City Faith – Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry, Hazrat Nizamuddin Dargah
Qawwali at Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia’s Dargah.
[Poem by Agha Shahid Ali; photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
I
Between two saints, he shares the
earth, Mohommad Shah “Rangeele,”
(evoked in Paluskar’s khayal)
The beggar-woman kisses the marble
lattice, sobs on Khusro’s pillars.
In a corner, Jahanara, garbed in
the fakir’s grass, mumbles a Sufi quatrain.
We recline on the grave-stone,
or on the saint’s poem, unaware
of the sorrow of the pulverized prayer.
Time has only its vagrant finger:
Knowing no equal, it paused for massacres.
II
Suffering still has its familiar patterns:
We buy flowers for Nizammudin’s feet,
dream in the corner to the qawwal’s beat.
The saint’s song chokes in his throat.
The poor tie prayers with threads,
accustomed to their ancient wish
for the milk and honey of Paradise.
III
I’ve learnt some lessons the easy way:
I’ve seen so many, even a child somewhere,
his infant bones hidden forever.
Stone, grass, children turned old:
The dead have no ghosts.
IV
These are time’s relics, its suffered epitaphs:
I come here to sing Khusro’s songs.
I burn to the end of the lit essence
as kings and beggars arise in the smoke:
That drunk debauched colourful king
dances again with hoofs of sorrow
as Nadir skins the air with swords,
horses galloping
to the rhythm
of a dying
dynasty.
The muezzin interrupts the dawn, calls
the faithful to prayer with a monster-cry:
We walk through streets calligraphed with blood.
(Born in Delhi, Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri-American poet)
One night at Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya Dargah
wanna visit here.is it safe in night?
Hi,
Visiting the dargah late at night is ill-advised. However, late evenings are quite safe. If you wish to save yourself the horror of seeing slaughtered carcasses of goats and sheep, avoid certain areas of Nizamuddin during early mornings.
You must only visit the dargah if you are not put off by filth, muck, hucksters, beggars and a general squalor. Some streets in Nizamuddin can be filthy beyond words.
It is sad that people in search of imaginary comfort and spiritual experiences neglect the overall condition of the place.
It can be a beautiful tourist complex, should the (un)concerned authorities feel motivated enough to make amends. Alas! Nizamuddin has devolved into a means to an end ( spiritual bliss or whatever) and has suffered a lot as a result. People treat the complex like a whore- riding roughshod all over it and abandoning it after they are done with the ‘experience’. Any decent human being would be disgusted by the paan stains on the walls and the dinginess that pervades the atmosphere.
There seems to be something about contemporary religion in India ( Sufism, Hinduism etc.)that condones filth and ignores aestheticism in favor of pipe dreams.
Hi,
I’ve scanned my entire collection of The veiled suite but I haven’t located this poem, or even “The walled city: 7 poems on Delhi” — which collection did you find this in, Mayank?
It’s in the book ‘The Best of Quest’.
Oh! Great, thanks, that’s a bit unnerving because all his poems are supposed to be in The Veiled Suite. Thumbs-up for sharing this, there are several strange versions floating about on the web and it helps to have a credible one.
“It can be a beautiful tourist complex, should the (un)concerned authorities feel motivated enough to make amends.”
The Dargah is among the most important historical and spiritual Islamic complexes in the World. It is in my opinion an area of Outstanding Universal Value. But alas, why would the Delhi Authority bhaiyaas care about this Basti? Some of my relatives say it is becasue it is an Islamic complex and hence its future is that of a second class citizen in an country of over a billion people. But I disagree, several temples and sikh gurdwaras are found in Delhi which unfortunately suffer from the same filth and squalor as Nizamuddin Basti. The problem, shameful to say as I’m an Indian myself, is the Indian mentality of not minding living in filth and squalor!!!!!
I have visited Pakistan and find places of worship there to be in a much cleaner and well-built surroundings, so it is not about India being a developing country that we find huge open stinking rubbish mounds next to places of worship. It is simply that people in India have an attitude that as long as their back yard is saaf sutra, no one gives a damn about communal streets!