Place · border village & crossing · India

Attari

Also known as Attari village

Function

Military & resistance

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

31.605, 74.623

Connections (7)

• Site adjacencyHarmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple)

  The Radcliffe line came down between Lahore and Amritsar, thirty miles apart, and the Wagah–Attari crossing is the one road left open through it. The Golden Temple became the receiving point for Sikh refugees from west Punjab through the autumn of 1947, feeding and housing tens of thousands in the parikrama. The daily flag ceremony now performed at the border, to cheering crowds on both sides, is held at the point the columns actually crossed.

• Mythic displacement toSadh Belo, Sukkur

  Most of the congregation left in 1947, and the shrine's life is now organised around their return. Sindhi Hindus who went to Ulhasnagar, Ahmedabad and Jaipur come back for the annual mela on visas issued in limited numbers, so the island's largest crowds are a diaspora's, arriving through the same border machinery that Wagah stands for. It is one of the few shrines in Pakistan whose principal congregation lives in another country and is admitted to it by quota.

• AnalogueRed Fort, Muzaffarabad

  Two places where the division of 1947 stopped being an argument and became a line. At Wagah the Punjab boundary was drawn through cultivated country and the corridor became the one official crossing, with the refugee columns going both ways through it that autumn. Muzaffarabad is where the Kashmir question was settled by force in October 1947, when tribal fighters entering from the frontier took the town and the Maharaja signed accession to India in response. The fort on the confluence became a border post of the resulting ceasefire line.

• AnalogueTorkham & the Durand Line

  Two borders, fifty-four years apart, and the difference is what each was drawn for. The Durand Line of 1893 was a limit of imperial responsibility, agreed between a British negotiator and an Afghan amir, and it cut through Pashtun and Baloch tribal territory without anybody pretending it divided peoples. Radcliffe's line of 1947, which Wagah sits on, was drawn to divide peoples and did so in six weeks. One is disputed by the state on its far side and crossed daily as local custom; the other is recognised by both states and nearly shut.

• Border crossingWagah

  Attari (India) and Wagah (Pakistan) are the two villages on either side of the only road crossing between the two Punjab halves, 500 metres apart on the Grand Trunk Road. Since 1959 the Indian Border Security Force and the Pakistan Rangers have performed a daily sunset Beating Retreat / flag-lowering ceremony — a tightly-choreographed mirror routine of high-step marches, long moustaches and synchronised flag-dipping that draws thousands of spectators on both sides every evening. It is the longest-running continuously performed international border ritual in the world, and the single most visible site of the India-Pakistan relationship.

• Site adjacencyAmritsar

  Attari village sits 32 km west of Amritsar city on the Grand Trunk Road — outside the city itself but within its taluk, and the city is Attari’s nearest urban anchor. The daily Beating Retreat crowds and the Samjhauta Express rail service both terminate at Attari before continuing into Pakistan at Wagah.

• Life routeNawaz Sharif

  Nawaz Sharif crossed to Attari in 1999 to receive the Vajpayee bus delegation and later for the SAARC exchanges around the Lahore Declaration — the one head-of-government crossing in the Attari-Wagah corridor's post-Partition history.

On these journeys

• The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
• The frontier — the Durand Line and the Pashtun century
• Decolonisation, partition and integration
• Punjab before partition — five rivers, one landscape

Sources

Standard reference.

• Wikipedia — Attari