Morinda

Morinda, also called Baghwala, is the town through which Mata Gujri Ji and the two younger Sahibzade were taken after being betrayed at the Sarsa, on the way to Sirhind.

The tradition holds that they were held overnight in the custody of the local officials, and Gurdwara Manji Sahib marks the place.

The road from the Sarsa crossing to Sirhind runs about forty kilometres through Morinda, and the whole sequence, capture, custody, Sirhind, the Thanda Burj and the executions, took a few days in the last week of December 1704.

The route is drivable in an hour and is not marked as a route.

Morinda now is a small town on the Chandigarh to Ludhiana road with a grain market and a rail junction.

The custody at Morinda is attributed in the tradition to Gangu, a former servant of the household, and the name has become a byword in Punjabi. The historical basis for the identification is the tradition itself.

A gurdwara at Morinda marks the place of the overnight halt. It is a small shrine in a town that most travellers pass through without stopping.

Nothing along that stretch is set up for anybody trying to follow it. The gurdwaras are in the middle of bazaars or at the edge of fields, not one of them carries a sign saying what came before it or what comes next, and a person doing the sequence has to know it already before setting out.

What we don't know

  • The details of the custody at Morinda, which come from later accounts.

Where to check this

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

  • Gurdwara records at Morinda.

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.