Bibi Rajni

The story is that Rajni, daughter of a chaudhary of Patti, told her father that whatever a person receives comes from God and not from him. He married her to a leper in anger.

She carried him in a basket and begged. At a pool in the forest she left him on the bank and went for food. He watched black birds go into the water and come out white, dragged himself in, and was cured.

The pool is the sarovar at Amritsar. The story is attached to the founding of the tank, in the time of Guru Ram Das Ji, and Dukh Bhanjani Beri, the jujube tree on the eastern side of the parikrama, marks it.

Pilgrims bathe at that spot in particular for healing, which is the most explicitly miraculous practice at the Golden Temple and sits uneasily with Sikh doctrine on ritual.

The story is told constantly and its point is the argument at the start, not the cure at the end.

The account is that she was disinherited for saying that what a person receives comes from God, married to a leper by her father, and that her husband was cured at the pool at Amritsar.

The story is one of the foundation accounts of the sarovar and of its association with healing, which is still part of why people bathe there.

Her father is given as the chaudhari of Patti in Tarn Taran district, which is the historical anchor the account has and the only one.

What we don't know

  • Whether the account has any documentary basis. It is tradition.

Where to check this

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

  • Gurdwara tradition at Dukh Bhanjani Beri.

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.

This is one of 130 accounts in The Ten, the chapter of this site covering the Gurus, from 1469 to 1708.