Hazrat Babajan

The woman later venerated as Hazrat Babajan was born around 1806 in Balochistan, in the borderlands of what was then part of the Afghan sphere, into a well placed Muslim family of Pashtun descent ^[1]. Her birth name is recorded in most accounts as Gulrukh, a Persian name meaning "rose faced", and biographers describe her father as a man of rank, variously identified as a minister or noble attached to the Afghan court ^[2]. The dating of her birth remains approximate. Followers who knew her in old age believed she had lived well past a century, and the year 1806 rests on their testimony and on later reconstructions rather than on any surviving document ^[1].

Gulrukh received the education expected of a daughter of her class. She is said to have memorized the Quran in childhood, becoming a hafiza, and to have learned Persian and Arabic alongside her native Pashto ^[2]. Accounts of her youth agree that she showed an early inclination toward prayer and seclusion that unsettled her family. In the society of nineteenth century Balochistan and Afghanistan, an aristocratic girl was expected to marry, and her relatives arranged a match for her while she was still in her teens or early twenties ^[1].

Her response set the course of the rest of her life. Rather than accept the marriage, Gulrukh fled her home, an act of extraordinary defiance for a woman of her time and background. Biographical traditions state that she escaped around the age of eighteen, possibly on the eve of the wedding, and made her way toward Peshawar and then into the Punjab ^[2]. From that point she never returned to family life, and the record of her movements for the next several decades survives only in fragments gathered long afterward from her own scattered remarks and from devotees ^[1].

For roughly half a century Gulrukh lived as a wandering ascetic, a rare path for a woman in South Asia and one that repeatedly exposed her to hardship and suspicion. She spent an extended period in Rawalpindi, where she came into contact with a Hindu spiritual teacher who set her to rigorous practice; accounts describe a period of severe austerity in the nearby hills ^[1]. She later moved south into the Punjab, and in Multan, according to the traditions preserved by her followers, she met a Muslim saint who completed her inner transformation. Her biographers present this as the moment she attained the state Sufis call fana, the passing away of the self in God ^[2].

What is better attested is the danger her condition brought upon her. A person absorbed in mystical states, speaking as though identical with the divine, risked the charge of blasphemy. Oral accounts state that in the Punjab she declared her spiritual status openly and so alarmed local religious authorities that her life was threatened ^[1]. One widely repeated tradition holds that a group of Baluchi soldiers or tribesmen, scandalized by her utterances, buried her alive, and that her later reappearance in Bombay astonished a former acquaintance who had witnessed the episode. The story cannot be verified and is best read as hagiography, but it circulated widely during her lifetime and shaped her reputation ^[2].

Her wanderings ranged far beyond India. She is reported to have performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, traveling by way of Afghanistan and Persia, and to have visited Baghdad, Najaf, and other centers of Islamic devotion before returning to the subcontinent ^[1]. By the 1890s she had reached Bombay, where she stayed for several years, and around 1903 she made a second pilgrimage voyage by sea. Not long afterward she settled in Pune, the city with which her name has been linked ever since ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Hazrat Babajan in the Pune of the early twentieth century would have been pointed toward a neem tree in Char Bawdi, a rough neighborhood near the cantonment. There the elderly woman, now known by the affectionate title Babajan (an unusual name, since Baba is a masculine honorific), took up residence in the open air around 1905 and remained for the rest of her life ^[1]. She owned nothing, slept beneath the tree in all weather, and gave away whatever food, money, or clothing devotees pressed upon her ^[3].

Her following cut across every religious boundary in the city. Muslims revered her as a qalandar, a God intoxicated saint outside conventional orders; Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Christians came in equal numbers, drawn by reports of healings and by her disregard for distinctions of caste and creed ^[2]. Contemporary observers noted that Char Bawdi itself changed around her. A district once avoided after dark became a place of nightly gatherings, tea stalls, and qawwali singing, and the crowds at the neem tree could number in the hundreds ^[1].

The military authorities of the Pune cantonment eventually acknowledged her standing in a practical way. When she refused to move despite plans affecting the area, a shelter was constructed for her around the tree itself, an accommodation almost without precedent for a pavement dwelling faqir ^[3]. She accepted the structure but continued to live exactly as before, receiving all comers, speaking tersely, sometimes harshly, and deflecting every attempt to treat her as an institution ^[1].

The episode for which Hazrat Babajan is most widely remembered occurred in May 1913. A nineteen year old Zoroastrian student named Merwan Sheriar Irani, who cycled daily past the neem tree on his way to Deccan College, was beckoned by the old woman and kissed on the forehead ^[4]. Merwan later described the contact as the beginning of a total transformation of consciousness, an experience so overwhelming that for months he could barely eat or sleep. He went on to become Meher Baba, one of the most internationally known Indian spiritual figures of the twentieth century ^[3].

Meher Baba consistently named Babajan as the first of the five "Perfect Masters" who, in his account, unveiled and then integrated his spiritual state, the others being Sai Baba of Shirdi, Upasni Maharaj, Tajuddin Baba, and Narayan Maharaj ^[4]. He continued to visit her at Char Bawdi in the years that followed, and his biographers record her referring to him as her son and telling visitors that the boy would one day shake the world ^[3].

This connection has meant that much of the documentation of Babajan's life comes through Meher Baba's movement. Writers such as Charles Purdom, Bhau Kalchuri, and the early chronicler Abdul Ghani Munsiff, a physician who knew Babajan personally, preserved the anecdotes and chronology on which later studies depend ^[4]. The most sustained independent treatment, Kevin Shepherd's 1986 study A Sufi Matriarch, drew these strands together and argued for her significance as a rare female exemplar of the qalandar tradition ^[1].

Babajan left no writings, founded no order, and never delivered formal discourses, so any account of Hazrat Babajan achievements rests on how she lived rather than on doctrine. Witnesses describe a small, weathered woman with white hair and striking blue eyes, dressed in a long apron like garment, her fingers often moving over prayer beads ^[2]. Her speech mixed Pashto, Persian, Urdu, and scraps of other languages, and much of it was cryptic. She habitually referred to herself in the masculine and spoke of her devotees as her children ^[1].

Stories of healing attached to her from the Bombay years onward. People brought the sick to the neem tree, and popular belief credited her touch and her words with cures; whatever the explanation, the crowds these reports drew were real and sustained for a quarter of a century ^[3]. She refused money for herself, and observers noted that gifts left with her were passed at once to the poor who gathered around her seat ^[2].

Her position within Islam was that of the majzub or qalandar, the ecstatic absorbed in God who stands outside the sober hierarchy of the Sufi orders. That a woman occupied this role publicly, in a busy Indian city, for decades, made her a genuinely unusual figure in the modern history of Sufism, and scholars of South Asian religion have cited her as evidence of the space Indian Islam could grant to female sanctity ^[1].

By the late 1920s Babajan was extraordinarily old by any reckoning, her frame bent and her health failing, yet she refused to alter her way of life. She remained at the neem tree through the monsoon seasons, accepting minimal care from the devotees who kept watch over her ^[2]. In 1930 an injury to one of her fingers became septic, and the infection resisted treatment. She reportedly declined to be moved to a hospital for any extended period, remarking in her oblique fashion that it was time for her to go ^[1].

She died at Char Bawdi on September 21, 1931. The response of the city measured her standing: shops closed, and the funeral procession that carried her body through Pune was described by contemporaries as one of the largest gathering of mourners the city had seen, with Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians walking together ^[3]. She was buried beside the neem tree where she had lived, and a dargah, or shrine tomb, was raised over the grave ^[2].

A few basic Hazrat Babajan facts frame the arc of that long life: born around 1806 in Balochistan, a runaway from an arranged marriage before 1830, a pilgrim to Mecca, a fixture of Pune from about 1905, and dead at an age her followers placed at roughly 125 years. The precision of the numbers is uncertain; the length and strangeness of the journey is not ^[1].

The dargah of Hazrat Babajan still stands on its original site in Pune, now enclosing the remains of the neem tree, and it continues to draw devotees of several faiths, particularly during the annual urs commemorating her death ^[2]. The surrounding locality is commonly known by her name, and the shrine functions as one of the city's shared sacred spaces, maintained by a Muslim trust yet visited by many who are not Muslim ^[3].

Her memory is kept alive along two distinct channels. Within the worldwide following of Meher Baba she holds a permanent place as the master whose kiss opened his spiritual career, and pilgrims on the Meher Baba circuit routinely visit her tomb ^[4]. Within the study of Sufism she figures as a documented modern instance of the female faqir, a category often assumed to belong to the medieval past. Every serious Hazrat Babajan biography, from Munsiff's 1939 memorial essay to Shepherd's book length study, returns to the same point: a woman who renounced rank, marriage, and shelter managed, without institution or publicity, to become one of the most venerated figures in a major Indian city ^[1].

No photograph, shrine, or chronology quite explains that outcome. Her contemporaries answered the question in their own way, by the thousands, simply by coming to sit near an old woman under a tree ^[3].