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

THE MENDICANT SAINTS
During his lifetime Lal Shahbaz Qalandar had quite a shady reputation:
Barani mentions how once he presented himself at the court of
the governor of Multan intoxicated with hashish and surrounded by
bē-shar‘ dervishes, who committed such outrages that they were
unceremoniously thrown out.
In the legends of popular Islam, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar is depicted
as an infernal dancer, in flowing scarlet clothes dancing on burning
coals, surrounded by tongues of flame. I have already mentioned that
the dargāh in Sehwan came into being at the place of a Shivaist
sanctuary. In such instances, as the example of Bahraich shows, some
functions and attributes of pre-Islamic objects of worship were
imparted to the Muslim saints. It is likely that Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s
macabre dance (raqs¸) was a replica of Shiva’s cosmic dance tāņd’ava.
It is possible that the cult image of the wandering ascetic took shape
under the influence of Shiva Nāţarāja, the many-handed sovereign of
dance, dancing in a fiery circle.
There are verses and hymns in Persian ascribed to Lal Shahbaz
Qalandar. The key image of his poetry is the dance of death, the
convulsions of a person hanged on the gallows (dār) who is a martyr
of Divine love. This image is borrowed from the Sindhi folk poetry of
the genre h˝allājiya, which came into being under the influence
of Mansur Hallaj’s visit to Sindh in the year 905. The dervishes,
nowadays performing ritual dances, or dhammal, in the Sehwan
dargāh, by the convulsive jerks of their bodies and typical quick
movements of their feet, as if they are hardly touching the ground,
reproduce both the writhing of the hanged and the gait of those
walking on fire.
In general, a visit to Sehwan makes a most powerful impression on
a foreigner: inside the dargāh reigns a particularly tense, even
hysterical, atmosphere, which is added to by saturated with the
suffocating odour of bhāñg (Indian hemp). The tomb itself, built in
1357 by Firoz Shah Tughluq, is of little interest as far as its architecture
is concerned. Apart from that it is difficult to have a close
look at it, hidden as it is behind compact rows of stalls and annexes.
It was continually in the process of being completed and today it
represents a tangled labyrinth of inner courtyards, passages and
galleries. One can reach the central courtyard, where the dhammal
dance is performed, only through the ‘new’ southern gate, built by
Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto. However, going back through it is for some
reason not possible. One has to make a fairly long detour, cross the
main courtyard and a connected series of small courtyards and pass
through large gilded doors, donated by the last Shah of Iran.
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