Music from the heart, offered at the Salim Chishti dargah.

Fatehpur Sikri is a deserted city. Its grand structures of red sandstone were abandoned not due to death or defeat, but voluntarily by the inhabitants. Today the builders are long gone but the structures remain, undisturbed save by the forces of nature. Last weekend I finally fulfilled a long harboured desire to visit this piece of Mughal history.

There we were, inside the Jama Masjid complex, amongst the tombs of the dead when, suddenly, life seemed to have returned to this ghost town.

Music!

Seated on the white marble courtyard at the centre of the mosque complex were the qawwals of Fatehpur Sikri. They were singing qawwalis at the doorstep of the mystic Salim Chishti’s dargah, and such was the magic of this simple, spiritual, hypnotic Sufi music that it gave us a sensation, however tiny, of what this place must have been like in the days of Akbar and his navratnas.

Props to Souvik for lending me his lens.