Earlier in the summer I recorded a podcast with Realms of Memory. There are two episodes for those interested in understanding more about the history of Partition, especially how it impacted the Punjab. The talk was based on my book, ‘From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Partition’ published by Cambridge University Press (2018). In the podcast I also discuss some of the recent changes that have taken place in the study in Partition.
You can listen to the podcast via most streaming sites, or via Realms of Memory
This account has rekindled memories of visiting the Rock Gardens in Chandigarh. I have pre-digital age photographs and will share those on my blog but this is a wonderful piece on the unique history of Nek Chand.
The Nek Chand Rock Gardens had been on our radar for a long time before we finally made it there. Located in the city of Chandigarh, at the foot of …
When we visualise India’s Partition of 1947, we almost always do so through the images of Margaret Bourke-White. For the past seven decades, her images have saturated the cover of numerous books, newspaper articles, magazine features, documentaries et al related to Partition. She was, of course, one of the most iconic photographers of the last century. Born in 1904 (d. 1971) in New York City and raised in rural New Jersey, she was the daughter of Joseph White (who was of Jewish descent from Poland) and Minnie Bourke, an Irish Orthodox Catholic. Joseph was an inventor and engineer and perhaps thus an early influence on his daughter’s eventual interest.
This interest matched the tenor of those times, as Henry R Luce, the publisher tycoon realising the potential of photography, felt that America was ready for a magazine that documented events the through photographs. In 1936, Luce bought Life magazine and relaunched it, with Bourke-White becoming one of the first photojournalist to be offered a berth there (Kapoor: 13). America then was in the midst of the Great Depression and Bourke-White ‘took to documentary photography in order to disseminate the idea of inconvenient truth’ for a readership of 2.86 million people (Bhullar: 301).
In India, she is primarily known for her photographs that captured the Partition-related violence and migration, as it ushered in the new dawn of independence. Her photographic essay, The Great Migration: Five Million Indians Flee for Their Lives, was published in Life magazine on 3 November 1947. It had commissioned her to cover the exchange of populations that was taking place across the plains of the divided Punjab and she writes thus what she saw: “All roads between India and Pakistan were choked with streams of refugees. In scenes reminiscent of the Biblical times, hordes of displaced people trudged across the newly created borders to an uncertain future” (Kapoor: 14).
Recently, in 2010, Pramod Kapoor published Witness to life and freedom:Margaret Bourke-White in India & Pakistan with a reprint of over 100 of her photographs. Kapoor wrote about them thus: “They offer a kind of stately, classical view of misery, of humanity at its most wretched, yet somehow noble, somehow beautiful”. His book gives us into a glimpse beyond the frames. Bourke-White had arrived in India in March 1946 and travel around documenting low life and high people: “She was there to photograph Gandhi at his spinning wheel. She was there to photograph Jinnah with his fez. And soon after, both men were to meet their Maker” (Kapoor: 14). Her frames on them served to reinforce their pervading stereotypes of the saint and shrewd. Kapoor details:
“Margaret photographed Gandhi many times afterward. He called her, fondly, she thought, ‘the torturer’. His inconsistencies puzzled her rational mind; it was not until she saw his self-sacrificing bravely in the face of India’s convulsive violence that she began to think him akin to the saint she made him out to be with her camera. She also photographed Mohammed Ali Jinnah; whose features were as sharp as the creases in his western business suits. Jinnah would almost single-handedly bring about the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan”.
Bourke-White documented the aftermath of the so-called Direct-Action Day in August 1946, which was announced by Jinnah following the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan. Her photographs of the riots in Calcutta then are sometimes confused with the images she took following the Partition, a year later. The article ‘The Vultures of Calcutta’ featured in the 9 September 1946 issue of Life, showing vultures waiting to prey on the bodies of dead victims was later, intermittently and inaccurately, used for depicting the carnage in August 1947.
Vicki Goldberg, the biographer of Bourke-White, writes that when she heard about the Calcutta Riots, Bourke-White immediately flew to Calcutta, and “badgered photographer Max Desfor (1913-2018), the first foreigner to photograph the aftermath of the riots, to tell her where to find the most carnage. While others were sickened by the sight of the bodies, Bourke-White kept working and wrote the scene reminded her of concentration camps in Germany: “the ultimate result of racial and religious prejudice” (Forbes: 7). Desfor’s images were not published by the Associated Press because they were “too revolting for its readers”. Bourke-White’s comrade was Lee Eitingon, a Life reporter based in India, in whose words, “Both of us were whatever the female equivalent of macho is. The smells were so terrible, the officers accompanying us would have handkerchiefs over their faces. We would not…that was part of the time and the period. Being women, we had to be tougher” (Kapoor: 27).
Much of Bourke-White’s archive are housed in Syracuse University’s Bird Library Special Collections section. Here “one can find some of the original photos that include the British soldiers who accompanied Bourke-White and Lee Eitingon” but, as Forbes notes, “the soldiers were cropped from the published pictures”, which dramatically changes the visual narrative (12). It now appears that Bourke-White staged photographs: “Eitingon wrote about her directing a group of starving Sikh refugees…to go back again and again”. She adds, “they were too frightened to say no. They were dying”. When Eitingon protested, Bourke-White told her “to give them money!” (Forbes: 11-12). Even Patrick French writes about how some of these images were staged. When the contact sheets were discovered, they provided an insight into the wider context in which these photographs were being taken. Some of this approach of a pushy, zealous and ambitious American, has been noted in the writing of Claude Cookman. In his examination of how Bourke-White and her French counterpart Henry Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) approached the coverage of Gandhi’s funeral he notes:
“Flash had become a contentious issue in Bourke-White’s coverage of Gandhi. She had used a flash bulb to make her famous portrait of Gandhi by his spinning wheel. Gandhi…tolerated the technique, but his inner circle never did. They thought flash was disrespectful, and they feared the bright light would harm his sensitive eyes. Flash became a serious liability for Bourke-White in her coverage of Gandhi’s funeral. With her camera concealed, she slipped into the room, where his body lay surrounded by grieving relatives, supporters and government officials. It was about 6:30 p.m.…When she ignited a flash bulb to make her exposure, his followers became enraged by her violation of their privacy and grief. They seized her camera and threatened to destroy it. Hannah Sen intervened, calming the group. After Bourke-White’s film was removed and exposed to the light, Mrs. Sen escorted her from the room. She returned the camera with the understanding that Bourke-White would leave Birla House and not return. Not one to give up after one rebuff, she reloaded her camera and tried to re-enter the room to get another picture. Eventually, Bourke-White yielded to Mrs. Sen’s pleas to honour her promise and left empty-handed. The stereotype of the rude, aggressive American news photographer, who would trample on anybody’s toes or sensitivities to get the picture was a commonplace during the 1940s…Cartier-Bresson deplored this rough-and-tumble approach to photo-journalism: ‘We are bound to arrive as intruders’, he wrote, ‘it is essential, therefore, to approach the subject on tiptoe. It’s no good jostling or elbowing’. As part of his approach, he rejected artificial lighting: ‘And no photographs taken with the aid of flashlight either, if only out of respect…Unless a photographer observes such conditions as these, he may become an intolerably aggressive character’. When Cartier-Bresson wrote this rejection of flash in 1952, he may well have been recalling Bourke-White’s experience at Gandhi’s wake four years earlier” (Cookman: 200).
Geraldine Forbes also notes the differences between Cartier-Bresson and Bourke-White. The former is less known but his images exude a sensitivity, absent in the work of Bourke-White. Upon receiving a photography award, Bourke-White claimed, “The photographer must know. It is his sacred duty to look on two sides of a question and find the truth”. And she cited her work to reference this point (Kapoor: 26). However, when we look at her work, we rarely observe that her work, almost entirely based on the Punjab migration, has yet been made to stand for Independence/Partition exclusively, without acknowledging the vast and diverse range of experiences. The visual record which is taken as “the truth” is rarely explored critically or contextually, while less said so of the racial-ethnic cultural capital of a white American female to travel freely to photograph this momentous carnage at the end of empire. These were foreign journalists writing for a predominately American and western audience, yet these photographs have come to represent Partition.
References:
Dilpreet Bhullar, ‘The Partition of the Indian Subcontinent Seen through Margaret Bourke-White’s Photographic Essay: ‘The Great Migration: Five Million Indians Flee for their Lives’, Indian Journal of Human Development, (2012) 6 (2): 299-307.
Claude Cookman, ‘Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson: Gandhi’s funeral’, History of Photography 22, no. 2 (1998): 199-209.
Geraldine Forbes, ‘Margaret Bourke-White: Partition for Western Consumption’, In Reappraising the Partition of India edited by K. Mitra and S. Gangopadhyay (Readers Service, 2019), pp. 3-16.
Patrick French, ‘A New Way of Seeing Indian Independence and the Brutal ‘Great Migration’, Time, 14 August 2016.
Vicki Goldberg, A Biography. New York: Harper & Row. 1986.
Pramod Kapoor, Witness to Life and Freedom: Margaret Bourke-White in India & Pakistan. New Delhi: Roli & Janssen. 2010.
Asma Naeem, ‘Partition and the Mobilities of Margaret Bourke-White and Zarina’, American Art 31, no. 2 (2017): 81-88.
I accidentally stumbled across Madhur Jaffrey’s Flavour of India, which is being repeated on BBC iPlayer. I remember watching this when there were hardly any Indian chefs or Indian cooking on mainstream TV, so I decided to watch some of these again…it is a Sunday morning! As I sat through the episode on Punjab, near the end of the programme I was amazed to see her making lamb chops on the Wagah-Attari border. I have crossed this border numerous of times and I have also seen now much it has changed from a leafy road with colonial bungalows acting as the immigration/custom points to a harsh border with a daily dose of jingoism and national pride on full display. These few minutes have just reminded me how much India (and Pakistan) has changed since 1995. I wonder where the BSF walla tasting the lamb chop is today…
Sharing a screen grab from the last page of my book From the Ashes of 1947. Balraj Sahni captured the human tragedy of Partition in this poem, the spectre of which still continues to haunt us everyday. We seem to be unable to be human first.
The role of any democratic country, with a well-defined rule of law, is to protect ALL its citizens, ensuring that their rights and freedoms are safeguarded. It is in fact difficult to imagine these lands without the heterogeneity that forms the essence of being South Asian. It is this vibrancy and diversity that gives it character and strength. To move toward a homogenous culture is not only problematic but also dangerous because it is based on exclusivity.
Extract:
In the midst of the monsoon of August 1947, British India ceased to be and gave way to two independent nations. The logic of this partition being religious and regional, the older and larger India was reinforced as a Hindu majoritarian society, while the newer and smaller Pakistan emerged as an Islamic country. No partitions are total and absolute but this one was especially terrible and ambiguous; it left about a 20 percent religious minority population on both sides. Moreover, it created two wings of Pakistan with a hostile Indian body-politic in the middle.
This event was not entirely of subcontinental making. The British Empire in Asia cracked under the hands of the Japanese army during World War II, most spectacularly with the fall of Singapore in February 1942, and began to crumble in South Asia after the war. Along with India and Pakistan, Burma (today’s Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) also emerged independent (both in 1948) at this time. All this was to bring about many changes, both internally in India and internationally. Europe, the ravaged battlefield of the world wars, ceased to be the center of the Western world, with political and economic power shifting decisively to the Soviet Union and the United States, representing two contrasting and conflicting ideological visions for the post-1945 world.
The end of British rule in South Asia happened alongside the emergence of this conflict, christened the Cold War. The road to freedom and partition of India and the creation of Pakistan was a long one and accompanied with fundamental social, economic, and political changes. From the mutiny of 1857 to the massacre of 1919 in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar; from the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 to the establishment of the All-India Muslim League in 1906; from fighting for king and country in two world wars to seeking self-rule in the interwar years; and from the development of an elaborate civil and military bureaucratic and infrastructural apparatus and a space for provincial politics – all these were to completely transform Indian society.
This transformation and its underlying tensions ultimately contributed to that final moment, when in the middle of August 1947, Britain finally bid farewell to its prized colony after being there in one form or another as traders, marauders, administrators, and rulers for over 300 years. Weakened by World War II, the British were forced to accept the new realities of a determined nationalist struggle and an emerging new world order in which old-fashioned colonialism no longer seemed feasible. The journey toward this reality was slow and painful.
This year, on August 14 and 15, the Pakistani and Indian state and society, respectively, will mark 70 years of freedom. The bulk of both countries will be in celebratory mode as much of them were in 1947. Neither will want to remember the hard history of this freedom, nor face the harsh realities of it today. Back in 1947, Mohammad Ali Jinnah was in Karachi and Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi, both welcoming a new dawn of freedom, but also engulfed in the fear and flames of communal violence. The worst of this was in the partitioned province of the Punjab in North India, where from March 1947 onward in Rawalpindi, communal violence and forced migration of people completely changed the landscape. Over the next year, but largely concentrated in August-December 1947, approximately 1 million were massacred and over 10 million were forced to move from one side of the Radcliffe line to the other. Bengal in East India, the other province to be partitioned, experienced similar, if slower, migration but not murder on the same scale. Other provinces, like Sindh, United Province, Bihar, Assam, Bombay, and the North-Western Frontier Province, also saw religious riots and exchanges of refugee populations.
Partitions are never easy; they are fraught with physical uprooting and dislocation, emotional and psychological separations, and, often, bitter memories of enmities. The partition of British India, though, appeared inescapable in early 1947, once constitutional attempts to secure a confederal arrangement for the Muslims in India to live in a post-colonial Hindu-majority country, without fear, collapsed. The movement for a home for Indian Muslims had gained currency in the interwar period, with poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal’s presidential address to the 25th session of the All-India Muslim League in December 1930, envisioning “a consolidated, North-West Indian Muslim State” amalgamating “the Punjab, North-West Frontier province, Sind, and Baluchistan” and self-governing “within or without the British Empire.” It culminated, almost 10 years later, in March 1940, in the lawyer- politician Jinnah’s speech at another session of the League. Describing Muslims as a “nation,” not merely a community, Jinnah demanded “homeland, territory, and state” for them.
Full article in The Diplomat, Issue 33, August 2017 or contact me.
Punjabi is an Indo-European (or Aryan) language and is the native language of Punjab, a land divided between India and Pakistan. It has approximately 100 million speakers, largely in north India and Pakistan but it is also widely spoken amongst the Punjabi diaspora around the world.
The Partition in 1947 not only divided the province of Punjab but it also divided the language, and this has been the source of much tension in post-47 in both India and Pakistan. Being a phonetic language, Punjabi was/is written largely in three different scripts: the Persian script (sometimes referred as Shahmukhi) is used mostly in Pakistan; Sikhs use the Gurmukhi script and less common is the Devanagari script which is associated with Hindu Punjabis. Punjabi interestingly was never given official state patronage; this is true for the Mughal period, Ranjit Singh’s reign and also under the British. The preferred state or official language was Persian and Urdu. Farina Mir argues that part of the problem under the British colonial period was the plurality of the scripts used to write Punjabi; all three scripts (Indo-Persian, Gurmukhi, and Devanagari) were used but none of them dominated (Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab, London: University of California Press, 2010).
It is not until after 1947 that Punjabi begins to get official state patronage, at least in India that is. It is officially recognised as one of the 22 official state languages in India. In West Punjab (Pakistan), Punjabi is confined largely to an informal language with no official status despite being spoken by the majority of people. And even though the number of Punjabi speakers in Pakistan has been declining over the decades, Punjabi is still the most widely spoken language. East Punjab after the Partition in 1947 was a fragmented province of its former self. It consisted of territory that was an amalgamation of divided Punjab, Patiala and East Punjab States Union (the former princely states), and the Hill States to the north of the province. By the 1950s, a Punjabi Suba (province) movement had started which hoped to create a Punjabi-language state, taking inspiration from the linguistic reorganisation taking place in other parts of India. This is eventually achieved in 1966, with the Punjab Reorganisation Act that created a new state of Haryana and also transferred territory (such as the Hill States) to Himachal Pradesh.
Leading up to this though was of course an enormous amount of discussion and political agitation, so, it is interesting to see some of the initial correspondence between Bhim Sen Sachar, Chief Minister of East Punjab and Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India and Nehru to Vallabhbhai Patel, the Deputy Prime Minister on the question of introducing Punjabi as the medium of instruction in schools.
BS Sachar to Nehru, 9 July 1949 (JN SG 26-I):
‘In my letter [of] 13 May, I referred to the two outstanding demands of the Sikhs, namely (I) representation in services, and (II) Punjabi in Gurmukhi script as the medium of instruction and court language…No compromise on them was considered possible…since then, I have had informal discussions on the language controversy with the Governor, my colleagues, various leaders of public opinion and the general view of government is as below. Before the Partition, Ambala division, excepting Ropar and Kharar tehsils of the Ambala district, spoke Hindustani, while Punjabi was spoken in the rest of the Punjab, barring Kangra district. After it, nearly a million displaced persons from the West Punjab moved into the Ambala division and, therefore, it cannot now be said that all the people [there] speak Hindustani. Nevertheless, the distinction which held good before exists even now, to a lesser a degree. With the gradual elimination of English and Urdu from the province, the question [of] their [replacement] has assumed great importance…the present controversy is not over the language [Punjabi] spoken but the script [Devanagari or Gurmukhi] in which it should be written…The unanimous demand of the Sikhs is that Punjabi in Gurmukhi should be adopted all over the province as medium of instruction, as the official and court language. This would not be acceptable to Hindus in general and especially to the Hindustani-speaking region of the Ambala division and Kangra district of the Jullundur division. It will be unfair to force it on them…The best solution would be to recognise the province as consisting of two distinct linguistic regions, Punjabi and non-Punjabi. Government would agree to the following: (i) Punjabi in Gurmukhi should be the medium of instruction in the Punjabi-speaking region of the province, up to and including the 5th class; (ii) In the Punjabi-speaking region, Hindi should be compulsorily taught as a second language from the 4th class; (iii) Reversal of the same arrangement in the non-Punjabi region; (iv) English and Urdu should for the present continue as the official and court languages. There are differences of opinion on two points: (i) whether girls’ schools should be allowed the option; (ii) whether the existing boundaries of the Jullundur and Ambala divisions should be regarded as correctly [representative]. The Sikhs would not agree to distinguish girls’ schools from boys’ schools…whereas Hindus should be in favour of it…The Sikhs would include the whole of Jullundur division and the whole of Ambala district in the Punjabi-speaking region whereas Hindus would like to exclude Kangra district and three tehsils, Ambala, Naraingarh and Jagadhari, of the Ambala district from it…No agreement on [these] appears to be possible…would be grateful [for your] decision on them’.
Nehru to Patel, 22 July 1949 (JN SG 26-II):
‘Giani Kartar Singh came to see me this morning…on the language issue in East Punjab…I told him that there is no point in our considering the [matter] unless we knew that the parties concerned would abide by our decision…He said that an agreement had been arrived at between the Hindu and Sikh Ministers and the Governor agreed…(1) Punjabi in Gurmukhi, (2) two linguistic areas, (3) Punjabi compulsory from 1st-5th standard in Punjabi area, Hindi vice-versa, (4) from 4th standard upwards, the other language should be compulsory…There was no agreement on the delimitation of linguistic areas. More especially, the Pahari Ilaqa – Sikhs considered as Punjabi areas…another point was Hindus wanted option to be exercised in regard to languages, the Sikhs did not…I made it quite clear that our general policy was against compulsion in regard to choice of the mother-tongue…I further pointed that Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati were well-developed languages…He confessed that Punjabi was not suited for higher education [but] should be used up to the Matriculation… [But] that there was a great deal of feeling behind the Sikh demand…I think some facts have to be obtained about the linguistic divisions of the province but the issue is quite clear…If the Punjabis want two linguistic divisions, they might have them but I just do not see how we can do away with the option of a parent to decide which shall be the mother-tongue…’
These two letters provide a glimpse into the discussions taking place in 1949. However, the two letters from 1951 provide a different lens, especially the DAV College correspondence which is clear that the medium of instruction should be Hindi, despite the considerations of the State Language Policy.
Jullundur City, 3 May 1951, DAV College Managing Committee (Bal Raj, President) To the managers of all the schools in the Punjab under the control of the DAV College Managing Committee (JN SG 92 II):
Please refer to the Punjab Education Department on the State Language Policy in the schools: it is [an] ill-conceived policy…I am to convey to you in very unmistakable language the views of the DAV College Managing Committee vis-a-vis this policy. Our schools should go ahead in their work undeterred by considerations of State Language Policy. To us, teaching of Hindi in our schools is a matter of supreme importance and on this point, there is to be no compromise. We would much rather let our schools face the consequences than submit to any direction from the Education Department, that weakens the position of Hindi in them. In case there is any trouble on this score from Education Department, the schools affected can rely on our fullest support, and we shall see to it that they do not suffer.
In our schools, Hindi will be the medium of instruction for all classes and Punjab will start as optional vernacular from V in place of IV as laid down by the Education Department because we consider its teaching in IV class too early. It should be clearly understood that Punjabi from V class will be optional i.e. only for those students, who would like to learn it. Provision should, however, be made for teaching in Punjabi medium for students coming from outside, and effort should be made to switch them on to Hindi medium as early as possible.
It is just possible that the Local Bodies’ Schools or Khalsa Schools might not make provisions for teaching in Hindi medium on grounds of non-availability of suitable Hindi teaching personnel or lack of demand for Hindi medium on part of students or that Hindi students might be persuaded to receive instruction in Punjabi rather than in Hindi. Proper vigilance will have to be exercised over these schools, and in case they do not implement the state policy, they should be brought to our notice to be reported to the Education Department.
A strong public opinion will have to be created in your area in favour of Hindi, so that students wishing to be taught in Hindi medium declare fearlessly their desire to be taught in this medium, undeterred by the local influence or pressure from teachers, not well disposed towards this medium.
Amritsar, 21 July 1951, The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbanbhak Committee (Kartar Singh, Publicity Secretary) To Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru JN SG 92 (II)
Enclose herewith a copy of the [above] letter…A perusal of this document will reveal to you which way the wind blows in those quarters. On the one hand, the Hindu schools are exhorted to go ahead in their work of shutting their doors to Panjabi “undeterred by considerations of State Language Policy” and not to “submit to any direction from the Education Department”. On the other hand, the Local Bodies’ Schools and the Khalsa Schools are to be compelled to make all arrangements for the teaching of Hindi in accordance with the State Language Policy. The attitude…is not only one of flagrant defiance of the government’s orders, but is also calculated to accentuate communal bitterness and vitiate the general atmosphere in the province. Due notice be taken of such anti-national and subversive attitude and activity as is being exhibited by these people.
In March 2017, in an impromptu adventure, I had the opportunity to visit Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan. It came amidst an amazing road trip, which took me from the Radcliffe line to the Durand Line (almost). The trip was full of surprises – monuments (old and new) in situ and people on the move – and their discussion, especially of religious spaces and their historical significance. During one of these conversation, Dr. Yaqoob Khan Bangash (ITU Lahore) asked why the Sikhs never demanded Kartarpur Sahib during the discussions of the 1947 Radcliffe Boundary Commission.
Kartarpur is located in Narowal District in Pakistani Punjab. It is about 120 kms/2 hours away from Lahore and is located only 3 kms from the Indo-Pakistan border by the river Ravi. Indeed, Dera Baba Nanak is located about 1 km from the border, on the other side, east of the river Ravi in Indian Punjab. Both are visible to each other on clear days. The Gurdwara is the historic location where Guru Nanak (1469-1539) settled and assembled the Sikh community after his spiritual travels around the world. It is on the banks of the River Ravi and even today there is a nomadic and unkempt, wilderness feel to the place. Guru Nanak spent eighteen years living in Kartarpur, during which he spent time preaching to a growing congregation; the appeal of Nanak spreading from nearby areas to beyond and drawing the first Sangat to the area. Many devotees remained and settled in Kartarpur, dedicating their lives to the mission of Nanak.
The informal led to the formal, with the establishment of the first Gurdwara (the house of the guru) being built circa 1521-2. Here, free communal dinning (langar) was started, feeding all those that came and the langar remains a defining feature of Sikhism – providing free food to everyone without any prejudice. The food is simple and usually vegetarian. It is not a feast, nor does it offend anyone due to their dietary preferences. Everyone, rich or poor, sits together; equal in the house of the guru.
However, for Sikhs, Kartarpur is an especially significant place, as it marks not only the beginnings of Sikhism but also the final resting place of the first guru. The original Gurdwara complex was washed away by floods of the river Ravi and the present-day building was built with donations from Bhupinder Singh (1891-1938), Maharaja of Patiala. More recently, the Government of Pakistan has been contributing to its maintenance. The most fascinating thing about Kartarpur is the appeal of the Gurdwara to all communities. Baba Nanak is revered as a Pir, Guru and Fakir alike.
My trip to Kartarpur was during the “off-season” period and so, mostly Muslims were visiting the shrine/Gurdwara to offer their duas/prayers. Legend has it that when Guru Nanak died, his Hindu and Muslim devotees disagreed about how his last rites should be performed: cremation or burial? During this ruckus, Nanak appeared as an old man before his devotees and, seemingly, suggested delaying the decision until the following day. The following morning, the shroud covering the body was found with flowers, in place of the body. These flowers were divided, with the Hindus cremating theirs, and the Muslims buried theirs. And so, in the courtyard of the Gurdwara is a shrine to symbolise this story. Outside the Sikh tourism that takes place, which is limited, this shrine is mostly frequented by Muslims.
In August 1947, Kartarpur was in Gurdaspur district, which had all (almost) been delineated to be in Pakistan, until the late, controversial changes to the boundary line, which meant that parts of Gurdaspur went to India. Thus, at the last minute, Kartarpur ended being in close proximity of the international border. After Partition, the Sikhs were negligible in their numbers in Pakistan and Kartarpur remained closed and abandoned for over fifty years. More recently, there have been attempts to get a connecting corridor between the communities in India and Pakistan today, but this has not materialised. Going back to the question of why Kartarpur never figured as a specific request before the Boundary Commission, perhaps part of the answer lies in the fact that Sikhs believe in reincarnation of the soul and, therefore, death of the body is not the end of life’s journey.
‘Corridor connecting India with Kartarpur Sahib Shrine in Pakistan ruled out’ by Ravi Dhaliwal:
BAGICHA 