Nagore Dargah: The Sufi Shrine on a Coast of Many Faiths

A few kilometres north of the old port of Nagapattinam, in the small coastal town of Nagore, a cluster of white domes and slender minarets rises above the rooftops and the palms. This is the Nagore Dargah — the shrine that holds the tomb of Hazrat Syed Shahul Hameed, a Sufi saint whom the people of the Tamil coast have revered for some four and a half centuries. What is remarkable about the place is not only its age or its beauty, but the crowd it draws: Muslims come here as a matter of course, but so do Hindus and Christians, all of them lighting candles, tying threads and asking the saint they affectionately call Nagore Andavar to hear them.

The saint of Nagore

Hazrat Syed Shahul Hameed — also remembered as Meeran Sahib, Qadir Wali and, in the Tamil idiom, Nagore Andavar — is traditionally held to have lived in the 16th century and to have travelled to the Tamil coast, where he settled and died at Nagore. Tradition connects him to the Qadiriyya order of Sufism and traces his lineage, by devotees’ accounts, back to the great Baghdad saint Abdul Qadir Jilani. As with most saints of his kind, his life is remembered chiefly through the miracles and cures ascribed to him: stories of the sick made well, storms calmed at sea and the barren granted children. These accounts belong to devotional tradition rather than dated record, and they are best read as the living faith of his followers rather than as history in the modern sense. What is beyond doubt is the pull the saint still exerts, and the shrine that grew over his grave to become one of the busiest Muslim pilgrimage sites in the south. You can find the practical detail on the Nagore Dargah page.

Five minarets by the sea

The dargah is a walled complex of courtyards, prayer halls and tombs, its central sanctum crowned by a gilded dome above the saint’s grave. Its most famous feature is its skyline of five minarets, or manarahs, which give the shrine its unmistakable profile against the flat coastal light. Tradition holds that the tallest of them — the great Periya Manara — was built as a thank-offering by a Maratha ruler of nearby Thanjavur, said to have been cured or otherwise favoured through the saint’s intercession. That gift is traditionally reported rather than firmly documented, and the exact ruler and circumstances are told in slightly different ways; but it fits a real pattern of Thanjavur’s Maratha kings patronising shrines of every faith across their country. The building you see today has been added to and embellished over centuries by rulers, merchants and ordinary devotees, so that the complex reads as an accumulation of gratitude as much as a single design.

The Kanduri festival

The great event of the shrine’s year is the Kanduri festival, a fortnight-long observance that marks the anniversary of the saint’s death — his urs, in the Sufi vocabulary, the day a saint is held to be united with the divine. For roughly two weeks the town fills with pilgrims; there are processions, the ceremonial raising of a flag to open the festival, offerings of cloth and sweets, and the sandanakoodu — sandalwood paste carried in procession and applied at the tomb. Music has a special place here, for Nagore is associated with a devotional tradition sung in Tamil, and the nights of the festival are threaded with it. Through it all the crowd is strikingly mixed, with families of different faiths keeping their own vows side by side. If you would rather avoid the crush, the shrine is open and busy throughout the year and can be visited quietly on an ordinary day.

A coast of many faiths

Nagore’s open-door devotion makes more sense once you see the coast it sits on. A short drive south of Nagapattinam stands Velankanni, whose Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health is one of the most important Christian pilgrimage centres in India, drawing enormous crowds of Christians and non-Christians alike — a mirror image, in another faith, of the shared devotion at Nagore. Nagapattinam town itself keeps its old Hindu shrines, among them the Soundararajaperumal Temple, a Vishnu temple of the delta. Older still is the town’s Buddhist memory: Nagapattinam was a great medieval port, and it was here that a Buddhist monastery, the Chudamani Vihara, was raised in the 11th century by a Srivijaya king with the patronage of the Chola emperor — a monument long since vanished but marked today at the Chudamani Vihara Buddhist heritage site. Sufi, Christian, Hindu and Buddhist devotions have layered themselves onto this one stretch of shore, and Nagore Dargah is the place where that layering is most visibly alive.

Visiting

The dargah sits in the middle of Nagore and is easy to reach from Nagapattinam, which is well connected by road and rail across the delta. Visitors of all faiths are welcome; dress modestly, remove footwear before entering, and expect the complex to be at its most crowded — and most atmospheric — during the Kanduri festival, so time your visit according to whether you want the spectacle or the quiet. Combine it with the basilica at Velankanni and the temples of Nagapattinam for a full sense of this remarkable coast. To fit it into a wider trip through the region, see /india/tamil-nadu/guides/nagapattinam-and-the-delta-in-2-days , and for advice on when to travel, read /india/tamil-nadu/guides/best-time-to-visit-tamil-nadu .