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This article is the third part of a series. You can read Part 2 >here .
One morning, the petite receptionist at the hotel in Amritsar asked me, “Sir, have you been to Dera Baba Nanak?”
By then, I had visited Attari — its railway station, the border crossing at Wagah, the Sikh farmers whose fields lay across the barbed wires, and enjoyed their hospitality, being treated not to chilled lassi but hot coffee. I had driven south to Ferozepur and crossed the Sutlej and gone up to Hussainiwala to witness the flag-lowering ceremony there.
I thought I was pretty much done with my border visits in Punjab and had come down to the reception to ask if there was anything else to see in Amritsar other than the Golden Temple and Jallianwala Bagh. That’s when she asked me about Dera Baba Nanak.
The name rang a bell. I remembered seeing Dera Baba Nanak on the map, a desolate dot, when I was looking at places in Punjab that sat close to the Radcliffe Line. Since it had appeared desolate — perhaps the map hadn’t downloaded fully to show finer locational details, or maybe because I was looking at the map sitting in ‘remote’ Chennai — and since the place touched the border on the map, I wasn’t very sure whether I should — rather, could — visit it. And so Dera Baba Nanak, in my head, had remained just that: a dot on the map.
“How far is it from here?” I asked the receptionist.
“Hardly 60 km, sir,” she said. “We go there often. Shall I book a cab for you?”
“Sure, but what can I see there?”
“You can see the Kartarpur Sahib Gurudwara through binoculars.”
“Why binoculars?”
“That’s because Kartarpur Sahib is located in Pakistan.”
Two of the holiest shrines of the Sikhs — both directly related to their first guru, Nanak — lie in Pakistan: Nankana Sahib, 80 km southwest of Lahore, where he was born in 1469, and Kartarpur Sahib, across the border from Dera Baba Nanak, where he died in 1539. The shrine at Kartarpur is said to have been built during the guru’s lifetime, and is therefore considered the oldest gurudwara: it missed being in Indian Punjab by a whisker, as I was soon to find out.
When the cab arrived, I discovered, to my great joy, that Babu was once again going to drive me. I also discovered that Babu, like me, was born in 1970, even though I had thought him to be much older because he often talked about his grandchildren.
“Do you still go back to Bihar?” I asked him, as we drove in the direction of Dera Baba Nanak.
“Yes, I do,” he said, “during weddings and other functions. If I don’t go there, how will my relatives know that I am doing well?”
“Are you doing well?”
“By God’s grace, yes,” he said. “If I were to stop working today for some reason, say if I met with an accident, my in-laws will be able to feed me and my family for an entire year. They are quite wealthy.”
I had imagined the journey would take longer, but we soon hit the narrow streets of Dera Baba Nanak, driving past a large gurudwara and a cluster of shops, and emerged out of its bustle to hit a road that ran through lush green paddies. We were flagged down at a Border Security Force check-post and allowed to proceed after a sentry had noted down my name, address and the car’s registration number. Exactly a kilometre from there stood the fencing, dividing India and Pakistan.
The Indian side wore a festive look. Villagers flocked to the small gurudwara that sat by the barbed wires, and stalls sold souvenirs and toys — mostly toy guns. On a tall observation post with an Indian flag flying over it were men stationed — with real guns. Diagonally across the border was a similar post, with a Pakistani flag flying over it. Buffaloes grazed on the strip of land between the two posts.
“Those are Pakistani buffaloes,” a young Sikh told me, as I climbed up a platform specially built for pilgrims to take a look at Kartarpur Sahib Gurudwara. The gurudwara, 4.5 km from where I stood, was visible to the naked eye — a white smudge between the blue of the sky and the green on the ground — but its features became clearer as I zoomed in with my camera. The distance and the inaccessibility gave the gurudwara an added halo: it looked as attractive as the Taj Mahal.
Suddenly, a pair of binoculars materialised out of nowhere. People took turns, some more eagerly than the others, in gazing at the gurudwara. The more devout became misty-eyed.
So near…yet so far.
Guru Nanak, who died at the age of 70, had spent the last 17 years of his life in what is today known as Dera Baba Nanak, eventually settling down on the banks of the Ravi, in a hamlet he named Kartarpur, where the gurudwara stands. Just because the Radcliffe Line today separates it from India, that gurudwara looks far more distant than the 4.5 km, as though belonging to a foreign land, which it does.
We climbed down from the platform and, covering our heads, walked into the modest gurudwara on the Indian side.
“Have you eaten at a langar before?” Babu asked me.
“No, but I have always wanted to.” Langar is the free kitchen at gurudwaras — driven entirely by the sense of service to mankind — that provides food to just about anybody.
“Come, today you will get a taste of langar food,” he said and led me to a verandah where people sat cross-legged on the floor in rows, eating. We joined one of the rows and I eagerly observed Babu to make sure I did not break langar decorum: the volunteer never bends down to serve you food, instead you have to stretch out your palm to receive the rotis and hold up your steel bowl to get the dal or kheer .
“Have some more kheer ,” Babu insisted, “it’s the best I have ever had.” He was right.
So I ate at a langar for the first time, but what made the meal even more special was the location: we were right at the border, with Pakistani buffaloes grazing a couple hundred yards away. For the locals, however, the border has long become a way of life — the barbed wire is as much a feature in their daily lives as are, say, electric poles or cellphone towers.
“The fencing came up only in 1986. Before that not many people knew where the border was,” said Baldev Singh, a local farmer, when I met him at the gurudwara compound after lunch. “Even the Indian soldiers, when they came to fight the war in 1965, had no idea where the border was. They were clueless. We villagers had to guide them.”
Baldev Singh was born a year after the Partition, and until then his family lived by the Ravi, across the border, right next to the Kartarpur Sahib Gurudwara. “Now, of course, the security is very tight. This gurudwara has to empty out by 8 p.m. Not just the gurudwara, the entire one-kilometre stretch from the BSF check-post to this place must be clear by eight,” he said.
I asked him if descendants of Guru Nanak still lived in Dera Baba Nanak. “Yes, they do,” he said, “You will find some of them at the Chola Sahib Gurudwara.”
“Are they also worshipped?”
“Why should we worship them?” Baldev Singh raised his eyebrows. “Our guru is the Guru Granth Sahib! By the way, that tree you see….,” he said pointing to a banyan tree in the compound, “Guru Nanak often rested under that tree.”
On my way out, I sat under the tree and asked Babu to take a picture.
Chola Sahib Gurudwara turned out to be barely a couple of kilometres away from the gurudwara where I had langar food. Here, in a glass case, is displayed a chola (robe) believed to have been worn by Guru Nanak. As I looked at the intricate embroidery, a sevadar handed me a pamphlet. It gave the first guru’s family tree: the sevadar ’s finger stopped at No. 17 — the seventeenth-generation descendant — against which was printed the name ‘Baba Lakkha Singh’.
“That’s Baba Lakkha Singh ji,” he pointed to a chubby man seated on the floor. He didn’t look more than 50, and wore a white kurta with churidar . People touched his feet and some of them gave him money too: Rs. 20, Rs. 50, Rs. 100. An assistant put the money into a briefcase.
I sat cross-legged in front of him.
“Did you go to school?” I asked him.
“ Haan ji .”
“Did your classmates know that you are a descendant of Guru Nanak?”
“ Haan ji .”
“Did they respect you because of that?”
“ Haan ji .”
“Did you have any other interests at school, such as sports?”
“ Nahin ji . Home to school, school to home.”
“Do you have a message for the younger generation?”
“ Lagan se kaam kiya jaaye to nateeja achha hota hai [If you put your heart into your work, the results will be good.]"
