The shrines on the other side

The most important sites of Sikh history are in Pakistan. Nankana Sahib, the birthplace. Kartarpur, where Guru Nanak Dev Ji died. Panja Sahib at Hasan Abdal. Dera Sahib at Lahore, where Guru Arjan Dev Ji was killed. The samadhi of Ranjit Singh Ji. Rohri Sahib, Sacha Sauda, Eminabad.

They are administered by the Evacuee Trust Property Board and by the Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, formed in 1999. A small resident Sikh population, largely from the frontier areas rather than Punjab, maintains some of them.

Pilgrim jathas cross four times a year under a 1974 protocol on religious shrines, with numbers agreed between the two governments and visas issued for specific sites. The allocation is a few thousand people at a time and demand is far higher.

Buildings not on the pilgrimage circuit have fared worse. A large number of gurdwaras, mandirs, samadhs and havelis across Pakistani Punjab are occupied, converted or ruined, and the same is true of mosques and dargahs in Indian Punjab.

The single largest fact about Punjab's built heritage is that most of each community's is in the other country.

The Evacuee Trust holds agricultural land attached to the shrines as well as the buildings, and the income from that land is what maintenance is supposed to come from. How much of it reaches the buildings is not published.

Restoration at Kartarpur, at Nankana Sahib and at the Lahore samadh has been done with government funding and international attention. What is not on a corridor or a protocol has no such claim on anybody.

A number of gurdwaras have been restored in the last two decades and a number of others are in ruins or in other use. There is no complete published survey of what survives.

What we don't know

  • A complete inventory of surviving Sikh and Hindu buildings in Pakistani Punjab, and of Muslim buildings in Indian Punjab. Neither exists.

Where to check this

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

  • 1974 Protocol on Visits to Religious Shrines between India and Pakistan.
  • Evacuee Trust Property Board records.
  • Surveys of religious buildings in both Punjabs.

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.