Gurdwara Janam Asthan Guru Ram Das, Lahoreਗੁਰਦੁਆਰਾ ਜਨਮ ਅਸਥਾਨ ਗੁਰੂ ਰਾਮਦਾਸ, ਲਾਹੌਰ

Gurdwara Janam Asthan Guru Ram Das stands in Chuna Mandi Bazaar, inside the Walled City of Lahore, Pakistan, on the site traditionally held to be the birthplace and childhood home of Guru Ram Das Ji, the fourth Guru of the Sikhs. He was born here in 1534 and spent his first seven years in this lane. The small family home gave way, centuries later, to the white marble shrine that Maharaja Ranjit Singh had built from 1801.

What is Gurdwara Janam Asthan Guru Ram Das?

A janam asthan is a birthplace shrine, and this one is also known as Gurdwara Janamasthan Patshahi Chauthi: the birthplace of the Fourth Master. It is one of the most visited Sikh shrines in Lahore, and one of the few in the city where readings from the Guru Granth Sahib are carried out daily. For Sikhs, Lahore holds two of the faith's most charged addresses within a short walk of each other: this birthplace of the fourth Guru, and Gurdwara Dera Sahib, where the fifth Guru was martyred.

The childhood of Guru Ram Das Ji

Guru Ram Das Ji was born on 24 September 1534 in Chuna Mandi, to Hari Das and Mata Daya. His birth name was Jetha, given because he was the eldest child, and the family were shopkeepers of the bazaar: his grandfather Thakur Das was a well known shopkeeper here. The boy spent his first seven years in the family home on this site. Both his parents died when he was about seven, and he left Lahore in the care of his maternal grandmother. Few janam asthans preserve so complete a story: the Guru who would found Amritsar began life in a trader's small house in a Lahore lane. Read his full story in our entry on Guru Ram Das Ji.

History

The ancestral home stood small for more than two and a half centuries. In 1801, during the celebrations for the birth of Kharak Singh, Maharani Datar Kaur, also remembered as Mai Nakain, asked her husband Maharaja Ranjit Singh to build a proper shrine at the site. He agreed, bought up the surrounding plots from the Qazis who held them, and had a gurdwara built measuring 122 feet 6 inches by 97 feet 6 inches.

Gurdwara accounts remember this shrine as the place from where the Singh Sabha movement, the great Sikh reform movement of the late nineteenth century, started. The gurdwara remained under the control of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee from 1927 to 1947, and it had shops endowed for its upkeep. In the communal rioting of Partition in 1947, eighteen Sikhs were killed inside the premises. Today the shrine is managed by Pakistan's Evacuee Trust authorities, and daily readings from the Guru Granth Sahib continue.

Architecture

The shrine rises from a white marble platform set several steps above the level of the bazaar street, in the Sikh Empire style of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Lahore. Gurdwara guides describe the building as modest and built in the manner of Sri Harmandir Sahib, on a smaller, city scale. To the west of the shrine is an open courtyard, with a two storey building along two of its sides and the Nishan Sahib hoisted in the western corner. An old well survives at the site, a reminder that this was first a family home before it was a shrine.

Where is it, and how do I reach it?

The gurdwara is inside Delhi Gate, near Purani Kotwali Chowk in Chuna Mandi, in the heart of the Walled City. It stands along the Shahi Guzargah, the old Royal Passage that ran from Delhi Gate to the Lahore Fort, and the Fort and the Begum Shahi Mosque are its near neighbours. The lanes of Chuna Mandi fill up by the middle of the day, so visitors do best to come early, and the cooler months from November to March are the most comfortable. Pilgrims usually combine it with Gurdwara Dera Sahib and the other Lahore shrines listed on our Gurdwaras in Pakistan hub.

Why does this shrine matter?

Guru Ram Das Ji went on to found the town of Ramdaspur, which grew into Amritsar, and his son Guru Arjan Dev Ji built Sri Harmandir Sahib there. The line of the faith's geography therefore runs from this small Lahore house to the Golden Temple itself. A birthplace shrine also does quieter work: it keeps Lahore, a city Sikhs had to leave in 1947, present in the living map of Sikh devotion, and it gives every yatra to Pakistan a beginning inside the Walled City's lanes.