Journey

Punjab before partition — five rivers, one landscape

Stops (18)

1. Bahāuddin Zakariya & Rukn-e-Ālam · 13th c.

   The Suhrawardi order's Punjab seat, on the Chenab. Bahāuddin Zakariya of Multan built one of the earliest Sufi khanqahs in the subcontinent here in the thirteenth century; his descendant Rukn-e-Ālam's octagonal tiled tomb of 1320 stands beside it. Multan is the oldest continuously inhabited city of the Punjab, and its ceramic-tile blue-and-white tradition — from Rukn-e-Ālam onward — became the visual signature of southern Punjab.

2. Uch Sharīf · 13th–15th c.

   A Suhrawardi and Qadiri dargah complex where the Sutlej meets the Chenab. Uch became a Sufi crossroads because it sat at the water confluence and on the caravan road from Sindh into the upper Punjab. Jalaluddin Bukhari, Makhdum Jahaniyan and the Bibi Jawindi tombs are here on separate mounds within a mile of each other — a rare cluster of glazed-tile Timurid architecture on the subcontinent.

3. Pākpattan (Ajodhan) · 13th c.

   The Chishti master Bābā Farīd whose Punjabi verses became the oldest material in the Guru Granth Sāhib — one shrine standing inside two scriptures. Pākpattan sat on the Sutlej crossing on the trade route from Multan to Delhi; the annual urs at the darvāza-i-bahisht draws pilgrims from both sides of the border, and Sikh sangats visit the shrine as they visit the gurdwaras. Farid taught Nizāmuddīn Auliyā of Delhi.

4. Katās Rāj · Puranic to medieval

   A Shaiva temple complex on the Salt Range, arranged around a spring-fed tank Shiva is said to have filled with his tears at Sati's death. The Mahabharata sets Yudhishthira's Yaksha Prashna at this pond. The seven temples are seventh-to-tenth century, in the pre-Islamic western-Punjab style; Hindu Shahi coins have been found in the complex, and it functioned as a stop on the pilgrim road between Kashmir and the plains.

5. Panjā Sāhib, Hasan Abdal · 16th c.

   Guru Nanak's handprint pressed into the rock at Hasan Abdal, at the point where a spring is said to have burst from the mountainside when a Muslim saint threw a boulder at him. The Sikh anchor on the road up to Peshawar, and the westernmost Sikh pilgrimage that the Kartarpur Corridor's opening in 2019 does not reach. Nanak passed through Hasan Abdal on his third udasi, going west and returning east.

6. Nankāna Sāhib · 1469 CE

   Guru Nanak's birthplace and the repository's origin point for Sikhi. Then a small village called Talwandi Rai Bhoi Ki, Nankana Sahib now holds nine gurdwaras marking the events of his childhood — where he first argued with Brahmins over the sacred thread, where he sat with cobras giving shade, where the school stood. The Punjab government left Nankana Sahib functional after 1947 and it remains a live pilgrimage for Indian Sikhs.

7. Kartārpur Sāhib · 1522–39 CE

   Where Nanak spent his last twenty years farming a plot on the Ravi, and where langar and sangat first took institutional shape as daily practices rather than ideas. Both Hindu and Muslim disciples buried and cremated him here — half the samadhi held ashes, the other half a grave. The Kartarpur Corridor of 2019 lets Indian Sikh pilgrims cross the Punjab border visa-free for the day to visit the shrine.

8. Lahore Fort & Shalimar · 1566–1673 CE

   The Mughal Punjab capital, midway between the western and eastern edges of the province. Akbar's fort of 1566, Jahangir and Nur Jahan's tombs at Shahdara across the Ravi, Shah Jahan's Shalimar of 1642 and Aurangzeb's Badshahi mosque of 1673 all sit within a mile of each other on the Grand Trunk Road. Lahore was governed as the Punjab's imperial anchor for a century and a half before Ranjit Singh took it in 1799.

9. Data Darbār, Lahore · 11th c. onwards

   Hujwīrī's shrine, the earliest and largest Sufi urs in the subcontinent. Ali Hujwīrī, an eleventh-century Ghaznavid immigrant whose Kashf al-Mahjub is the first Persian treatise on Sufism, is buried in Lahore's old city; his shrine draws the biggest Chishti gathering north of Ajmer, and generations of Punjabi qawwals — including the Sabri Brothers and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — recorded regularly at Data Darbār. His Persian text was translated into Urdu locally.

10. Wazir Khan Mosque, Lahore · 1634 CE

    Seventeenth-century Punjab's most ornate mosque, tiled in kashi-kari blue and yellow floral panels of a kind associated with the Multani ateliers. Wazir Khan was Shah Jahan's viceroy at Lahore. The building sits inside the walled city on the road from Delhi Gate to Lahore Fort, and its tiled screens are the last major surviving example of the western-Punjab tile tradition that runs south to Multan and Uch.

11. Attari · 1947 CE

    The line that cut the Punjab in half, drawn across the Grand Trunk Road. Cyril Radcliffe's award of 17 August 1947 split West Punjab from East Punjab along a line running through Lahore, Amritsar and Ferozepur; the resulting migration corridor at Wagah–Attari saw eight to ten million people cross in six weeks, with mortality estimates from a few hundred thousand up to two million. The ceremonial evening flag-lowering here dates from 1959.

12. Harmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple) · 1577 CE

    Sikhi's centre on the eastern side of the partitioned Punjab. The Harmandir Sāhib complex was founded by the fourth Guru Rām Dās in 1577 at a natural tank, expanded by the fifth Guru Arjan who compiled the Ādi Granth here in 1604, and rebuilt after Ahmad Shah Abdali's destruction in 1762. The Guru Granth Sāhib is read continuously; the langar feeds tens of thousands daily; and April 1919's Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place adjoining it.

13. Baba Bakala · 1664 CE

    Where the ninth Guru Tegh Bahādur was selected among the many claimants after Guru Har Krishan's death — the succession's Punjab moment. Har Krishan had told his sangat "Bābā Bakāla" as he died in Delhi; when the sangat came to Baba Bakala they found twenty-two men claiming to be Guru. Bhai Makhan Shah Lubana tested them all, and Tegh Bahādur — sitting in silence in a room in his mother's house — was identified as the true successor.

14. Khadur Sahib, Tarn Taran · 16th c.

    The second and third Gurus' seat before Amritsar was founded. Guru Angad codified the Gurmukhi script here around 1540 for the writing of Nanak's verses; Guru Amar Das ran the free kitchen here for two decades before Ram Das established Ramdaspur (later Amritsar). Khadur Sahib is where the Guru's kitchen was first regularised into a daily community practice, and the langar as an institution rather than an idea takes shape here.

15. Anandpur Sāhib · 1699 CE

    Where Guru Gobind Singh instituted the Khalsa on Baisakhi, 30 March 1699, initiating the first five volunteers into the double-edged sword and giving Sikhi its distinctive form and its five kakars. Anandpur is one of the five Takhts and the takht where the Guru held court through the last decade of his life at Anandpur, before Aurangzeb's siege of 1704 forced his withdrawal south. Hola Mohalla is celebrated here every March.

16. Damdamā Sāhib, Talwandi Sabo · 1706 CE

    Where Guru Gobind Singh dictated the final recension of the Granth in 1706 — the textual centre of the tradition. Damdamā Sāhib is the fifth Takht, and the Guru's editorial work at this scriptorium is the reason the Granth includes the ninth Guru Tegh Bahādur's hymns. It was here, not at Anandpur, that the Sikh scripture reached its closed textual form; Bhai Mani Singh was the scribe.

17. Qila Mubarak, Patiala · 18th–19th c.

    The Sikh princely capital that survived partition on the Indian side and kept its court aesthetic intact. Patiala was one of the Phulkian states of eastern Punjab under Maharaja Ala Singh from 1763, and the Qila Mubarak inside the town holds the Durbar Hall, the arms collection, the paintings of the Ala Singh line and the state records. The Patiala rulers were Sikhs who patronised Hindustani classical music and the Patiala gharana grew here.

18. Sheesh Mahal, Patiala · 19th c.

    The Patiala court's mirror-work palace, built in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Punjab-court aesthetic that borrowed heavily from Rajput and Mughal precedents. The palace's Medal Gallery holds the largest collection of gilt medals in Asia. Sheesh Mahal sits within the same complex as Qila Mubarak and gives the eastern Punjab a Sikh-Rajput-Mughal architectural counterpart to what the Lahore Fort represents on the western side of the border.

Sources

• Wikipedia