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

8
THE MENDICANT SAINTS
Till now the discourse has been chiefly about the saints belonging to
the main silsilas and attached to particular khānqāhs. Some of
them, like Baba Farid, Nizamuddin Awliya and Shah Madar were
throughout their life bound to one place, like veritable muqīmān.
Others spent many years travelling, like Data Ganjbakhsh, Khwaja
Mu’inuddin Sijzi or Shah Jalal and only in their declining years did
they become ‘settled’. The posthumous fame of the awliyā of both the
categories and the cult of their tombs are closely connected with
the places where they led the life of a hermit or preached in their
lifetime, hence the abundance of local legends and toponymy, coming
into being around one or another mazār or dargāh and in the
aggregate making up a peculiar ‘sacred’ geography of the subcontinent.
However, in South Asia there were quite a lot of saints
and mystics who did not belong to any ţarīqa, and who spent their
entire life on the journey. The most common name for them was the
word qalandar (literally ‘a rough unshaped block or log’). 1
The term qalandar was historically applied to various categories
of mystics. Up to the fourteenth century it was synonymous with the
concept of dervish and denoted a wandering mystic-ascetic, who did
not have personal property or a definite place of residence. In early
mystic poetry qalandar is a wanderer who has renounced everything
temporal and is absorbed only in love for God. The Persian Sufis of
the eleventh century, Abu Sa‘id Maihani, ‘Abdullah Ansari and Baba
Tahir ‘Uryan, called themselves qalandars in precisely this sense. The
last-mentioned said:
I am mystic gypsy called Qalandar;
I have neither fire, home, nor monastery.
By day I wander about the world, and at night
I sleep with a brick under my head.
(Rizvi 1986: 301)
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