A week of inayat

A week of inayat
Renuka Narayanan

It’s been raining Sufis this week and I'm in such a tizzy with all the good thoughts that have come to me from every side, that they can't help spilling into Faithline. First of all, thanks to Express reader Mrs Vimal Balasubrahmanyam of Hyderabad, who wrote a lovely letter, telling me about the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan. As recommended by her, I've bought and carefully started reading Dr Elizabeth Keesing's book on this musical and spiritual guru (born in Baroda, 1882, died in Delhi, 1927), who lived in the west for some years and whose dargah is located near the tomb of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. The books suddenly appeared in new stock at my regular bookstore, literally two days after Mrs Balasubrahmanyam's letter!

Next, a great big thank you to Sardar Khushwant Singh who generously told me interesting stories and verses, besides lending me a fantastic book on the Sufis of the Punjab by L. Rama Krishna. Then, after hunting vainly in shops in my locality, I suddenly found a qawwali tape with the very songs of Amir Khusro that I'd been longing to hear for months (òf40óMan kunto maula and òf40óChhap tilak sab chheeni re). So it's been a week full of inayat, of a Benevolent Gaze upon me.

In particular, the kafis of Bullhe Shah (1680-1758), the greatest of the Punjabi mystics, rang a whole carillon in my head with their Vaishnava resonances. Their spiritual force reminded me irresistibly of the few early ninth century Tamil paasurams that I know (he wrote thousands), by Nammalwar (Our Alwar), who is revered as the very soul of the Vaishnava Alwar tradition. Around 2,000 miles away and eight centuries later, Bullhe Shah was born into a Sayyid family at Village Pandoki, Kasur, in the district of Lahore. (Kasur is also the hometown of the late Bade Ghulam Ali Khan.) This was in the 21st year of Aurangzeb's reign. The Sayyids of Kasur were highly orthodox and absolutely livid when Bullha became a Sufi, a disciple of the Arain (market-gardener), Inayat Shah Kadiri. The Kadiri Sufis of the Punjab were famous for their philosophical studies (like the Jesuits are known for their learning). Indeed, it was the Kadiris who influenced Prince Dara Shikoh.

They were greatly influenced by Hindu philosophy and I learned from L. Rama Krishna's book that in his òf40óDastur-e-Amal, Inayat Shah described various spiritual stages of Hindu thought and posited that these were carried west by Alexander's Greeks, subsequently influencing Islamic mystics. The link that delighted me the most was that Inayat Shah Kadiri was a spiritual descendant of Muhammed Ghaus of Gwalior, the murshid of none other than Mian Tansen.

With such a sonorous parampara, Bullhe Shah's verse, inevitably, was spiritually exalted. Though he described himself as Heer pining for Ranjha (God), he did not borrow the Persian convention of needing to love a young man in order to describe God's ``physical'' beauty. (This upsets me sometimes about orthodox beliefs, Hindu or Semitic. Amongst Sufis, it really puts me off Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, though I know he's a hot `success' in the US. Not that I'm homophobic, but because Rumi trashes the womb repeatedly as a place of filth. The womb -- expected to produce sons -- gets no respect as a female space. That diminishes Rumi for me, just as it is boring to eternally hear of Devi's pectorals in Hindu verse.)

In exalted contrast, Bullhe Shah saw the Beloved as an all-pervading Universal Soul and was quite unable to describe God in terms of cheeks, eyes, breasts, thighs -- an assembly of spare parts from the male fantasy. But judge his verse for yourself from this snippet: òf40óMasjid dhainda, mandir dhainda, dhainda jo kuch dhaanvin; Ik kise da dil na dhaavin, Rab dilaan vichch rehnda. Break the mosque and break the temple, break whatever can be broken; but don't break someone's heart, for God lives there.