Nurpur Bedi and the Bedi lands

Nurpur Bedi in Rupnagar district takes its second name from the Bedi family descended from Guru Nanak Dev Ji, who held land in this belt along the Sutlej at the foot of the Shivaliks.

The Bedi lineage carried great prestige and considerable jagirs across the Cis-Sutlej country, and Baba Sahib Singh Bedi of Una crowned Ranjit Singh Ji at Lahore in 1801.

The Kandi belt around Nurpur Bedi is dry, broken country cut by chos, and the villages there have among the smallest holdings and the highest out-migration in the district.

Anandpur Sahib and Kiratpur are about twenty kilometres away and Ropar is thirty.

A stretch of poor land at the foot of the hills carried more of the Sikh tradition's institutional history than most of the fertile plain, which is a pattern that repeats across Punjab.

The Bedi jagirs were confirmed by the British after annexation, as most large religious grants were, and the family kept its standing into the twentieth century.

Baba Khem Singh Bedi of this lineage was a leading figure in the Lahore wing of the Singh Sabha and represented the position that the Gurus' descendants held a special authority, which the Amritsar wing rejected.

The town itself is a small tehsil headquarters in the Kandi. The water comes hard, the fields are cut by chos, and the young people leave.

What we don't know

  • The extent of the Bedi jagirs before annexation.

Where to check this

  1. Rupnagar district gazetteer material. Punjab district gazetteers and settlement reports (Internet Archive) ↗

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