Indians at Herod’s Gate

“You are in India now.”

With these words, author Navtej Sarna was welcomed into the Indian Hospice (also called Baba Farid’s hospice), located in Jerusalem’s Old City. Sarna’s self-imposed mission is to understand the history of the Indian presence in Jerusalem. From the al-Ansari family, the custodians of the hospice, he gets the broad outline of that story, which he supplements with news articles and other memoirs, histories, waqf records, and travelogues. The end result is Indians at Herod’s Gate: A Jerusalem Tale, a very readable and interesting account about a part of Jerusalem’s history that is not well known.

The author begins his story with Salah al-Din's conquest of Jerusalem, wresting the city from the hands of the Crusaders, but doing so without bloodshed, just as Caliph Omar had done centuries earlier. Salah al-Din began to Islamize Jerusalem, and one of his goals was to make Jerusalem available to foreign Muslim pilgrims who had been denied access to the holy city while it was under Christian rule.

One of those who came to Jerusalem was an Indian mystic, Baba Farid, who had been born into a Punjabi family “that could trace its lineage to Caliph Omar.”1 At a young age, he was identified as having spiritual power. The hospice had its origins in the room in which he meditated during his 40-day stay in the holy city. Other rooms were added to it, which together were dedicated as a waqf that would serve Indian pilgrims who passed through the holy city on their way to or from Mecca. That was in the 13th century, and it has been in continuous use ever since.

Sarna's musings about people and places during his meandering around the city help him place his attention within the broader focus of historical changes in the city in which the hospice developed over the years. He spends time socializing at the American Colony Hotel, which takes him to the Husseini family history, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre leads him to the family of Sari Nusseibeh, whose (Muslim) family has been in possession of the church’s keys to keep the peace among the fractious Christian denominations. It was a very commonsensical resolution of what might have been a contentious, no-win battle: Let a Muslim keep the key.

One year, during Christian Holy Week, he notices various sects in a procession carrying their crosses on the Via Dolorosa (an ancient route in Jerusalem’s Old City that is believed to follow the route that Jesus took to be crucified).

Large crosses, flags, ornate robes, impressive beards, and decorated cortèges pass by through the narrow lanes, all moving toward the Holy Sepulchre.

Suddenly the adhan rises from some mosque. A very Jerusalem moment.2

Sarna’s observation captures an ordinary occurrence that most locals take as a given: this easy mingling of religious practices. Clearly, he is charmed by it.

Poring through the waqf records with the assistance of Nazir al-Ansari (the son of the hospice director), he begins to reconstruct the history of the hospice. In the past, there were many scattered Indian hospices, but in 1824, an Indian sheikh made the case for exchanging some of the properties with rooms adjacent to the hospice at Herod’s Gate to consolidate the services and management. Through that deal, the original hospice grew by seven rooms, a courtyard, and two water tanks.

In 1846, another Indian sheikh bought property in the vicinity and added it to the hospice property. (Other additions were made during World War II.) The result is the current sprawling hospice, which covers 7,000 square meters. The hospice properties also feature noncontiguous areas, the author later learns, including a bakery and a two-dunum mini-zoo in Bab al-Hutta with ducks, hens, peacocks, turkeys, and black swans.

Evliya bin Dervish, an Ottoman explorer, visited Palestine twice in the 17th century and wrote a travelogue in which he describes his trips in exhaustive detail. Sarna pores over the text and easily locates places he has come to know from walking those roads centuries later.

Another trove of documents pertaining to Jerusalem’s history, this one maintained in the Islamic university in Abu Dis, allows the author to make definitive statements about the Indian presence in Jerusalem: Most of the Indians came for religious purposes and resided in Bab Hutta; they came from different parts of India and had sheikhs represent them when they had to deal with the authorities. By the 1600s, “they had a strong presence in Jerusalem, not only in one hospice that we know today but in several.”4

The history of the al-Ansari family, the custodians of the hospice, is revealed through numerous conversations over endless cups of tea. Nazir’s grandfather was sent to Jerusalem in 1924 by the Indian Khilafat movement, which had supported the Ottoman Empire, to check on the hospice. The author’s reading helps him flesh out the details in this telegraphic account, and Hajj Amin al-Husseini enters the picture. The mufti was named president of the Supreme Muslim Council in 1922, and he decided to restore the dilapidated structures of al-Haram al-Sharif in part to rally Arabs and Muslims to the Palestinian cause. The restoration project required money, and so he sent a delegation to India, land of wealthy Muslim princes, and to meet with the Indian Khilafat movement. The movement had heard that the hospice needed attention and decided 45-year-old Sheikh Nazir was the man for the job.

From then on, Jerusalem became his home; he settled in the city and set to repair the hospice. He became a prominent figure in Jerusalem society, in part due to his membership on the Supreme Muslim Council and his personal relationship with the mufti. (The mufti and al-Ansari would travel together to India in 1933 to raise funds and to arouse anti-British sentiment, but they do not seem to have been particularly successful on either score).

By 1935, al-Ansari had managed to turn the hospice around, as attested to by a Calcutta lawyer in a signed letter (addressee not specified):