O n the night of June 23, 2021, the sounds of qawwali rang out from a Sufi shrine in Dhotian, a village in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district. Th...
On the night of June 23, 2021, the sounds of qawwali rang out from a Sufi shrine in Dhotian, a village in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district. The brutal second wave of the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t yet receded, but hundreds were in attendance at the shrine, dedicated to a Sufi saint named Ramzan Shah Qadri.
On the walls of the shrine were numerous posters, some of which showed the saint with other figures. The most prominent among these others were the two brothers Rashpal and Gurpal Singh – shown in one poster as receiving bright beams of blessings that were shooting out from Ramzan Shah Qadri’s palms.
The two brothers, who are the chief patrons of the shrine, belong to the Mazhabi Sikh community, which has roots that are at least 200 years old, and trace back to landless Dalit labourers who converted to Sikhism. The posters suggested that they intended to enmesh their reputations with that of the Sufi saint. As did the fact that they had appended the name Ramzan Shah Qadri to their own names.
The all-night vigil was the first major event to be held in over a year at the shrine, which had lain silent during this period.
If the celebrations seemed particularly...
