The dervish’s begging bowl in the collection of Mumbai’s Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum bears inscriptions from the Quran in Nastaliq script and mystical poetry in Persian, and is made from one-half of the shell of the Coco de Mer or “coconut of the sea”, a species of palm found in the Seychelles.

The entry on the object in Mumbai: A City Through Objects (Harper Design) launching tomorrow and edited by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, Managing Trustee and Honorary Director of the museum, informs how these bowls were associated with wandering Sufi preachers in India active between the 12th and 14th centuries. Moreover, Bombay played an important part in spreading Sufi teachings, with Worli’s Haji Ali Dargah of Sufi saint Haji Ali Bukhari being one of the city’s most visited Sufi sites. “Very few people know that Mumbai was a Sufi centre,” says Zakaria Mehta, “It is not just that an object is beautiful… What were their makers going through, what were their stories and how did they [in turn] impact the objects,” she insists, are what engage the ordinary reader.