I’ve just returned from a two-week trip out of town, starting in Mumbai with a women’s conference on tackling religious extremism, then continuing on to Ranthambore, Jaipur, Ajmer, Pushkar and Agra. I’ll update with bits from the trip as I can, but one of the most fascinating parts was my visit to the shrine of the 12th-century Sufi saint Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmer, Rajasthan. Along with the shrine of his spiritual descendant Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, which I visited a few weeks ago, Moinuddin Chisti’s dargah is the most important Muslim pilgrimage centre in India.
Ajmer is a fairly anonymous bustling modern town – until you get close to the dargah. The shrine is surrounded by a maze of crowded bazaars, all crowded with excited pilgrims and lined with every conceivable means of making money from them/ providing sincere spiritual service. Like Varanasi, it is a great example of religious enterprise. The bazaar above, which leads to the shrine’s outer gate (the white minaretted building in the centre) is full of people selling incense, candles, great heaps of rose petals and marigolds, green-and-gold embroidered cloths (to lay over the saint’s tomb), prayer beads, devotional music and religious books alongside completely secular children’s toys, clothes, fried snacks and beautiful displays of Ajmer’s famous nut-and-sugar sweets.
I wasn’t allowed to take my camera inside the shrine, but it is somewhat similar to the bazaar outside – a huge sprawling complex (far bigger than the Nizamuddin dargah) of stalls, prayer rooms, ablution facilities and accommodation around the central hub of the tomb. Just inside the entrance are two enormous cauldrons donated by Mughal emperors – one cooking food for the poor (over a vast fire below), one for cash donations. The shrine was full of families and groups of men in their best clothes, all lining up to push inside the main tomb chamber. Unlike at Nizamuddin, women are allowed into the chamber – inside, it’s small, intricately decorated and thick with incense. A crush of people circled the green-draped tomb, pushed by the tomb attendants, who also solicited cash offerings for a blessing with the green silk tomb covering, and pushed pilgrims one by one into a cubby hole under the tomb canopy to kiss the stone floor and scatter rose petals – a split second of private communion with the saint. Outside, two groups of qawwali musicians were competing to honour the saint, whose followers are famous for their love of ecstatic music.
Despite the shrine’s popularity, all this devotion (to a human, rather than to the divine) is frowned on by more conservative Muslims such as the Deobandis, who I’m going to visit in their home town of Deoband tomorrow…
Hi Rachel, cant believe you are still in india (or are you back?). I envy you knowing so much about the people and places of North India. I left india when I was 24 and I have to admit that so much of what i know of the country of my birth is book knowledge.i’m glad you have had such a constructive trip and let us in on it via the blog. I am going to be in Ooty in the Nilgiri Hills from the 2oth to the 27th of Feb and then in Chennai till the 2nd of March. Going to do some research for my book. would be fun to meet up if you are around. cheers, keep safe, Cauvery