Muslim Saints of South Asia: The eleventh to ... - blog blog blog

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THE INDIAN TOMB
Everyone who has had the good fortune of travelling through
India and Pakistan has been surprised by the abundance of saints’
tombs, which are powerful places of pilgrimage and objects of
popular devotion. It sometimes seems that certain regions of the
Indian subcontinent – Sind, Punjab, Gujarat, the Deccan – are
nothing less than extraordinary sacred necropolises, where someone’s
venerated tomb is located almost at each and every step of the way.
For example, on the hill of Makli near the town of Thatta in Pakistan,
according to popular belief, one hundred and twenty-five thousand
saints are buried! The eighteenth-century Sindhi historian Mir ‘Ali
Shir Qani, who has dedicated The Book of the Hillock Makli
(Maklīnāma, 1778) to this place, has written: ‘The dust of this hillock
is antimony for the eyes of those who have been endowed with
insight, and its earth is the seedbed for the grain of the concealed’
(Qani 1967: 11).
Another hillock, Shahpura in the Deccan, where many Sufi
mentors (shaikhs and sayyids) were buried in the fifteenth to
seventeenth centuries, is not unlike the hill of Makli in this respect.
Similarly, the towns of Punjab Multan and Ucch, where many
celebrated mystics have been laid to rest, have become ‘lands of
bliss’, as has the eastern part of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh
(in former times the territory of the principality of Awadh and
Rohilkhand); here as far back as the eleventh century those warriors
for faith who became saints in popular perception have found eternal
rest.
Muslims were, in the first instance, the social media where the cult
of the saints and their tombs developed. The Hindus, who adhere
to the practice of cremation and not burial, it seemed, did not have
any particular basis for veneration of the saints’ tombs. But in the
course of many centuries of intercourse and living together these two
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