Place · Udasi island math · Pakistan
Sadh Belo, Sukkur
An island in the Indus at Sukkur given over entirely to a monastery. Baba Bankhandi Maharaj, an ascetic said to have come from Nepal, founded the math in 1823, and it grew into a complex of temples, a library and some fifty rooms covering the rock. The order is Udasi, the renunciate lineage that traces itself to Baba Sri Chand, Guru Nanak's elder son, and which sat across the line later drawn between Sikh and Hindu. It remains the principal Hindu shrine of upper Sindh.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.694, 68.879
Worth knowing
Most of the congregation left in 1947, so the island's largest crowds are now a diaspora's: Sindhi Hindus travel from India on visa quotas for the annual mela, and the boats to the island fill with people returning to a shrine they do not live near.
Connections (3)
- Institutional successionGuru Nanak
The math on the island is Udasi, the renunciate order that traces itself to Bābā Sri Chand, Guru Nanak's elder son, who took to asceticism when his father's teaching was for the householder. The Udasis consequently sat across the line later drawn between Sikh and Hindu: they kept the Granth and the Nanak lineage while running maths with images and ash-smeared celibates, and they held many of the historic gurdwaras until the Akali reform movement took them back in the 1920s. Sadh Belo is the order's principal surviving seat in Sindh.
- Shared sacred geographySindhu / Indus
The monastery is the river's. Bābā Bankhandi chose an island in the Indus at Sukkur in 1823 and the complex covers the whole rock, so the approach is by boat and the shrine is surrounded by the water it is dedicated among — a siting that belongs to the same Sindhi religious sense of the Indus as a person that produces Jhulelal at Odero Lal. Upstream and downstream, the other islands at Sukkur carry related establishments, and the barrage built in 1932 changed the channel around all of them.
- Mythic displacement toAttari
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.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sadh Belo”. Michel Boivin, Historical Dictionary of the Sufi Culture of Sindh; Sindh auqaf and Evacuee Trust Property Board records.
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