Place · Mughal-era village & shrine cluster · Pakistan
Saidpur, Islamabad
Also known as Saidpur Village, Fatehpur Baoli, Ram Kund
Saidpur is a village in a ravine of the Margalla Hills, founded in 1530 as Fatehpur Baoli and renamed after Said Khan Gakhar, to whom Akbar granted it for the Gakhars' service against Sher Shah Suri. Raja Man Singh visited in 1580 and made it a Hindu site, building ponds named after Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman; a gurdwara was later built beside the Rama temple. Since 2006 the Capital Development Authority has run it as a heritage village.
- Date
- 1530–None
- Function
- Other / mixed
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 33.742, 73.068
Worth knowing
Hindus held that Rama and his family drank from Ram Kund during their exile, and records of 1893 note a yearly fair there. The temple has had no worship since 1947 and served as a girls' school from 1960 to 2006.
About the place
Placed at the coordinates given on the Wikipedia article.
The Rama tradition is local legend, and the identification of Saidpur with the village 'beyond Rawalpindi' where Jahangir says he stayed is a belief rather than a certainty.
Connections (4)
- Site withinIslamabad
Saidpur is a village and union council in a ravine of the Margalla Hills inside the Islamabad Capital Territory, beside the Daman-e-Koh overlook. The planned capital grew up around it, and from 2006 the Capital Development Authority spent 400 million rupees remodelling it as an arts and crafts village, refurbishing its mud houses, cleaning its stream and opening a museum of old photographs of Islamabad, so that a sixteenth-century settlement became one of the modern city's main heritage sights.
- PatronageRaja Man Singh I
Raja Man Singh, Akbar's Kachhwaha commander, visited Saidpur in 1580 and, according to the village's history, set it up as a place of Hindu worship. Ponds were built and named after figures of the Ramayana, Rama Kunda, Sita Kunda, Lakshman Kunda and Hanuman Kunda, and temples were raised, among them the small Ram Kund temple that survives. Hindus from Rawalpindi gathered there to celebrate Baisakhi, and an 1893 record notes a yearly fair at the pond where Rama was believed to have drunk.
- Traditional linkJahangir
Saidpur takes its name from Said Khan Gakhar, son of the Pothohar chief Sultan Sarang Khan, to whom Akbar transferred the village for the Gakhars' service against Sher Shah Suri. Said Khan's daughter married Akbar's son Salim, the future Jahangir, and her father gave her Saidpur as a wedding gift. Jahangir's memoir, the Tuzk-i-Jahangiri, mentions a stay at a village beyond Rawalpindi on the road to Kabul, then a garden resort watered by a spring, which is believed to be Saidpur.
- Site adjacencyFaisal Mosque, Islamabad
Saidpur and the Faisal Mosque both lie along the foot of the Margalla Hills on the northern edge of Islamabad, about three kilometres apart, and the Daman-e-Koh viewpoint beside Saidpur's ravine looks down on the mosque. The pairing sets the oldest and the newest of the capital's landmarks side by side: a village founded in 1530 and made a Hindu pilgrimage site in 1580, and the national mosque designed in 1969 and completed in 1986.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Saidpur, Islamabad".
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