aishani gupta

Department of History PhD Candidate
Guiliano Fellow, Summer 2019 

“The Shrine’s City: pilgrimage, politics, and the making of colonial Ajmer, 1857-1947”

My dissertation project takes the case study of British colonial Ajmer, a city that has been the foremost Sufi pilgrimage site in India and a ‘second Hajj’ for Muslims in South Asia. I examine the ways in which pre-colonial sacred spaces like Sufi shrines, and their associated rituals and practices became an integral part of the institutional life of empire in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I argue that sites like Ajmer’s medieval Sufi shrine continued to be active sites of political, cultural, and economic appropriation and networking in colonial South Asia, and were used by the British, the native subjects and other trans-regional actors to voice their individual roles and prerogatives in the making of the modern colonial city. The urbanization of non-metropolitan or secondary centers pivoted on pilgrimage like Ajmer, appears to have been founded on intense negotiations between different interlocutors, including the keepers of the shrine, the descendants of the Sufis, management and other staff, wealthy businessmen and political elites who granted patronage, the colonial administration, pilgrims, women, civil servants and other interlocutors. I use watershed moments of their interactions with each other as well as with the Sufi Dargah to craft a layered narrative of colonial urbanism, and in turn, of empire. These help expand our understanding of colonial cities that were centered on religion and pilgrimage rather than solely on political and commercial activities; evolving nonetheless, amidst other contemporary social, political, economic and intellectual changes.

Archives and methods:

The preliminary archive I accessed between September 2019 and November 2019 was the Rajasthan State Archives in Ajmer. The files requisitioned can be categorized under the following: Land Revenue records of Ajmer-Merwara province, documents of Ajmer Municipality, Personal Correspondences from the Offices of the Commissioner and Assistant Commissioner of Ajmer. The files of particular interest were those concerning the Dargah or the shrine of the medieval Sufi saint Muin al-Din Chishti. They provided details of financial transactions involving the shrine and its keepers, trans-regional religious, political and economic networks with the shrine, lawsuits and complaints stemming from the shrine which connected it to the municipal infrastructures of the city, and attempts from both colonists and native populations to exert control over the sacred space. 

The other archive that I started compiling was oral histories and narratives, by taking interviews of locals involved in the upkeep and functioning of the shrine and other spaces associated with the colonial regime. There were three subjects of interview – a Khadim or a guide of the shrine, a caretaker of a colonial-era cemetery and a grave-digger responsible for the upkeep of the same. These interviews gave a glimpse of community affiliations within a pilgrimage city, and also legacies of local communities who have been involved in the functioning of sacred spaces since the colonial period, and even earlier. The following is an interesting section from an interview conducted at the Anglican cemetery in Ajmer, off Nasirabad Road:

Aishani [to an old woman who is currently the caretaker of the cemetery]: “Yeh angrezon ke zamaane ka kabristan hai?” (“Is this a cemetery dating back to the British times?”)

Caretaker: “Haanji bilkul. Aap local nai lagte?” (“Yes. You don’t look like a local?”)

A: “Nahi main Ajmer ke bare mein padhai kar rahi hu. Aap yahan ka dekhbhaal karte hain?” (“No I am studying about Ajmer. Do you look after this place?”)

Caretaker: “Mera naam Roshan Bano, hum Pathan hain, mere sasur ke zamaane se hum log kabristan ka dekhbhaal karte aaye hain. Aap ka naam kya hai?” (“My name is Roshan Bano, we are Pathans, our family has been looking after this cemetery since the time of my father-in-law. What is your name?”)

A: “Aishani…”

Caretaker: “Aap Hindu ho? Maine unn logo se [pointing at gardeners in the cemetery] kaha jab aap andar aaye ki yeh yahan ki nahin hain, Brahmin ladki lagti hai [smiles].” (“You are a Hindu? I told [pointing at gardeners in the cemetery] them when you came that you are not from here, you look like a Brahmin girl [smiles].”)

[Then she proceeded to guide me around the cemetery, talking of American and European students who had visited the graveyard before.]

Caretaker: “Aap Dargah gayi hain?” (“Have you been to the Dargah?”)

Aishani: “Haan main usi ke bare mein padhai kar rahi hoon…” (“Yes I am studying about that only…”)

Caretaker: “Haan beta, aap samhal ke jaana wahaan… Khadim log bilkul bhi ache nahin hain, hum log Pathan hain, phir bhi hum un Khadim log se dur rehte hain, bohot bure log hain, khaas kar auraton aur ladkiyon ke saath badtameezi karte hain. Samhal ke jana beta…” (“Yes child, be careful when you go there… the Khadims are not good at all, we are Pathans, but still we stay away from Khadims, they are bad people, especially because they misbehave with girls and women. Go carefully child…”)

The Pathans are an ethnic group tracing their homelands back to Afghanistan and north-western regions of modern India and Pakistan. They are Muslims. This interaction underscores the fact that community affiliations do not necessarily translate into unity of purpose in a pilgrimage space. The Khadims have been in the service of the shrine for centuries, yet they are usually looked at with distrust by local communities, including other Muslims. There is some historical evidence to support this. In November 1908, S. Imamuddin, a cousin of the sajjada-nishin (spiritual descendant of the Sufi saint buried in Ajmer and the titular head of the shrine) complained to the British Commissioner of Ajmer about the misdemeanour of Khadims towards two British wives:

When the madam was once there, Abdul Karim son of Imam Baksh and Mardan Ali son of Irshad Ali and some other Khadims began to use some vulgar language somewhat of which Mrs. Mannersmith understood and asked me what they were saying I, with a view that it might not grieve her, made an evasive answer & requested the ladies to proceed further one. Seeing this The Manager also became very angry with the Khadims & was very sorry for these actions of them.

Using instances like this, I am able to corroborate certain contemporary local narratives with historical evidence in order to paint a picture of the shrine-people, as well as local affiliations to the sacred space and its functioning.

My fieldwork at the Rajasthan State Archives in Ajmer has provided information on the administrative and legal workings of the pilgrimage city in the colonial period. I have perused municipal notices, legal proceedings, orders from the local colonial administration, various complaints lodged by the shrine-keepers to the administration, and the economic circuits that bolstered urbanism in the region. As of January 2020, the following archives remain to be accessed:

Rajasthan State Archives in Bikaner: Documents pertaining to the colonial administration of Ajmer around the time of the 1857 Uprising and immediately after. The Ajmer archives contains documents from 1870 to 1950.

National Archives in Delhi: Land records of Rajputana Agency and Ajmer-Merwara province, police force records of Ajmer in the nineteenth century, maps of Rajputana and Ajmer, Dargah Sharif litigations, Dargah staff and Sajjada-Nashin appointment papers and Dargah Khwaja Saheb Act 1936 documents.

Mayo College Archives in Ajmer: Mayo College building plans and histories.

British Library India Office Archives and SOAS archives in London: Documents on the everyday interactions of the officers and civil servants in Ajmer, as well as local communities including the Jains, who engaged in various cultural activities to involve themselves in the colonial milieu. Other materials of importance to my project include records of the visits of Queen Mary, the Prince of Wales and the Viceroy, to Ajmer, in the early 1900s, several paintings of Ajmer and the Sufi saint buried in the famous shrine, and biographical anecdotes of civil servants stationed at Ajmer.

Preliminary structure of the dissertation:

 In order to explore the evolution of the urban space around the shrine of the Sufi saint in nineteenth-century Ajmer, I put teleological considerations aside (the stereotypical narrative of pre-colonial establishments being replaced by colonialism, which was then followed by the emergence of nationalism). Instead, I structure this project as a series of watershed moments of interactions, exchanges and conflicts among various interlocutors and stakeholders. I look beyond paradigms of segregation to find instances of interconnectedness among them. 

 First, I examine why, despite the shift of British colonial policies towards religion in South Asia after the Uprising of 1857, the government in Ajmer got increasingly enmeshed in shrine affairs such as economic transactions, appointment of cleaning and managing staff and institutionalizing rituals such as the sama’. I uncover their attempts to link the Sufi shrine to modern legal and municipal infrastructures in the city by encouraging litigations among Khadims (those who served in the memory of the Sufi saint), managing Committee, spiritual and biological descendants (Sajjad-nashins and pirzadas), and workers, and imposing sanctions on health and sanitation. I also examine how, despite the efforts of the government to institutionalize matters, these groups often worked the system to address complaints, obtain favors and patronage, and press for recognition.   

Second, I explore the shrine’s integration into other local and trans-regional circuits of patronage linking it to places such as Hyderabad, Oman and Afghanistan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and examine how this resulted in the emergence of a new, urban public affiliated with matters of the shrine. I use contemporary newspaper reports on pilgrim footfall in Ajmer and the “menace” of pan-Islamism, to understand not only the colonial anxieties related to the trans-national public sphere, but also how modern islamicate solidarities emerged around old networks of pilgrimage and patronage. 

I investigate this yoking of the sacred space to other local and imperial circuits more closely with case studies of several women in the early twentieth century, including Queen-Empress Mary, who used the shrine and its new legal systems to voice their oppression and inscribe their power. This will not only allow me to understand how issues of gender, sexuality and race were played out in sacred spaces across the empire, but also what difficulties the colonial administration had to face despite imposing cultural and moral sanctions on such spaces. 

Next, I investigate the cultural tensions between British and other elites over establishment of hegemony through architecture and control of space, both inside the shrine and outside in the city. Some of the examples include the Mayo College (an educational institution for local Princely chiefs and their families), the Mahfil Khana or gathering hall in the Dargah, the Victoria Jubilee Clock Tower, and the permission granted to Dr. Elahi Bux, the physician of the shrine, to be buried in the shrine complex. This section attempts to understand how, and in what ways, centuries-old cultural and political symbols and rituals became a crucial part of colonial space-making and modernization.

The Victoria Jubilee Clock Tower, built in 1887. Photograph by author.

The post-1857 policy of non-interference in religious institutions, with which this narrative began, seemed to have completely submerged under a rising tide of Sufi urbanism by the 1900s. The British Raj sought to control and survey pilgrimage, health and sanitation, the use of sacred spaces and define the boundaries of religion within the city, often by closing burial grounds and putting sanctions on the use of sacred water tanks. But modernization of the pilgrimage town also invited economic and political involvement of different stakeholders such as princes and chieftains, lawyers, businessmen and civil servants, keepers of the shrine and descendants of the saint. They contested against, as well as contributed to, the reuse of sacred land, rituals, architecture and patronage. As a result, instead of an imposed urban development that the Raj had initially hoped for, a colonial city with distinct interest groups emerged, who were working the changes brought in by the imperial regime, with the colonists struggling to keep a hold on their modern urban space.

Impact on student learning:

My dissertation project brings together historiographical concerns that have typically been found separately in Sufism and religious studies, Empire and urbanization. For instance I use scholarship on rituals and practices, networks of patronage, and construction of sacred architecture to understand and analyze British colonial negotiations with these in nineteenth and early-twentieth century South Asia. Another example is an examination of how ritual duties of Sufis and pilgrims become an integral part of the institutional life of empire. Yet another, is an examination of Ajmer as a non-metropolitan urban space that was strongly founded on intense negotiations between the colonists and existing religious, cultural and ritual practices. These help expand our understanding of colonial cities beyond unilateral perspectives of either domination or resistance or even economistic deliberations on urban growth. 

To explicate this a little further: I use hagiographic narratives of the Sufi saint Muin al-Din, interviews of the shrine-keepers, and analyses of pilgrimage rituals and patronage traditions to understand the significance of this early modern institution in the colonial period. I then use this analysis to probe further into issues of space-making in the context of urbanization. I investigate how the shrine evolved to become a locus of political and economic contestations between different stakeholders in this period, and how the sacred space was gradually encroached upon by colonial and other local polities in a bid to impose their domination in the region. I also use pilgrimage records, documents on police surveillance and sanitation, epidemics, litigations, constructions and economic flows to understand how the shrine got linked to it urban environs. These linkages in turn reveal the workings of the nineteenth-century colonial city. The shrine-space of Ajmer and its surroundings allow us to understand empire as formations of new networks which brought diverse people, spaces and affiliations into a direct ambit of exchanges and conflicts.

My project thus proposes a kind of religious urbanization in South Asia, specifically a Sufi urbanization that interacted with other contemporary social, political, economic, intellectual and religious concerns. This contributes to the burgeoning field of non-metropolitan urban studies in South Asia, especially places pivoted on religion, pilgrimage, education or tourism. Examples include Madhuri Desai’s Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), Kama Maclean’s Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Janaki Nair’s Mysore Modern: Rethinking Region Under Princely Rule (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Hussain Ahmad Khan’s Artisans, Sufis, Shrines: Colonial Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Punjab (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015).

 

 

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