The Marble Mosque and the Delhi Press: Jahanara Begum’s Ajmer Pilgrimage in Urdu Translation, 1643–1891

Abstract

In February 1891 Sayyid Mir Hasan, proprietor of the Razavi Press and of the Delhi newspaper Khair Khwah-i ‘Alam, printed an Urdu translation of Mu‘nis al-Arwah Jahanara Begum’s Persian life of Mu ‘in al-Din Chishti and sent copies to Ajmer to be presented as an offering at the saint’s tomb. This article reads that lithograph, rather than Jahanara’s Persian, as a source for the architectural history of the Ajmer dargah. It argues that the text records three successive acts of claiming ground and performs the third: a thirteenth-century saint takes possession of a site by refusing to move from it; a seventeenth-century princess takes possession of the same site by moving through it in a fixed sequence threshold, door, dome, grave, mosque and laying a cloth over the grave; and a nineteenth-century publisher takes possession of both by making that sequence portable. Jahanara’s appendix of Ramadan 1053 (1643), dated to the day and quoted here at length, is shown to be among the most detailed surviving accounts of movement through a Mughal-period shrine, and one that locates most devotional labour in the precinct’s open ground rather than its interior. The vernacular devotional lithograph is proposed as a neglected class of architectural document: the mechanism by which a shrine’s spatial protocol, and the emotions attached to it, were standardised and circulated to readers who had never seen it.

Keywords: Ajmer Dargah; Mu‘In Al-Din Chishti; Jahanara Begum; Mu‘Nis Al-Arwah; Chishtiyya; Pilgrimage and Ziyarat; Mughal Architecture; Sacred Space; Urdu Print Culture; Lithography; Colonial India.