Saints and Sovereigns: Sacred Urbanism in the Formation of Medieval Srinagar

Abstract

The emergence of Srinagar as a medieval urban centre cannot be explained solely through the frameworks of political authority or dynastic ambition. Instead, it is better understood as the outcome of a process in which sovereignty, spirituality, and spatial practices were continuously negotiated. This study argues that Srinagar’s urban formation developed through the interaction between Sultanate and Mughal governance and the diffusion of Sufi networks, each shaping and legitimizing the other. While state structures provided the administrative and infrastructural foundations of urban growth, they alone cannot account for the city’s cultural coherence. Sufi institutions—particularly khanqahs, shrines, and itinerant networks—reconfigured the city into a sacred urban landscape, functioning as centres of devotion, social interaction, and knowledge production. Engaging with debates on Indo-Islamic urban formations, this study moves beyond rigid typologies of the “Islamic city” and instead approaches urban space as historically produced and culturally mediated. Within this framework, Srinagar emerges as a distinctive example of sacred urbanism, where sovereignty is sacralised through proximity to spiritual authority and sanctity is spatialized through everyday practices. By foregrounding the relationship between power and piety, the paper demonstrates that Srinagar’s urban morphology cannot be separated from the spiritual imaginaries that shaped it. The city therefore appears not merely as a site of governance or economic exchange, but as a lived archive of cultural production where political legitimacy, religious devotion, and spatial practice converge.