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Black-and-white photo of the shrine complex in Ajmer, with the large dome of a mosque visible behind some trees. A small number of people are standing in the grounds.

Between Spirituality and Resistance: The Sufi Pilgrimage Town of Ajmer under British Rule

In March 1920, a three-day conference was convened at the dargah (shrine complex) for the Sufi saint Muinuddin Chishti (d. c.1230) in Ajmer in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. More than 10,000 people attended, and various political speakers discussed the question of whether to support the Khilafat movement, which existed between 1919 and 1923 and opposed the removal of the Ottoman sultan. The British administration of Ajmer recorded such politically motivated activities in detail and, in light of the conference, deemed the shrine a ‘peculiarly fertile centre for political and religious propaganda’.1 These politically ambitious gatherings were observed and classified, and the details passed on to the India Office. A Sufi shrine as a centre of propaganda? How could this have happened?

Sufi orders have had a particular influence on Islam in India. In Sufism, saints and their tombs are intensively venerated, and the Sufi masters (shaykhs) claim divine and mystical contact with Allah. Their followers may be Sunnis or Shiites, but most are Sunni Muslims. The path to becoming a Sufi master is also realized in the founding of a Sufi brotherhood.

One of these Sufi brotherhoods is the Shishtiyya order, which was founded by Muinuddin Chishti in Ajmer in the late thirteenth century. Chishti became a leading spiritual preacher of the teachings of the orthodox Islamic Sufi order. He was known for his broad tolerance, so non-Muslims, too, regularly make pilgrimages to Ajmer. The tomb of Muinuddin Chisthi, who became known as Gharib Nawaz (‘benefactor of the poor’), developed into a nationally renowned centre for the practice of faith and spirituality. Sufism should be seen as an alternative to the strictly orthodox practice of Islam, manifesting, for the believer, a special intimacy through its mystical character. For this reason, it has attracted many followers, and this in turn has had an influence on everyday Muslim traditions. The most important festival for Sufis is Urs, the anniversary of the death of Muinuddin Chisthi, which is celebrated for six days every year and attracts up to 100,000 people from across India to Ajmer. Due to its growing popularity as a place of pilgrimage since the end of the nineteenth century, Ajmer is also often described as the Mecca of the East. The dargah is therefore first and foremost a place of peace and inner contemplation, one not primarily associated with demands for resistance to the colonial power.

Ajmer: A Place of Pilgrimage for Mughals and the Poor

The poorer Muslim population in particular, who could not afford the Hajj to Mecca, made alternative pilgrimages to holy sites so they could approach the saints as supplicants, generally asking for help with their everyday physical and moral problems.

Ajmer became an increasingly popular pilgrimage site from the sixteenth century onwards. The Mughal ruler Akbar (r. 1556–1605) revered Chisthi in particular; he visited the dargah fourteen times, made large donations to its administration and building projects, and built a mosque, named after him (Akbari Masjid), on the site. In 1579 he extended Chisthi’s mausoleum. Akbar also built a college (Khwaja Garib Nawaz-Sufi Madrasa) on the site of the dargah. Akbar’s son Jahangir (r. 1605–27) followed his father’s patronage and also donated large sums of money to the dargah. Shah Jahan (r. 1627–58) continued its expansion by building a majestic marble mosque and another gateway.2

1818: The East India Company Conquers the City of Ajmer

In the Third Maratha War (1817–19), which also led to a war between the Marathi House of Scindia and the military unit of the British East India Company (EIC), Ajmer was ceded to the latter after its victory. The city was seen as a foot in the door for the British, who hoped to gain influence over the whole of Rajasthan, which until then had consisted purely of independent principalities.

Map of Rajasthan, India.
Fig. 1: Ajmer as the only place in Rajasthan directly administered by the British. G. U. Pope, Text-Book of Indian History: With Geographical Notes, Genealogical Tables, Examination Questions, and Chronological, Biographical, Geographical, and General Indexes, for the Use of Colleges and Private Students (London, 1880), facing p. 19. Public domain.

Integrating the native elites also enabled political control. In the first few decades, the relationship between British administrators, officers, and the indigenous population was comparatively tolerant on both sides, partly because the colonial government had ordered its officials not to interfere in religious matters.

Due to the dargah and the regular pilgrimages that accompanied it, however, Ajmer remained a thoroughly Islamic city during British colonial rule. The British established themselves in the city. They undertook extensive modernization in order to create economic incentives in Rajasthan and to exert influence on the entire province at various levels. During this time, British colonial officials did not have a full grasp of local religious processes and traditions, which meant that up until the mid nineteenth century, there was barely any appreciation of the importance of the pilgrimage site to the Muslim community, and the annual gatherings of thousands of believers at the dargah for the Urs festival were, for the most part, ignored.

Tension between the Indian Population and the Colonial Government

Until the 1830s, the EIC favoured the strategy of cultural adaptation to Mughal culture, to the extent that officers were sometimes referred to as ‘White Mughals’, as Margit Pernau emphasizes in her 2008 publication.3 This was particularly evident in regions where British rule was not yet so secure that it could afford to dispense with formal and informal alliances, for example in Bengal and northern India, where British interactions with the native elite were largely conducted according to indigenous rules. This initially acquiescent stance was also evident in Ajmer, but as the colonial trading company consolidated its political power and institutional status, tolerance began to wane. By the time Ajmer became a crown colony in 1858, the British colonial government had changed its approach. Until the revolt of 1857, the shrine was barely even noticed. However, after this massive outbreak of resistance to the colonial government, a growing unease on the part of British administrative officers and military personnel became apparent. The Muslim elite were suspected of conspiring against the British colonial government. What was known at the time as ‘Mussulmano-phobia’4 was found equally among the colonial administration, the military, and the civilian population. In particular, there was fear of further widespread Muslim resistance to the British colonial regime. These insecurities also triggered processes of knowledge production, both at the local level and in London.

In 1858 India became a Crown colony, and in 1877 Queen Victoria also became Empress of India. She declared neutrality towards the Indian religions, which meant that the state would continue to refrain from interfering in religious practice. The goal was to separate religion from politics, and thereby also of course to eliminate any potential for conflict among the population. The assertion of British authority across very different spheres over the course of the following decades often led to tension between the Indian population and official colonial policy. In addition, in the second half of the nineteenth century, European missionary orders and societies increasingly felt they had a duty to devote themselves to evangelism in northern India, including Ajmer. Although, on the face of it, the goals of missionary societies and colonial authorities were by no means aligned, the increasing influence of the former on the ground was certainly conducive to containing Islam, a core aim in nineteenth-century imperial ideology.

The increasing dominance of the British in the country led to resistance in many places and to greater social distance between the British and the Indians. This was accompanied by a growing sense of superiority among the administrative officers and members of the military, who saw themselves as a neutral authority over India’s various cultural communities. In government circles the unanimous view was that only the British were in a position to govern in the context of such diversity. However, with the decision to categorize the population by religion, the British contributed to Indians coming to see faith as a marker of identity. Especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, this form of colonial policy actually promoted the emergence of a modern Muslim community consciousness.

This can also be seen in the example of the pilgrimage town of Ajmer, a place which on the one hand—and like most other cities in India—was characterized by religious diversity, but on the other was known far beyond the borders of Rajasthan as a centre of Sufi saint worship. Here, at the turn of the twentieth century, a growing tension between practical colonial politics and the increasing politicization of faith was very apparent. In Islam, pilgrimage in particular is a marker of community, and—especially at the beginning of the twentieth century—the grounds of the shrine in Ajmer came to serve as a place of worship, a meeting place for newly formed religious and political nationalist groups (including the Khilafat movement). Religious reformers used the festivities in honour of Muinuddin Chishti to address the faithful and draw attention to grievances. As described above, Muslim leaders sometimes exerted great influence on the population, and this in turn was closely monitored by the colonial officials.

The Aim of my PhD Thesis

It is precisely these developments in the British colonial government’s treatment of the Muslim population in Ajmer that I aim to analyse in my PhD. As a highly frequented place of pilgrimage, the British administration, both locally and in the metropolis, felt it should keep a particularly close eye on Ajmer because it attracted large crowds and was fast becoming a hub of resistance.

The relationships between the Muslim population and the European administrations in India provide a deeper insight into the growing tensions between Muslim communities and European actors in the long nineteenth century. These circumstances also promoted the acquisition of knowledge within the colonial system, especially European knowledge about Islam, which arose in the constant exchange between the still relatively new subject of Islamic studies and the various institutions of the colonial state, and became increasingly important in interpreting religious actions and reformist developments. My PhD thus aims to provide a new perspective on the colonial administration’s approach to Muslim pilgrimage, a topic which so far has been completely dominated by the Hajj to Mecca—both in current research and through the contemporary lens of the colonial powers. I aim to broaden the view of the fundamental colonial pattern in dealing with the ‘other religion’. My project is a specific case study of a site central to Indian spirituality that came under colonial control, and also an exploration of colonial Islamic politics with its options for action, political strategies, and patterns of interpretation.

My GHIL scholarship enabled me to come to London to access the British Library (which holds the large collection of the Indian Office Records), the National Archives in Kew, and the SOAS archive. During my stay, I found various administrative sources that clearly showed, over time, a shift in both British vigilance towards the population in general and the treatment of the Muslim contingent in particular. My research in London was crucial to the development of my project, so I am very grateful to the GHIL for this support.


Translated by Marielle Sutherland (GHIL).

Feature image: Dargah of Ajmer, 1880s. From James Douglas, Bombay and Western India: A Series of Stray Papers, vol. 1 (London, 1893). British Library, Digital Store 010056.h.10.

  1. Continuation of Home Department telegram of 2 Feb. 1920, Political and Secret Department Records, IOR/L/PS/10/798, British Library. []
  2. Qamar-ul Huda, ‘Khwâja Mu’în ud-dîn Chisthî’s Death Festival: Competing Authorities over Sacred Space’, Journal of Ritual Studies, 17/1 (2003), 61–78, at 64. []
  3. Margrit Pernau, Bürger mit Turban: Muslime in Delhi des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2008), 47. []
  4. Michael Mann, South Asia’s Modern History: Thematic Perspectives (London, 2015), 59. []

The text only may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Ute Kemmerling (March 23, 2026). Between Spirituality and Resistance: The Sufi Pilgrimage Town of Ajmer under British Rule. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved April 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15xcb


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