Photo Essay: Touching the divine in Delhi

In a time when Islam is demonised in the West as the terrorist’s ideology of choice and more and more people believe there is an irreconcilable difference between “them” and “us”, there is a place tucked away in the back streets of a dusty south Delhi suburb that stands for the very opposite.

In this place, differences are set aside. Muslims stand shoulder to shoulder with Hindus and Christians, locals sit cross-legged with foreigners, all here to pay respects to a man nearly eight centuries gone. He is Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, a Sufi mystic and saint of the Chishti order.

Unlike mainstream Muslims, Sufis focus less on strict ritual and scripture and more on seeking a personal connection with God, be it through music, poetry, dance or meditation.

The Mevlevi Sufis of Turkey whirl themselves into a higher state of consciousness to reach God - the Sufis of the Indian subcontinent sing. Their music is called qawwali.

Qawwali is an expression of praise and calling to the divine unique to the Indian subcontinent and it is the reason I went to visit the mausoleum of Hazrat Nizamuddin.

Qawwali songs are devotional, full of praise and longing for God. The music is hypnotic and haunting. First, the harmonium lays down a soft, lilting melody. Then, the tabla and dholak drums quickly join in with their steady, syncopated beats. The intensity of the song ebbs and flows, with two, three or more singers taking turns to bring the music to ever higher peaks of emotion, accompanied by hand claps and wild gestures. The lyrics are usually sung in Urdu or Punjabi, but their sounds have a beauty all their own.

I visited the mausoleum on a Thursday evening. Being a popular pilgrimage site, hundreds of people are gathered there. Devotees jostle to sprinkle rose petals and touch the saint’s tomb, while women tie coloured knots on the mausoleum’s intricate lattice windows, praying for the saint's intercession. All the while, volunteers dole out free food to the needy in the courtyard.

As dusk approaches, evening prayers are said at the adjoining mosque. I pay my respects at the saint’s tomb and join the crowd congregating cheek-by-jowl around the qawwali singers as the music commences.

Some in the crowd sway to the music with their eyes closed, perhaps in a trance. Others clap and sing along. And yet others, like myself, simply sit silent and wide-eyed, taking it all in. The singing continues for a long time, some songs lasting twenty minutes or more.

The simplicity and rawness of the devotion is moving. Religion here is stripped of ideology, rules and regulations, all the things that divide, instead replaced by a simple certainty that there is something out there higher and greater than all of us, and giving personal expression to that truth.

I’m not a religious person, but for a few moments that evening, I felt invisible, my individuality subsumed by some greater presence. The stranger next to me didn’t seem so strange and our differences didn’t seem so great. He wasn’t an Indian, I wasn’t a foreigner. We were just two people seeking a glimpse of the unseen.

Perhaps that’s what the divine is really about – that feeling of humility in the understanding that we are all equals – whether there is a God involved or not.

I don’t really know.

But I do know that anything that helps reminds us of our common values, rather than our differences, can’t be a bad thing, especially in these troubled times. Long may Hazrat Nizamuddin’s mausoleum continue to do so.