Gurdwara Dukhniwaran Sahibਗੁਰਦੁਆਰਾ ਦੁਖਨਿਵਾਰਨ ਸਾਹਿਬ

Gurdwara Dukhniwaran Sahib is a historic gurdwara in Patiala, Punjab, standing where the village of Lehal once was, on the spot where Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji sat under a banyan tree beside a pond on 24 January 1672. Local tradition holds that a sickness troubling the village eased after his visit, and the place took the name Dukh Nivaran: the eradicator of suffering. Its sarovar is still visited for its healing repute.

Why is it called Dukh Nivaran, the eradicator of suffering?

It is called Dukh Nivaran because of what the village believed happened here in 1672. Lehal had long been troubled by a serious and mysterious sickness. After Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji came at the villagers' request, sat by the pond and held his diwan under the banyan, the sickness subsided. The ground where he sat was remembered by the meaning of the event itself: dukh is suffering, and nivaran is its removal. The name is not a title given later by any court or committee. It is the village's own verdict on the day, kept for three and a half centuries.

A village asks for help: the visit of 1672

The story is preserved, the gurdwara says, in an old handwritten document still kept at the shrine. Bhag Ram, a jhivar of Lehal, heard that Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji was staying at nearby Saifabad, now Bahadurgarh, and went to him with a simple request: come to our village, bless it, and free its people from the sickness that has been their burden for so long. The Guru agreed. On Magh Sudi 5, 1728 Bikram, which is 24 January 1672, he came to Lehal, sat under the banyan tree beside the village pond, and spent time there in prayer and discourse.

What followed is the heart of the shrine. The sickness in the village subsided, and the pond beside which the Guru had sat gained a lasting repute for healing. Devotees have held that faith ever since: the water of the sarovar that later took the pond's place is still approached by people carrying illness and worry, in the belief that the Guru's visit blessed this ground in a way that did not end with his departure.

The garden, the banyan and the railway that stopped

For generations the site was kept not by a building but by a garden. Raja Amar Singh of Patiala, who ruled from 1748 to 1782, had a memorial garden laid out here and entrusted it to Nihang Sikhs. Records of a court case in 1870 still speak of a Guru's garden and a Nihangs' well on the spot, which tells us the memory was being actively tended more than a century after the visit, long before any gurdwara stood here.

The banyan tree itself became the shrine's defender. In 1920, surveyors marking the proposed Sirhind to Patiala to Jakhal railway line found that the line would require the old tree to be felled. The men charged with cutting it refused to touch it. The matter rose to Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, who ordered the entire project cancelled rather than see the tree destroyed. A railway was given up for a tree, because the tree was the last living witness of 1672 that Lehal possessed.

The shrine built at last, 1930 to 1942

Remarkably, no gurdwara building rose here until the twentieth century. Only in 1930 was a committee formed to collect funds and begin construction, and the work took twelve years, completing in 1942. Maharaja Yadavindra Singh, the last Maharaja of Patiala and a devout Sikh, built the present building and its sarovar. On completion the gurdwara passed under the Patiala state government, then to the Dharam Arth Board of the Patiala and East Punjab States Union, and eventually to the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which administers it today.

Architecture and the healing sarovar

The complex spreads over several acres. A two storey gateway with a collapsible iron gate and black and white marble flooring opens onto the pathway to the main building. To the left of that path stands a small marble shrine marking the very place where the Guru sat under the banyan. The central building is two storeys on a raised base, with an octagonal domed chamber at each corner and a pinnacled lotus dome above, its round sun windows set into each side. Inside, white and grey marble paves the floor and panels the walls and pillars, the ceiling carries floral stucco work, and the Guru Granth Sahib is seated under a square canopy at the far end.

The sarovar, about 75 metres square and since considerably extended, lies to the right as one enters, with the Guru ka Langar on the left. For most visitors the sarovar is the reason for coming: people bathe in it or take its water home in faith in the healing repute it has carried since the pond of Lehal. The gurdwara's daily life runs on that faith and on the ordinary rhythm of Sikh worship: kirtan, the reading of the Guru Granth Sahib, and langar served to all.

Festivals and visiting Dukhniwaran Sahib

A large gathering is held here on the fifth day of the light half of every lunar month, but the festival of the year is Basant Panchami, which marks the day of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji's visit itself. Patiala keeps its Guru Tegh Bahadur memory at two shrines: this one, from his 1672 visit to Lehal, and Gurdwara Moti Bagh Sahib, which marks a halt on his final journey in 1675. Pilgrims often visit both in one round of the city. Patiala has its own railway station and road links with Chandigarh, Ambala and Ludhiana, and the gurdwara stands within the city, in what was once Lehal village. The Gurdwaras in India guide lists Dukhniwaran Sahib among Patiala's essential shrines.