Place · qasba & train-action site · India
Kākorī
Also known as Kakori
A qasba near Lucknow with two quite separate claims on the record: it is associated with Bhikhan, two of whose hymns are in the Guru Granth Sahib, and it is the station where in August 1925 members of the Hindustan Republican Association stopped the 8-Down train and took the government treasury chest.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Bhagat bani in the Guru Granth Sahib
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.830, 80.770 (approximate)
Worth knowing
Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Roshan Singh and Rajendra Lahiri were hanged for the robbery in 1927. Bismil and Ashfaqulla, a Hindu and a Muslim who wrote Urdu verse together and were executed within days of each other, became the standard nationalist example of what the movement wanted to be.
Connections (3)
- Scriptural inclusion inHarmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple)
Bhikhan, associated with Kakori near Lucknow, has two hymns in the Granth, and he is usually identified as a Sufi. A small qasba in Awadh therefore carries a node of a Punjabi scripture, which is the pattern throughout the bhagat bani: the compilers gathered verse from wherever they judged it true, and the resulting geography runs from Bengal to Sindh and from Punjab to Maharashtra.
- Silsila lineageHazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi
Bhikhan of Kākorī is usually identified with a Sufi shaikh of the Chishti line, which would make two of the fifteen bhagats Chishtis. Kākorī is a small qasba near Lucknow and almost nothing else about him survives — the Granth preserves a voice its own century had already nearly lost.
- Site withinLucknow
Kākorī lies within Lucknow — the two sites sit about 18 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Kākorī is one of the specific sites that give Lucknow its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kakori”. Kakori conspiracy trial records, National Archives of India; and for Bhikhan, the bhagat bāṇī of the Guru Granth Sahib.
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