Shahdara Sharief

Where Rajouri's Hills hold a Shrine for Everyone

Subir Jamwal

harmeetjnu@gmail.com

Tucked into a hillock above Thanna Mandi in the Rajouri district, the shrine of Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah has drawn Hindu and Muslim pilgrims alike for the better part of two centuries, a living lesson in shared faith that the hills around it have rarely been allowed to forget.

The road to Shahdara Sharief climbs steadily once it leaves Rajouri town, switching back through pine and deodar as it gains height in the folds of the Pir Panjal. By the time it reaches the shrine, roughly 30 kilometres on and some 5,800 feet above sea level, the town below has disappeared behind a wall of green hills, and the visitor is left with little but the wind, the birdsong, and the white domes of the shrine itself. It is one of the most visited religious sites in the Jammu region, and on most days the small market that has grown up around its approach road is busier than the shrine's hillside setting would suggest a steady stream of buses and taxis from Jammu, some 155 kilometres away, depositing pilgrims who have come, in roughly equal measure, from Hindu and Muslim households.

A Saint, a Forest, and a Name

Local memory holds that before the saint who gives the shrine its name ever arrived, the spot was simply known as "Se Dra", roughly "lion's forest", a wooded tract on the shoulder of the mountain with little to distinguish it from the slopes around it. The man remembered today, Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah, is said to have travelled into these hills from the Sialkot side of the Punjab in the early years of the 19th century, sent north by his own spiritual teacher to find a quiet place to meditate. He is said to have ordered the forest cleared at the spot where the shrine now stands and to have dug himself a trench in the earth in which he would sit for long stretches of prayer, emerging only when his meditation was complete. Over time, Se Dra softened in local speech into Shahdara, and the saint's own name was folded permanently into the place.

Of the many stories that survive about him, one in particular still does the most work in explaining why the shrine looks and functions the way it does today. Devotees point to an orange tree growing in the shrine's courtyard that is said to bear fruit through every season of the year; pilgrims gather its leaves with the same reverence others might reserve for relics, convinced that whatever blessing settled on the saint settled on the tree beside him as well.

A Throne Foretold

The story most often told to visitors, however, concerns not a devotee but a soldier. In the early 19th century, according to the account still repeated at the shrine, a general in the service of Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab was sent into the Rajouri hills on a campaign that went badly: he lost the greater part of his force and was left, by the time he made camp near Thanna Mandi, with only a couple of dozen men. Hearing that a saint of some renown lived in the area, he went to seek his blessing. The saint, on seeing him, is remembered to have simply smiled. Asked why, he is said to have replied that he could see a throne waiting in the soldier's future.

The soldier was Gulab Singh, who would go on, within a generation, to become the first Dogra Maharaja of an independent Jammu and Kashmir. Once enthroned, he did not forget the hillside near Thanna Mandi: tradition credits him with constructing the shrine that now stands over the saint's grave, making a Hindu monarch the builder of one of the region's most important Muslim shrines. It is this story, more than any official slogan, that local caretakers point to when they describe Shahdara Sharief as a shrine that belongs to no single community, and it is a large part of why the saint himself came to be known, in the honorific that still precedes his name, as "Badshah," or king, even though he ruled nothing but a hillside and a handful of disciples.

A Shrine Built to Feed Strangers

Whatever the precise historical kernel inside these stories, the shrine that has grown up around them today is a substantial working institution rather than a quiet ruin. Its langar, the community kitchen that is a fixture of Sufi shrines across the subcontinent, runs continuously, feeding pilgrims regardless of their faith; dormitories on the site can accommodate close to a thousand visitors at a time, particularly useful during the rush of the annual Urs. A small economy of guesthouses, dhabas and shops has grown up along the final stretch of road, providing a livelihood for a sizeable number of local families, many of whom describe their work at or around the shrine as itself a form of service to it.

That sense of service has visibly intensified in the past two years. The Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board, under its chairperson Dr Darakhshan Andrabi, has made repeated visits to Shahdara Sharief to inaugurate upgrades: new guest houses, one named for the saint himself and another for Hazrat Fatima-tu-Zehra, a new dormitory and dining hall, fresh carpeting across the shrine's halls, and an automated roti-maker and utensil cleaner installed in the langar kitchen to cope with the volume of pilgrims it serves. Andrabi has also flagged, on her visits, the poor condition of the approach road as an urgent concern still awaiting a fix.

A Shrine, Not a Boundary

What makes Shahdara Sharief unusual is not that it is described as a symbol of communal harmony plenty of shrines across India carry that description loosely but how literally local people insist the description should be taken. Hindu and Muslim families are routinely seen arriving together, tying threads at the same railings, sharing the same langar, and lighting lamps within sight of each other without any apparent sense that they are observing two different religions rather than one shared custom. For a region whose hills have, at various points in the past four decades, seen real division and violence, the shrine's claim to be visited "irrespective of caste, creed or religion" is treated locally less as a piece of tourist-brochure language than as a literal description of a Saturday afternoon there.

The shrine's annual Urs, marking the saint's death anniversary, falls on the 10th of Muharram and remains the high point of its ritual calendar. Pilgrims arrive bearing offerings of rice, wheat flour and cash; devotional gatherings continue late into the night, and the resident imam leads special prayers, held at fixed times even outside the Urs season, that devotees describe as supplications offered not merely for the district or the region but, in the words repeated to visitors, for peace more broadly.

A Second, Older Shrine on the Same Hill

Few visitors realise that the wider Shahdara Sharief complex in fact holds two distinct shrines rather than one. A short distance from Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah's own resting place lies Ziarat Sadeeq, dedicated to a considerably earlier figure, Sain Sadeeq Sahib, remembered locally as having migrated to Rajouri generations before Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah's own arrival. According to the story told there, a village woman once refused, sarcastically, to fetch water for the saint's ablutions; offended, he struck his walking stick into the ground a short distance away, and water gushed out on the spot. The spring is said to be maintained to this day. Layered onto the same hillside, separated by what local tradition treats as centuries rather than decades, the two ziarats together make Shahdara less a single monument than an accumulated record of devotion to one stretch of mountain.

None of this would matter as a newspaper story if it were simply old folklore politely preserved. What keeps Shahdara Sharief current is that the pattern its stories describe, a Hindu king's debt to a Muslim saint, a kitchen that asks no one's religion before it feeds them, a yearly gathering that briefly dissolves the lines the rest of the calendar draws between Rajouri's communities, is still visibly being renewed: in fresh carpets laid this year, in guest houses inaugurated last summer, and in the unbroken stream of pilgrims still climbing the same hillside road, for reasons that have not changed very much in two hundred years.

(The author is Doctoral Fellow, Panjab University, Chandigarh)