Place · Nath jogi hill retreat · Pakistan
Tillā Jogiān
The highest point of the eastern Salt Range, and for centuries the chief Nath jogi establishment of the Punjab, attached to Gorakhnāth and used for the forty-day retreat that gives the order its discipline. Guru Nanak is held by janamsakhi tradition to have sat here. The monastery's tanks, cells and shrines stand abandoned on the summit among the pines the British planted. It is the one Nath centre west of the Ravi that entered Punjabi literature rather than only Nath texts.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 32.861, 73.440
Worth knowing
Ranjha comes to this hill to have his ears split and take the jogi's ochre in Waris Shah's Heer, so a Nath monastery in the Salt Range is a plot point in the central love story of Punjabi.
Connections (3)
- Canonised by textHeer (Wāris Shāh)
Ranjhā goes to Tillā Jogiān in Wāris Shāh's Heer to have his ears split, take the ochre and come back as a jogi, which is how he reaches Heer after she has been married away. The poem therefore sends its hero to a real Nath monastery on the highest hill of the eastern Salt Range, whose tanks and cells can still be walked through. Punjabi audiences knew the place as a functioning establishment, so the disguise had an address, and the episode is the pivot on which the qissa turns.
- Pitha network withGor Khatri, Peshawar
Two Nath sites west of the Ravi, and between them most of what the order left in the north-west. Tillā Jogiān on the Salt Range was the chief Punjabi establishment, used for the forty-day retreat that gives the discipline its shape, and janamsakhi tradition puts Guru Nanak on the hill in conversation with its jogis. Gor Khatri in Peshawar held a Gorakhnāth temple built under Sikh rule on ground that may have been Nath much earlier. The Naths were the one ascetic order that held the whole corridor from Peshawar to Gorakhpur.
- Life routeGuru Nanak
Janamsakhi tradition takes Guru Nanak to Tillā Jogiān to argue with the Nath jogis, and the Siddh Gosht — the long dialogue with the Siddhas in the Guru Granth Sahib — is the literary form that encounter takes. Whether he climbed this particular hill is narrative rather than documented, but the argument is real and central: Nanak's rejection of withdrawal, ash and ear-rings in favour of the householder's life is worked out against exactly the practice that Tillā Jogiān existed to maintain.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Tilla Jogian”. Punjab archaeology department records; Waris Shah, Heer; janamsakhi tradition for the Nanak association.
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