The Chishti Khanqah as a Socio-Religious Institution in Medieval India: Space, Authority, and Everyday Sufi Practice, c. 1200–1600

The khanqah — the residential Sufi hospice that combined the functions of teaching institution, hostel, almshouse, and devotional assembly-hall — was among the most influential and least formally documented institutions of medieval Indian religious life. This article examines the Chishti khanqah as a socio-religious institution in North India and the Deccan between approximately 1200 and 1600, drawing on the established historiography of Indian Sufism together with the genre of malfuzat (recorded discourses) that remains the richest contemporary source for its social history. The article develops a functional-spatial model of the khanqah, comprising the jama'at-khana (congregational hall), langar (communal kitchen), guest quarters, ziyarat/tomb precinct, and the khilafat-nama (deputyship) mechanism through which the institution reproduced itself across generations and regions, and situates this model against the doctrinal Chishti preference for futuh (unsolicited alms) and tawakkul (trust in God) over in'am (state land grants). Tracing the silsila from Mu'in al-Din Chishti's settlement at Ajmer (c. 1192) through Nizam al-Din Auliya's Delhi khanqah at its early-fourteenth-century apex to the post-1350s regional dispersal of khilafat into the Deccan, Bengal, Malwa, and Gujarat, the article argues that the Chishti khanqah functioned simultaneously as a site of vernacular religious mediation, an alternative locus of moral authority to the Sultanate court and the ulama-dominated madrasa, and a mechanism of social incorporation across caste and communal boundaries — while cautioning against the romanticized 'syncretism' narrative that recent historiography has increasingly problematized. The analysis engages critically with the long-standing 'myth of decline' thesis regarding post-fourteenth-century Chishti Sufism, arguing, in line with revisionist scholarship, that institutional dispersal following Nasir al-Din Chiragh-i-Delhi's death in 1356 reflected geographic diffusion and adaptive continuity rather than terminal decline. The article concludes by identifying source-critical and methodological directions for future research on khanqah institutional history, including underused revenue and endowment records and comparative regional case studies.