ਮੋਰਿੰਡਾਮੋਰਿੰਡਾ

Morinda is a city in Rupnagar district of Punjab, India, on the Chandigarh to Ludhiana highway, known as Baganwaala, the City of Orchards. Its Kotwali Sahib gurdwara marks where Mata Gujri and the younger Sahibzade were held in 1705. The 2011 census counted 24,022 people.

Where is Morinda?

Morinda is in the south of Rupnagar district, on the Sirhind plain at 267 metres above sea level, about 20 kilometres south west of Rupnagar city. It stands on National Highway 5 between Chandigarh and Ludhiana, where the roads to Nangal and to Patiala also cross, which is why a bypass was built to take through traffic around the town. In the census of 2011 it lay in Chamkaur Sahib tehsil, and Chamkaur Sahib town, with its own great place in Sikh history, is its near neighbour to the north east. Its PIN code is 140101. The name is locally explained as coming from Moran, worn down over time to Morinda, and its second name, Baganwaala, is explained in the next sections.

History: a Taoni chhat on the Sirhind road

Morinda is an old town of the Sirhind country. A Punjab States Gazetteer of 1904 lists it among the chhats, the principal seats, of the Taoni Rajputs, the same landholding clan whose seats included Banur and Kharar across this tract, so Morinda's old mohallas belong to the same Rajput and Mughal layered world as its neighbours Bassi Pathana and Sirhind. It grew as a qasba and market town on the road between Sirhind and Rupnagar, serving the villages of the plain, and under later administrations it settled into the Ambala and then Rupnagar district systems. Its modern growth, though, belongs to the highway age: the Chandigarh to Ludhiana road runs through it, and the town's own account, carried by its municipal council, is that Morinda has grown faster than its neighbouring towns, drawing in industries that once sat in Bassi Pathana.

Why is Morinda sacred to Sikhs?

Morinda is sacred to Sikhs because of one night in December 1705. After the evacuation of Anandpur and the crossing of the flooded Sarsa, Mata Gujri, the mother of Guru Gobind Singh, and the Guru's two younger sons, Sahibzada Zorawar Singh and Sahibzada Fateh Singh, sheltered at Saheri village nearby in the house of their former cook Gangu. Gangu betrayed them to the officials of Morinda, and the three were arrested and brought into Morinda, where they were kept for a night in the town's kotwali, its police lock up. Gurdwara Shri Kotwali Sahib stands on that place today. The next morning they were taken on towards Sirhind; tradition records that the cart's wheel broke as they left, that a local carpenter repaired it, and that Mata Ji and the Sahibzade waited and drank water from the well at the place now marked by Gurdwara Shri Shaheedganj Sahib in Prem Nagar. At Sirhind the two boys were martyred, and Mata Gujri died in the Thanda Burj. Morinda's two gurdwaras, with Gurdwara Sri Rath Sahib at Saheri where the arrest was made, keep the town on the route every Sikh family travels in memory each December.

Geography and people

The 2011 census counted 24,022 people in the municipal council, up from 22,635 in 2001 and 17,440 in 1991, on a council area of 4.5 square kilometres: 12,648 men and 11,374 women, a sex ratio of 899 women per 1,000 men, in a town of 13 wards. Children under seven numbered 2,539, about 11 per cent. Literates numbered 17,856 among residents aged seven and above, an effective literacy rate of 83.12 per cent, well above the Punjab average of 75.84 per cent in the same census. Scheduled Castes numbered 6,437, about 27 per cent, and 8,115 residents were recorded as workers. Sikhs and Hindus are closely balanced here: Sikhs 48.61 per cent and Hindus 47.64 per cent in 2011, with Muslims at 2.14 per cent and Christians at 0.91 per cent. Punjabi, in its Puadhi form, is the language of the town and its villages.

Orchards, sugarcane and the sugar mill

Baganwaala means the place of orchards, and Morinda earned the name honestly: large orchards once occupied ground that has since been cleared for housing, and mango and guava trees still mark its outskirts. The fields around it grow the wheat and paddy of the Sirhind plain, and sugarcane enough to anchor a mill: Morinda hosts one of Punjab's cooperative sugar mills, a member of the state Sugarfed family of mills, which takes in cane from the surrounding villages each crushing season and gives the town an industrial rhythm alongside its grain market. Between the mill, the highway frontage of showrooms and dhabas, and the small industries that have moved here from neighbouring towns, Morinda's economy is broader than its size suggests, and its municipal services and schools have grown with it.

Education and a growing corridor town

Morinda has also become a local education centre. The town and its edges hold a network of schools and colleges, among them the Charanjit Singh Memorial Institute of Nursing Education near the Ludhiana to Morinda bypass, and the wider corridor counts several universities within commuting reach, so students and staff form a visible part of the town's working population alongside commuters to Chandigarh, Rupnagar and Ludhiana. That mix, students, mill and market workers, highway trade and village agriculture, is the modern Morinda: a district town that functions as the service centre for a wide circle of villages in Chamkaur Sahib tehsil.

Getting there and Morinda today

Unusually for a town of its size, Morinda has two railway stations. The old Morinda Junction (station code MRND), under the Ambala division of Northern Railway, opened in 1927 and stands on the city road with two platforms. New Morinda Junction (NMDA), opened in 2006 about two kilometres from the town centre, was built as the junction where the Chandigarh to Sahnewal line meets the Sirhind to Daulatpur Chowk line, giving Chandigarh its direct rail link into Punjab; it too has two platforms and handled about 137 passengers a day in 2018, most of them changing trains. By road, National Highway 5 and the town bypass tie Morinda to Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Rupnagar and Sirhind. Today the City of Orchards lives between its two inheritances: a sacred night in 1705 that brings pilgrims to Kotwali Sahib, and a highway and rail junction that keeps remaking it as one of the faster growing towns of Rupnagar district.