Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  Or not?

  In Sufi poetry, merging with god is described as merging with one’s beloved. And that beloved is always coded as male. One reason for this coding is that much Sufi poetry in India was written in Persian (scholars suggest more Persian poetry was written in India than in Persia), and since Persian is a non-gendered language, the addressee is universally assumed, in a sexist manner, to be male. But far beyond this conventional privilege accorded to masculinity in which both god and devotee are grammatically deemed to be male, Sufi poetry often names its addressee by name as a man. Which is to say that Sufi poetry often names itself as homoerotic. The only matter of debate is whether the beloved thus named is considered to be a vessel of godliness or a vector of carnal desire. Or both.

  Consider, for instance, that the 13th-century poet Amir Khusro, still considered by many to be the finest poet India has produced, describes himself repeatedly as the bride of his spiritual guide Nizamuddin Auliya. In one of his most famous qawwalis—‘Chhaap tilak sab chheeni re mose nainaa milaaike’—he says that Nizamuddin seduced him with a single look. In his book Muslim Shrines in India, Christian Troll quotes another popular Sufi poem that describes this seductive aspect of the courtship between the pir and murid, teacher and pupil: ‘I asked what is heaven, he said a glimpse of me / I asked what is contentment, he said a favour from me / I asked what is anguish, he said a yearning for me.’

  Thus it was not only the grammatical vagaries of the Persian language that produced Indian Sufism’s passionate homoeroticism. But just as one does not know for certain who Kamali is, so too is there no way to tell whether this passionate poetry was heavenly or worldly. At the very least, one presumes it must have been both. When it was written in Punjabi too, for instance by Bulleh Shah in the 18th century, the beloved was presented not only as male, but also as an erotic partner. ‘Now Inayat will come to me on the bed in the morning,’ says Bulleh Shah of his pir, Shah Inayat Qadiri; ‘The bangles on my arms, the plait on my head and the bracelet on my wrist all look good. I am dyed with the delight of union with my beloved, and my whole being is filled with joy.’ Legend has it that once, when Bulleh Shah fell out of favour with Shah Inayat, he taught himself how to dance and danced his way back into favour: ‘Bullah, let us go and sit at the gate of Shah Inayat, who / made me dress in green and red. When I started / dancing, I found my way to him.’ This repeated insistence on being the bride of the pir, of dressing in red and green, with bangles on the wrist and flowers in the hair, all suggest an erotic union. Some people will argue that these verses are an expression of ‘real’ homoerotic desire, while others will insist that they are metaphorical renditions of one’s desire for god. But whether or not Khusro and Nizamuddin chose to consummate their relationship or Jamali and Kamali really were lovers matters far less than the fact that the couples were buried together in death after declaring their love for one another in life. How this love allows us to think about desire is the real legacy of the dargahs.

  Given its Sufi provenance, this male-male love resulting in a shared burial site is attached to other tales that populate the faith. One Sufi tale claims that the mark of a real pir is that he can read the namaz prayers at his own funeral. This is what it means to possess the secret of the annihilation of the self—the raaz-i-fana: to still be present when the self is no longer there. Or absent while the self is still ostensibly present. This annihilation of the self is central to the tenets of Sufism in India. Qazi Hamiduddin, beloved of both the Chishti and Suhrawardi sects of Sufism (Jamali was a Suhrawardi), insisted that although the Lover and the Beloved seem different, they are in fact identical. The annihilation of the self is commonly understood in Sufism as a merging of the self with god, an immolation in the fires of devotional passion. The language with which Sufi poetry describes this process of annihilation—fana—is utterly erotic. But even more important is the power of this eroticism to destroy the self. In other words, what is erotic about Sufi desire is its power to eradicate that which is experiencing desire. The desire embedded in the dargah is fatal because fatality is what makes it erotic. But this fatality is not, or not only, literal.

  Let us turn to Bulleh Shah, again speaking about his beloved Shah Inayat: ‘He was Heer and then became Ranjha. Very rare are the / people who realize this. Once they do, all disputes / are resolved.’ Bulleh Shah casts his poetry in the mode of popular romance—the story of Heer and Ranjha was for centuries the best-selling subcontinental version of Romeo and Juliet. The passionate love between members of different social classes is prevented by difficult parents and ends with the death of the two lovers. But Bulleh Shah also describes this passionate love as bringing to an end the reign of opposites. Heer and Ranjha are no longer two different entities but versions of the same phenomenon of desire, both of which are embodied by Shah Inayat. Realizing that the lover is both everything—Heer and Ranjha—and nothing—neither Heer nor Ranjha—adheres to a Sufi understanding in which erotic love is indistinguishable from religious love, in which disputes, or oppositions, are destroyed. At other times Bulleh Shah narrates himself as Sohni—the heroine of another popular love legend that bears an uncanny resemblance to the story of Hero and Leander, except that in the Punjabi story, as opposed to the Greek myth, it is Sohni, the woman, who swims every night across the river Chenab to meet her beloved Mahiwal. Sohni dies when her sister-in-law replaces the earthern pot she would carry to stay afloat in the water with one made of unbaked clay that quickly dissolves in the river. For Bulleh Shah, the insistence on death in love is simultaneously an instance of the dissolution of the self.

  In their passion, the lovers move fluidly between states, between being Heer and Ranjha, Sohni and Mahiwal. He who was once Heer (the female protagonist) could then become Ranjha (the male protagonist), and vice versa. Even more, this ability to move between being Heer and being Ranjha allows us to resolve all disputes. ‘Get rid of duality,’ Bulleh Shah says later, ‘there is no confusion. He is both Turk / and Hindu, there is no one else.’ While the surface of the debate rests on whether the ‘He’ here is the mortal male pir or the immortal male god, the rigour lies in the idea that male homoeroticism for the Sufis seems to depend on an absence of boundaries. Or a recasting of boundaries so that they are no longer bounded.

  Not only is Bulleh Shah here blurring the difference between Sufi pir and god, between male-female and male-male romance, he is also pushing against the difference of faith between the two major religions of India. ‘I am not a Hindu, nor a Muslim. I have forsaken pride / and become unsullied. / I am not a Sunni, nor a Shia. I have adopted the path of / peace toward all. / I am not hungry, nor am I full. I am not / naked, nor am I covered... / Bulleh Shah, the mind that is fixed on God leaves behind / the duality of Hindu and Turk.’ One of the ways to describe what Bulleh Shah is doing here is to say that he is asking us not to get attached to differences of religion, gender and species. We might be different from one another but those differences are not primary. For him, we are not Hindus or Muslims, men or women, but ecstatic devotees all. Some might think of this position as disingenuous. After all, Bulleh Shah’s beloved is Shah Inayat—whom he variously addresses as spouse, husband, lord, friend and beloved—rather than, say, a woman. But the Sufi response to such an objection would be to say that what is being undermined is not gender, religion or species, but rather the fixity that we attach to them. Shah Inayat can be both Heer and Ranjha, female and male—and it is this lack of a fixed self that attracts Bulleh Shah to his pir.

  Such a vertiginous lack of fixity has become visually the most recognizable form of Sufism—the whirling dervishes whose bodies dissolve in a swirling dance. The meditative dancing practice of the dervishes is said by some to have been invented by the famous Turkish Sufi saint Jalaluddin Rumi in concert with his male companion, Shams Tabrizi. Both Sufis of Persian descent, Rumi and Shams, or so the story goes, retreated into a cave for forty days during which Shams taught Rumi the meaning of true knowledge. Rumi’s students are rumoure
d to have murdered Shams out of jealousy over the fact that Rumi spent all his time in isolated retreat with him. The passion between Rumi and Shams, and the intertwining to which this desire gave rise, are all contained in the self-annihilating whirling of the dervishes.

  Such a dancing desire uproots not only Sufis, but also their tombs. Bulleh Shah’s dargah, for instance, moves as though in search of his pir (Shah Inayat is buried in Lahore). I was surprised to discover a sign pointing to ‘Bulleh Shah ji ki dargah’ on the way from Mussoorie, in Uttarakhand, to Chandigarh. When I asked my taxi driver about this sign, expressing surprise that it existed at all given that Bulleh Shah’s dargah is in Kasur in Pakistan, the driver, taking pity on what he obviously saw as my ignorance, said that Bulleh Shah’s dargah can be materialized anywhere because he is so widely beloved. He went on to add that there are many ‘Bulleh Shah dargahs’ all over North India. I have not been able to locate any of these other dargahs, but the one near Mussoorie exists, and even hosts an annual urs or anniversary of the saint; the dargah is referred to as a ‘symbolic tomb’ of Bulleh Shah. This idea of a travelling tomb is entirely in keeping with the Sufi love of mobile desire. In the case of Bulleh Shah’s tomb, such movement flouts even the British-drawn boundaries between India and Pakistan.

  As much of this history makes clear, for the Sufis in their dargahs, there is no boundary to desire since desire transgresses geography, gender, religion, culture, language, and the earthly realm itself. But arguably the two most distinctive barriers that the Sufi poets crossed were those of gender and religion—the 17th-century Jewish-born Sufi fakir Sarmad Shahid and his student Abhai Chand are an example of such incessant crossings. Another male couple from Lahore—Shah Hussain and his disciple Madho Lal—were so deeply in love that Shah Hussain changed his name to Madho Lal Hussain. In addition to being a same-sex couple, Shah Hussain and Madho Lal were also a cross-caste and cross-religious and cross-generational couple: Shah Husain was a lower-caste convert to Islam while Madho Lal, some four decades younger, was a Hindu Brahmin. They are buried side by side in their dargah despite these differences, a feat that would not always be possible today. As though paying tribute to this rich history of desire and transgression, thousands still gather at the dargah every year for Madho Lal’s urs.

  Like Bulleh Shah, Madho Lal Hussain too played extensively with the romance legend of Heer and Ranjha—‘Ranjha is a Yogi and I his Yogini, what has he done unto me?’ he sang. The story of Heer and Ranjha—made five times into films before Partition in 1947, and then several times after that in both Pakistan and India—is a source of endless fascination in the subcontinent. The masala of its tale not only tracks the difficulty of love, but also emphasizes that the lovers die for each other, and are then buried together. Being buried together thus has a popular history of signifying love’s intensity. Since they are not Sufi saints, Heer and Ranjha’s historical burial place has not become a dargah, but their grave in Jhang in Pakistan Punjab is nonetheless visited frequently (like Juliet’s alleged ‘balcony’ in Verona) by hopeful lovers.

  Playing Heer and Ranjha involves both a gendered and religious transformation for Shah Hussain and Madho Lal, and in traducing these boundaries, Madho Lal Hussain’s poetry develops the best practices of both Hindu and Muslim art. Historically, all-women theatrical performances, called stree preksha, regularly presented women playing both men and women. The 4th-century Harivamsha Purana contains a detailed description of women playing scenes from Krishna’s life. Legends of Krishna and Radha include tales of Krishna dressing up in women’s clothes, while several grammatical and theatrical texts, including the Natyashastra (2nd-century BCE—2nd-century CE) describe men dressing as women, and women playing men. In the 19th century, Ramakrishna Paramahansa was only one among many saints who dressed as women in their devotions to various gods—Ramakrishna dressed as a gopi when he worshipped Krishna, and describes Sita merging into his body when he worships Rama; he also goes through a period of being a mother to the child Rama. So when Shah Hussain writes, ‘If I play thus with the Beloved, I am ever a happy woman,’ he speaks a language that has and continues to have a recognizable vocabulary and syntax in India. This language of desire is syncretic, crosses borders and speaks even from beyond the grave.

  ‘Dargah desire’ thus testifies to the lack of boundaries in desire rather than instating new borders around it—this is why locking up a dargah makes no sense at all. Heer and Ranjha are synonymous with Bulleh Shah and Shah Inayat, Shah Hussain and Madho Lal, Shams Tabrizi and Rumi. In one of Bulleh Shah’s kafis, even the god Krishna and the human Ranjha are described in identical terms: as cowherds who pursue their passion. Both Bulleh Shah and Madho Lal Hussain perfect a poetic oeuvre that allows all to be equal, and equally, in the grip of desire. What is fascinating about this history of desire is that it actively demands not to be identified with just one thing or person. Indeed, the only thing about which we can be sure with dargah desire is that we do not know whose desire it is, and for whom. Two men are buried together, and their songs speak of intense same-sex love. But equally they speak of an intense longing for god. Rather than adjudicating between these possibilities, the dargahs present us with both options. There is no pressure to pick one over the other. Far from being seen as antithetical, religion and sexuality sing the same song of desire.

  In early Europe, intense religious experiences called forth the same language of eroticism. From Margery Kempe’s writings in medieval England to Bernini’s 17th-century statue of St. Teresa (‘Ecstasy of St. Teresa’) in Baroque Italy, the nexus between erotic desire and religion was expressed in painting, poetry and sculpture. But unlike in India, where there is no recorded history of persecution against people for their desires, Europe rapidly developed a discourse around sodomy and non-normative desire that resulted in several violent deaths. Witches were burned at the stake and kings were skewered on red-hot spits. Laws were passed to prosecute ‘unnatural desires’ and religion and desire were quickly treated as distinct realms, the one sacred and the other profane. The difference between medieval Europe and non-European civilizations is that in the former the move from syncretism to demonization happened at a frightening pace and then continued apace. Same-sex desire, for instance, was hunted down and persecuted relentlessly. In stark contrast, and certainly up to the middle of the 19th century, if not beyond, India was dotted with the kinds of indeterminate desires to which the dargahs stand testimony.

  In a second stark but related difference from Europe, the lack of persecution in India also ensured that neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality emerged as separate categories. While Europe came up with a taxonomy of desires into which fixed identities were slotted, desire in India was somewhat less determined. Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra is certain only that it speaks of the man about town as its protagonist. To whom this man addresses his desires, and who else in this man’s world feel and act on their desires, are matters left marvellously fluid. The text, which for long has been considered the final word on matters of desire and sexuality, speaks of people of ‘the third nature’ to describe (what we now understand as) homosexuals, except that the Kamasutra uses this term to refer only to men who take on the passive position in oral sex. Such third-nature men share a conceptual term with men who produce only daughters. Men wanting to have oral sex with other men do not always belong to the third nature. And anal sex is described as a heterosexual pleasure. Our current insistence on attaching uncertain acts to certain identities would have been completely alien to Vatsyayana and the dargah dwellers alike. They suggested instead a movement in which assigning a single name to desire was an impossibility. The advantage of not having an assigned name, of course, is that there are no fixed parameters within which desire can be constrained, or benchmarks it can be accused of dishonouring. Today the public assertion of identity by sexual minorities is considered a victory, but it also signals the defeat of a history of desire that was resistant to, and flourished by not, being named. Not because i
t did not dare be named for fear of god or the law, but because it participated in too many pleasures to be able to count them all.

  Indeed, one of the meditative practices of the Sufis is to tell the 99 names of Allah in the full knowledge that such a list is not, and cannot be, exhaustive. What is astonishing about the imaginative horizons enabled by the architectural space of Sufi dargahs is that desire is divorced from sexual identity. Almost all the pirs were married and had children (with the notable exception of Nizamuddin Auliya, who thought that if he had children, they would mislead his disciples). But they almost all are buried with their male murids, or disciples. Many of them loved across religions and castes and languages. And not one of them thought of their desire as being contained in a category of its own.

  The history of desire as it emerged in the dargahs is not a history that can be written down or told with any certainty. It is not a history of identity that can define the characteristics of a class of people. It is, instead, a history of identification; one that allows desires to cross borders and get attached to the most unlikely persons and objects. The desire of the dargah travels through space, time and people and never claims for itself a status of its own by which it can be known.