SaiBaba were contemporaries resident in the sameregion, it is not surprising that there seemsto have been contact between them. BanneMiyan was also visited by Meher Baba (1894–1969), the other notable pan-religious leaderto emerge from the region during the later partof this period.47 Like that of Banne Miyan, theearly life of Sai Baba is enmeshed in uncer-tainty, but most sources agree that he visitedAurangabad a number of times during his earlytravels (and may have lived there for severalyears) and came into contact with Banne Miyanduring this period.48 He is sometimes regardedas having been the student of an otherwiseunknown Sufi of Aurangabad called RawshanShah. Shortly before his death in 1918, Sai Baba

is also reported to have sent word to BanneMiyan in Aurangabad advising him of his com-ing demise with the words, “On the ninth dayof the ninth month, Allah will take away my life,for such is Allah’s will” (Nau din nau tarikh, Allahmiyan ne apna dhuni lagaya, marzi Allah ki).49 Onhearing this, Banne Miyan is said to have burstinto tears of grief. Interestingly, no reference ismade to Sai Baba in A‘zam al-karamat, possibly inreflection of the limited fame of Sai Baba at thetime of its composition. Yet Banne Miyan andSai Baba were remarkably similar figures, di-vided more by their posthumous fortunes thanby the character of their earthly careers.

As we have seen, true to the traditions ofthe antinomian faqir, Banne Miyan was also fa-mous for his use of cannabis. Several narrativesin both A‘zam al-karamat and the saint’s lateroral tradition revolve around his smoking ofthe straight Indian clay pipe (chillam).50 Asidefrom his pipe, Banne Miyan’s only possessionsin A‘zam al-karamat seem to have been a sim-ple local blanket (kamal), with which he some-times covered himself in public, and the peb-bles (konkar) or occasionally bones (hadi) thathe would throw to supplicants when granting arequest. However, undoubtedly the most vividimpression of Banne Miyan is gained throughthe few photographs that survive of him in thelast years of his life. In one of these, he is seennaked with his legs curled up before him ina pose that echoes a well-known painting ofanother antinomian Sufi majzub from Bijapurin the southern Deccan more than two cen-turies earlier.51 Another photograph shows himdraped in a large black Egyptian cloak, embroi-dered with gold and silver thread and appar-ently given to him by the Nizam’s Hindu primeminister, Kishen Parshad (in office from AH1320/1902 to AH 1329/1911), before beingpassed down to his heirs.52

46. For recent reconsiderations of Sai Baba’s religiousidentity, see M. V. Kamath and V. B. Kher, Sai Baba ofShirdi: A Unique Saint (Mumbai, India: Jaico, 1991);Y. S. Sikand, The Shirdi Sai Baba and His Messageof Communal Harmony (Bangalore, India: Himayat,2001); and M. Warren, Shirdi Sai Baba in the Light ofSufism (Delhi: Sterling, 1999).

47. See C. B. Purdom, The Perfect Master: Shri MeherBaba (London: Williams and Norgate, 1937), 24.

48. Warren, Shirdi Sai Baba, 116–18.

49. Ibid. I have somewhat altered the transliterationof this sentence in line with what seems (to me)to make sense. See also A. Rigopoulos, The Life andTeachings of Sai Baba of Shirdi (Delhi: Indian BooksCentre, 1993), 240; and B. V. Narasimhaswami, Life ofSai Baba, 4 vols. (Madras: All India Sai Saraj, 1980–83),3:164.

50. E.g., AK, 28.

51. This miniature painting is published as the fron-tispiece to R. M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur 1300–1700:Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1978).

52. The cloak measures around three-by-two metersand is preserved by Banne Miyan’s great nephewMustafa Shah Biyabani, to whom I am grateful forshowing me this and other relics of the saint.

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The issue of Banne Miyan’s religious iden-tity is compounded both by the assertion in hishagiography that he had many non-Muslim fol-lowers and by the fact that his cult eventuallycame to be dominated by non-Muslim devotees.The picture gained of Banne Miyan’s own activ-ities from the later oral tradition of his familyand followers presents him in the less sharplydefined tradition of the South Asian holy man,rather than as a definitively Muslim figure. Oneof the earliest descriptions of Banne Miyan inA‘zam al-karamat pictures Banne Miyan sittingalone in ascesis near to the Cantonment on theedge of Aurangabad as dozens of worms crawlfrom his ears.53 Here he appears as the classicSouth Asian ascetic, a figure who belongs moreto India as a whole than to any of its specific re-ligious traditions uniquely.54 It was perhaps thisvery marginality, this occupation of a religiousspace between narrower conceptions of Muslimand Hindu religiosity, that lent Banne Miyan afollowing that drew on each of Aurangabad’sreligious communities. Like that of Sai Baba,Banne Miyan’s religiosity drew on the compos-ite culture that had been an integral part of lifein the Deccan for centuries. Reflected earlierin the Dakhani poetry patronized by the pre-Mughal sultanates of the Deccan, this compos-ite culture had earlier manifested itself in Au-rangabad in the cult of Shah Nur Hammami,particularly with regard to his connection withthe great Sadhu, Manpuri Parshad.55

As A‘zam al-karamat expressly declares to-ward the end of its long introductory section,its main contents of miracle accounts form themost substantial of all proofs of Banne Miyan’ssainthood.56 Yet it is in the accounts of thesemiracles, narratives that contain a great deal ofethnographic detail and present a vivid pictureof the living Banne Miyan, that the saint’s affin-ity to a solely Muslim tradition of holy men be-

gins to appear less firm. There are several nar-ratives dealing with his regular use of cannabisand suggested use of opium, activities that oc-cupied a common ground between a certainclass of holy men of Muslim or Hindu familybackground. Other stories deal with the saint’sregular practice of throwing a pebble or bonetoward his supplicants as a sign of grantingtheir requests, activities that occupy a similarlyneutral religious symbolism. A‘zam al-karamatpresents very little by way of Banne Miyan’steachings, but we do occasionally see a glimpseof the nature of his teaching style. In the fewinstances where his words are directly quoted,he speaks only in pithy riddles. On one occa-sion, he greets two of his followers by declar-ing that “Mecca and Madina have arrived,” be-fore telling them to “humble themselves andtremble.”57 On another occasion, he is heardonly to repeat over and again the words, “Yesbrother, yes brother” (Han bhai, han bhai).58

In this manner of speaking and in the numer-ous accounts of his erratic behavior, we gain alively picture of the words and deeds of an ec-static dervish or holy fool. Banne Miyan’s men-tal distraction contains echoes of the biogra-phy of the early Urdu poet of Aurangabad, Sirajal-Din Awrangabadi (d. AH 1177/1766). Sirajsimilarly spent years in states of alternating joyand anguish that would be classified in mod-ern terms as a form of mental illness, wander-ing naked among the Sufi shrines of nearbyKhuldabad.59 While Banne Miyan’s manner ofspeaking clearly does at times place him withina Muslim cultural and religious framework withearlier echoes in local dervish culture, Isma‘ilKhan’s insistence at one point in the text thatBanne Miyan always performed his prayers andupheld the Sharia seems to clash with thewider antinomian image of the saint that is pre-sented in the text.60 At times, there seems to be

53. AK, 17–18.

54. For an interpretation of the meanings of such fig-ures, see J. Parry, “Sacrificial Death and the Necropha-gous Ascetic,” in Death and the Regeneration of Life,ed. M. Bloch and J. Parry (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1982), 74–110.

55. On this earlier Dakhani literature, see A. Suvorova,Masnavi: A Study of Urdu Romance (Karachi, Pak-istan: Oxford University Press, 2000).

56. AK, 14.

57. Ibid., 20–21.

58. Ibid., 14.

59. The main source of Siraj’s biography is the Tuh-fat al-shu‘ara (The Gift of the Poets) (AH 1165/1751) ofAfzal Beg Khan Qaqshal (d. unknown). Extracts fromthis text are presented and its contents discussedby ‘Abd al-Qadir Sarwari in his Urdu introduction tothe complete works of Siraj. See Siraj Awrangabadi,Kulliyat-e-Siraj (The Complete Works of Siraj), ed.‘Abd al-Qadir Sarwari (repr., Delhi: Qawmi Kawnsilbaraye Furugh-e-Urdu Zaban, 1998), 17–81.

60. AK, 43–44.

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6 2 9a nervous twitch toward respectability on behalfof the nephew and biographer of this saintlyvagabond.

The Contexts of Hagiography:Authors, Heirs, and ArchitectureFour years before Banne Miyan’s death in AH1339/1921, in AH 1335/1917 a formal Persiancertificate (sanad-e-khilafat) was issued appoint-ing his nephew and subsequent biographerIsma‘il Khan (d. AH 1376/1956) as his deputy,or khalifa. This extant document gave Isma‘ilKhan the right to appoint disciples on hisown behalf and to lead the death anniversaries(‘aras) of the preeminent figures of BanneMiyan’s Sufi tradition, namely, ‘Abd al-Qadir Ji-lani (d. AH 561/1166) and Afzal Shah Biyabani(d. AH 1273/1856).61 The document was cer-tified with the seals and/or signatures of sev-eral witnesses, who included the hereditary Sufirepresentatives (sajjada nashins) of the famouslate Mughal Sufi Nizam al-Din Awrangabadi (d.AH 1142/1729) and the minor local Sufi saintShah Sokhta Miyan (fl. AH 1080/1670?), alongwith the official seal of the khilafat office (daftar-e-khilafat) in Aurangabad. Intertwined with le-gal matters of the inheritance of endowed(waqf ) property, as well as the purely symboliccapital of the saint’s barakat, such certificatesdemonstrate the way in which Sufism had be-come interwoven with the bureaucracy andlegal procedures of an Indo-Muslim princelystate.62 In a sense, the document embodies themeeting of ecstasy and order that has been atheme in the history of Sufism since its ninth-century beginnings in Baghdad and Khurasan.For in princely Hyderabad, as in other Mus-lim environments during the same period, as apublic matter sainthood and its inheritance at-tracted the regulating hands of the state.63 Byvirtue of the power that Banne Miyan’s popu-

larity demonstrated that religious ecstasy (jazb,wajd) possessed, ecstatic religion required so-cialization and control.64 Much of the charac-ter of Sufism as a formal mystical discipline hasbeen defined by attempts to walk between thesetwo poles of ecstasy and order, a balance con-stantly reinforced in the ritual musical perfor-mances (mahfil-e-sama‘) played before Muslimand Hindu participants in the shrines of India’sSufis from the medieval period to the presentday.65

The oral tradition of Banne Miyan’s fam-ily describes the Nizam’s Hindu prime minis-ter, Kishen Parshad, throwing pearls and goldcoins (ashrafis) before Banne Miyan, whichwere collected by his brothers Mahmud Khanand Ibrahim Khan for the subsequent founda-tion of the shrine. Given Kishen Parshad’s well-documented devotion toward the shrines ofKhuldabad, and the fact that he maintained amansion (deori) at a short distance from BanneMiyan’s compound, this does not seem an un-reasonable claim.66 As was mentioned earlier,there was the gold-embroidered Egyptian cloakthat Kishen Parshad also presented to the saint.Numerous other gifts were also bestowed onBanne Miyan by devotees, which were later keptby his family as relics. Appropriately, these in-cluded a large folio Persian commentary on theKoran (dated AH 1315/1897–98) and an early-twentieth-century Hindi edition of the Bha-gavad Gita. A large number of the rudrakshabeads often associated with Sadhus were alsogiven by devotees, while another visitor gave a1910 hundred-ruble Russian banknote.

Around AH 1309/1891, the Nizam Mah-bub ‘Ali Khan had granted an income of fifteenrupees per month for Banne Miyan’s food anddrink (khur wa nush), which five years before hisdeath was increased to twenty-five rupees, andeventually fifty rupees, after the Nizam visited

61. Banne Miyan Papers, shrine of Banne Miyan, Au-rangabad, document A (copy in author’s possession).

62. On the status of waqf properties in British India,see G. C. Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments and Soci-ety in British India (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress, 1985).

63. On similar procedures in nineteenth- and twenti-eth-century Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt, see J. Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, PopularProtest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia,1800–1904) (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1994); and V. Hoffman, Sufism, Mystics, and Saintsin Modern Egypt (Columbia: University of South Car-olina Press, 1995).

64. On different aspects of this theme in the ear-lier Sufi tradition, see J. C. Burgel, “Ecstasy and Or-der: Two Structural Principles in the Ghazal Poetry ofJalal al-Din Rumi,” in The Heritage of Sufism, ed. L.Lewisohn, vol. 2, The Legacy of Medieval Persian Su-fism (1150–1500) (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999), 61–74;and C. W. Ernst, The Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (Al-bany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

65. On these performances in past and present, seeB. B. Lawrence, “The Early Chishti approach to Sama,”in Islamic Society and Culture, ed. M. Israel and N.K. Wagle (Delhi: Manohar, 1983), 69–93; and R. B.Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

66. On the early-twentieth-century deoris of Aurang-abad, see D. G. Qureshi, Tourism Potential in Aurang-abad (Delhi: Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, 1999), 61–63.

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Aurangabad in person.67 This income was latertransferred to Banne Miyan’s nephew, BahadurKhan, who acted as caretaker (muntazim) ofBanne Miyan’s shrine when his cousin, the au-thor of A‘zam al-karamat, Isma‘il Khan, becamethe first official successor (sajjada nashin) ofBanne Miyan. The occasion of Banne Miyan’sdeath and funeral in AH 1339/1921 are de-scribed in some detail in an official letter writ-ten to the chief administrator (subehdar) of Au-rangabad shortly after Banne Miyan’s death.68

The letter describes the funeral as being at-tended by a huge crowd composed of the saint’sHindu and Muslim followers. The Muslim partyalone was large enough to fill the great FridayMosque built in the city by Awrangzeb and spillout into the ruins of Awrangzeb’s former palace,the Qila Arak. Because of the eagerness of somany people to pay their last respects to BanneMiyan, the funeral lasted from the morning un-til the last hours of the evening, during whichtime the shops of the city’s bazaars all closed outof respect.

Given the composition of A‘zam al-karamataround the time of Banne Miyan’s death, thetext should be seen as in some ways coeval withthe shrine to the saint that developed in theyears following his death. As we have observed,Isma‘il Khan was not only the author of A‘zamal-karamat but also the first official successor ofBanne Miyan and as such the key figure in theestablishment and maintenance of his shrineuntil his own death in AH 1376/1956. As isso often the case, hagiographic writing and fu-nerary architecture cooperate in the processesof memory that are at the heart of cultic activ-ity. The oral tradition of Banne Miyan’s fam-ily describes a hujra that Banne Miyan madefor himself by hollowing out a mound of clay.This retreat was located in the family compound(ahata), which subsequently became the loca-tion of the saint’s shrine, where Banne Miyan’srustic shelter was kept after his death as a re-minder of his presence. It remained intact un-til the late 1930s when it was destroyed by

a falling tree during a monsoon storm. YetBanne Miyan’s clay hujra echoed a wider tra-dition among Indian ascetics. This tradition ofoccupying an earthen mound included the leg-endary anthill that appeared over the meditat-ing author of the Ramayana, Valmiki (“he of theanthill”), the similar association of anthills andother earthen mounds with Maratha holy fig-ures in the Aurangabad region, and ultimatelythe association of the Aurangabad Sufi ShahNur with another such mound in the oral tra-dition of his shrine in the twentieth century.69

Here again, Banne Miyan’s symbolic repertoirebelonged to a class of holy men united by a com-mon ascetic tradition rather than separated bymore formal religious boundaries.

After the destruction of Banne Miyan’soriginal clay retreat, it was rebuilt in brick by hisgreat-nephew, Mu‘in al-Din Khan (b. AH 1323/1905). It was also around this time that a domedmausoleum was built over Banne Miyan’s gravein 1351/AD 1932, so rendering permanent thecharisma of the living saint. A‘zam al-karamatmentions several landowners (jagirdars) andHyderabadi officials as being followers of BanneMiyan, and their attachment to the faqir duringhis lifetime seems to have been enough to granthim sufficient land in the center of the city forhis shrine to be established. The text referredto people coming to see the living Banne Miyanwhile he was still alive at his ahata, a term thatis used synonymously with reference to familyresidences and shrines. The attachment of lo-cal notables to the saint later resulted in BanneMiyan’s family being given more land outsideAurangabad, around the village of Harsul, as apious endowment, or waqf, for the foundationand upkeep of a shrine. The main bequest ofland amounting to around sixty-two acres camefrom one Ramz ‘Ali Shah, while the mausoleumitself was paid for by a local member of the AsafJah bureaucracy called Zamir al-Hasan.70

The architectural style of the mausoleumclosely followed the prototypes of the region’searlier Sufi shrines, particularly those of Nizam

67. BanneMiyan Papers, documentD (copy in author’spossession).

68. Ibid.

69. On such associations, see Green, “Oral Competi-tion Narratives”; and J. Irwin, “The Sacred Anthill andthe Cult of the Primordial Mound,” History of Reli-gions 21 (1982): 339–60.

70. This information is based on interviews withmembers of BanneMiyan’s family at his shrine in Au-rangabad during August 2003. I am grateful to Muin-uddin Khan, Kashifuddin Khan, and Seyyid Quddusfor their cooperation and hospitality.

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6 3 1al-Din Awrangabadi (a short distance away)and Shah Nur Hammami. The style of themausoleum in this way placed Banne Miyanwithin an Islamicate tradition of saints in theDeccan, architecture in this case giving a moreclearly bounded definition of his religious iden-tity than his own activities seem often to havedone during his lifetime. For while Hindu andMuslim pilgrims paid equal devotion to thebabas buried in these shrines, often throughreligiously ambiguous language and practices,the fact remains that Banne Miyan was com-memorated in a shrine built according to Mus-lim architectural tradition rather than in thesamadhi or math of a Yogi or Sadhu. While weshould be careful not to regard architecture asdefinitively fixing religious identity, the posthu-mous changes in Sai Baba’s burial site from Sufimausoleum to samadhi clearly reflect the sym-bolic and at times communal currency of thearchitecture of death.71

It is also important to bear in mind thecontinued social and political prestige of Islamin Hyderabad State as a factor in the shapingof Banne Miyan’s religious identity. DefiningBanne Miyan as a Muslim saint brought the as-sets bequeathed to him by his followers with-in the realm of the Muslim law of charitableendowments (awqaf ), a legal category that wasadministered and promoted by Hyderabad’sadministration. Isma‘il Khan was successful increating a shrine that could continue his un-cle’s cult after his death and also, through thelaws governing shrine administration, enablehis extended family to maintain control of theshrine. The legal definitions governing Muslimreligious institutions, the security of which wasmaintained by Hyderabad’s historic protectionof Muslim interests, thus played a part in hagio-graphic definitions. In this way, legal formulasechoed hagiographic formulas: if Banne Miyanwas a Sufi, his shrine was therefore a dargah,which in turn meant that its income would beprotected by Muslim endowment law. This legaland hagiographic cohesion is also borne out by

the fact that the author of A‘zam al-karamat wasthe first sajjada nashin of Banne Miyan’s shrine,having previously had his appointment as thesaint’s khalifa ratified by the state administra-tion in Aurangabad in AH 1335/1917. WithBanne Miyan’s identity fixed in the terminologyof Islamic sainthood, we are presented in thepages of A‘zam al-karamat with the perspectiveon the saint’s identity of an aspiring Muslim re-ligious notable in a Muslim princely state.

Legal categories aside, we should not ig-nore the social prestige that came with entryinto the class of sajjada nashins in HyderabadState. This was still a period in which Hyder-abad possessed a self-consciously Muslim estab-lishment, proud of its traditions and mainte-nance of the legacy of Mughal culture. Throughthe help of their “ecstatic” relative, whose dis-tracted and manic states were interpreted as asign of divine favor through recourse to the Sufinotion of the majzub, the family of Banne Miyanwere able to move from one pillar of respectabil-ity to another, from the military to the religiousclass. No longer the scions of minor officers inthe Hyderabad Contingent, the family were nowthe heirs of a saint whose renown was capableof attracting the attention of the Nizam’s primeminister, Kishen Parshad.

Inside the mausoleum of Banne Miyan, awooden frame was built above the saint’s tomb,from which four ostrich eggs were hung. Thepresence of the eggs in a shrine of this period istestimony to the ongoing tradition of importingostrich eggs as pilgrimage goods from the hajjat a time at which the ostrich was being huntedto extinction in Arabia. In further testimony tothe Islamicization of Banne Miyan’s legacy bysome of his followers, a small mosque was addedto the shrine shortly after the construction ofthe mausoleum. The rest of the compound wastaken up with the living quarters (zanana) ofBanne Miyan’s family and a small family burialground, where the saint’s brothers and succes-sors were later interred. A small supplementaryshrine (astana) to the great medieval Sufi Mu‘in

71. On recent communal tensions over shrine archi-tecture and the religious identity of cult figures in In-dia, see Y. S. Sikand, “Another Ayodhya in theMaking?The Baba Budhangiri Dargah Controversy in South In-dia,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 20 (2000):211–27.

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al-Din Chishti was later constructed in a cor-ner of the shrine, where one of Banne Miyan’sdevotees had witnessed a vision of the Indianfounder of the Chishti order. Here, visionsserved to link Banne Miyan and his shrine toa wider Sufi geography of pilgrimage in SouthAsia, making the astana at Banne Miyan’s shrinein Aurangabad a local surrogate for the mainshrine of Mu‘in al-Din at Ajmer. In these ways,whatever the religious ambiguities of his ownlife and the multiple faiths of his followers, itwas ultimately hagiography and the architec-ture and patronage of Banne Miyan’s shrinethat solidified his memory as an heir to the ear-lier Sufi saints of the city, whose shrines werereflected so clearly in his own. The work of thetext was thus reified by the architectural con-texts of Banne Miyan’s cult.

ConclusionsAmid the various forms of ideological attackon traditional religiosity present in HyderabadState in the guise of Muslim and Hindu doc-trines of religious nationalism and reform dur-ing the early twentieth century, in A‘zam al-karamat customary religion was able to findliterary expression in a text that describes de-votional activities unaffected by Hindu or Mus-lim calls for religious reform. Despite this, A‘zamal-karamat manifested a struggle to define andcontrol the religious identity of the faqir thatwas by no means unique to the cult of BanneMiyan. Here Banne Miyan’s career was reflectedby those of his faqir contemporaries in the re-gion, and in the years following Banne Miyan’sdeath the forces of communalism struggledover the legacies of each of his contemporariesin turn.72 The gradual “Hindu-ization” of SaiBaba of Shirdi is the best-known example ofthis tendency, by which the faqirs’ connectionswith Islamic and even Islamicate tradition haveprogressively shrunk over time. Yet this pro-cess was also alive in the colonial milieu ofthe faqirs themselves. A dispute broke out be-

tween Sai Baba’s Hindu and Muslim followersstraight after his death over whether he shouldbe buried or cremated. In the case of Baba Janof Poona (d. AH 1350/1931), burial disputeswere even more premature and actually beganseveral years before her death.73 What is inter-esting about Baba Jan’s case, however, is theway in which they highlight fractures within theMuslim community itself. As recounted in re-ports in the Times of India from 1926, the dis-pute revolved around protests that her burial inPoona’s Pensioners’ Mosque would mean thatperformances of praise singers (qawwals) wouldnot be possible on her death anniversary, sinceit was claimed that such performances wereforbidden in or near mosques.74 Such perfor-mances were also, of course, a shared featureof Hindu-Muslim piety and so there was alsoclearly a communal dimension to the dispute.In the case of another famous faqir of the re-gion, Taj al-Din of Nagpur (d. AH 1344/1925),such contentions were principally concernedwith the location of his burial. For while his pa-tron, the deposed Maharaja of Nagpur, desiredhim to be buried in the grounds of his palace,other followers successfully demanded the con-struction of a dargah in a place that they claimedTaj al-Din had himself selected.75 Expressed inthe various nuances of these different disputeswere the various interpretations of the identityof the faqir.

In A‘zam al-karamat, Banne Miyan’s suc-cessor Isma‘il Khan attempted to make senseof the religious tradition represented by BanneMiyan in accordance with a preexisting Muslimconceptual schema of sainthood, or walayat. Inattempting to do so, A‘zam al-karamat demon-strated a clash between textual definitions andsocial practices that is common to many otherforms of religious writing. For A‘zam al-karamatwas part of a discursive tradition of Muslim writ-ings on sainthood on which it drew itself in itsattempt to give a clear definition in words of acomplex social being, Banne Miyan. From one

72. Cf. I. Copland, “ ‘Communalism’ in Princely India:The Case of Hyderabad, 1930–1940,” Modern AsianStudies 22 (1988): 783–814.

73. On this figure, whose colonial career bears manyechoes of that of Banne Miyan, see K. A. Shepherd, ASufi Matriarch: Hazrat Babajan (Cambridge: Anthro-pographia, 1985). The principal early account of Baba

Jan’s life is that of her follower, Abdul Ghani Munsiff,“Hazrat Babajan of Poona,”Meher Baba Journal (Ah-madnagar/Bangalore, India), 1938–42 (repr. in Awak-ener [New York] 8 [1961]). A shorter account of her lifealso appears in Purdom, The Perfect Master, 19–21.

74. The reports on Baba Jan appeared in the Times ofIndia on 4 September and 7 September 1926.

75. On Taj al-Din’s life, see Ekkirala Bharadwaja,Shri Tajuddin Baba (Ongole, India: Sri Gurupaduka,1999). This book is also currently available onlineat www.geocities.com/nagpurbaba/contents.htm. Ashort early account of Taj al-Din’s life also appears inPurdom, The Perfect Master, 25.

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6 3 3perspective the text was successful: it presentsthe reader (or, at least, the reader with a famil-iarity with Muslim tradition) with a clear idea ofwho its subject was and the place he occupiedin the cosmic scheme of things. But from an-other perspective, the text was a failure: its de-scriptive, but also implicitly prescriptive, modelfailed to address the complexity of its subject’ssocial and religious identity. In simple terms,A‘zam al-karamat was an act of writing that failedto adequately describe the world.

Instead, in reflection of a widespread andperhaps inherent propinquity of writing, A‘zamal-karamat reflected the contents of earlierbooks out onto the world at the very momentthat it reflected the forms and movements ofthe world into the pages of a new book, so de-scribing the local world of Aurangabad throughthe lenses of Muslim written tradition. Along-side the contextual influences on the shapingof Banne Miyan as a Muslim saint in A‘zam al-karamat, the written word itself seems to haveplayed a role in the narrowing of his religiousidentity. This may be explained by the fact thatA‘zam al-karamat drew on a wider discourseof Muslim sainthood as expounded in localhagiographies like Afzal al-karamat and ear-lier writings in Persian and Arabic with whichIsma‘il Khan showed some familiarity. Yet thevery act of writing is in itself an act of defin-ing, of the editing out of the ambiguities andnuances of the outside world. As in part a fail-ure of writing itself, the limited vision A‘zam al-karamat presents of Banne Miyan’s complex re-ligious identity is a reminder of the limitationsof written knowledge. As with the suspicion ofwriting shared by platonists and postmodernistsalike, it is also appropriately a failure that hasmany echoes in the paradoxical mistrust of writ-ing displayed by the Sufi writers of previous gen-erations.