As I sat at the back, watching the men – young, old, and children – pass through the doors of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya’s mazaar, touching the grave in the inner sanctum of the dargah and paying their respects, I felt caught in my gender. Like many women, I handed over my offerings to a man entering the inner shrine on my behalf.
Though the Sufi’s annual urs (death anniversary commemoration) attracts a large crowd, gender dictates who gets to have proximity to the Sufi, who performs ceremonies and who holds space near the revered grave.
I grudgingly handed over my plate of roses and attir, a kind of perfume, to a man going inside. I had come to the urs of the Sufi as a devotee, but I was first and probably only seen as a woman.
The spatial politics of communal spaces often keep women at the margins, restricting their mobility and limiting their access to private corners and chambers. The politics of space also control the activities they can perform and participate in.
During the urs, the dargah hosts a variety of ceremonial activities, primarily led by male devotees. When asked about women’s involvement, a caretaker of the dargah said that while women may not participate in the activities inside the mazaar, they are welcome to visit the dargah freely, provided they maintain modesty and avoid unwanted attention.
Although the urs allows women to sit and enjoy the qawwali sessions throughout the night, they cannot sing or lead the activities, especially those held within the mazaar’s premises.
The discourse of women’s access to the shared spaces of temples and shrines has attracted many – some as petitioners or activists and others as writers arguing for or against the notion.
However, questions about devotee women’s response to such restrictions and how they occupy these spaces loom large. Are they passive recipients of these segregational practices or do they create their own space?
While this was difficult to gauge at Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah, a comparison to Sufi shrines in Kashmir can help us understand the nature of women’s participation in communal spaces.
Women at the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. Photo: Indrajit Das/Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
These shrines in Kashmir occupy a massive part of its landscape, which is also known as reshi vaer (valley of reshis) due to the prominent influence of sufis and rishis.
Apart from the many Sufi orders that came to India from West Asia, Kashmir also gave birth to an indigenous order, the Reshi order, whose name is derived from the Sanskrit word rishi, meaning sage. This Sufi order is known for uniquely integrating local cultural practices from Buddhism and Shaivism into Islam. Most of its shrines are located in rural Kashmir, wherein devotees gather to celebrate the urs every year.
The vernacular culture of the shrines provides exquisite space for women’s assertion, their participation and a form of resistance against segregated spaces and gendered practices.
Each year during the urs of the reshi(s), women gather dressed in brightly coloured salwar kameez or phiran (a kind of knee-length robe) to perform wanwun outside the shrine. Wanwun is a traditional practice of collective reciprocal singing typically performed during ceremonial functions in Kashmir, such as during a wedding when the groom leaves for the bride’s house.
Since in Sufi philosophy the urs symbolises the mystical union between the Sufi (the lover) and God (the beloved), which often depicted as a marriage (wisal), wanwun is also a means to celebrate that union or marriage.
In some Reshi shrines like Syed Sultan Ali AlaBalkhi’s, on the first night of the urs, women assemble carrying books, poetry and notebooks containing hymns for the reshi, which they sing for the next twelve nights.
At other Reshi shrines, such as the shrine of Nund Reshi, the initiator of the Reshi order, wanwun lasts for an entire month, without which the urs is thought to be incomplete. Sipping kahwa, a mix of traditional sweetened green tea and dry fruits, women continue to sing in their loud and devout voices that fill the air with joy and love for their reshi.
Women sit outside the inner precincts of the shrine of Syed Ali AllaBalkhi in Budgam, Kashmir. Photo: Sehar Abdullah.
Though restricted to outside the shrine, wanwun gives women the space to mark their importance in carrying forward the traditions of urs, which otherwise remain under male reins.
Unlike qawwali, which is accompanied by instruments such as the harmonium and is mostly sung by men, wanwun does not require instruments and is sung by women. The focus during singing is given to the high notes and the technicalities of the art; every woman participating in it carries the responsibility of practicing it first. For women, it is a celebration, an act of worship, a tool of participation that needs to be carried out thoroughly.
While wanwun provides a space for women’s participation, the shrine’s premises are still gendered on grounds of ‘traditions’. The idea of tradition seems to be stagnant and unchanging for most caretakers of shrines in Kashmir and in Delhi. However, to understand if these segregations are an actual part of Kashmiri ‘traditions’, I spoke to Kashmiri historian M.H. Zaffar, a prominent voice on Kashmiri Shaivism.
Zaffar pointed out that traditionally, Kashmiri society wasn’t as gendered – women had equal, if not more access to the public than men. Social gatherings such as weddings and funerals were gendered, but the shared spaces of shrines or temples weren’t. Women would go inside the premises of the shrine and were not strictly forbidden as they are nowadays, Zaffar said.
The change in local traditions began with the increasing effect of West Asian mannerisms that were assimilated into Kashmiri culture. Another important influence from the last three decades was the spread of Islamic revivalist movements in Kashmir, which resort to a puritanical understanding of Islam. For the revivalists, visiting shrines and paying homage to the Sufi is seen as an “innovation” in Islam and hence forbidden.
A woman holds her book of Sufi hymns during wanwun at an urs event. Photo: Sehar Abdullah.
As a result, increasingly fewer people visit the shrines, and those who do adapt to gendered mannerisms.
However, there still exist some shrines in rural areas that remain outside the gaze of the moral police, such as the shrines of Sufi Wahab Khar and Samad Mir, where women continue to go inside the premises. Even within the Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya shrine complex, there are the graves of a Mughal ruler, mystic disciples and others that remain open to be touched, put roses on and prayed upon by women.
The tradition of strict gender segregation has mostly been adapted for the graves of Nizamuddin Auliya and Amir Khusrau; other mystics’ graves remain outside its domain. The inconsistency in policing points out that there is more to it than meets the eye.
Unlike the popular understanding of Islamic traditions as being mostly rooted in dogmatism, in reality they are not averse to change. As anthropologist Talal Asad points out, traditions in Islam are not unchanging, dogmatic or unquestionable; rather, they are dynamic, changing and open to question.
Rather, what needs to be checked is whether the changes align with Quranic ideas and the wider Islamic corpus. If women were given a fair chance to examine these changes, we may probably have had different traditions.
The fact that Kashmiri women were historically allowed to enter shrines, even if such a thing is unimaginable to us now, points out that such events can and do happen within Islamic culture.
The debate over women’s entry inside the shrine is not a dead end. Nor is the custom a part of unchanging tradition. If women in Kashmir can sing wanwun and occupy these shared communal spaces, can we not go back and check if such tools were lent to women in Delhi as well? Maybe the answers have the potential to steer a tradition of inclusivity in faith and worship.
Sehar Abdullah is a freelance writer and researcher from Kashmir.
