Place · Sikh gurdwara town · Pakistan
Kartārpur Sāhib
Also known as Guru Nanak, Guru Nanak (last years), Kartarpur, Kartarpur Sahib (Pakistan)
The town across the Ravi river from Dera Baba Nanak in Narowal district, Pakistani Punjab, where Guru Nanak settled around 1521 after his four udasis, farmed the land, and died in 1539. Here the institutions of Sikhism — langar (community kitchen), sangat (congregation) and pangat (shared seating across caste) — took institutional shape under his daily life. The Gurdwara Darbar Sahib on the Pakistani side of the border is one of the holiest Sikh sites. The November 2019 Kartarpur Corridor opened a visa-free four-kilometre pilgrim passage from Dera Baba Nanak, India, to the shrine — the only such religious pilgrim corridor between the two states.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Janamsakhi tradition; Sikh institutional history
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 32.033, 75.000
Connections (4)
- Journey legNankāna Sāhib
From birth at Nankana Sahib to the working settlement at Kartarpur on the Ravi, where Nanak farmed for his last eighteen years and where langar and sangat took institutional form — everybody eating together in one line regardless of caste, and the community assembling to sing. Both sites are in Pakistan; Kartarpur has been reachable from India since 2019 by a visa-free corridor, which took seventy years to arrange.
- Guru Nanak lifeNankāna Sāhib
Nanak was born at Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib, in 1469 and spent his last eighteen years farming at Kartarpur, where he died in 1539 — with the travelling in between. The two ends of the life are about a hundred and forty kilometres apart, and the institution he left was not a doctrine so much as a settlement with a free kitchen, a daily assembly and a successor chosen for merit rather than birth.
- Route adjacencyKalika Devi, Kalka
Kalka is where the plain ends and the hills begin, which is why the narrow-gauge railway to Shimla starts beneath the temple — built 1898 to 1903 with a hundred and two tunnels to carry the colonial government to its summer capital. A pilgrimage halt became a railhead for the same reason it was a halt.
- Monastic foundationGuru Nanak
Kartārpur is where the travelling stopped and the institution began: a working farm, a langar in which everyone sat in one line to eat, a daily sangat, and a successor chosen for service rather than birth. The Sikh tradition is what Nanak did in his last fifteen years, not on the roads.
On these journeys
Sources
Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur
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