Baba Umer Dargah, Solapur

Baba Umer Dargah is an Islamic shrine in Solapur, Maharashtra, known for an unusual custom: infants are let fall from a platform about 15 metres high into a cloth stretched out by men below, both Muslim and Hindu.

The practice is reckoned to be five to seven hundred years old. According to the story behind it, a pir told families losing their babies to put up a shrine and drop the sick children from its roof as a sign of their faith in God, and the infants are said to have been caught safely by a sheet that appeared in midair.