City Travel – Sufi World, Ajmer
Glimpses of a sacred space.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
An elderly pilgrim from Rajkot in Gujarat lovingly offers a rose petal to the lips of his wife. Nearby, rose petals are placed on an unknown person’s grave.
The Delhi Walla is in the Sufi shrine of Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, Rajasthan. (I wrote about this shrine in great detail here.)
Ajmer is a town with dream-like aspects. This is a place where the earlier ways of life are fleetingly glimpsed in fragments of old buildings, like in Delhi, too. But you see the old world also in the everyday dresses of the people of this town, in the quiet gestures of the fakirs, in the beautiful eyes of a bangle-seller, and also, in one instance, in the spice bowls of a tea-stall.
I offer you images from one of the holiest cities of India.
Khwaja’s land
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Incredible and beautiful!!
its so nice to see,the way religion connects us.
🙂
Reading through the blood-drenched pages of religion’s history, one soon realizes how divisive religion is. It is not only divisive; it is dangerous and deadly. In Hindu India one can be murdered if someone spreads the rumor one has killed a cow. Elsewhere one has to fear being on the wrong side of the Sunni-Shiite divide. Meanwhile, on the way to the “Holy” land to kill Muslims during the Middle Ages, the Christians rounded up and slaughtered every Jew they could find. Unquestionably, religion is the worst idea man has ever devised.
All religions connect us to the UNSCIENTIFIC SUPERSTITIONS and MYTHS.
Beneath this exotic exterior lies the hideous practice of ‘haaziri'( exorcism). When I went to Ajmer a couple of years ago, I saw about a dozen ‘possessed’ who’d been chained to the marble screens and grilles of the sanctum. Some howled while others contorted their frail bodies as if to tear off their shackles. The bedlam was curated by Dargah khaadims and controlled by ‘sundry vested interests’. I was shocked to the core even though I’d come prepared.
🙁
Oh such lovely pictures. Transforms me back to Dargah.