Narowal

Narowal district lies on the Ravi opposite Gurdaspur and holds Kartarpur, where Guru Nanak Dev Ji spent his last eighteen years and died.

The Kartarpur corridor from Dera Baba Nanak on the Indian side terminates here, and Indian pilgrims cross visa-free for the day.

The gurdwara at Kartarpur was rebuilt in the 1920s with funding from Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala after the Ravi damaged the earlier structure. The river has shifted repeatedly at this point and the site has been protected with embankments.

Baba Nanak's samadh and grave stand side by side there, which is the physical form of the story about the flowers.

The district was heavily Sikh and Hindu before 1947.

It is four kilometres from India and it took seventy-two years to arrange a day pass.

The corridor opened in November 2019 for the 550th anniversary of the birth of Guru Nanak Sahib Ji. Indian pilgrims cross for the day without a visa, pay a service fee, and return by evening.

The fields around the gurdwara are farmed by the establishment there and the site was rebuilt and greatly extended before the opening, with a large new complex set around the older building.

Narowal district includes Shakargarh tehsil, which was part of Gurdaspur district before 1947 and was awarded to Pakistan. For seventy-two years the usual way to see Kartarpur from India was through binoculars from a platform at Dera Baba Nanak.

What we don't know

  • Nothing central.

Where to check this

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

  • Records of the Kartarpur corridor agreement, 2019.
  • Gurdwara records at Kartarpur.

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 69 accounts in The Crossing, the chapter of this site covering 1947 and what it did.