Data Darbar, Lahoreਦਾਤਾ ਦਰਬਾਰ, ਲਾਹੌਰ

Ask Lahore for its holiest address and the answer is Data Darbar. The shrine of Ali Hujwiri, the eleventh century Sufi whom devotees call Data Sahib, the giver, stands in the heart of the Walled City near Bhati Gate, and it never really closes: through the night, every night, thousands move through its marble courtyard to the white tomb. It is at once a grave, the home of Sufism's first Persian textbook, a kitchen of staggering scale and the beating devotional heart of Punjab's capital, and it belongs to the wider story told in the Sufi heritage of Punjab.

Ali Hujwiri, the giver of treasures

Ali Hujwiri was born in about 1009 at Hujwir, near Ghazni in present day Afghanistan, and studied across the Muslim world before settling in Lahore, where tradition says his teacher directed him to succeed another saint. In Lahore he wrote the Kashf al-Mahjub, the Revelation of the Veiled, in Persian: the earliest Persian treatise on Sufism, setting out the path, its states and stations, and the lives of the early saints. He died in about 1072, though some sources give 1077, and is remembered by the title Data Ganj Bakhsh, the giver who bestows treasures, a name tradition traces to praise spoken of him by Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. He is honoured as the patron saint of Lahore, and devotees hold that no saint could settle in the subcontinent without his spiritual permission.

The shrine through the centuries

The shrine began as Hujwiri's grave beside the mosque he had built; a larger shrine rose over it by the Mughal period, and the complex was expanded in the nineteenth century. Across the centuries its visitors read like a roll of Punjab's saints and rulers: Baba Farid, Moinuddin Chishti, Nizamuddin Auliya, the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh and the poet Allama Iqbal all paid their respects here. The shrine came under government control with the Auqaf Ordinance of 1960, and a great expansion in the 1980s, adding a library, madrasa, markets and performance spaces, made it the largest Sufi shrine in South Asia. A qawwali festival, the mehfil-e-sama, has been held at the shrine since 1965. The shrine has also been attacked, in 2010 and 2019, and entry is now through security checks, a modern fact of its life.

The urs and the great free kitchen

The annual urs, held over three days on the anniversary of Hujwiri's death, draws up to a million devotees, with qawwali through the nights and the complex lit and draped. But the shrine's daily miracle is its kitchen. In a custom devotees describe as a thousand years old, up to 50,000 visitors a day are offered free food, funded by patrons who donate money or their own labour, and the shrine also supports schools and hospitals nearby. Between 30,000 and 60,000 people visit on an ordinary day, doubling on Thursdays and holidays, and writers on Lahore note that it is one of the few places in the city where the richest and the poorest share the same ground.

Visiting Data Darbar

The shrine is open at all hours and entry is free. It stands off Lower Mall Road by Bhati Gate, served by the Bhatti Chowk station of the Lahore Metrobus, and Thursday nights, the traditional night for shrine visiting, are the busiest of the week. Modest dress is expected. Travellers following Punjab's Sufi circuit pair it with Baba Farid's shrine at Pakpattan, a few hours south, the other pole of the region's shrine calendar.

The complex today

The tomb itself is Mughal era work in carved white marble, its cenotaph ringed by marble screens and mirror work, standing in a vast marble courtyard. Around it the modern complex has grown in layers: the rebuilt mosque in a modernist style, a library and madrasa, offices, markets and the spaces where qawwali is performed, all administered by the Punjab Auqaf Department with some two hundred staff. It is the board's richest shrine, and the department regulates preaching and practice here more closely than at Punjab's other shrines. One corner of the courtyard holds the shrine's other daily institution, the langar lines, where the free kitchen has served its visitors, by the shrine's own telling, for a thousand years.

When is the Data Darbar urs held?

The urs is held each year over three days on the anniversary of Ali Hujwiri's death in the Islamic calendar; because the Islamic year is lunar, the Gregorian dates move earlier by about eleven days each year. Thursday nights draw the largest weekly crowds, and through the urs the shrine is decorated and lit, with qawwali and the free kitchen running day and night.