The ‘Alamdār

Shaikh-ul Aalam Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies

University of Kashmir

ISSN: 2249-5096

Kashmir is unique in a number of respects. Its cultural personality in its multifaceted dimensions has been shaped through an interface between two factors during its long history. The mountainous surroundings have helped it shape up differently from its neighbouring areas. Very few ethno-regional and cultural communities of any significant size globally have had so very directly marked, manifest and discernible relationship between people and the place of their habitation with defined geography as that in Kashmir.

Khwaja Mu’in al-Din, who has been given the epithet of Chishti, Sijzi, and Ajmeri, is designated by modern historians as the founder of the Chishti silsila. This paper traces the textual references to the saint, and interrogates why narratives about him only begin to appear over a century after his death. While scholars have studied the imperial patronage given to the dargah of this saint at Ajmer, and the effect this had on the articulation of sovereignty and the ideological claims of the Mughal rulers, it is also necessary to study the effect of this patronage and relationship on the stake-holders of the shrine as well as members of the Sufi fraternity. This paper is a first step in a study about the crafting and creation of community identity on the part of the Chishtiyya, and looks at the narratives about Mu’in al-Din in this light. As the authors of hagiographies and histories ascribed different geographical identities to Mu’in al-Din, this had an effect on the contours of the sacred geography of the Chishtiyya Sufis as well.

Shaikh Noor-ud-Din, or Nund Rishi, is arguably one of the most famous pre-modern local saints of Kashmir and is widely known as the founder of a local Sufi order, the Rishis. Modern works on Kashmir have understood the intellectual milieu of pre-modern Kashmir as dominantly Sanskritic in nature. As such, Noor-ud-Din’s poetry, composed as it is in a dominantly Islamicate frame, with frequent use of Arabic and Persian vocabulary is understood as a ‘miracle’ which otherwise defies a historical explanation. Besides, the spread of Islam in Kashmir is mainly understood with respect to either the missionary activities and miracles of Persianate Sufi saints or the inherent liberating impact of Islam, or alternatively seen as intimately connected to its political patronage by the Shahmiri and Chak Sultans of Kashmir. With respect to its various manifestations, Islam is subsequently divided into mutually exclusive categories of Rishi, Sufi and orthodox Islam, a schema in which personalities such as Noor-ud-Din are pigeon holed into a certain reductive role. It is with these issues in mind that I propose to use Noor-ud-Din’s poetry, particularly Gongol-nama for an intervention into three historio-graphical debates about pre and early modern Kashmir. I would be focusing on three inter-related points; one, debates about Kashmir’s links with the larger Persianate world, two, the spread of Islam in Kashmir, and three, the binaries of Rishi, Sufi and scriptural Islam.I conclude with three main points: one, a need to do away with Noor-ud-Din’s image as a local saint and relocate his intellectual milieu by highlighting his connections to the Persianate world, two, re-interpret the spread in pre-modern Kashmir as a philological encounter, and three, revisit with the highly-problematic binaries of Rishi, Sufi and scriptural Islam.

This paper is divided into three sections: the first deals with the historiography related to Qāḍī Ḥamīd al-Dīn Nāgawrī; the second is a biographical note on the Qāḍī; and the third discusses his legacy.

At the outset, I would like to steer clear of the relevance of the traditional prosody in contemporary genuine poetry and would rather emphasize the fact that rhythm and metre have all along been organic components of poetry and that versification alone cannot make a poem. It is, perhaps a poet’s extraordinary creative personality — endowed with imagination and sensibility — representing the intensely individual music of his thought patterns that shapes his art. A poem or a verse of a ghazal is considered to be an organic whole wherein words and other poetic vehicles are not ornamental and decorative, but are contributory to the making of the organic unity of that linguistic structure. Like words and metaphors, metre and rhythm too contribute towards creative power of poetry. There is no denying the fact that total metrical rigidity has and will continue to hinder the organic growth of a poetic experience and shall rather encourage a kind of poetic composition that is mechanical and frigid, lacking in imagination, intensity of thought and insight and, above all, the powerful expression, the essence of poetry.