Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Cities

Delhi

Also Known As New Delhi Alias rather than a new entry: New Delhi is the planned capital district within Delhi, which the atlas already holds as City 40.
India

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Delhi was the seat of Muslim rule in northern India from the Delhi Sultanate through the Mughal empire, and its Qutb complex, Jama Masjid and imperial tombs record that history in stone. The dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya, the Chishti master who died in 1325, remains a working shrine where qawwali is sung, and the tradition of Amir Khusrau is attached to it. The city also holds major Sikh gurdwaras, including Sis Ganj marking the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675, and the Bahai House of Worship known as the Lotus Temple.

Facts
Attributions
Tradition
Islam, at the Jama Masjid and at the Chishti dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya; Hinduism; Sikhism, at the gurdwaras marking the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur; and Jain and Christian communities 2
Origins
Founded
A succession of cities on the Yamuna, from the Tomara and Chauhan foundations through the sultanate capitals to Shahjahanabad, built by Shah Jahan from 1639 1
Site
Pilgrimage
Major pilgrimage destination today 2
Traditions
Sacred and Liturgical Languages
Persian and Arabic in the sultanate and Mughal religious literature, Urdu in the devotional poetry of the city, Sanskrit and Hindi in Hindu worship, and Punjabi in the gurdwaras 3
Learn More
Nizamuddin's Hospice and the Singers at the Shrine

Nizamuddin Auliya settled outside the walls of the sultan's Delhi and kept his distance from it for fifty years. His hospice ran a kitchen that fed whoever came, took no grants from the court, and made a point of accepting gifts only from those with no expectation attached. The Chishti order he led held that a master should not visit rulers, and the stories that gathered around him turn on that refusal; the most quoted, when a sultan was marching back to punish him, has him answer that Delhi is still far off, which it proved to be.

His closest companion was Amir Khusrau, a poet at several courts who wrote in Persian and in the emerging speech of the region, and whose name is attached in tradition to forms of devotional singing and to particular instruments. He is buried a few steps from his master, at the master's own instruction.

The shrine has therefore carried a musical tradition as well as a devotional one for seven hundred years. Hereditary families of qawwals perform at the tomb on Thursday evenings and at the annual urs, and the repertoire mixes Persian, Braj and Urdu texts. The dargah draws Muslims and Hindus alike, and the practice of visiting saints' tombs that it embodies is precisely what reformist movements within Islam reject, so the shrine sits at the centre of an argument as well as at the centre of a devotion. Access to the inner chamber remains closed to women, a restriction that has been contested in Indian courts in relation to other shrines.

Sultans, Gurus and a Lotus in Concrete

The Qutb complex holds the first congregational mosque built in northern India, begun in 1192 and raised with columns and carved stone taken from demolished temples, a fact its own foundation inscription states. In its courtyard stands a fourth or fifth century iron pillar, moved there from elsewhere, whose resistance to rust has been studied by metallurgists and whose Sanskrit inscription records the raising of a standard of Vishnu. The Jama Masjid, built under Shah Jahan in the 1650s, is the great mosque of Mughal Delhi and keeps a collection of relics attributed to the Prophet.

Sikh Delhi is written into the same streets. Gurdwara Sis Ganj in Chandni Chowk marks the place where Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed in 1675 after refusing to convert, having taken up the cause of Kashmiri Brahmins threatened with forced conversion, which is why Sikh tradition remembers him as a martyr for another community's freedom of religion. Rakab Ganj marks where his body was cremated, and Bangla Sahib stands where the eighth guru stayed during a smallpox epidemic and where water from its tank is taken as medicine.

The city has also been the site of communal killing within living memory. After the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, several thousand Sikhs were murdered in Delhi over three days, and the commissions of inquiry into it ran for two decades. At the southern edge of the city the Bahai House of Worship, opened in 1986 and shaped as an opening lotus, holds no images and no sermons and is open to anyone who wishes to pray in it.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Delhi directly: "at Buddhagaya, Sarnath, Lumbini, New Delhi, Bhubaneswar, Nowgarh and Lucknow offering pilgrim services alongside charitable and educational welfare activities, and its continued publication of The..."

Source About MBSI (Maha Bodhi Society of India, Own Website)Maha Bodhi Society of India

This source names Delhi directly: "at the kotwali near Chandni Chowk in Delhi, seventy one years after Guru Arjan installed the Adi Granth at Harmandir Sahib in 1604, already recorded here."

This source names Delhi directly: "Published 1981 in New Delhi by Today and Tomorrow's Printers & Publishers, 433 pages, under the general editorship of Acharya Tulsi, the ninth Acharya of the Svetambara Terapanth sect, and his..."

Source Ayaro = Acaranga Sutra (Internet Archive)Internet Archive (digitized catalogue record)

This source names Delhi directly: "& Publishers as publisher, New Delhi as the place of publication, 1981 as the year, and 433 pages, and states the volume was "published under the auspices of Jaina Vishva Bharati, Ladnun-341306..."

Source Ayaro = Acaranga Sutra (Internet Archive)Internet Archive (digitized catalogue record)

This source names Delhi directly: "arrested on 4 December 2013 near the Delhi-Haryana border after evading capture for months."

This source names Delhi directly: "Details the Anjuman's Delhi High Court challenge asserting offerings are voluntary gifts to Khadims, not institutional income."

The dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi is a principal shrine of the Chishti order.

This source names Delhi directly: "CE held by the National Museum, New Delhi, citing the museum's own website and Roshen Dalal's published reference "Hinduism: An Alphabetical Guide" (Penguin, 2014, p.412) for its identification of..."

This source names Delhi directly: "executed Guru Tegh Bahadur in Delhi in 1675, both already recorded here, the young Sikh community's relationship to worldly power changed at its own center."

This source names Delhi directly: "News reporting on the Delhi High Court dismissing the Islamic Research Foundation's legal challenge to the government ban, documenting the court record independent of the government's own..."

This source names Delhi directly: "defeated the last Hindu ruler of Delhi and Qutb al Din Aibak founded the Delhi Sultanate in 1206."

Source Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and BeyondCarl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence

This source names Delhi directly: "reviewed and confirmed the ban, the Delhi High Court dismissed the foundation's legal challenge to it, and the ban was extended for a further five years from November 2021, remaining in force..."

This source names Delhi directly: "forty-sixth session, held in New Delhi, India, from 21 to 31 July 2024, as a transnational serial property spanning Bethlehem in the United States, Herrnhut in Germany and Gracehill in the United..."

This source names Delhi directly: "He was arrested on 4 December 2013 near the Delhi-Haryana border after evading capture, and was later released on interim bail in 2015 to visit his ailing mother."

This source names Delhi directly: "The Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, custodian of Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib at Chandni Chowk where Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed, publishes this account of his 11 November 1675 martyrdom..."

This source names Delhi directly: "1675 martyrdom at Chandni Chowk in Delhi, naming Gurdwara Sis Ganj as the site historians mark for the execution."

This source names Delhi directly: "CE, held by the National Museum, New Delhi, accession 50.178."

This source names Delhi directly: "held by the National Museum, New Delhi, accession 50.178, describing the god standing with a lotus in each hand on a seven horse chariot driven by Aruna, flanked by the attendants Danda and Pingala..."

This source names Delhi directly: "against Sikh communities across Delhi and other Indian cities that broke out on 31 October 1984, immediately after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards in..."

This source names Delhi directly: "Agra, Beas, Tarn Taran, Hoshiarpur and Delhi."

This source names Delhi directly: "the Radha Soami Satsang Beas centre in Delhi, an independent news outlet's direct account carrying no individual byline in this record."

This source names Delhi directly: "in its forty-sixth session in New Delhi, India, inscribed the Moravian Church Settlements on the World Heritage List as a transnational serial property."

This source names Delhi directly: "in 1968, with the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, becoming the United Society Partners in the Gospel that still operates today."

Source Our History (USPG)

Contained In

India, Countries
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
3. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
John Bowker (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1997View the Source
Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond
Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002View the Source
Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context and Meaning in Qawwali
Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, Cambridge University Press, 1986View the Source
J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3)
J. S. Grewal, Cambridge University Press, 1998View the Source
Report of the Justice G. T. Nanavati Commission of Inquiry (1984 anti-Sikh riots)
Justice G. T. Nanavati, Government of India, 2005
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