Through its narrative, the production raises enduring questions about love, violence, and humanity.
The words of Sufi poet Bulleh Shah, whose shrine in Mussourie shrine was recently vandalised, ring true centuries later.
The play’s production is marked by immersive staging, minimalist sets and mystical experiences for the actors themselves.
There is an anecdote. While in Bengal writing about war on one of the royal missions, Amir Khusrau was attacked by a soldier from the very army that served the same Sultan as he did.
The soldier sought to kill Khusrau for preaching love, not war. Having lost his entire family to battle, the man, enraged and helpless, asked him: whom do I love now? How does love stop war?
Khusrau— the chronicler, the court poet, the historian— was stumped. The man who had mastered so many languages, was left speechless. How does love stop war? He did not have the answer.
Centuries later, in the modern world, we are still asking the same question. As the United States threatens to invade a new country every fine morning, as dignitaries argue over technicalities — is there a ‘famine’ in Gaza yet, or is it merely death by starvation? — and as Ukrainian soldiers await the European Union’s help to defend their borders against Russia, the question returns with undiminished force: how does love stop war? Does anything stop war at all?
This was the moment when the audience, otherwise applauding, fell silent, as the musical play Jo Dooba So Paar posed the question after reciting this story.
But this question was not posed to Khusrau; it was asked of Rumi, in an anecdote recounted in Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love.
Jo Dooba So Paar, directed by Ajitesh Gupta and Mohit Agarwal, explores Amir Khusrau’s intimate bond with his pir, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, and traces the emergence of qawwali through their shared spiritual journey. They began the production as trained singers, but as complete novices to the lived reality of Sufism. “We had to Google, ‘what is Sufi music?’ That is how innocent the beginning of this play was,” Gupta said.
“But that is the beauty of Sufism, the more you read about it, the more it consumes you,” he added. Reflecting on the journey of the play, first performed in 2019, Gupta said it had been marked by mystical experiences.
“I found the place where Nizamuddin Auliya himself prayed. Whenever Mohit and I were stuck, we could feel Amir Khusrau guiding us, saying, ‘Beta idhar jao, idhar raasta hai.’”
Much has been written about Khusrau and Nizamuddin Auliya, but rarely with the magic, melody and mayhem of crescendos and dizzying highs that this play achieves.
As the narrators weave qawwali with daastaans, the audience is left defenceless against the overwhelming ecstasy, navigating the ageless enchantment of Sufism and sama, of devotion and surrender; stirring tears and applause to rise together, indistinguishable from one another.
Gupta said he chose to end the play with the question left unanswered, despite having written multiple alternate endings, inspired from Gandhi or Rumi or Bulleh Shah. “How can I preach love as someone born a Hindu, who has never been subjected to that kind of hatred or violence? How do I stand before an audience member who may have lost a loved one to violence, to a communal riot?”
“If I give it an answer, dramatically, as a playwright, would I really be honest? When I asked myself this question, I concluded that I was actually not being honest.”
On a stage occupied only by takhats and a handful of musical instruments, with stage lights gently shaping the rhythm of the scene, the narrative opens with the story of Khusrau’s life — born into a family far removed from the world storytellers, poets, pens and litterateurs.
When a dervish lifted the toddler into his arms, he told Khusrau's father, “Your son will be a poet of unimaginable excellence, like none before,” a prophecy his father conveniently dismissed, until it could no longer be ignored. A six-year-old child could weave poetry by marrying any four stray words into meaning and music.
Many trials lay between Khusrau and Delhi before he finally found his way to his murshid, Nizamuddin Auliya. Their first meeting did not require speech. Bound by something beyond the ordinary, they spoke without words; touched by the divine, they communicated in silence, or as the narrator would put it, “Khusrao saw the universe in Nizammudin Auliya’s eyes.”
The play held the audience spellbound, weaving together a rich blend of Khusrau’s poetry, his wit, and his gradual transition into a writer who chose the language of the people. It traced his brilliance as a court poet, with kingdoms at the Delhi court offering lavish sums to claim his talent.
Yet the production went beyond biography. It spoke powerfully to the present, showing how Khusrau, just as the dervish had foretold, transcended the boundaries of religion, gender and caste, soaring across centuries.
Staged at Mandi House on January 30, just kilometres from the President’s House and Lutyens’ Delhi, the play also posed deeper questions: about who gets to write history, a privilege often reserved for the “gaddi-nasheen”; about a Delhi once shaped by Khusrau and Auliya now turning into a gas chamber, with AQI measured in temperature.
As Gupta and Agarwal alternated between the roles of Khusrau and his mehboob-e-ilahi, the contrast with today’s toxic masculinity was striking, an era where men could write poetry without being diminished for their emotional honesty; where two men could share a relationship so deeply intertwined, openly and without ridicule. A tale that placed compassion above social norms.
In the current age marked by a tense socio-religious climate, where identity is often reduced to faith alone, Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah endures as a space where love exists beyond seemingly inescapable boundaries.
Agarwal narrated:
“Beshak Mandir Masjid todo,
Bulleh Shah ve kehta,
Par pyaar bhara dil kabhi na todo
Is dil mein dilbar rehta”
Words said by Bulleh Shah, a Sufi poet remembered centuries later, whose shrine in Mussoorie was vandalised last month by a right-wing fringe group. Neither the weight of those words nor the irony of it was not lost on those present in the theater.
Khusrau could not meet his mehboob one last time. Auliya passed away while Khusrau was in Bengal. He failed to return in time.
Yet we choose to believe that they are reunited in the afterlife, freer than they ever were, still singing and dancing in the courtyard of the dargah, where they now lie resting just metres apart.
Even today, devotees visit Khusrau’s dargah before making their way to Auliya’s.
Familiar though it has always been, the dargah now feels transformed to me. Passing it on my way home after watching the play, I felt Delhi, home to me for over a decade, draw closer; knowing it has long been a place of love, not just for me, but for countless others before me.
