People come frequently to take his advice and blessing at the base of the enormous banyan tree. People didn’t seem to have any inhibitions about airing their private problems in front of me and in front of other visitors. This aberration from everyday life fortifies the sense of sacredness of the dargah, where people check their vanity at the gate and purify themselves in the presence of a divine force.

While I sat with him, a group of four burqa-clad women and two small children asked him to cure a cold all the children had. The woman nearest to me greeted me, and in the conversation, I learned they came from a village 300 km away in Karnataka and are staying for eight days with their father who lives in Hyderabad. People come when they are sick, have family problems, or to replace worn protective charms with new ones.

For each person, after hearing what is wrong and sometimes thinking hard on it and giving them advice, whispers something and blows on their faces. He gives them taviz, akshars from the Quran (which he calls the Gita) folded and tied with yarn into necklaces. He then gives them nine papers with stamps on them, which he spends the whole day apparently cutting and which are meant to be put in water, which is then drunk. He also gives them charts that he says to rub on their face and body and then set on fire twice a day. Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu explore the discursive and misleading dichotomy of ritual and belief endemic in the canon of religious anthropology as well as Sufi studies.  They show that ritual and belief are necessarily connected, though it is not always clear how, arguing that when one separates “belief (in witchcraft, in spirits, in ancestors) from ritual action, and reconstructs it as disembodied and abstract . . . [it] transmutes the site [and] embodies ethics of ritual practice into ideology constructs” (Werbner and Pnina, 5). Ritual and belief are two sides of the same leaf at the Baba Mastan dargah.

In an activity lull at the dargah, Iftikar-ji started to tell what I would call a “miracle story.” In one, a girl had a tumor on her face and her parents wanted to take them to the hospital, but it was a risky procedure. They came to Iftikar-ji and he helped her: one night in her dream, she had the operation and the tumor was gone in the morning. He also helped her in the same way to get married when no one wanted her hand, and to conceive when she could not. I asked him for more such stories (kahaaniyan), to which he paused for a few moments and responded that they aren’t stories but true things (akhri khat).

Hindu women who came to the dargah did not wear veils or head-coverings. Joyce Fleuckiger explains that it can be difficult to tell if a man is Hindu rather than Muslim, “unless they hasve just attended a Hindu ritual and have the forehead marking.” The boy who came with two children had this mark, demonstrating he actively participates in both Hindi and Muslim spiritual frames. They give him money of different denominations. The boy with two children gives him 50 rupees, and he replies that it’s 50 per each, and the boy promises to pay on his next visit. Flueckiger explains that “spiritual healing characterizes vernacular religious traditions in India, creating a shared plane of experience and assumptions of spiritual powers that impact physical bodies across lines of educational, class, caste and religious differences. But each healing site is uniquely created by who “sits” in it and the means through which they claim authority to be there” (Flueckiger, 4).

The dargah inhabits a relevant social location to the people who visit it and an ambiguous cultural location outside of Islamic orthodoxy. What is the religious and cultural location of the Mastan Baba Dargah? Sufi dargahs in India inherit status directly from people who, for example, believe in their healing powers, rather than in the conventionally perceived paradigm of separate religious traditions and loyalties. Iftikar-ji said that many Muslims and Hindus come, though Sufis are more rare. “While seen as distinctly Muslim spaces, such shrines (and the pirs from whom they derive their importance) are viewed as repositories of power that transcend the boundaries of religious affiliation.”

Entrance to the Mastan Baba Dargah. The fading sign is written in English, Telugu (below), and Urdu (left), relfecting the influence of overlapping linguistic spheres in Hyderabad. The yellow and green flag in the distant center of the photo marks a Jaguar dealership adjacent to the dargah.

A blank and enduring six-foot cement wall nearly fully shrouds the grounds from street-view other than a fading but catching inscription announcing the “Dargah Mastan Baba,” but once inside several imposing structures greet you. Foremost is the nishaan (sign) of Huzur Pirnane Haussal Azam Dastagir, the pir (teacher) of the dargah’s namesake: a tremendous banyan tree painted white and some twenty feet in circumference. A broad cement platform circles the trunk and bears a traditional Islamic flag—green with gold Arabic script and gold border denoting the presence of sacredness. Somewhat set back, a tall and skeletal framework of wooden scaffolding arching over another raised cement platform draws your eye to the samadhi (holy grave) of the Baba Mastan and his wife, Kurabibi. Strings of roses and loose rose petals adorn the two oval fabric mounds of colored silks in the center. In the mornings, a pot holds ashes and burning incense. Nearby on the ground level are two more grave markers to two dedicated disciples of the Baba Mastan, Halif and Ismael. All of these figures were dedicated Sufis, and for the most part Muslims pay them special respects when they visit, but the sacred power of the dargah is in its spiritual relevance of so many local traditions. As Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu reflect in their study Embodying Charisma: modernity, locality and performance of emotion in Sufi Cults, “the shrine’s magicality is grounded in heterodox beliefs regarding the divine powers of the saint” (Werbner and Basu, 4).

The dargah property was purchased about 30 years ago when the surroundings were undeveloped and forested, and has become rooted in the community which funds the construction of the dargah through donation. The name of the neighborhood, which Masid Banda, is a mixed community of Muslims and Hindus residents, takes its name from the Telugu version of the Arabic “masjid” for mosque, is a product of interwoven traditions.