The pilgrimage year

A Punjabi household's religious year involves travel: to Anandpur at Hola Mohalla, to Muktsar at Maghi, to Damdama Sahib at Vaisakhi, to Amritsar at any time, to Nankana Sahib if a visa can be got.

Punjabi Hindu households go to Jwalamukhi, Chintpurni, Naina Devi and Vaishno Devi, on foot in jathas with a red cloth, and Punjabi Sikh households go to a good many of the same places.

Ravidassia families go to Benares for the birth anniversary of Bhagat Ravidas Ji, by special train, in very large numbers.

Valmiki families go to Ram Tirath near Amritsar in November.

Muslim families in Malerkotla and elsewhere go to Haider Sheikh's shrine and to the urs at the surviving dargahs.

The pilgrimage map of Punjab crosses every religious boundary the twentieth century drew, and always has.

The travel is organised by sangats and village committees rather than by tour operators, and the buses are hired collectively. A village will fill four or five buses for a single trip.

The walking pilgrimages to the hill shrines run in the Navratri periods, and the roads out of Punjab into Himachal carry walkers in numbers large enough to need traffic management for a fortnight.

Households also travel to Nanded and Patna for the Sikh sites outside Punjab. Those two are the long journeys most families make once rather than annually.

What we don't know

  • Nothing central.

Where to check this

  1. Punjab district gazetteer material on fairs and pilgrimages. Punjab district gazetteers and settlement reports (Internet Archive) ↗

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 120 accounts in The Village Itself, the chapter of this site covering how a Punjabi village works and what it holds.