When I first saw the fakirs, they were encircling the shrine, and I asked them if I could come with them and then this fakir led me through lanes to the dhuni where many of their community members sat smoking and singing.
I spoke to Barshad and kept asking him if the feats of endurance that he performed didn't hurt him and he said he didn't care. The faith carried him through.
We came back in the night for the Dhammal. One fakir pierced a sharp sword through his cheeks, the other lashed himself with a whip. An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on Oct. 12, 2009.
This one is for the fakirs.
"Come, come, whoever you are. Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter.Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come." Rumi
Saints and fakirs
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 10, 2009
Barshad Ali Khalifa Rifai emerged from a throng of fakirs chanting,and dancing on the third day of the Urs at the famous Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Aulia, knelt down and put a dagger right through his shoulder.
His face twitched, his eyes rolled, but no blood colored the floors.
And no shouts of pain rose through the cacophony of drum beats and clanging cymbals.
Jaws dropped, cameras flashed, and nobody blinked through the Dhammal, a combination of magic tricks like walking on fire, endurance of physical torture like flagellating with chains dangling with knife-blades, and rhythmic skipping from foot to foot. The faith seemed infectious. It was as if they were all awed by the feat, yet they all knew he would be fine, and that he won’t die. Nobody cared to probe further, to question the antics, to get into a debate.
All this while, the fakirs who had gathered at the Rifai Chowk, the site of the scared fire or the dhuni at Nizamuddin Basti, from all over the country, traveling hundreds of miles to pay homage to Sufi poet Amir Khusro, the disciple of the 12th centrury saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, shouted “Mast Kalandar”, and whipped themselves as part of the performance.
The air was heavy with sweat, the scent of rose petals, the dying embers from the dhuni, and the waft of hashish from the chillums the fakirs smoked. It also throbbed with anticipation, dread, and disbelief.
Then Barshad stood up, and in a state of rapture pulled out the dagger, smiled, and walked back to his seat, swaying wildly.
No, he never felt any pain. It was a sweet trance, he said.
“I don’t think about the pain. It’s ecstasy. This is for Sarkar (Nizamuddin Auliya). Jis wali ke dar par fakir na gaya toh Urs kaisa. (No Urs is complete without the fakirs) So we come, we dance, we do dhammal, and we smoke,” he said. “He sees us through this. We keep the faith and he sees us through.”
The three-day Urs at the 705th death anniversary Khusro, culminated on Friday, a fortnight after Ramzan. The annual affair that celebrates the death because it signifies the ultimate union with God is an orgy of qawallis, mushairas, feasts and prayers and also intoxication, both literally and spiritually because the fakirs claim they are drunk on God’s love, and the tricks are to add to the enigma of the saint. Urs is also Arabic for marriage. For Sufis, it is time to celebrate, to
feast and pray. Thousands attended the Urs.
Rongila Bibi came from Bengal for the blessings of the saint.
"He is a special man of God. Khusro is his companion," the pregnant woman said. "I have come here to ask for his grace at the Urs. They say this is the best time."
For the wandering fakirs who converge at shrines, smoke, and do Dhammal, the Urs at Nizamuddin holds special significance, too. They claim they are sent invites to come and pay respects to the saint.
So they come, dressed in long robes, eyes lined with kohl, and with matted hair, chanting and dancing and encircle the shrine while the faithful stick Rs. 10 notes on to their swords, or daggers that they proudly brandish. And even though a certain disdain line their faces, many step aside to make way for them because they dread their curse.
Qalandar, whose name the vagrant fakirs invoke, was one of Pakistan’s Sufi saints who didn’t belong to any order. The fakirs say he performed miracles, brought the dead to life and such were his powers.
The fakirs are ascetics who are either born into the order like Barshad who says he was always a fakir, or are inducted like Islamuddin Khalifa who left his family in Delhi to become a wandering ascetic. When he was inducted in a ritual where his coffin was prepared symbolizing the death of his previous life, he was expected
to remain true to the fakirs, living a nomadic life, and sever all ties with the world.
As he sat in a corner watching the tricks of endurance performed by the fellow fakirs, he looked happy.
“I got peace here. I found God here,” he said.
While many doubt their beliefs and denounce their practices as being against Islam, the fakirs say they are too lost in their love for God to care. Justification isn’t the way of the true mystics, they said.
“Dervishes. Well, a lot of them might just be traditional and cultural. A true Sufi would call himself Fakir. But a lot of this is tradition and a way of earning. True qalandars are true Sufies lost to the world. I wouldn’t think they are true mystics,” Sadia Dehlvi, who authored a book on Sufism, said. “The true Qalandars are all gone.”
The Urs itself has transformed over the years. For the old-timers, the Urs has now become a tourist must-watch thing after the shrine was included in the Lonely Planet list, Dehlvi said.
Dehlvi has been going to the two Urs – of Nizamuddin Auliya and Khusro – for more than two decades and recalls the days when only the devoted came to the shrine. The qawallis too were different.
“Now it feels like a concert. The qawalls sit in a semi-circle but the middle path is supposed to be kept free so the djinns can come and listen to the music,” she said. “All that stands diluted now. So many things have changed.”
But even though many have dismissed them as petty mendicants who reduce to cheap magic tricks to beg for alms, the fakirs are as much part of the tradition of Urs as is the qawalli.
People made way for them as they came in. For at the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
“The world comes here on Urs. The fakirs come, too,” he said. “But these days it is not the real Qalandars who were the high masters. They have the knowledge. The fakirs are a show. They resort to cheap tricks.”
They can’t ask the saint to cure ills, to mediate and fulfill wishes. That’s forbidden, he said.
Khwaja Hasan Saani Nizami, the hereditary keeper of the shrine, said the fakirs are not real Sufis. They are mad men because in Sufism, the boundaries are defined. Fakirs are deviant, he said.
But then, the fakirs scoff at these notions. Sufism, they say, is a
tradition. Saints are venerated and even sinners have a chance at redemption, the self-styled mystics said.
“Maybe we are sinners. But I have left all to be with God,” Islamuddin said. “At the Urs, we come to see our saint. He doesn’t despise us.”
As for the endurance tricks, he said they did it to show their devotion, to show the powers of the venerated saints, and to add to the Urs festivities.
“We go where the Urs is,” he said. “We have come from Kolkata, Mumbai, Uttar Pradesh, everywhere. The power of Urs brings us here.”
Such endurance tricks are not unique to the the Muslim fakirs. Many other sects practice such piercings. In the 1960s in the West, circuses started getting fakirs to perform piercing tricks in front of the crowds.
In Shia branch of Islam, on Muharram many followers mourn and commemorate the death of Imam Husayn ibn Ali , a grandson of Prophet Muhammad , and other family members in the Battle of Karbala. Flagellation is part of the mourning rituals.
However, the Fakirs don’t do it as mourning but as celebration of the supernatural powers of their saints and believe that by piercing and flagellation, they prove they are so lost to the faith that pain ceases to exist. They also claim it has been part of the Urs tradition for many centuries. While the Rifai fakirs indulge in piercing and other tricks, the Jalalis shackle themselves in heavy iron chains, which sometimes weigh as much as 70 kgs, Islamuddin, who claims to be a fakir in the Qadiri- Rifai Sufi order, said. At the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
On Saturday, the fakirs walked to the Dargah with a shrowd of flowers, and offered to the Saint. And then, they smoked once again, sang qawallis and boarded the buses to return to where they came from.
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