Yasir Ali
Yasir Ali
Jul 30, 2017 · 6 min read

Revisiting Ghazi Mian – Fact and Fiction – Shahid Amin’s The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Mian

Every year, as the mangoes begin to ripen in May, Bahraich, a small city in the North East of Uttar Pradesh, abutting Nepal, comes alive with festivities at the shrine of Ghazi Mian. People travel from villages all across the Gangetic plain in noisy, boisterous parties, particularly in the Eastern Banaras-Gorakhpur belt, to come and celebrate his marriage and mourn his martyrdom.

According to local lore, sung by balladeers even today, and a seventeenth century hagiography, Ghazi Mian’s real name was Syed Salar Masud. He was born in 1014 AD in Ajmer to the sister of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, the infamous Turkish marauder who invaded and ravaged Northern India, including the great temple of Somnath, in the eleventh century. Salar Masud apparently grew into a ferocious warrior at an early age, but played only a minor role in Sultan Mahmud’s invasions of North Western India. He later recruited his own army and fought local wars before dying in 1034 AD in a battle, launched ostensibly to protect cows being rustled by a local ruler Raja Sohal Deo. His death did not come as a surprise though. It was pre-ordained – cursed by a Pir at the time of his birth, and confirmed by a Brahmin priest before his marriage – that he would die on the day of his marriage without consummating it. That Salar Masud still went ahead with his marriage and died the fated death is perhaps part of the charm of his great tragedy.

The memories of Ghazi Mian, also called Bale Mian, Bala Pir, Pir Bahlim or Gajan Dulha, are carved deeply in the semi-urban and rural landscape of the Gangetic Plain. His ballads are sung by Dafalis or balladeers, and supposed shrines and cenotaphs of Ghazi Mian and his close associates dot the small cities and towns of Uttar Pradesh such as Satrikh, Rudauli, Bara Banki, Amethi, etc. Even Meerut, my native city and to the western extreme of this vast province, claims to have the “real shrine” of Bale Miyan in the main Nauchandi mela ground.

Ghazi Mian’s medieval shrine in Bahraich is whimsical even by Sufic standards. It has the graves of “Panchpiriya”, or Five Pirs, consisting of Ghazi Mian and his closest followers, as can be expected. However, the other popular attractions at this site include graves of Zohra Bibi, a young woman who supposedly built the dome on Ghazi Mian’s shrine and served it for six years (but was also perhaps the woman he was to marry on the day he died, as per another story), a grey mare Lilli, and even a dog, Sakul, typically considered impure in traditional Islam.

The “name” Ghazi itself has hard Islamic connotations and traditionally signified a “religious fighter” in the cause of Islam. It may then come as a surprise that a wide swathe of Hindu and Muslim communities are counted among his followers. In fact, in the official UP census of 1911, 13.5 million people were counted as among the followers of Panchpiriyas, or Five Pirs, consisting of Ghazi Mian and his four closest followers. This number may have come down now due to the strenuous puritanical efforts of Elite or “Ashraf” Muslims and reformist Hindu pamphleteers from the late nineteenth century onwards; but the shrine of Ghazi Mian retains a strong attraction for the rural folks that seek a quick, earthly intercession to their material desires for it’s supposed powers or “barakat”. As Dafalis sing, with the “barakat” of Ghazi Mian, “the blind regain sight, the lepers are cured of their affliction, and infertile women get blessed with sons”.

So, Syed Salar Masud was a Ghazi, an Islamic religious warrior, but also a cow-protector, and thus loved by Ahirs or cow-herds, being almost their patron saint in some of these parts. He was clearly of foreign origin, but also developed a strange, special affinity towards the terrain of Awadh or Eastern UP, getting attached to such quotidian things like “paan”, jungles of Bahraich, and their ubiquitous Mahua tree. Masud’s mother called for a Brahmin priest, not a Qazi, to work out an auspicious date for her son’s marriage. The grave of this religious warrior was protected from desecration by a dog, whose dead body is now lined along with him in an honour that flouts all known Islamic traditions. Salar Masud’s grave itself is claimed to be in more than one place in today’s UP.

What does one make of these paradoxes and apparent contradictions?

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Shahid Amin’s new, wondrous book, Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Mian, explores these fantastic legends comprehensively without resorting to simplified, lazy allusions to either a “dreadfully dark medieval age” or even a “syncretic” one of bhai-bhai bonhomie between communities. Through an obsessive study of both historical sources (hagiographies, chronicles, British gazetteers, etc.) as well as local lore, some of which he collected directly in a field study in Bahraich and other small towns in Eastern UP and Bihar in mid 1990s, Amin presents a complex, nuanced picture of Hindu-Muslim relations, and how they changed during the medieval and modern periods.

Serious historians sometimes dismiss folklore as mere fantasies that have no bearing to what happened “really”. Amin, on the other hand, is interested in not just “what happened” – which in itself can be contested, particularly where contemporary evidence is scant – but also in how people and communities choose to remember their past. As the master Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote, “A myth, old or modern, is not a lie.”

When it comes to the historicity of Ghazi Mian himself, there is actually nothing in contemporary chronicles of Sultan Mahmud about this prodigious son of his sister who took the Eastern UP by storm in the early eleventh century. There is however ample evidence for old celebratory traditions at the shrine of Bahraich. They go back to at least late thirteenth century when the poet-historian Amir Khusrau referred to the “fragrant tomb of the martyred commander at Bahraich” spreading the “perfume of odorous wood” throughout Hindustan. His shrine was later visited and commented upon by the Moroccan traveller Ibn Batutta, patronised by Tughlaqs and it’s boisterous parties commented upon even by Abul Fazl, Akbar’s court historian and ideologue.

Amin shows that there are multiple versions of Ghazi Mian’s life and it’s various events. Sure, past is infinitely malleable that can be stretched to conform to our own desires and ideological inclinations. But his endeavour is not just to sift these different versions and proclaim one to be “truth”. Rather, he illustrates the social and psychological implications of these different stories, each of which could be true, illuminating us about our collective and inter-communal fantasies, fears and anxieties.

If the above description makes you wonder about the kind of “history” that deals with fiction as much as facts, make no mistake; Shahid Amin is no ordinary historian. And, this is no ordinary book. Amin is part of the remarkable set of sub-alternist historians who came up in the early 1980s, and were focused on “writing history from below”. A strong sense of place, communities, and modes of representation have always been central to the concerns of these historians.

A self-confessed “purabia”, a colloquial term for a local denizen from Eastern UP, Amin’s area of interest has remained in excavating the layers that veil the cobwebs of life in his place. He is unfortunately not very prolific. His only other major full length work is “Event, Metaphor, Memory”, a masterly deconstruction of the event of Chauri Chaura, whose only entry in Nationalist historiography is as a violent, peasant event that derailed the non-violent Non-Cooperation movement in 1922. Amin recast the Chauri Chaura event in new light, with evidence from court records, gazetteers, direct interviews and local memories, and presented the voice and consciousness of the rioters that was intertwined with the nationalist movement in it’s own unique ways.

I was completely blown away when I read that book around a decade back (the book itself was published in 1995), and did not think that it could be bested by any other book on Indian history in sheer inventiveness, readability and subversion of mainstream historiography. Amin’s book on Ghazi Mian has managed to do that quite well. You just cannot look at a medieval Ghazi in the same way after reading this book.