A fairly new phenomenon is the sight of traditional healers exorcising people who have become possessed by evil spirits. People who believe in the supernatural come to seek ‘solutions’ to their problems. Just as you see at Sufi shrines, people (usually women) in a trance or possessed, actually find a solution. When you walk with me, I can show you videos of healers at work.

The story of Laddu Shah
A popular story goes that the jinn worship is linked to a character called Laddu Shah. In his early life, Shah was a successful black marketeer of cinema tickets. He started visiting Firoz Shah Kotla in the early 1970s to pray, and would play a flute there. People said his playing so charmed the jinns that they gave him the gift of healing.

As Shah went to the citadel more often, he came under the influence of the Baba (jinn saint) and his black-marketeering gradually ceased. He began to feel strongly that the abandoned mosque should once more be used for prayers. One day Shah performed a miracle by healing a paralysed boy; and instead of taking the offered reward, he asked the assembled crowd to offer prayers at the Firoz Shah Kotla mosque.

That’s one story, but Anand Vivek Taneja, in his fascinating book Jinnealogy (Stanford University Press, 2018), proposes additional explanations for the start of the practice in the 1970s.

A bureaucracy of jinns

It was a few months after The Emergency of 1975-1977 that Firoz Shah Kotla became established as a religious site. Many of those who came, both Hindu and Muslim, were from working-class areas of Old Delhi, the parts worst affected by The Emergency’s evictions, forced sterilisations, and demolitions.
These desperate people came for healing at a time of great distress. And what is so interesting is that the petitioning of the jinns echoes the medieval practice of shikwa, a Perso-Islamic legal form of submitting complaints directly to the sovereign.

It’s as though the jinns run a bureaucracy. Many petitions are carefully typed or hand-written with names, addresses, photos, and signatures. Some are photocopied many times and distributed at different places in the ruins, along with the offerings of candles, coins, flowers, fruit, incense, and sweets.

Taneja argues that the practice happens because people have lost faith in traditional forms of government, so are turning to an ancient method of getting justice, directed at the jinns.