The ruins of the 13th century fortress-city of Firoz Shah Kotla in New Delhi is thronged weekly with thousands of supplicants seeking favour from supernatural beings of smokeless fire, djinns. These magical entities also known as jinn, jann or genies spring from Islamic mythology as well as pre-Islamic Arabian mythology. They are mentioned frequently in the Quran and other Islamic texts and inhabit an unseen world called Djinnestan. Believers, mostly Muslim but from other faiths too, circumnavigate the ruins clutching dozens of photocopied requests, flower petals, incense, and candles. They visit the numerous niches and alcoves in the catacombs said to be occupied by different djinns and greet and salute the invisible occupants with offerings. A copy of their requests, often with detailed contact information, photographs and even police reports to bolster the case is left with the ‘Baba’ before moving on to the next where the procedure is repeated - like making applications at different departments of a bureaucracy. Anand Vivek Taneja in his book “Jinnealogy” makes a compelling case for linking the historical and ongoing effects of Partition and the later Emergency with the current traditions at Firoz Shah Kotla. Partition, he argues, ‘was not just a singular event in 1947 but rather the inauguration of a structure of dispossession, displacement, and amnesia. The “Long Partition” (Vazira Zamindar 2007) continued to affect the Muslims of Delhi long after the events of 1947, being entrenched in the laws and policies of the postcolonial state, systematically eroding Muslim rights of property and citizenship’. Although jinn veneration has been associated with the Firoz Shah Kotla for almost a century, Taneja says: ‘We can think of the dargah of the jinn-saints making possible the reformation of community in the aftermath of violence. It was only in 1977, a few months after the end of the Emergency, that we have the first record of people starting to come to Firoz Shah Kotla in large numbers. This seems significant, given how destructive the Emergency was for the Old City and how many poor and working class people were displaced from the Old City to resettlement colonies across the river’.

Though the age and gender of the supplicants varies there’s a marked prevalence of women, especially younger women as they usually have the most difficult time coping within the rigid social structure of many Indian families. Some of these women subconsciously believe themselves to be possessed by spirits.