Deities
Syed Muhammad al-Hussaini
Gesudaraz — The Long-Tressed Saint of the Deccan
Gesudaraz — The Long-Tressed Saint of the Deccan
No primary scriptures are catalogued for this entry yet. If you know of scriptural references we have missed, please contribute them.
Bandā Nawāz Gesūdarāz (1321–1422) was a Chishtī shaykh of the Suhrawardī/Chishtī milieu of north India who travelled to the Deccan and settled at Gulbarga, where his dargah remains one of the most visited shrines in the Deccan and one of the few outside the subcontinent's conventional Sufi geography. He is remembered as Gesūdarāz — "the long-haired one" — and as the teacher whose arrival made the Chishtī order a permanent institution in the Bahmani kingdom.
The biography that comes down to us is a tadhkira biography and should be labelled as one. He was born at Delhi; he was initiated there; he travelled in the company of his brothers, and he is said to have been directed south — to Daulatābād (Devagiri) and then to Gulbarga. The dates and the royal patronage in this story do not fit together. If he died in 1422, he cannot have been invited by Ahmad Shāh Walī, whose Bahmani reign is dated later in the century and who is nonetheless the sultan to whom the building of the Gulbarga dargah is attributed. The discrepancy is a known problem in the Bandā Nawāz literature and it has not been resolved for this entry; the safest account is that the saint's arrival at Gulbarga and the dargah's construction are both traditional, with their details and their chronology in dispute. The dargah itself, a square plan with a large central arch and corner turrets, is a standing building and should be described from itself rather than from the hagiography.
The second reason Banda Nawaz matters is linguistic. He wrote in Dakhni/Deccani Arabic and Persian, in verse and prose, and he is often called the father of Urdu poetry in the Deccan. That title is a later literary honour and is contested: Urdu as a distinct literary language is a category formed later than his century, and the label should be used as tradition rather than as philological fact. His Urdu ghazals and qasīdas are nonetheless canonical in the Deccani repertoire and are sung at the shrine. His urs is kept in the month of Dhūʾ al-Qaʿḍa, and the shrine's langar continues its feeding of the poor in his name — the same Chishtī institution that Gandhī chose as a model, for reasons recorded at length in the Gandhi literature.
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