• Why and how do Hindus celebrate Vasant Panchami? Does the Nizamuddin Dargah celebrate it the same way? Who is a Sufi? Was Amir Khusrav a liberal or. Does the Dargah festival story have a historical basis?

Vasant Panchami at Nizamuddin Dargah is a centuries-old appropriation of Hindu tradition, stripped of its original meaning and repackaged under Sufi frameworks.

First why do Hindus celebrate Vasant Panchami?

Dr Priyaanka Mathur wrote, ‘Vasant Panchami commemorates the birth of ‘Saraswatiji’ The goddess of knowledge and wisdom. The beautiful goddess is portrayed in white attire, playing Veena a string musical instrument, sitting on a white swan that symbolizes Satwa Guna, which encompasses Learning, Wisdom and the Fine Arts. While the masses offer prayers and rituals, Indian Classical Musicians celebrate it by rendering various spring ragas to seek her blessings. It is interesting to know that the Raga Vasant is connoted as the raga of spring and is depicted in the Ragamala paintings as Lord Krishna dancing with the maidens, evoking the aura of romanticism and the mood of love (Shringara)

Meena Om wrote in the Times of India, ‘The colour yellow is of special import during Basant Panchami as it the coming of Spring after a long and arduous winter. It is the colour of the energy giving Sun; the mustard fields in bloom are a bright yellow, exuding the warmth of an imminent season of Basant or Spring. Fittingly, therefore, the radiance is associated with knowledge – symbolized by Goddess Saraswati.’

Read on and decide for yourself, if Vasant Panchami is celebrated by Muslims like this.

On January 23rd, 2026, Instagram reels, print media posts and social‑media shares were flooded with claims of a “700-year tradition of Hindus and Muslims celebrating Vasant Panchami together at Nizamuddin Dargah.” The flood of visuals from the dargah was presented as if it were an age-old symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity.

At the same time, influencers and journalists promote the claim that Amir Khusrau introduced the festival to console his patron Nizamuddin Auliya over the death of his nephew, a story with no support in credible historical sources.

The story that Vasant Panchami at Nizamuddin Dargah began because Nizamuddin Auliya mourned a nephew, prompting Amir Khusrau to dress in yellow and sing, is pure dargah lore. No contemporary sources-Persian chronicles, Sultanate records, or other medieval writings confirm the existence or death of Nizamuddin’s supposed nephew, Khwaja Taqiuddin Nuh.

This fabricated narrative originates with dargah custodians and oral retellings. It is so told by all that the truth cannot be distinguished from folk lore.

A key premise of this analysis; “no religious movement embedded in conquest can be analysed honestly without confronting the power that enabled it.”

This feeds into a broader, aggressively manufactured myth in the medieval history of Bharat; the idea of the “peaceful Sufi.” Recast as gentle mystics; singing poets, lovers of humanity and supposed bridges between Islam and Sanatana Dharma, Sufis are presented as standing outside conquest and coercion.

Actually, Sufis were active instruments of Islamic expansion in Bharat, operating within and benefiting from an imperial order built on violence, dispossession and religious subjugation.

But who are Sufis?

According to volume 7 of The History and Culture of Indian People published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, “Historically, Sufism was a religious system which in the course of its development, had imbibed several beliefs which are essentially of Hindu origin. It is not strange that in the 16^th/17^th centuries it came to be common with the bulk of the Indian Muslims to be attached to some religious preceptor, usually a Sufi, just as the Hindus considered the guidance of a Guru to be essential for one’s spiritual salvation, so that almost every religious-minded Muslim linked himself up with one Sufi Silsila (chain) or another as a sine qua non of respectability and religious awareness.”  Pg 655

Sufism in Bharat

Sufism did not arrive in Bharat as a detached, abstract spiritual movement. The Chishti, Suhrawardi and Qadiri orders entered the subcontinent in the wake of conquest, deeply embedded within the machinery of Islamic expansion. Moinuddin Chishti, originating from Chist in the Herat region, arrived alongside the invader Shihabuddin Ghori and established Chishti silsila in Ajay Meru (Ajmer). Reconfirmed in 1

The Suhrawardi order consolidated itself in Multan after the fall of Raja Kanda, where Shaykh Shahab-ud-Din Suhrawardi of Baghdad directed his disciple Baha-ud-Din Zakariyya to convert the conquered Hindu population.

P M Currie wrote in his book, “Mu‘in al-din. Chishti is believed to be Allah’s appointed evangelist in Hindustan, to have been instrumental in the victory of the Muslim armies in their final invasion of India. 1 Pg 198

Chishti networks in Delhi, including that of Nizamuddin Auliya, developed under Sultanate dominance rather than outside it. The Qadiriyya order, tracing its lineage to Abdul Qadir Jilani, entered the subcontinent later in the late fourteenth century and expanded under Turko-Afghan rule. Sufi khanqahs and dargahs functioned as patronage-dependent institutions, maintained through Sultanate waqf endowments and sustained by court protection.

Author J Said Deepak wrote in India, Bharat and Pakistan, “Although he was himself a sanad-holding Sunni Sufi of the Naqhhbandiyah Order, Dehlawai wanted Muslims of this part of world to rid of bida, i.e. Hindu influenced Sufi practices. Only that version of Sufism which was rooted in the Quran and Hadith was right one.” Pg. 13

My argument proceeds from a simple demand; history must be examined through evidence and structures of power, not through slogans of “harmony” or post-colonial moral theatre. When subjected to such scrutiny, the romanticised narrative of  Sufism collapses. To isolate Sufism from this context and present it as an autonomous, apolitical spiritual phenomenon constitutes historical distortion, substituting hagiography for analysis and recasting imperial collaboration as moral legitimacy.

Sufis were active participants in gazwa-e-Hind machinery of conquest. Silent in the face of Muslim brutality, they exploited the spiritual bent of Hindus to facilitate conversion. Sufi orders did not “coexist” with Hindus, they deliberately appropriated Sanatan rituals and cultural practices to confuse and convert Hindus. 

Singing Hindi bhajans at Sufi sama gatherings was central to a strategy that lured surviving Hindus; exhausted, traumatized and vulnerable from the devastation of invasions, into spaces designed to gradually undermine their original faith. The music, poetry and chadar ceremonies romanticised as benign or aesthetic, were calculated tools of influence, reshaped from Dharmic rituals into instruments of conversion.

Shaikh Ahmad, disciple of the converted Imam Faqir Madhu (who retained his Hindu name), became renowned for these renditions, exemplifying how conversion and cultural appropriation worked hand in hand.

Intellectual engagement was weaponised for Islamic expansion for e.g. Mir Gisu Daraz studied Sanskrit to confront Brahmans and convert them to Islam. Qazi Ruknuddin Samarkandi learned Hath Yoga from a Siddha Bhojar Brahman and translated yogic knowledge into Sufi frameworks. Qalandars adopted visual markers such as earrings from Kanphat yogis. Sayyid Murtaza, in his Yoga-Qualanar, explicitly aligned Qalandariya disciplines with yogic techniques. Nizamuddin Auliya practiced pranayama; Shaykh Abdu’l Quddus and his Ruduls incorporated the teachings of Shri Gorakhnath.

This was strategic entanglement, embedding Hindu spiritual systems into Sufi practice to blur lines, manipulate devotion and facilitate conversion.

Sufis labeled Hindu practices as shirk, promoted saint-veneration in place of deity worship and with murti‑puja banned by Islamic rulers, encouraged tomb-centered devotion as a substitute. These measures redirected Hindu devotional energy toward dargahs and away from traditional pooja practices.

The gentle-mystic image of Nizamuddin Auliya is manufactured; he thrived under Delhi Sultanate patronage and expanded where Hindu society was destabilized. Amir Khusrau, his disciple, praised Hindu slaughter and celebrated temple destruction as Islamic triumphs.

According to Volume 7 of The History and Culture of Indian People published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan here is a passage from his description of Hindusthan : ‘The whole country, by means of the sword of our holy warriors, has become like a forest denuded of its thorns by fire. The vapours of infidelity (i.e. Hinduism) have been dispersed. The strong men of Hind have been trodden under foot. Islam is triumphant, idolatory is subdued. Had not the law granted exemption from death by the payment of poll-tax, the very name of Hind, root and branch, would have been extinguished.’Pg. 502. This is said to be the view of one considered to be a liberal Muslim. 

To say that Amir K “introduced” Vasant Panchami at Nizamuddin’s dargah as a gesture of respect for Hindu culture is difficult to fathom in view of the above.  

The soft, benevolent image of Nizamuddin Auliya that dominates popular imagination is manufactured from tazkiras (memoirs) written by disciples and not from historical records. Nizamuddin maintained close ties with Delhi Sultanate elites, ensuring his khanqah flourished and that the Chishti order expanded most aggressively in regions where Hindu society was destabilized by conquest. There is no evidence that the Chishtis opposed temple destruction, jizya, or the enslavement of non-Muslims.

Khusrau is the smoking gun. Celebrated today as the Sufi poet who brought music and literary brilliance to Bharat; Amir Khusrau was foremost a court chronicler of conquest. He celebrated temple destruction as triumphs of Islam.

Stripped of its Hindu meaning, Vasant Panchami at Nizamuddin Dargah is a facade advancing the unfinished agenda of Gazwa-e-Hind. Devi Saraswati erased, the sacred cosmology  dismantled and centuries-old rituals stripped of their meaning; Vasant Panchami is recast as Sufi Islamic worship disguised as “cultural harmony.” 

Let us call it what it is: Vasant Panchami is a Hindu festival, linked since millions of years, to Devi Saraswati and the renewal of spring.

Modern narratives defend Sufi appropriation to protect the illusion of peaceful Islam turning perpetrators into saints, victimised Hindus into “intolerant” and the persistence of Hindu festivals into evidence of Islamic tolerance.

Dargah worship is diverting Hindu ritual allegiance away from Sanatan practices. The devotional energies of large numbers of Hindus visiting dargahs are systematically redirected into tomb-centred rites, eroding Hindu and weakening the continuity of Sanatan sacred traditions.

Practices such as “Vasant Panchami” at Nizamuddin and chadar offerings fuse incompatible rituals by equating tomb worship with temple-deity devotion, diluting Hindu civilizational identity while recasting centuries of conquest and domination as “shared heritage.”

To read all articles by author

References /Also read

1. Shrine and Cult of Mu‘in al-din Chishti of Ajmer by P M Currie

2. Basant Panchami at Nizamuddin Aulia

3. The Sufi Mission in Kashmir

4. Sufism by late Shri Ashok Joshi  

Meenakshi Sharan is a hospitality entrepreneur, an avid history buff, an independent researcher known for debunking false narratives and a civilisational activist. Her book, “Ancient Future, sanatan wisdom for preserving mother earth” is ready for publication and should be out soon.

Her campaign of Shraddh Sankalp Diwas and Samoohik Tarpan for the Hindus killed throughout Islamic & Christian invasions and partition of Bharatvarsh has become a movement observed by thousands of Hindus spanning 14 countries of the world. Her production of Odissi ballet “Saraswati Untold” in the classical Odissi dance form using relevant shloka from Vedas and Purans, based on the geographical evidences from Hindu Scriptures garnered critical acclaim. Saraswat Untold is the first ever repertoire on the Sarawati river. To serve her Indic roots, she has founded Ayodhya Foundation, which promotes revival of Vedic Culture & relevant art forms. She is on X, FB, Instagram as @MeenakshiSharan