Walking to the shrine

The sangh was the organised pilgrim party: a group from a village or a set of villages walking together to a distant shrine, with a leader, a standard, provisions and a fixed route and season.

The Sakhi Sarwar sanghs walked from the central districts to Nigaha in Dera Ghazi Khan, five hundred kilometres and more, and back. Others went to Multan, to Pakpattan, to Hardwar and to the Devi shrines in the hills.

The journey was the point as much as the destination. A sangh took weeks, camped, sang on the road, and returned with a standing in the village that lasted.

The Devi pilgrimages to Jwalamukhi, Chintpurni and Naina Devi are the surviving form on the Indian side, still walked in jathas with a red cloth.

The long-distance sanghs west ended with the border.

The roads that carried them are the same roads that carried the armies, the traders and the refugees, and nobody has traced any of them.

A sangh is a party travelling together to a shrine, organised in a village, on foot or now by bus, with its own arrangements for food and shelter on the road.

The walking parties to the hill shrines, and to Pakpattan before 1947, were the ordinary form of long distance travel for most people, and they ran on established routes with known halts.

The routes west stopped in 1947. What was a walk of a few days from central Punjab to Pakpattan is now a visa application that is usually refused.

What we don't know

  • The routes, which are not recorded anywhere.

Where to check this

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

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

  • Ethnographic accounts of the sangh tradition.

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 65 accounts in Before the Gurus, the chapter of this site covering the region before 1469, from the Indus cities to the Lodhis.