Gurdwara Sri Tahliana Sahib, Raikotਗੁਰਦੁਆਰਾ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਟਾਹਲੀਆਣਾ ਸਾਹਿਬ, ਰਾਏਕੋਟ

Gurdwara Sri Tahliana Sahib is the main gurdwara of Raikot, a town in Ludhiana district, Punjab, about 40 kilometres south west of Ludhiana city. Sikhs remember it as the place where Guru Gobind Singh Ji, travelling in disguise after Chamkaur, rested under a tahli tree in January 1705, where the herdsman Noora Mahi milked a buffalo into the holed copper urn called the Ganga Sagar, and where the Guru first heard the news from Sirhind.

Why is it called Tahliana Sahib?

The name is the simplest part of the story. The Guru reached Raikot in the evening, after the road from Machhiwara by way of Alamgir, and rested under a tahli tree, the shisham or Indian rosewood that shades farms and roadsides all over Punjab. The gurdwara rose where he rested, and it took the tree's name: Tahliana, the place of the tahli. Local tradition keeps the tree itself in honour: the complex still includes a shrine housing the dried tahli, standing to the right of the main Darbar Sahib.

The morning of the Ganga Sagar

In the morning a cattle grazer named Noora Mahi, the paali or herdsman of the Raikot chief Rai Kalha, brought his buffaloes past the tree. The Guru asked him for milk. Noora answered honestly: the buffaloes had already been milked, and he had no vessel anyway. The Guru pointed to a young buffalo that had never given milk and told him to milk her, and handed him a copper urn. The urn, the Ganga Sagar, was pierced with 288 small holes. Noora tied the buffalo to a karaunda shrub and milked her, and the milk stayed in the holed urn. The astonished herdsman ran to tell his master, and Rai Kalha came himself to meet the stranger under the tahli tree.

What happened when Rai Kalha met the Guru?

Rai Kalha, a Muslim Rajput chief whose family had founded Raikot in 1648, knew exactly what sheltering the Guru could cost him. Aurangzeb's armies were hunting the Guru, and hospitality was a risk to his family, his property and his small state. He offered it anyway. The Guru asked him for riders to go to Sirhind for news of his mother, Mata Gujri Ji, and his two younger sons, who had been separated from him at the River Sirsa. Noora Mahi was the natural messenger, because his own sister was married at Sirhind, and Rai Kalha sent him. Noora came back with the darkest news of those months: the younger Sahibzadas, Zorawar Singh and Fateh Singh, had been executed at Sirhind after refusing to give up their faith, and Mata Gujri Ji had died. The place in Sirhind is kept today by Fatehgarh Sahib.

On hearing it, the Guru is remembered to have dug up the root of a kaahi plant with his arrow and declared that the roots of Mughal rule had been dug up with it. When Rai Kalha said that he was himself of Turkish stock, the Guru answered his service instead: tradition holds that he presented the chief with three gifts, a khanda (a sword), the Ganga Sagar itself, and a rehal, the wooden stand used for a holy book, with the word that while the family kept these things with care, its rule would stand.

Where is the Ganga Sagar today?

Of the three gifts, only the urn survives, and its afterlife is part of the shrine's story. It is a small crafted copper vessel, about half a kilogram in weight and under a foot tall, with holes running around its body and base, a spout, an ornate handle and a lid joined to the top. The sword was taken by the British in the nineteenth century and the wooden rehal did not survive the centuries. The Ganga Sagar stayed with the Rai family as an heirloom, and until 1947 a Nagar Kirtan on Guru Gobind Singh Ji's Gurpurab would process from Tahliana Sahib to the Rai's haveli, where the reigning Rai brought the urn out for the sangat to see. After Partition the family moved to Lahore, and for decades the relic was kept quietly. Its later custodian, Rai Azizullah Khan, researched its history in libraries and gazetteers and from 1994 showed it publicly again, first in Britain and then to sangat in Australia and elsewhere, where it is received with deep reverence as an object the Guru himself handled and gave.

The shrine complex

There are four gurdwaras in the Tahliana complex. The main Darbar Sahib stands at the centre. To its left is Gurdwara Manji Sahib, marking where the Guru camped for about three days. Behind Manji Sahib is the spot where he dug up the kaahi plant, and to the right of the Darbar Sahib is the shrine of the dried tahli tree. The complex has a sarovar and a sarai of about nineteen rooms for pilgrims, in the usual pattern of a working Punjabi gurdwara. Pilgrims following the Guru's Malwa road link it with the shrines before it on the route, Alamgir and Mehdiana, and with the full circuit of the Guru Gobind Singh Marg.

How do you reach Tahliana Sahib?

Raikot stands about 40 kilometres south west of Ludhiana city, on the roads toward Barnala and Jagraon, and the gurdwara is in the town itself, easy to find by its name on local signs. Combine it with the other Ludhiana district shrines of the same January 1705 journey: Gurdwara Manji Sahib at Alamgir, where the Guru set down the palanquin of his disguise, and Gurdwara Mehdiana Sahib, the School of Sikh History. All three, and the road that joins them, appear in Jugti's guide to Gurdwaras in India and on the Guru Gobind Singh Marg page.