Nizamuddin Auliya settled outside the walls of the sultan's Delhi and kept his distance from it for fifty years. His hospice ran a kitchen that fed whoever came, took no grants from the court, and made a point of accepting gifts only from those with no expectation attached. The Chishti order he led held that a master should not visit rulers, and the stories that gathered around him turn on that refusal; the most quoted, when a sultan was marching back to punish him, has him answer that Delhi is still far off, which it proved to be.
His closest companion was Amir Khusrau, a poet at several courts who wrote in Persian and in the emerging speech of the region, and whose name is attached in tradition to forms of devotional singing and to particular instruments. He is buried a few steps from his master, at the master's own instruction.
The shrine has therefore carried a musical tradition as well as a devotional one for seven hundred years. Hereditary families of qawwals perform at the tomb on Thursday evenings and at the annual urs, and the repertoire mixes Persian, Braj and Urdu texts. The dargah draws Muslims and Hindus alike, and the practice of visiting saints' tombs that it embodies is precisely what reformist movements within Islam reject, so the shrine sits at the centre of an argument as well as at the centre of a devotion. Access to the inner chamber remains closed to women, a restriction that has been contested in Indian courts in relation to other shrines.