Hagiographic Encounters

Let me begin with a personal anecdote. Approaching a small town called Sohagpur some forty kilometres from Hoshangabad (MP), I chanced to see a wayside shrine to Jogi Ajaypal, whom one associates more with central Rajasthan. Looking for antiquities on the fields there, I chanced across a mazar under a large banyan tree dedicated to none other than Hazarat Mohinuddin Chishti of Ajmer. It turned out that it was built by a local Muslim devotee when he became too old to attend the annual urs of the saint. He had brought a brick from the original shrine and built this dargah around it. That explained the presence of the shrine to Ajaypal a few kilometres away as the two saints had intimately connected, competitive and complementary hagiographic lives. This complexity is further evidenced by the letters of the 17th century ‘Zinda Pir’ Emperor Aurangzeb to the Jogis of Jakhbar (Mughals and the Jogis of Jakhbar published by BS Goswamy and JS Grewal), which demonstrate deep reverence and concern for the welfare of the Jogi and requests for high quality purified mercury, no doubt for use in some alchemic process. It is this complex relationship between the Sufis and the Jogis that the late Professor Simon Digby explores through the lens of Islamic hagiographies in the volume under review published posthumously in 2025.