The Satth Project

Tarn Taran · 31.45° N, 74.93° E · Under the Company

Tarn Taran

ਤਰਨ ਤਾਰਨ

Guru Arjan Dev Ji founded Tarn Taran in 1590. The sarovar there is the largest of any gurdwara.

The district was carved out of Amritsar in 2006, which is why Baba Gurdit Singh of the Komagata Maru, born at Sarhali in 1861, is described in older sources as being from Amritsar district. Sarhali Kalan is in Tarn Taran today.

Baba Gurdit Singh chartered the Komagata Maru in 1914. After the shooting at Budge Budge in September 1914 he was a fugitive for seven years. He died at Amritsar on 24 July 1954.

The sarovar at Tarn Taran is the largest of any Sikh shrine, larger than the one at Amritsar, and the town was laid out around it in 1590 with a leprosarium attached. That institution, for a disease that carried total social exclusion, is among the earliest of its kind in the region and it is not mentioned in most accounts of the town.

The Masya gathering, on the new moon, draws very large numbers each month, which makes it one of the most frequent mass religious gatherings in Punjab and one of the least reported.

The district is a border district and the belt between the town and the fence, through Khemkaran, Bhikhiwind and Valtoha, carries the pattern described elsewhere on this site: land beyond the wire, high army recruitment, no industry.

What we don't know

  • Whether any memorial to him stands at Sarhali. This could not be confirmed and wants a ground check.
  • The home villages of the roughly 300 other Komagata Maru passengers. This is an open research thread.
  • The history of the Tarn Taran leprosarium, which is referred to in the tradition and documented almost nowhere.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • jatchiefs.com, on Baba Gurdit Singh.
  • Wikipedia entry on Baba Gurdit Singh.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

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This is one of 122 accounts in Under the Company, the chapter of this site covering British Punjab, from annexation to the canal colonies.

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