Banda Nawaz, India’s great human benefactor: By Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi
Banda Nawaz, meaning "people's benefactor," was an epithet given to the former South Indian sufi — Khwaja Geusu Daraz
WordForPeace.com Special
B
anda Nawaz, meaning “people’s benefactor,” was an epithet given to the former South Indian sufi — Khwaja Geusu Daraz (may Allah please him). A descendant of Hazrat Ali, the son-in – law of the Prophet, Banda Nawaz settled in Daulatabad, a part of the Deccan, where he devoted much of his life to bringing people of all faiths, traditions and cultures together in a thread of spiritual synergy. He was among the most prominent Sufi mystics of the Deccan who stressed India’s need for Hindu-Muslim harmony.
Banda Nawaz believed that there should be an amalgamation between their languages and local dialects for connecting people’s hearts. So, in a mixed dialect of Deccani Urdu and Hindi (Hindawi), he conveyed his message of love. Maulvi Abdul Haqque, one of the pioneers of the Urdu language, noted that almost all vernacular languages were studied by Banda Nawaz to spread his words of wisdom to common citizens. He was also beautifully rooted in the local cultures to attain that goal. He created a beautiful synthesis of the Deccan language in his effort to effectively communicate his mystical discourses, borrowing salient features from the earliest form of Urdu proses.
Banda Nawaz would relay the beautiful discourses on hadith (prophetic traditions), suluk (Sufi path) and kalam (rational Islamic philosophy), every day after Zuhr ‘s prayer. Remarkably, he would speak to those who did not understand Urdu, Arabic, or Persian, in the vernacular Dakhni language. Khwaja Banda Nawaz has written many spiritual treatises, including Hidayat Nama, Qaseeda Amali and Adaab-al-Mureedein. But its masterpiece is Me’raj-ul-Ashiqin. It exposes what it takes to be an Ashiq — the true lover or seeker of the mystical path that, through ma’rifat (gnosis), reaches ultimate relationship with the divine. In his opinion, m’arifat connotes an intuitive understanding through profound perceptions of the universal spiritual reality. ; This close personal relationship between the lover and the Divine is expressed in these wonderful Persian lines, as mentioned in
Me’raj-ul-Ashiqin:
Man tu shudam tu man shudi,
man tan shudam tu jaan shudi,
taakas na goyad bad azeen,
man deegaram tu deegari
Translation:“I became you and you me. I am the body, you soul; so that no one hereafter will be able to say that you are someone else and me.
