On many weekends Wliayat Ali and his group took time off from their professional and domestic chores to gather together in Bara Banki. For this they used the loop line of the Awadh and Rhilkhand railway system. It ran from the erstwhile Nawabi capitalto Faizabad, the city founded by Saadat Ali Khan (1772-39) and refurbished by Safdar Jang (vazir from 1748 until 1753), and Banaras, traversed the district from west to east, and passed throguh Bara Banki, Rasauli, Safdarganj, Dariabad, Makhdumpur, Rauzagaon, and Rudauli. En route, they visited the shrine of Shah Abdur Razzaq (1636-1724) at Bansa, who not only won the recognition of his contemporaries but who exerted after his death one of the most powerful influences in Awadh spiritual history. His shrine, a nucleus of ascetic pietism, shelters the devotee, Hindu and Muslim alike, from disease and mental ailments, and offers a place where one seeks refuge from the pressures of everyday life. In the 1870s, the urs at Bansa attracted as many as five thousand devotees. The Shah’s twenty-three immediate successors included at least three members of the Kidwai, and six of the Farangi Mahal family. sitting cross-legged at one of the shrines, they may well have repeated the following lines:

I stood by the Reformer’s tomb: that dust
Whence here below an orient splendour breaks,
Dust before whose least speck stars hang their heads,
Dust shrouding that high knower of things unknown. (Iqbal)

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Excerpted from “Pluralism to Seperatism Qasbas in Colonial Awadh”
Mushirul Hasan - Oxford University Press