'Alakh Niranjan!'

Very recently, while struggling up Mount Girnar in Gujarat (the last post here), I heard a high pitched devotional song played from a road side stall. The refrain went:
"Alakh Niranjan Alakh Niranjan
Alakh Niranjan Girnari!"
That reminded me: not very long back, I had read the tragic story of Heer and Ranjha in Wikipedia; and there I had first encountered the Mantra: 'Alakh Niranjan'.

Wikipedia gives the meaning of this Mantra as: "Alakh means "that which is not seen" and niranjan means "without any stains.". It is implied that 'alakh' is a derivative of the Sanskrit word 'alakshya', the opposite of 'lakshya'. 'lakshya' is taken to mean 'target' or 'goal' but literally it could perhaps mean 'an object being seen'. 'Anjana' is a kind of black stone (with a high antimony content) and could also mean 'black spot' or 'stain'. So 'niranjana' could mean 'stainless', 'pure' that is.

So, the mantra could just be the join of two attributes of the divine: 'invisible' ('subtle'?) and 'pure'.

But there is another possible analysis: 'Alakh' could be derived from 'Allah'. So 'Alakh Niranjan' could mean the full declaration: "God is Pure(Purity)". And this derivation actually seems likelier - the Mantra is popular in and probably originated in Punjab and Sindh and the popular religion of both regions has been a very syncretic cocktail of Hinduism and Islam over most of the last Millennium (Sikhism is of course, the most remarkable of the many - often overlapping - belief systems which crystallized from this mix of faiths and cults). And phonetically, the sounds 'ha' and 'kha' are close and interchangeable, so 'Allah' could very naturally have become 'Alakh'.

The connection between 'Alakh Niranjan' and 'Girnari' is not difficult to piece together. One of the peaks of Mount Girnar has a shrine dedicated to Gorakhnath, a near mythical saint, whose legends have an all-North India (and well beyond) presence. And the 'Alakh Niranjan' mantra is believed to have been created by him. It is widely believed Gorakhnath initiated Jhulelal, the patron saint of Sindh (difficult to classify him as either Hindu or Sufi) into the mysteries of this mantra. And love-lorn Ranjha, Muslim hero of the Heer-Ranjha epic, turns a fakir/jogi, meets this same Master and finds solace in this very mantra. The word 'Girnari' could mean 'the lord of Girnar' and could refer to Gorakhnath himself.

Dattatreya, who 'owns' another peak of Girnar, has very similar syncretic credentials - over a wide swathe of India have flourished Hindu saints and Sufis (especially of the 'Mast Qalandar' type) believed to be incarnations of this Master (who in turn was the incarnation/amalgamation of all the 'Trimurtis'!). This impressive list of holy men features the Swami of Akkalkot, Baba Budan ( credited with bringing coffee cultivation to Chikmagalur, Karnataka) and more recently, and most famously, the Sai Baba of Shirdi.

At least one guide book says Girnar contains the Dargah of a sufi saint. I could find no tomb there; it may well lie hidden beneath one of the temples; and memories of the saint himself might have merged into Datta or Gorakhnath (or both).