Michael Snyder - Where Delhi

COLUMBIA UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
WHERE DELHI IS STILL QUITE FAR:

HAZRAT NIZAMUDDIN AULIYA AND THE
MAKING OF THE NIZAMUDDIN B ASTI 1
MICHAEL THOMAS PASCHAL SNYDER
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
ABSTRACT:
This study aims to examine the nature of the relationship between

the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya and the neighborhood that
surrounds it, the Nizamuddin basti. The paper begins with an
explanation of the life and history of the Saint himself before moving
on to a consideration of activities at the shrine, especially the
thoughts and practices of devotees, and their ways of connecting to
the figure of the venerated Saint. The experience of the devotee is
divided into two sections, the first dealing with the devotees’
connection to the historical figure of the Saint himself, the second
with the significance of the dargah’s physical location in the Saint’s
teachings and the practices of his devotees.
Having examined the Saint and his dargah, the essay moves on to an
analytical look at the historical circumstances surrounding the
development of the Nizamuddin basti, from its early stages as a
miniscule settlement for the caretakers of the shrine, to its current,
denser condition. The historical conditions surrounding the
formation of the basti are then related to its form today and the ways
in which it sustains itself as an urban unit. Through the entire
discussion, I suggest that connection to community, land, and place is
the unifying link between the life and teachings of Hazrat
Nizamuddin Auliya, and the basti that took his name.
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1 Acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge my project advisors, Jack
Hawley and Scott Kugle, Kamaal Hassan, the Aga Khan Foundation (esp. Deeti
Ray, Tara Sharma, and Shveta Mathur), Shabi Ahmad, Syed Tahir Nizami, Farid
Nizami, Mohammad A. Awan, Uzma Zafar, Shamim Khan, Dominique Sila-Khan,
Srivatsa Goswami and the Jai Singh Ghera Ashram, Mary Storm, Guy McIntyre,
Dheeraj Nakra, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and the Religion
Department of Columbia University, all for their support and scholarly advice,
without which this study would have been impossible.
1
WHERE DELHI IS STILL QUITE FAR
Introduction
I n the midst of the historical monuments and posh colonies of

South Delhi, the dense tangle of streets known as the
Nizamuddin basti is an anomaly. As one approaches from Lodhi
Road to the West, the basti presents a worn but determined face of
crooked brown houses, pushing out over the dried up nallah, or
storm drain, that forms the Western boundary of the neighborhood.
From this vantage point, the crowded assemblage of narrow
buildings appears no more penetrable than the locked, gated, and
guarded walls of the wealthy colonies along Lodhi Road. That the
Nizamuddin basti is its own, self-contained world, something apart
from the Delhi that surrounds it, is obvious at first glance. I
embarked on this project in the hopes of discovering how the dargah
at Nizamuddin has remained one of the city’s most-visited holy
places. This investigation led me, perhaps inevitably, to an
examination of the neighborhood that surrounds it. How does a
place like the basti survive in the heart of modern Delhi? What has
produced it? What holds it together?
Every question about the basti leads eventually to the dargah

that sits at its centre and the life of the Saint buried therein. The
dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia is the unquestionable historic,
religious, and geographic origin of the neighborhood, the reason it
came into existence, and the reason it continues to draw visitors from
the world over; its survival through fully seven hundred years of
Delhi’s turbulent history parallels the basti’s survival through
gentrification in neighboring colonies, the Delhi Development
Authority’s fight against haphazard construction, and the
neighborhood’s confused, liminal status in the DDA’s development
plan. Researching the Saint led always back to the place where he
lived; researching the basti led continuously to the foundations laid
there by the Saint. The essay that follows presents the histories of
the Saint and the basti as parallels, both sharing the important thread
of connection to place and community.
I began by exploring the Saint both as a historical figure and

as an object of veneration for modern devotees, using when possible
first-hand interviews with them. I supplemented my own interviews,
which were of course restricted by my inability to converse in Urdu,
with secondary source materials that recorded the experiences of
other devotees at the dargah, as well as some that dealt directly with
its history. After speaking to the custodians of the dargah, I was
given an English translation of a diary purportedly written in the
Saint’s lifetime. Despite encountering other such documents, I used
this as my central historic text simply because it was chosen by a
2
devotee as exemplary of the Saint’s teachings.
Despite the fact that the Saint died some seven centuries ago
and the basti continues to thrive today, tracking the history of the basti
proved far more challenging than uncovering that of the Saint
himself, requiring both the testimonies of residents, as well as the
knowledge and expertise of scholars. When possible, I spoke to
residents of the basti, otherwise using the information gathered by
consultants at the Aga Khan Foundation who, in their work for that
organization’s development project in the basti, have conducted
extensive interviews with members of the community otherwise
difficult for me to access. Textual sources dealing extensively with
the history of the basti were difficult to come by as most historians
have preferred to focus on the dargah itself, while other sources that
might have proved useful were largely in other languages. Most
importantly, though, the history of the Nizamuddin basti has taken on
a life of its own in the minds of its residents and visitors, a life as
complex, as cloaked in mystery, and as reverentially guarded as the
life of the Saint. The past of the Nizamuddin basti is preserved not
through history, but through hagiography.
It has been my aim neither to reveal a central truth nor to

make overarching claims about the neighborhood I have studied. I
have merely tried to point out similarities and confluences between
the world of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah and the
neighborhood that surrounds it. In so doing, I have concluded that,
even as the dargah becomes less and less relevant to the daily lives of
the basti’s inhabitants, the teachings of the saint persist, as generative
now in the production of an identity for the Nizamuddin basti as they
were seven centuries. The importance of place and community, of
syncretism and hospitality, of resistance to invasion remain
omnipresent in the deep devotion of the basti’s residents to the land
on which they live and, more importantly, the community that
sustains them.
Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya
“Nizamuddin Auliya was one of the pillars of Islam.”

“Not was. Is one of the pillars of Islam.”2
My two interlocutors at the ‘urs—celebrated on the

anniversary of the Saint’s death—were not really disagreeing, nor
were they debating some minor theological quibble. The continued
life of the holy man is a central feature of his spiritual importance,
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2 Anonymous Sufis, conversation with author, 15 April 2009, Nizamuddin
dargah, New Delhi, India.
3
and yet this celebration, the most important of the year for any Sufi
Saint, commemorates the day of his physical death. The day before
when I had visited the Dargah to speak with its custodians, two
members of the Nizami group of families who claim direct descent
from the Saint’s sister, I described the ‘urs as a death anniversary.
Syed Tahir Nizami corrected me: “It is a wedding anniversary—the
day the beloved is united with Allah.”3 These two features of the Sufi
Saint—his eternal presence in the world and his intensely loving
relationship with the divine—are essential for the community of
worshippers at his tomb today. It is because the Saint’s spirit persists
at the dargah that the faithful feel they can communicate with him,
and because of the Saint’s special closeness with the divine that they
feel their prayers will be heard more clearly by Allah through him.
During the ‘urs people travel from all over the world to visit the place
of the Saint’s burial; the Saint, despite his special status as
intermediary between humanity and the divine, remains grounded in
the place of his burial, where his earthly body remains. It is a
historical figure buried here to whom people pray, and coming here
to pray is an act of historical as well as spiritual connection.
The Historical Figure and his Teachings
Hazrat Nizamudin Auliya was born in Badayun, Uttar

Pradesh to parents that had migrated from Bokhara in Central Asia.4
Among the first important Sufi Saints born on the subcontinent,5
Nizamuddin Auliya encouraged the development and spread of
medieval Sufi practices amongst Hindus of North India through his
emphasis on equality, charity, and religious syncretism. By
incorporating traditional ritual practices of the subcontinent—most
famously the use of music in worship—Nizamuddin and other great
Saints of the Chishti order indigenized Islam on the subcontinent, so
much so that scholars and religious figures, both those sympathetic
to and those opposed to Sufi practices, have attempted to trace its
origins to India.6 The Saint’s popularity across the subcontinent has
not abated in the intervening centuries; indeed, the dargah has
survived as an actively worshipped site even through the constant
political and geographic upheavals that have shaped Delhi’s long
history.7 The Saint came to the environs of Delhi, specifically the
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3 Syed Tahir Nizami and Farid Nizami, interview by author, 14 April 2009,
Nizamuddin dargah, New Delhi, India.
4 H. Sajun, trans., A Diary of a Disciple of Nizamudin Aulia (Lahore: Talifat-e-
Shalidi, 2001), 30.
5 Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, “The Early Chishti Dargahs,” in Muslim Shrines in
India: Their Character, History and Significance, ed. Christian W. Troll (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press,1989), 3.
6 Sir Richard Burton, “The Sufis of Sindh,” in The Sufi Mystery, ed.
Nathaniel P. Archer (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2007), 137.
7 Siddiqui. Muslim Shrines in India, 18.
4
town of Ghiyaspur on the outskirts of the Sultanate city at Siri, and

established his kanqah (or “hospice”8) after being directed there by his
predecessor in the Chishti silsilah, Sheikh Baba Farid in Ajodhan.9
Hazrat Nizamuddin stayed in Ghiyaspur for the remainder of his life,
drawing disciples to his kanqah through miraculous acts and teachings
of the basic Chishti tenets: “love and devotion to God, cultivation of
moral virtues, and selfless service to humanity.”10 His success
amongst all populations and his openness to followers of all religious
backgrounds has lent to his reputation as a great missionary in the
name of Islam.11 Some specifics of these teachings have been
preserved in several texts from the period including the Diary of
Rajkumar Hardev, a Deccani Prince-cum-disciple, and the Fawa’id al
Fu’ad, an important text in the malfuzat tradition, texts recording
conversations between Sufi saints and their disciples.12
The former example does more to recount the social world

surrounding the kanquah of Nizamuddin Auliya than anything else,
and yet in so doing it captures the atmosphere of divinity, charity,
and religious conciliation around the Saint at its center. Hagiographic
tales like “The Miraculous Handkercheif” and “The Story of the
Halwa,”13 deal with the Saint’s extraordinary powers, but more
importantly demonstrate his wisdom, his beneficence, and his
position of authority even amongst powerful political figures. As a
document composed by a Hindu Prince who becomes a disciple of
this humble Muslim teacher, the Diary gives pride of place to the
Saint’s teaching on religious tolerance and cultural syncretism. In an
episode early in the text, the Saint encourages his favorite disciple, the
poet Amir Khusro, “to write in the Hindi language so that the
Muslims may feel inclined toward the Hindus in their everyday
speech.”14 Even today Hindus familiar with Khusro’s poetry will
point out that almost all of it is written in Hindi or a related dialect
rather than Persian15 (though this ‘fact’ has been vehemently
contested).16
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8 A. R. Saiyed, “Saints and Dargahs in the Indian Sucontent: A Review,” in
Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, ed. Christian W. Troll
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 242.
9 Sajun, Diary of a Disciple, 31.
10 Abdur Rahman Momin, “Delhi: Dargah of Shaykh Nizmauddin Awliya,”
Marg 56:1 (2004), 15.
11 Siddiqui, Muslim Shrines in India, 11.
12 Joel Lee, “Sayyid, Sweeper, Butcher, Pir: Hierarchy and Inclusivity in a
Fourteenth Century Sufi Text” (unpublished essay, Columbia University) 9.
13 Sajun, Diary of a Disciple, 85-6, 89.
14 Ibid., 10.
15 Soni Suvarna Goswami, conversation with author, 10 April 2009, Jai
Singh Ghera Ashram, Vrindavan, India.
16 Dr. Mohammad Wahid Mirza, The Life and Works of Amer Khusrau
(Lahore: Panjab University Press, 1962), 5.
5
In fact, this instance of linguistic diplomacy is secondary

compared to the religiously syncretic move that preceded it, namely
the acceptance and inclusion of song in Chishti religious practice. In
the 13th-14th centuries, the use of music in Muslim religious practice
was tremendously controversial, illustrated by the episode near the
conclusion of the Diary when an emissary of the King interrupts an
evening of qawwali—the devotional music developed by the Chishti
order—crying “ ‘By the King’s command, under punishment by the
sword, stop this non-Sharia practice! […] I know that you are a
favorite servant of God, but now you are committing a sin and I have
been appointed by the King to stop this sin.’”17 As this passage
demonstrates, the use of song in devotional practice, derived from
the indigenous musical-religious traditions of the sub-continent,
stood far outside the orthodoxy of contemporary Muslim practice.18
By the end of the episode, the King’s emissary has cut all of the ropes
that hold up the tent, but it does not collapse, a miraculous
occurrence that the Saint explains thus: “ ‘I along with my
companions were absorbed in the remembrance of God through this
qawwali, and it is God who has held up this tent without its ropes.’ ”19
This episode highlights three of the most important features of the
Saint, all of which remain important for the modern life of the
dargah, namely his miraculous closeness with the Divine, his
disregard for religious orthodoxy in favor of syncretic religious
practice, and his flouting of political authority.
While the first two points—the miraculous and the

syncretic—are more apparently important for worship at the dargah
today, the political overtones of the episode described above, and
several others in the Diary, should neither be overlooked nor
discounted in relation to the modern dargah. In a celebrated story,
Nizamuddin Aulia is believed to have said (and I paraphrase here),
“My kanqah has two doors. If the Emperor enters through one, I will
leave through the other.”20 (In the case of King Sultan Mohammed
Tuglaq, who famously visited the Saint’s kanqah, the Saint supposedly
predicted his royal ascendancy, so his relationship with him is that of
teacher to follower, rather than subject to King.21) The Saint used
political resistance as a vehicle for his messages of humility, mercy,
and religious tolerance. The story of the Miraculous Handkerchief,
in which the Saint’s used handkerchief allows the reigning monarch
to see into the homes of his subjects, not only reveals the Saint’s
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18 Amar Nath Khana, Pilgrim Shrines of India (New Delhi: Aryan Books
International, 2003), 72.
19 Sajun, Diary of a Disciple, 153
20 Kamaal Hassan, conversation with author, 7 March 2009, dargah of
Sheikh Ala Uddin Sabir, Khaliyar, Uttarakhand, India; Interview with Syed Tahir
Nizami, 15 April 2009, Nizamuddin dargah, New Delhi.
6
miraculous powers but also his compassion when he says “man is

quick to embark on the wrong path. I gave him the handkerchief so
that he might become aware of the oppressed and the needy people’s
problems and so he could protect them from oppression.”22 In
another episode, the Saint’s rejection of the notion of zimmi—a non-
Muslim under the protection and control of a Muslim ruler—carries
both political and religious resonance: “ ‘We are all God’s Zimmis.
No human being can be another’s Zimmi.’ ”23 This political element in
the Saint’s teachings appealed directly to oppressed classes, making
his kanqah a haven for people of low social status, the poor, and, in
the case of the Diary’s writer, even Hindus, who found themselves
subordinated under Muslim rule. Though the Saint’s position vis-à-
vis hierarchical social structures is hardly cut and dry, the overarching
message of his teaching as it has survived into the present deliberately
disregards class distinctions.
Connecting to the Man
Even the least complex draw to the dargah—the

miraculous—has as its basis a human connection to the person of the
Saint. Many devotees, including devotedly monotheistic Muslims,
come to the dargah due to the Saint’s reputed ability to grant wishes
and desires, yet these Muslim devotees make an important distinction
between the Saint’s role and Allah’s in performing the miracles they
seek. For the devotees to whom I spoke, the Saint acted as
intercessor, hearing the prayers offered at the dargah and taking them
directly to Allah, who actually grants them. It is not uncommon for
visitors to seek a cure to infertility or illnesses; others come seeking
exorcisms. It is worth repeating that it is specifically through the
Saint’s privileged connection to Allah that he is able to perform these
miracles. As Nizamuddin Auliya said himself in a story related above,
he does not perform miracles, per se, Allah performs them on the
behalf of him and his followers. In an article on the dargah and its
devotees, Desiderio Pinto relates an exemplary statement made by a
worshipper at the dargah: “ ‘He was a man like us. Therefore he is
able to take our case to God, intercede on our behalf, and make us
more acceptable to him.’ ”24 The Saint’s humanity—importnatly not
divinity, allows his devotees closer connection to him, and it is by this
connection to the mortal that the miraculous can occur. As Pinto
points out, though, many devotees—perhaps even most—“visit the
dargah on a regular basis […] without the intention of acquiring
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22 Ibid., 86.
23 Ibid., 21.
24 Desiderio Pinto, “The Mystery of the Nizamuddin Dargah: The
Accounts of Pilgrims” in Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character History and
Significance, ed. Christian W. Troll (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 122.
7
anything from the saints, the pirs and pirzades”;25 the miraculous is
secondary to the spirit of connection and love experienced at the
dargah. The devotee prays, then, via a kind of divine social network
that begins with what devotees describe as a personal, individual,
loving relationship between themselves and the Saint.26
Prayer is but one means by which a devotee can enter into

this Sufi network. By its very nature, the Sufi tradition functions as an
ancient chain of historical figures stretching back to the Prophet
himself. Referred to as a silsilah, this genealogy passes from one Sufi
Pir (teacher) to his kaliph (disciple) in an enormous family tree, with
orders and branches within orders proliferating through a series of
Saints, disciples, and devotees down to the present day. In her book
on qawwali, Regula Qureshi notes that, even as a Westerner and a
woman (doubly an outsider in the inner circles of Sufi tradition),
“once part of the Sufi ‘network’ that extends all over the
subcontinent” she gained access to participate in events and practices
nearly anywhere she wished. She had become part of the extended
Sufi family.27 I experienced a similar kind of initiation at the ‘urs of
Sheikh Alauddin Sabir in Khaliyar. While sitting amongst a group of
Sufis in the expansive kanqah that had been formed around the
dargah for the several days of celebration, one of several Sufi elders,
clearly esteemed by those around him, began divesting himself of his
many necklaces. When he placed the last of them around my neck,
he repeated to me several times that the stone in the necklace (the
same as the stone in his ring) was my connection to him specifically,
and to the Sufi tradition, more broadly; it was, he said, my “life
stone.”28
One does not typically enter the social order on a mere whim,
or merely by being present at the dargah (my situation was unique,
and, I expect more a gesture of hospitality than of initiation). A full
initiation into a Sufi silsilah requires intent and the permission of the
pir, a process described in Rajkumar Hardev’s Diary, and which,
according to those Sufis to whom I spoke at the dargah, remains
more or less the same today. In fact, the process itself is not
particularly complicated. On more than one occasion I was
reminded that entering the Chishti silsilah (the largest Sufi order in
South Asia) requires neither intricate rituals nor formal conversion.
Instead, a devotee asks his pir for baiat, which, according to one pir
that I met during the ‘urs in Nizamuddin, can be translated as
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25 Ibid., 117.
26 Ibid., 119.
27 Regula Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning
in Qawwali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), xv.
28 Anonymous Pir, conversation with author, dargah of Sheikh Ala Uddin
Sabir, 7 March 2009, Khaliyar, Uttarakhand, India.
8
“connection.”29 Usually performed with a simple joining of hands,

baiat initiates the devotee into the line of teachers and pupils who
keep alive the esoteric teachings of the various Sufi silsilahs. The
teachings and traditions of the order are passed by a simple act of
intellectual, spiritual, and physical connection. Today, physical
presence is not necessary for the pledging of baiat, but connection via
another pir is. Uzma, a Pakistani woman who has lived in Austria for
twenty years whom I met at the ‘urs in Nizamuddin, has her pir in
Jabalpur (a small city not far from Delhi in Uttarakhand), a place she
had not visited until the day before I met her. Instead, she met with
a pir in Pakistan who connected her with his pir in Jabalpur. In spite
of the physical remove, the symbolic act of connection must still be
undertaken by the disciple, in Uzma’s case via another pir.30 Sufi
saints, then, do not float in a sacred vacuum, but rather are
historically embedded in a time and a place within the line of teachers
and disciples. This historical thrust is manifest in the structure of the
Dargah itself, where the Saint’s tomb occupies a central place and is
surrounded by the graves of his disciples, which receive varying levels
of devotion depending on their respective historical statures. When
devotees pray at the dargah, they are praying to a specific historical
figure who remains connected to the place and the time in which he
lived.
Connecting to the Land
Though modern global realities have opened up possibilities

of geographic remove, physical presence with the pir remains ideal, as
evidenced by Uzma’s trip to India; clearly the draw of place still plays
importantly in the sacred grammar of worship at the dargah of
Nizamuddin Auliya. Though Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya remains
among the most prominent figures in South Asian Islam, the major
holy spot associated with him is the dargah at the heart of his
namesake neighborhood, the place of his burial, the place where his
physical remains lay. Of course, it is the persistence of the Saint’s spirit
that draws worshippers and disciples to the dargah, yet it is due to the
presence of his bodily remains, the fact that this is the place where he
chose to be buried, that devotees think of the dargah as “the place
where he is ‘most certainly present.’”31 Worshippers travel great
distances to this and other Sufi shrines, particularly at the time of the
‘urs when homes are opened to traveling devotees, and food, or
langah, is provided in great quantities to any who want it. These
periods of pilgrimage, in fact, have a transformative effect on the
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29 Pir Mohammad A. Awan, interview by Author, 15 April 2009,
Nizamuddin dargah, New Delhi, India.
30 Uzma Zafar, interview by author, 15 April 2009, Nizmauddin dargah,
New Delhi, India.
31 Pinto, “Mystery of the Nizamuddin Dargah,” 118.
9
neighborhood, and not an entirely positive one. The dargah in

Nizamuddin actually sees its busiest time in October when it
becomes an important stopping point on the route to Ajmer, where
the ‘urs of Shaikh Mu ‘inuddin Chishti is celebrated. During this
period immense crowds descend on the neighborhood, crowds so
large as to put a considerable strain on the area’s resources and
infrastructure.32
On my visits to the Dargah during the Saint’s ‘urs in mid-

April, during which the crowds are somewhat smaller, though still
formidable, I encountered a delegation from Pakistan (many visiting
Delhi for the first time), a couple that has lived in Austria for the last
twenty years, and a man from Northern Virginia. By some means or
another, each of these far-flung individuals traces his or her spiritual
lineage to the man buried here in Nizamuddin. The traditions of
hospitality still practiced at the ‘urs, and the event’s ability to draw
thousands of people from across India, the subcontinent, and the
world,33 come directly from the historical figure of the Saint. Now as
then, the Saint’s reputation for generosity and hospitality is known
across the subcontinent. As was the case with Rajkumar Hardev,
visitors of many backgrounds come from great distances and are
offered hospitality and food by the Saint and those who make their
residence nearby. Coming to the Saint’s dargah today is, in a sense,
equivalent to attending his kanqah in the fourteenth century; the
devotee comes to be in the presence of the saint, to seek his aid, and
to offer respect.
The tomb of the Saint, which has been built, rebuilt, and
renovated over the centuries under the patronage of aristocrats,
sultans, and kings, exerts a sort of gravitational pull on the
neighborhood, the dargah complex, and the people that occupy both.
The closer one gets to Nizamuddin, the greater the density of tombs
and graves. From the monumental structures of the Lodhi Gardens,
to Humayun’s tomb and its adjacent graveyard, to the numerous
small dargahs and anonymous graves dotting the neighborhood itself,
these tombs were built on these sites primarily for their closeness to
the sacred energy of the Saint.34 “It was a basically a shortcut to
heaven if you were buried close to the Saint,” explained Shveta
Mathur, a consultant for the Aga Khan Foundation’s revitalization
and preservation project in Nizamuddin, adding that the entire area
was once one large graveyard.35 Similarly, a walk through the
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32 Shveta Mathur, interview by author, 30 April 2009, Aga Khan
Foundation Offices, Jangpura, New Delhi, India.
34 Dr. Mary Storm, on-site lecture, 9 March 2009, Humayun’s Tomb, New
Delhi, India.
35 Mathur, interview by author, 30 April 2009.
10
neighborhood of Nizamuddin finds the density of population and

commerce increasing the nearer one gets to the dargah.
Inside the dargah complex, the 16th century, Mughal-built

marble dome occupies the same place in relation to the 14th century
Jama’at Khanah Mosque—claimed by some to be the oldest active
mosque in Delhi36—as the pool of sacred water used for ablutions in
Mughal period mosques. Surmounted by a lotus, the dome even
resembles a delicate fountain. Though I do not want to make too
much of the symbolism embedded in this architectural gesture—after
all, the Mosque is not a Mughal period mosque—it is interesting to
note that, just as the faithful purify themselves through ablutions
before approaching Allah in prayer, so too do devotees say that the
Saint “is able to take our case to God, intercede on our behalf, and
make us more acceptable to him.’ ”37 The Saint effectively becomes
the sacred font, purifying the prayers of his devotees such that God
will hear them. At any time of day other than the five standard
prayer times, a visitor to the dargah will find most devotees facing the
tomb of the Saint rather than Mecca to the west. Trance-inducing
qawwali is always performed facing the dargah. Once during the
evening prayer, I observed a member of the Nizami family offer his
prayers facing Mecca as tradition dictates, but finish by turning to
face the tomb and offer his prayers in that direction as well. The
saint and his tomb fulfill an important role in the geographic
symbolism of the faith practiced at the dargah, never superceding
Mecca or the Prophet (the dome of the tomb, for example, is lower
than the highest point of the adjacent mosque), but functioning in a
similar way, drawing its devotees with a magnetic force second only
to that of Mecca itself. The dargah, and the Saint buried there, act as
an axis, or qutb (also an honorific for a Sufi holy man) connecting the
earthly world to the divine. When devotees touch the grave itself—
or in the case of women, the marble screen surrounding it—they are
touching an axis that runs from the tangible earth to the heavens,
connecting themselves to the divine through the Saint, thus realizing
the individual connection to the divine, and the presence of the
divine in every person, so essential in Sufi thought.38
The Nizamuddin Basti
What is the relationship between the modern place

surrounding the dargah, and the historical structure and person that
form its center? It goes without saying that the historical location to
which devotees are so drawn is far from the same place it was when
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
36 Khana, Pilgrim Shines of India, 74.
37 Pinto, “Mystery of the Nizamuddin Dargah,” 122.
38 A.M.A Shushterry, “Philosophy, Training, Orders, and Ethics,” in The
Sufi Mystery, ed. Nathaniel P. Archer (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2007), 65.
11
Nizamuddin himself lived there. Once a humble town outside the

imperial city to its south, Ghiyaspur—which, according to the
popular mythology, became Nizamuddin immediately following the
Saint’s death—now stands at Delhi’s geographic and cultural heart.
In the intervening centuries, tombs, mosques, forts, and capitals have
risen on all sides of Nizamuddin, and often next door. In the 16th
century the Purana Qila sprung up just to the north, and not long
after, the Emperor who began it added his grandiose and celebrated
tomb to the graves of those that sought burial within the auspicious
environs of the Saint’s final resting place. Shahjahanabad, Lutyens’
New Delhi, the post-Independence colonies, and now the seemingly
endless urban development sprawling across Haryana and Uttar
Pradesh—Nizamuddin’s dargah has borne witness to all this over 700
years of Delhi’s history. There is a famous tale that was repeated to
me on multiple occasions, although it does not appear exactly this
way in Hardev’s Diary. The Saint decided to construct a baoli, or
step-well, near the site of what would later be his dargah, which
involved men who were also working on the construction of the
Emperor’s new city at Tughluqabad. Seeing the Saint as competition,
the Emperor ordered Nizamuddin to desist in his project. According
to Kamaal Hassan, my first contact at the dargah, the Saint refused
by saying, ‘your city will be a ruin, but my well will still be here.’
Kamaal relayed this story to me while we stood looking down into
that well, which is adjacent to the dargah. “He was right,” he said.
“Here is Hazrat’s well, and Tughluqabad is in ruins.”39 He neglected
to point out that the restoration work currently underway thanks to
the Aga Khan Foundation only started when one of the baoli’s walls
began to collapse; this was irrelevant. The continuity of the place was
the central point.
A Village, a Slum, a Master Plan
Ironically, despite the fact that residents of Nizamuddin will

often tell you that their neighborhood is one of the oldest in Delhi,
the settlement now known as the Nizamuddin basti—the village-like
tangle of alleys directly surrounding the dargah—has only existed in
its present form for about sixty years.40 A photograph displayed
prominently in the Jangpura offices of the Aga Khan Foundation,
taken from the dome of Humayun’s Tomb in the mid-19th century,
shows a view over the ruins of the surrounding area (Appendix A).
The many-domed skyline of this photograph reveals a plethora of
buildings, many still standing, others long since lost. Noticeably
absent from the photograph are the modern colonies of South Delhi,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39 Kamaal Hassan, conversation with author, 19 February 2009,
Nizamuddin dargah, New Delhi.
40 Tara Sharma, interview by author, Aga Khan Foundation offices, 30
April 2009, New Delhi.
12
and any indication of permanent settlement around the Dargah.

Given the frequent claims of the antiquity of the neighborhood, and
the labyrinthine streets most nearly akin to those found in Delhi’s
medieval neighborhoods, I was surprised to discover that the
Nizamuddin basti is, in fact, a very recent phenomenon. While the
dargah itself has existed in some form or another for seven centuries,
worshipped continuously, and attracting the patronage and
veneration of kings, it was not until the flood of refugees following
Partition that a major settlement around the dargah appeared on
Delhi’s map.41 For centuries, the area surrounding the dargah was
essentially a graveyard with a small settlement occupied exclusively by
the pirzade, families claiming descent from the Saint. In the years
preceding Partition, no one outside the pirzade community could
enter the settlement, let alone live there.42 According to development
consultants at the Aga Khan Foundation, major development around
the dargah—the kind visible in the basti today—did not appear on
maps of Delhi until the early 1940s, and even then only as small pucca
houses.43
The confusion surrounding the historical status of the

settlement at the Nizmauddin basti has undoubtedly been exacerbated
by similar confusion over the area’s status in Delhi’s developmental
plans. Following 1962, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) set
into motion a plan that divided the city into self-sufficient zones,
each with areas designated for commercial, residential, and public
uses, and allowances made for those preexisting settlements that
would be absorbed in the massively expanded city.44 Since the
implementation of the first Master Plan, Delhi has engulfed nearly
400 of these settlements, officially classified as ‘urban villages.’
Though the 1999 DDA Zonal Plan for the New Delhi area refers to
the Nizamuddin basti as an old village, the map shows no such special
designation for the area (see Appendix B).45 In fact, the map does not
distinguish in any way between the basti and the wealthy colony of
Nizamuddin West that merges with it to the South.46 Neither does
the Nizamuddin basti appear on the DDA Land Management
webpage’s list of acquired villages.47 My contacts at the Aga Khan
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
41 Ibid.
42 Patricia Jeffrey, Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah (New Delhi:
Manohar, 2000), 10.
43 Sharma, interview by author, 30 April 2009.
44 Ranjana Sengupta, Delhi metropolitan (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2007)
45-6.
45 Delhi Development Authority, “Zonal Development Plan: Zone
(Division-‘D’ New Delhi),” http://www.dda.org.in/planning/zonal_plans.htm
(accessed April 23, 2009).
46 R.S. Gusain, Zonal Development Plan: Zone (Division-‘D’ New Delhi) (New
Delhi: Delhi Development Authority, 1999), 65.
47 Delhi Development Authority, “Village and Khasara Details,”
http://www.dda.org.in/ddausers/LMIS/default.aspx (accessed April 23, 2009).
13
Foundation were both under the impression that the basti qualified as
an urban village. They cited the unrestricted building in the area as
evidence that it must be exempt from standard New Delhi residential
building codes. Conversely, a 1990 article in Economic and Political
Weekly states clearly, “Nizamuddin is not ‘laldora land’, a status that
enables a Delhi ‘village’ to claim beneficial commercial subsidies and
to build without restrictions common in Delhi’s planned sectors.”48
Much of the character of the settlement as it appears today is the
direct result of its strange, liminal status in Delhi’s urban bureaucracy.
The commercial life of the basti, focused almost exclusively

on sales relating to Islamic religious life, and limited to only a few
locations, seems to support Economic and Political Weekly’s assessment.
A look at the DDA’s most recent Zonal Plan classifies “Hazrat
Nizamuddin (East and West)” as areas where “no retail shops or
household industry are to be allowed.”49 Note that here, as elsewhere,
the DDA fails to differentiate between the basti and its wealthier
neighbors. Without acknowledging the basti as a separate
geographical or social unit, the DDA implicitly applies the same
restrictions to all three neighborhoods. The only commercial areas in
the basti can be found on the lane leading to the dargah, and the
street directly in front of the center for the Tablighi Jama’at, a
conservative religious organization that competes with the dargah for
dominance in Nizamuddin’s religious life. These shops deal almost
exclusively in specifically religious goods—copies of the Quran, and
recordings of qawwali—with some small eateries mixed in. The type
of commerce that typically springs up in South Delhi’s urban
villages—“mechanical workshops, petty offices, Xerox shops”—is
largely absent from Nizamuddin.50 According to Mr. Shabi Ahmad, a
consultant with the Indian Council of Historical Research and a
forty-year basti resident, only the street near the Tablighi Jama’at is
zoned for commercial use. Mr. Ahmad told me that, as far as he
knows, the basti actually falls under the auspices of the Municipal
Corporation of Delhi’s Slums Division, despite the Aga Khan
Foundation’s researchers’ finding that the majority of residents there
actually live above the poverty line.51 Mr. Ahmad explained that this
apparent discrepancy has something to do with revenue reports
appearing in the Gazetteer of Delhi produced by the English some
200 years ago.52 Exactly how and why the neighborhood’s current
status is related to a centuries-old, colonial report was not entirely
clear to me, nor did it seem particularly clear to Mr. Adhmad himself.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
48 Pradip Datta, et. al., “Understanding Communal Violence: Nizamuddin
Riots,” Economic and Political Weekly 25:45 (Nov. 10, 1990), 2489.
49 Gusain, Zonal Development Plan, 25.
50 Datta, et. al., “Communal Violence,” 2488.
52 Shabi Ahmad, interview by author, 2 May 2009, Nizmauddin basti, New
Delhi.
14
The Modern Making of an Ancient Town
Nizamuddin’s strange absence from Delhi’s urban plan

notwithstanding, Mr. Ahmad, like many basti residents, insists on the
presence of a settlement in the area since the time of the Saint’s
death. Sitting with me in his living room, hidden at the end of a lane
in the heart of the basti, Mr. Ahmad pulled a tattered book from his
shelf, an Urdu translation of the Persian Seru Manazil, penned by
Sangin Baig in 1827 after a commission from Charles Metcalfe and
William Fraser. Mr. Ahmad opened the book and translated for me
from the Urdu into English: “ ‘There is a rainwater drain behind Ab-
ki-Sarai and kotla Nizamuddin abadi.’ Kotla means settlement, abadi
means population. There must have been a settlement even in
1830.”53 Mr. Ahmad pointed also to the presence of ancient mosques
and wells in the neighborhood, all of which date back at least 100
years, as clear indicators of permanent settlement. Such structures,
he believes, would only have sprung up in an area with at least some
settlement.54 The kotla mentioned by Baig was probably the pirzade
settlement, which, according to Mr. Ahmad, would have housed no
more than a few hundred people—perhaps a small enough
settlement not to show up in the photograph at Aga Khan’s offices.
If this is the case, then the idea of the Nizamuddin basti proposed to
me by residents does not necessarily contradict that forwarded by Ms.
Sharma and Ms. Mathur at the Agha Khan Foundation. So long as a
handful of families can trace their roots back to the dargah, so long as
ancient mosques, wells, and graveyards dot the landscape, the whole
neighborhood will remain ancient in the historical imagination of its
inhabitants.
Ms. Mathur, Ms. Sharma, and Mr. Ahmad agree that the
current character of the basti is indeed a modern phenomenon.
Starting in the Partition era, and continuing to this day, a steady flow
of immigration has ensured Nizamuddin’s regular growth. Walking
with me down the narrow lanes leading to his house, Mr. Ahmad
described the neighborhood as it was when his family first settled
there in 1966: “All of this was open space or graveyard. There were
two or three families on this lane. There has been a lot of vertical
development in the last twenty years.”55 Though the area has
certainly grown considerably since Mr. Ahmad first arrived in the
mid-60s, by then the Muslim personality of the area, had been solidly
forged—like so much of Delhi’s character today—in the crucible of
Partition. With the eruption of communal violence across Delhi, and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
53 Sangin Baig, Seru Manazil , trans by Shabi Ahmed during interview by
author, 2 May 2009, interviewee’s home, Nizamuddin basti, New Delhi.
54 Ahmad, interviews by author, 2 May 2009.
55 Shabi Ahmad, interview by author, 1 May 2009, Nizamuddin basti, New
Delhi.
15
the mass exodus of Muslims to Pakistan, many of the Muslim

families that chose to remain in Delhi abandoned their homes and
fled to refugee colonies. One of the most populous of these colonies
was in the area that we now know as the Nizamuddin basti.56 Though
written first-hand accounts are largely unavailable, it is clear enough
that Nizamuddin was chosen as a safe haven for Muslim families at
the time due to the powerful presence of the dargah, and the
perceived safety lent by an area with strong historic associations with
Islam. Whether or not immigrants at the time chose Nizamuddin for
explicitly religious reasons, to one extent or another the dargah
exerted a kind of protective force for Delhi’s suddenly endangered
Muslim population. As these migrants settled precariously on the tiny
patch of land around the dargah, the areas just to the east—the
neighborhoods that are now Nizamuddin East and West—were
acquired by the government for sale to incoming Hindu families
fleeing from communal violence in the Punjab.57 These
neighborhoods have since become “the most upmarket of the
erstwhile refugee colonies.”58
According to Mr. Ahmad, the two major population booms

of Nizamuddin occurred in the wake of Partition, and in the 1980s,59
a time, as Patricia Jeffrey notes in the introduction to her book Frogs
in a Well, “when ‘communal’ politics took centre stage to a degree
that had not been seen since the troubled period leading up to the
events of 1947.”60 These spikes in communal tension apparently
coincide with major periods of growth in Nizamuddin’s population.
Without a full knowledge of the historical circumstances surrounding
the growing population of the neighborhood, I cannot assert a
definite causal relationship between increased communal tensions
and migration of Muslim families to Nizamuddin, yet the
correspondence between the two is striking. Though communal
tension has only once led to violence in Nizamuddin (in a minor
skirmish in 1990), it remains very much alive in the national psyche, a
constant looming threat that seems to inform nearly every political,
social, and religious reality, particularly for the marginalized Muslim
community. No wonder, then, that the population boom, beginning
in the 1980s with that second spike in communal tension, has still not
abated.61 As in the time of Partition, Muslim families threatened in
their home communities by violence, or by social and economic
systems that make upward mobility an impossibility, continue to seek
out Nizamuddin when they arrive in Delhi, at least in part due to its
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
56 Sengupta, Delhi Metropolitan, 74.
57 Jeffrey, Frogs in a Well, vii.
58 Sengupta 82.
59 Ahmad, interview by author, 1 May 2009.
60 Jeffrey, Frogs in a Well, viii
16
historically Muslim identity.62
While Muslim identity certainly played a large part in the

development of Nizamuddin following Partition, Ms. Mathur
emphasized repeatedly the importance of Nizamuddin’s location in
attracting large migrant communities.63 As we have seen, location
was hardly incidental to the Saint himself. As I have already
discussed, settling in Ghiyaspur, with its close proximity to, and
equally important independence from, the Sultanate city of Delhi
placed the Saint and his often-controversial teachings64 at an
important political crossroads. Regardless of Delhi’s status within the
politics of the subcontinent, it has always held a central place in the
political movement across North India. This high traffic level has
long helped to keep the dargah alive; even when Delhi was
abandoned under the reign of Muhammad-bin-Tughluq, the dargah
at Nizamuddin attracted followers.65 Today, the accessibility of
Nizamuddin’s dargah continues to distinguish it from others around
North India, and even those elsewhere in Delhi. When I visited the
dargah at Khaliyar in Uttarrakhand, its remoteness was sited as an
important point of distinction between it and the better-known
dargah of Nizamuddin. The hagiography of the Saint buried there
actually explicates its remoteness by saying that the Saint’s passionate
and fiery power—his jalal—prevented even birds from flying over his
burial place for more than three hundred years.66 Conversely, Hazrat
Nizamuddin Auliya’s generosity and kindness made him the
perpetual center of a social circle, amongst devotees at his kanqah in
his lifetime, and amongst the visitors at his dargah in death. More
recently, Delhi’s rapid expansion to the South has found Nizamuddin
directly in the city’s center. Within walking distance of major train
and bus stations, Nizamuddin basti is among the most easily
accessible locations in Delhi. According to Ms. Mathur, many
residents of the neighborhood have cited accessibility of
transportation as an important reason for remaining in the
Nizamuddin basti in spite of growing space and sanitation concerns.67
From Nizamuddin, one can easily reach any part of Delhi, or North
India. Interestingly, one of the custodians at the dargah cites this
practical accessibility as one of the reasons for the dargah’s popularity
above those of the other major Chishti Saints in Delhi.68 Connection,
always important to the Saint, has now taken on a distinctly modern
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64 Dalrymple, City of Djinns, 276
65 Siddiqui, Muslim Shrines in India, 18-19.
66 Hassan, interview by author, 7 March 2009.
68 Scott Kugle and Bruce Lawrence, “Delhi Dargahs: the Chishti Strategy
for Survival in 21st Century India” (unpublished article, Henry Martyn Institute,
2009) 8.
17
vehicular valence.
Connection and community have been the primary

productive forces in the Nizamuddin basti from the first. The
authors of the article in Economic and Political Weekly observe: “the
layout of the graveyards around the dargah […] suggests a sense of
community among the dead, a community that is linked to the living
through a shared desire for barkat (grace) from the saint.”69 Thus,
‘community’ of one kind or another—be it amongst the living or the
dead—has existed at the dargah whether or not we can find historical
agreement on when, or in what kind of settlement, that community
developed there. The contingent factors that have shaped that
community over the years resemble nothing more than the central
institution of the Saint’s lifetime: his kanqah. Though Nizamuddin
always kept with him a close circle of preferred disciples—analogous
to their supposed descendents who constituted the first small
settlement around the tomb—descriptions of the perpetually
crowded kanqah refer often to ‘visitors’ and ‘guests.’70 (In his account
of the Saint, William Dalrymple says “he likened his own role among
his disciples to that of a well-mannered host towards a group of
simple guests.”71) In its formative years, the Nizamuddin basti was
formed by an influx of such ‘guests,’ refugees seeking shelter in the
safety of a Muslim locale. Like Rajkumar Hardev before them, these
numerous new residents began as guests but, in settling in
Nizamuddin and committing themselves to the place by permanent
construction, were not only accepted into a community, but were
granted access to, and even possession of, its historic past. Today,
the living and the dead, the Sufi and the orthodox, even the Hindu
and Muslim share Nizamuddin together, but by one circumstance or
another it seems that most of them have been drawn there by the
dargah, which continues to occupy its central place in the life and
imagination of the Nizamuddin basti.
Nizamuddin’s Open Door
On the larger scale of modern Delhi, the recreation of the

kanqah requires more than evoking a spiritual ‘home’, as kanqah was
translated for me several times.72In its newer form, the Nizamuddin
‘kanqah’ has had to embrace many from outside, including those that
have not come voluntarily to seek the Saint’s grace—visitors as well
as immigrants of all religions, origins, and socio-economic
backgrounds turn up regularly at the Saint’s door. Today, patterns of
migration to Nizamuddin continue in much the same way that they
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
71 Dalrymple, City of Djinns, 275.
72 Awan, interview by author, 15 April 2009.
18
have for decades, though now those seeking refuge in the

neighborhood regularly come form Bihar and Bangladesh, seeking
improved socio-economic opportunity rather than protection from
violent communal frenzy. Generally, these new immigrants live on
the periphery of the community, squatting on median strips,
constructing jhuggi villages in parks, and, until a large-scale clearing
project two years ago, making homes in the nallah, or drain, that runs
along the western edge of the neighborhood.73 One such area nearby
has developed around the site of two possibly Mughal-era Sufi
tombs, with the thirty or so families living there—mostly migrants
from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—employed in the construction of a
new dargah. The draw of the Saint, which led these two Sufis to seek
burial in the area, has now obliquely attracted thirty new families,
though it is impossible to say how many will remain once
construction is complete. It would be excessive to color acceptance
of such settlements as hospitality on the part of basti residents. Still,
in the past, the pirzade and other inhabitants of the basti have allowed
poor immigrant communities to continue settling in their vicinity
without charging rent, and without alerting the government to their
highly illegal presence. 74
More often the basti’s hospitality applies to visiting

worshippers. In the tradition of the Saint, whose kanqah, according
to Hardev’s Diary, played constant host to those passing through on
the way into or out of the capital,75 Nizamuddin puts on its most
vibrant face for those visitors drawn to the dargah from around the
city, country, and world. Ms. Sharma suggested, based on her
observations of practices at the dargah, that the majority of devotees
there now are actually from outside the basti area,76 a suggestion
confirmed with assurance by Mr. Ahmad, who says that relatively few
of the neighborhood’s residents actually use the dargah as their
primary religious center.77 Though as of now there are no statistics
tracking how many worshippers at the dargah come from within the
community and how many from without, on a recent visit to the basti
on a Thursday night—the most popular at the dargah—Ms. Sharma
and Mr. Ahmad’s assertion seemed particularly plausible based on the
hugely increased number of cars parked around the neighborhood’s
periphery (easily double the usual number), and the crowds of people
moving directly from the gates of the dargah toward the two or three
primary points of exit from the basti back into greater Delhi. The
significantly increased presence of merchants for those few hours on
Thursday nights points also to the increased traffic of visitors come
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
75 Sajun, Diary of a Disciple, 51, 74, 85, 90, 103, 107, 126, 144, 174.
76 Sharma, interview by author, 30 April 2009.
77 Ahmad, interview with author, 2 May 2009.
19
to worship at the dargah. In recent years, the popularity of worship

on Thursday nights at the Tablighi Jama’at Masjid has also added to
the increased congestion of the basti on those evenings.
Though the primary draw of Nizamuddin has always been its

Muslim identity and the great institution of the dargah that helped to
forge it, residents to whom I have spoken pride themselves on the
near absence of communal violence from their neighborhood, and
the approximately 10% of the population that is Hindu living
amongst them.78 Conversely, upon finding out that I was living near
and doing my research on the Nizamuddin basti, one or two wealthier
inhabitants of other parts of Delhi have ominously said ‘there are a
lot of Muslims there [in Nizamuddin],’ with the implicit observation
that there are not a lot of Muslims here (wherever that may be). The
population of Nizamuddin West, largely comprised of Partition-era
Punjabi migrant families who have accumulated considerable
wealth,79 has even attempted to keep the small number of wealthy
Muslim families in the neighborhood from participating in residents’
committees and other civic activities.80 The difference in tone
between residents of the typical (read: Hindu, affluent), South Delhi
colony, and the dense, ramshackle basti is remarkable. More
remarkable, perhaps, is the extent to which the Nizamuddin dargah
actually lives up to its claims of universal appeal and openness. On
any given day, Muslims pray alongside Hindus and Christians, while
the inner courtyard teems with seemingly equal numbers of beggars,
itinerants, and visitors from various social strata.
A Different Communal Difference
If any kind of internal tension predominates in the

Nizmauddin basti, it is that between competing Muslim groups. In
the 1930s the Tabliqhi Jama’at established its center on the lane that
connects what is now the major thoroughfare of Mathura Road
directly to the dargah. With its conservative push for a return to
traditional Islam—or ‘re-conversion’ to Islam—the Tablighi requires
a turn away from the syncretic traditions of Sufism,81 and stands in
direct opposition to the institution of the dargah. In an as yet-
unpublished article, Drs. Scott Kugle and Bruce Lawrence suggest
that “Tablighi popularity can be imagined as "parasitic" on the
esteem Sufis enjoy,” using the thoroughfares, commercial structures,
and constant flow of visitors produced by the dargah as a means to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
78 Kamal Hassan, Syed Tahir Nizami, various conversations, Nizamuddin
dargah, New Delhi; Datta, et. al., 2488; Mathur, interview by author, 30 April 2009.
81 Kugle et al., “Delhi Dargahs,” 20.
20
spread a conservative message.82 Despite an apparently adversarial

relationship to the dargah, the Tablighi’s choice to establish itself in
Nizamuddin in the 1930s was motivated by proximity to the dargah
and its magnetic draw on Muslim communities across India, as
evidenced by the Tablighi’s tactical use of rhetoric drawn from the
Saint. Much scholarship has credited Sufism with the rapid spread of
Islam in South Asia, with Nizamuddin Auliya as one of the most
revered missionary forces of the medieval period.83 The Tablighi
Jama’at, for whom public preaching and the rhetoric of conversion
play a central role, claim, according to Mr. Ahmad, “ ‘we preach
Islam, so we are the true descendents of Nizamuddin Auliya.’ ”84
Thus, even an organization positioning itself against the syncretic Sufi
tradition of the dargah has attached itself to the historical figure
buried there to legitimize its place in the community.
Despite any such in-fighting in Nizamuddin’s Muslim

community, the basti is ultimately just that: a community. Although
Economic and Political Weekly states “the widely assumed concept of a
coherent, unified, organised Muslim community remain[s] widely
unrealised,”85Islam, in some form or another, has undoubtedly been
the single greatest force in shaping the Nizamuddin basti as it exists
today. It was because of the presence and draw of the dargah that,
following Partition, the land now known as the basti superceded other
historic settlements in the vicinity as a refuge for Muslim migrants.86
As both the Aga Khan Foundation and Mr. Ahmad have confirmed,
any habitation around the basti preceding Partition would have been
reserved for those directly associated with the dargah, lending the
area its reputation as historically Muslim. The original character of
the area has survived primarily in the form of tombs and mosques, all
of which were built there because of the dargah. It was this history,
so deeply tied to Islam, that drew the first migrant communities to
the neighborhood, transforming it into one of the most important
centers of the Muslim community in modern Delhi. Today, Mr.
Ahmad suspects, only about one third of the neighborhood’s
permanent residents depend on the dargah for their livelihood (the
Agha Khan Foundation estimates even fewer), and probably fewer
still pray there regularly.87 More strikingly, the presence of the
Tablighis—easily spotted by their particular mode of dress88—
appears to overwhelm the neighborhood. In reality, the Tablighi
population is largely a floating one, drawn to the center for short
periods, with relatively few residents of the basti permanently
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
83 Siddiqui, Muslim Shrines of India, 19.
21
associated with the organization.89 Yet even if we include this

floating population in an analysis of the basti, I would argue that
neither the growing power of the Tablighi Jama’at, nor the apparent
indifference of many basti residents to the dargah, can ultimately
detract from the its centrality to the neighborhood. Though at most a
handful of families can claim ancestral antecedents in the basti,
anyone that has settled there for its Muslim character has entered into
a history generated by and around the dargah. Even those
adversaries of Sufism contextualize themselves in the basti via the
personality of the Saint.
Sleeping in the Monuments, Living for the Land
Still, the general population of the Nizamuddin basti is not

preoccupied with the neighborhood’s past. When I asked Mr.
Ahmad if residents of the basti cared particularly about the history of
their neighborhood, he shook his head no: “They have no sense of
history. They sleep in the monuments.”90 While visitors from outside
the basti flock there to connect to the Saint, the neighborhood itself is
sustained more by a connection to place. Despite the
neighborhood’s problems with congestion, sanitation, access to
health care, and education (all problems the Aga Khan Foundation
hopes to tackle in coming years), most residents of the basti would
not leave if given the option.91 Many of the reasons for this are
practical. As I discussed before, the neighborhood’s location has
played an important part in its development and sustenance over the
years. Today, Nizamuddin offers unparalleled access to other parts
of the city and the country, and despite the neighborhood’s
appearance of poverty, the majority of the basti’s permanent residents
live above the poverty line. 92 In fact, due to its location, the basti
actually has considerably better access to utilities than far more
luxurious neighborhoods elsewhere in the city, with twenty-four-hour
access to water nearly all year long, and a minimum of power cuts.93
“In some ways,” Shveta Mathur said to me, laughing, “the quality of
life is far batter in the basti than in lots of East Delhi.”
More importantly, a unifying sense of community engenders

deep feelings of security for residents of the basti unique in
notoriously dangerous Delhi. In the Nizamuddin basti people know
one another. Walking with me through the congested alleys of the
basti, Kamaal would stop constantly to speak with his friends and
neighbors; I never saw this conviviality replicated in Nizamuddin’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
90 Ibid.
91 Mathur, interview by author, 30 April 2009
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid.
22
wealthier, more spacious neighbors. So far as I could tell, the only

place in Nizamuddin West that appeared to draw any crowd of
‘regulars’ was the tea shop near the market where, perhaps not
surprisingly, the clientele was comprised predominantly of Muslim
residents of the crowded, social streets of the basti. In her chapter on
urban villages, Sengupta records an interviewee from Chiragh Delhi
saying “that the village [is] by and large safer than other parts of
Delhi because it [is] smaller and because ‘everyone knows your
family.’ ”94 According to Mathur, who has done extensive interviews
in the neighborhood, even women say that they feel safe, an
uncommon state of affairs in greater Delhi. Those outside often
view the neighborhood suspiciously, some because of its publicly
Muslim majority, others because of the impoverished populations
living on its periphery, which give the area a reputation amongst
some for illicit drug activity.95 While traditionally the basti residents
have allowed these communities to set up on the periphery of their
neighborhood, there is always a clear distinction between those that
live in the basti itself and those that subside on its fringes.96
Even these peripheral groups generally share in the unifying

Muslim identity of the neighborhood. Though Muslim identity has
caused the neighborhood’s growth over the decades while helping to
preserve its timeless quality, “Nizamuddin’s stability is not simply
self-generating; it is enforced by an implicit communal bias in urban
planning.”97 Though I have focused thus far on the generative aspects
of Muslim identity in Nizamuddin, negative communal realities have
also informed the basti’s growth. Like so many of Delhi’s
predominantly Muslim neighborhoods, Nizamuddin remains
considerably poorer than any of the surrounding, Hindu-majority
neighborhoods. And communal injustice has not gone unnoticed.
At a political rally for the BSP held near the Tablighi Jama’at Center
in April of 2009, a series of speakers appealed to the collective sense
of disenfranchisement amongst the neighborhood’s Muslims in
India’s current political establishment. The people to whom I was
able to speak at the rally, when asked why they were voting for the
BSP, gave as their primary explanation the fact that the party had
nominated a Muslim candidate.98 One of the speakers at the rally—
the favorite of the evening, based on the crowd’s reception—built his
speech around the repeated refrain “Here, we are a majority!”
appealing to the solidarity of a community whose Muslim identity has
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
95 Mathur, interview by author, 30 April 2009; Tapan Chakravarty, interview
by author, 30 April 2009, New Delhi.
97 Ibid., 2488
98 Observers at BSP political rally, conversations with author, 27 April 2009,
Nizamuddin, New Delhi.
23
long defined it.99 This seems at odds initially with residents’ pride in
the communal harmony of their neighborhood. But more than an
appeal to religious identity, the speech was an appeal to place, to
people who feel their home has not been fairly represented in the
political arena. When I spoke to Kamaal after the rally, he explained
to me that the BSP (as he understood it) planned to appoint
candidates that represented the communities from which they
came—“a Muslim in a Muslim community, a Brahmin in a Brahmin
community.” Several days later, when Kamaal and I spoke again
about the rally, he told me he planned on running for local office in
the next election. Though he planned to vote this time for the
Muslim candidate to represent Nizamuddin, he expressed
disappointment at the lack of a representative from the
neighborhood itself. He believes that, if he runs in the future, the
community will eagerly band together to vote for one of their own.
Though the basti plays constant host to outsiders coming in

to pray, there seems to be deep suspicion of those whose intentions
are less clear. Often these suspicions and fears tend to be couched in
terms of the land the basti occupies. In the small communal riots of
March 1990, all of the instigators came from outside the
community;100 what was by all appearances an issue of religion was in
fact an issue of invasion. Even in the legal disputes that preceded and
followed the riots (a dispute over a piece of land between an ancient
Muslim graveyard and a more recent Hindu cremation ground),
“there is repeated citation of legal land rights,”101 notably not citation
of violated religious rights. For the residents of Nizamuddin, the
community depends on the religious, cultural, and historical heritage
of the land that it occupies, thus it is the fear of encroachment from
outside that motivates it to action, and such encroachment need not
be Hindu. After my conversation with the consultants at the Aga
Khan Foundation, I was surprised to find that many residents of the
neighborhood are suspicious of the foundation’s plans for their land.
Shamim Khan, the managing editor of a local Urdu newspaper,
expressed the fears that he shares with his fellow basti residents that
the Aga Khan Foundation, along with the Archeological Survey of
India, would attempt to “capture” the historic landmarks of the
neighborhood.102 Similarly, many poorer members of the community
fear that Aga Khan plans to demolish their houses and develop them
commercially. A blog started by the Hazrat Nizamuddin Residents
Association enumerates in detail the community’s suspicions and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
99 BSP political rally speech, trans. Kamaal Hassan, Nizamuddin basti, April
2009.
100 Datta et. al., “Communal Violence,” 2487.
101 Ibid. 2489.
102 Shamim A. Khan, Managing Director Parwaz Express Urdu Daily,
conversation with author, 30 April 2009, Nizamuddin West, New Delhi.
24
concerns regarding the development project helmed by Aga Khan.

Though the document is extensive and complicated, a theme that
emerges time and again is the fear of losing the distinctive character
of the neighborhood to an aggressive outside force.103 The
Nizamuddin basti is on the defensive. Though the rhetoric of
politicized Islam can be heard with increasing frequency on its
streets, violated religious territory is not the issue; as in the 1990 riots,
the issue is the violation of the land from outside. Whether they have
lived on their plots for sixty or six hundred years, residents of the
basti today know that they do not want to see their neighborhood
changed or ‘captured’. Like the tomb of the Saint himself, the land
seems also to act as a qutb, connecting the residents of the basti not to
the divine, but to the traditions of unity, security, and community
that so many lost in Partition.
The Saint’s Place
Following the political rally, party organizers provided food

for anyone who wanted to partake—I attended along with one or
two other acquaintances whom I knew not to be BSP supporters.
The event reminded me particularly of the several kanqahs that I had
attended in the preceding months. Whether or not the allusion was
intended, the resonance with Sufi tradition could not have gone
unnoticed in Nizamuddin where the Saint’s spirit remains
omnipresent. At the conclusion of her essay on Delhi’s urban
villages, Ranjana Sengupta says, “the inhabitants of urban villages
[…] have—some of them—lived in the same spot for 200 years. Yet
their loyalty is not to Delhi, for which many express contempt. It is
to their land and community.”104 In the Nizamuddin basti this is not,
strictly speaking, the case. Most families living in Nizamuddin have
been there no more than sixty years. Whether or not they actively
participate in the life of the dargah, these families participate in a
community that has the dargah as its ever-present historical
backdrop. Equally embedded in the community of the basti is the
spirit of connection preached by, and embodied in Hazrat
Nizamuddin Auliya. What had at first appeared a political rally
appealing primarily to religious sentiment turned out to be just
another kanqah, the manifestation of Nizamuddin’s deeply felt sense
of community expressed through the great traditions of the Saint
whose tomb still sits at the neighborhood’s center.
The above example of the dinner following the political rally,

it seems to me, effectively expresses the nature of the relationship
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
103 Hazrat Nizamuddin Residents Association, www.hnra.blogspot.com
(accessed May 1, 2009).
25
between the Saint’s dargah, and the neighborhood that surrounds it.
While Nizamuddin Auliya and his celebrated tomb may not form the
center of religious life for the residents of the basti, his presence can
still be felt everywhere. It was because of the Saint that the
neighborhood came into existence, because of the Saint’s presence
that the neighborhood’s particular historic character was established,
and because of the dargah that most of the current inhabitants came
to live there. Though I would not go so far as to suggest that the
community’s contemporary connection to its land derives from the
Saint’s own emphasis on connection and community, it seems clear
that there is a continuity between the present shape of the
Nizamuddin basti and the religious and ritual principals that are so
important to the institution that defined it. The residents of the basti
may no longer worship at the dargah; indeed, many of the people
found in the basti on a given day would likely describe the rituals at
the dargah as heterodox. Nevertheless, the Spirit of the Saint is
immanent.
Just as the Saint’s greatest adversary was the unjust

encroachment of political power on the spirit of equality, humility,
and love that characterized his kanqah, so today do the residents of
the Nizamuddin basti perceive the intrusion of outside forces as the
greatest threat to the continued survival of their neighborhood as
they know it—ancient, harmonious, small, and safe. Whether by the
productive internal force of the community, or by the negative
exterior force of religious bias, Nizamuddin has remained its own,
despite the vigor of Delhi’s expansion. Today Nizamuddin faces
many challenges, perhaps first among them maintaining its character
and its community without losing hold of its cherished traditions of
hospitality and syncretism. One need only set foot in the dargah to
see these traditions alive and well, with ‘outsiders’ from nearly every
one of Delhi’s communities finding a place. Residents of the basti
may not typically participate in the life of the dargah, but so long as
they preserve their connection to their neighborhood and their
community, they can look out to the colonies that surround them and
heave a sigh of relief with a version of the Saint’s famous words in
their heads: despite everything, “Delhi is still quite far.”105
Conclusion
I have attempted here to understand the dynamic between a

modern neighborhood and the historical monument at its heart.
Through my research I have discovered just how complicated these
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
26
terms really are in a place as multilayered and historically complex as

the Nizmauddin basti. The history of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya,
though easily accessible for anyone who cares to look, is not history
in a conventional sense; it is a hagiography. This I expected. What
had not occurred to me was the possibility that a neighborhood could
have a hagiography, a history of mutually exclusive truths,
contradictory evidence, and a ‘reality’ as evasive as that of any Saint.
In both cases, I decided to accept hagiographical history as
relevant—if not strictly accurate—to the thrust of my research. Thus
my inquiry ceased to examine the historical birth of a neighborhood,
focusing instead on the way a neighborhood lives in the minds of its
residents. So two equally elusive and nebulous figures came to
occupy my attention: Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, and the
Nizamuddin basti. Much to my surprise, the latter, which I
experienced first hand on a daily basis, was by far the more difficult
to understand.
It is facile to say that the dargah and the basti are mutually
sustaining, and neither does it capture the full complexity of their
relationship. The dargah, I can say with certainty, was the generative
force behind the Nizamuddin basti, whatever we may regard as the
first form of that neighborhood. From that time, the man and the
ideals enshrined there have persisted in the basti, in its continued
Muslim character, in its pride in communal harmony, its openness to
like-minded visitors, and its resistance to unwelcome external forces,
be they political or otherwise. It is my contention that, even if
residents of the basti no longer constitute the primary community of
the Saint’s devotees, it is through their deep sense of connection, to
their land, to their history, and to their community, that the Saint’s
teachings continue to live.
27
Appendix A
Detail of Nizamuddin dargah and basti area.
Dome of Jama’at
Khanna Masjid Subz Burj
28
Appendix B
Delhi Development Authority, Zonal Development Plan,

Zone-D Map
29

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COLUMBIA UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES

WHERE DELHI IS STILL QUITE FAR:

MICHAEL THOMAS PASCHAL SNYDER

This study aims to examine the nature of the relationship between

I n the midst of the historical monuments and posh colonies of

Every question about the basti leads eventually to the dargah

I began by exploring the Saint both as a historical figure and

devotee as exemplary of the Saint’s teachings.

It has been my aim neither to reveal a central truth nor to

Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya

“Nizamuddin Auliya was one of the pillars of Islam.”

My two interlocutors at the ‘urs—celebrated on the

The Historical Figure and his Teachings

Hazrat Nizamudin Auliya was born in Badayun, Uttar

town of Ghiyaspur on the outskirts of the Sultanate city at Siri, and

The former example does more to recount the social world

In fact, this instance of linguistic diplomacy is secondary

While the first two points—the miraculous and the

miraculous powers but also his compassion when he says “man is

Connecting to the Man

Even the least complex draw to the dargah—the

Prayer is but one means by which a devotee can enter into

“connection.”29 Usually performed with a simple joining of hands,

Connecting to the Land

Though modern global realities have opened up possibilities

neighborhood, and not an entirely positive one. The dargah in

On my visits to the Dargah during the Saint’s ‘urs in mid-

neighborhood of Nizamuddin finds the density of population and

Inside the dargah complex, the 16th century, Mughal-built

The Nizamuddin Basti

What is the relationship between the modern place

Nizamuddin himself lived there. Once a humble town outside the

A Village, a Slum, a Master Plan

Ironically, despite the fact that residents of Nizamuddin will

and any indication of permanent settlement around the Dargah.

The confusion surrounding the historical status of the

The commercial life of the basti, focused almost exclusively

The Modern Making of an Ancient Town

Nizamuddin’s strange absence from Delhi’s urban plan

the mass exodus of Muslims to Pakistan, many of the Muslim

According to Mr. Ahmad, the two major population booms

historically Muslim identity.62

While Muslim identity certainly played a large part in the

Connection and community have been the primary

Nizamuddin’s Open Door

On the larger scale of modern Delhi, the recreation of the

have for decades, though now those seeking refuge in the

More often the basti’s hospitality applies to visiting

to worship at the dargah. In recent years, the popularity of worship

Though the primary draw of Nizamuddin has always been its

A Different Communal Difference

If any kind of internal tension predominates in the

spread a conservative message.82 Despite an apparently adversarial

Despite any such in-fighting in Nizamuddin’s Muslim

associated with the organization.89 Yet even if we include this

Sleeping in the Monuments, Living for the Land

Still, the general population of the Nizamuddin basti is not

More importantly, a unifying sense of community engenders

wealthier, more spacious neighbors. So far as I could tell, the only