ਰਾਏਕੋਟਰਾਏਕੋਟ

Raikot is a city in Ludhiana district of Punjab, India, founded in 1648 by the Rai family, the Manj Rajput chiefs who once ruled much of the Ludhiana plain. It is sacred to Sikhs as the town where Rai Kalha sheltered Guru Gobind Singh Ji in 1705 and received the Ganga Sagar. The 2011 census counted 28,734 people.

Where is Raikot?

Raikot is in the south-west of Ludhiana district, about 40 kilometres south-west of Ludhiana city, at about 235 metres above sea level in the flat Malwa plain. It heads a tehsil of 201,451 people (2011 census) whose villages include Bassian, Halwara, Pakhowal, Sudhar and Talwandi Rai, the last two names carrying the area's older history. Jagraon lies to the north-west, Barnala district to the south, and the Sutlej, the old northern boundary of the Rai chiefs, flows across the top of the district. The municipal council covers 10.61 square kilometres in 15 wards. Its PIN code is 141109.

History: the Rai chiefs of the Ludhiana plain

The Ludhiana District Gazetteer tradition records a family building towns across this plain: Talwandi Rai in 1478, Raikot in 1648 and Jagraon, founded by Rai Kamaluddin from Raikot, in 1688. The Rais were Manj Rajput chiefs, Muslims by the Mughal period, who received this country as a fief in the Sayyid era and held it through the empire's strong centuries. In the later Mughal period the western part of Ludhiana district was leased to them, and by the early 1700s they were semi-independent, ruling a territory whose northern boundary was the Sutlej and which at its height took in the uplands of Jagraon and Ludhiana tehsils and parts of Moga and Zira. In 1760 they took Ludhiana town itself. District accounts remember their rule as mild, taking a quarter share of the produce and no other tax.

The 18th century pressed them from all sides. In 1798 Bedi Sahib Singh of Una attacked the Rais, who beat him back with help from the Maharaja of Patiala and George Thomas, the adventurer of Hansi. In 1806 Maharaja Ranjit Singh crossed the Sutlej, reduced the Rais and distributed their territory among his own chiefs. Under the British settlement that followed, Raikot settled into its modern role: a quiet tehsil and market town that keeps the name and the shrines of the chiefs who founded it.

Why is Raikot sacred to Sikhs?

Raikot is sacred because in January 1705 Guru Gobind Singh Ji, travelling through the Machhiwara jungle after Chamkaur with the Mughal armies searching for him, was sheltered here by the Muslim chief Rai Kalha, at risk to his own life, his family and his rule under Aurangzeb. The Guru encamped under a tahli (shisham) tree west of the town, at the site of Gurdwara Tahliana Sahib. His herdsman host Noora Mahi was asked for milk, and the account tells how a young buffalo that had not yet calved gave milk into the Guru's Ganga Sagar, a copper urn pierced with many holes, and not a drop spilled.

It was here, tradition records, that the Guru heard the news he had sent Noora Mahi to Sirhind to learn: the martyrdom of his two younger sons and of Mata Gujri Ji. He is said to have pulled up a kaahi plant by the roots and declared the roots of Mughal rule dug up. On leaving, on 5 January 1705 in the Ganga Sagar account, he presented Rai Kalha with the Ganga Sagar and a sword in gratitude. The urn stayed in the Rai family's Raikot haveli until 1947, when the family moved to Pakistan; it is still kept by Rai Kalha's descendants, nine generations on, and the January darshan gathering at Tahliana Sahib, ending with a rally of about six kilometres since the relic itself left, keeps the visit at the centre of the town's year.

Geography and people

The 2011 census counted 28,734 people in the municipal council, up from 24,769 in 2001 and 21,061 in 1991: 15,138 men and 13,596 women, a sex ratio of 898 women per 1,000 men, close to the Punjab average of 895. Literates numbered 20,226 among people aged seven and above, an effective literacy rate of about 79 per cent. Scheduled Castes numbered 11,828, about 41 per cent of the town, a share well above the state pattern and close to the tehsil figure.

By faith, Sikhs form the town's majority at 17,218 (59.92 per cent), with Hindus at 9,910 (34.49 per cent), Jains at 919 (3.20 per cent), an unusually visible Jain community for a town this size, Muslims at 445 (1.55 per cent) and small Christian and other communities. The tehsil around it is more heavily Sikh, at 84.26 per cent. The council, a B class committee, counts 16 schools in the town, including four government senior secondary schools, and health care from a civil hospital, dispensaries and private nursing homes. Punjabi in its Malwai form is the common language, and wheat, paddy and dairy farming in the tehsil feed the town's grain market and trade.

Places of interest

Gurdwara Sri Tahliana Sahib, about 1.5 kilometres west of the town, is Raikot's great shrine. Its older building, a square domed room with a verandah built in the 1920s and paved with glazed tiles, is still used as the prakash asthan, with a later divan hall and a small sarovar beside it; it is managed by the SGPC through a local committee. Its great event is the three-day fair on 19, 20 and 21 Poh, in the first week of January, marking the Guru's visit.

At Bassian village in the tehsil stands the Maharaja Duleep Singh Kothi, a mansion believed built around 1800, where the 11-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last Sikh ruler of Punjab, spent the night of 31 December 1849 on his way into exile after the British annexation of Punjab, before being taken on to Fatehgarh in present-day Uttar Pradesh and then to England. Long in ruins, the Kothi was conserved by INTACH with Punjab Government funding between 2011 and 2015 and opened on 24 May 2015 as the Maharaja Duleep Singh Memorial, a museum of his life with replicas of his belongings, gardens and an amphitheatre.

At Halwara, also in the tehsil, is one of the Indian Air Force's oldest frontline bases: built by the Royal Air Force in 1942, reactivated on 16 March 1950, home in turn to Spitfires, the IAF's first jets in 1954 and, since September 2012, Sukhoi Su-30MKI squadrons, and active in the 1965 and 1971 wars. A civil enclave agreed in December 2018, on 135.5 acres beside the base, is intended to give Ludhiana district its international airport.

Notable people

Rai Kalha, the chief who sheltered Guru Gobind Singh Ji in 1705, is the town's defining figure, remembered across faiths for risking everything for a guest; his family kept the Ganga Sagar for nine generations, and his name is inseparable from Raikot's. The Rai line before and after him, from the founders of Talwandi Rai and Raikot to Rai Kamaluddin who founded Jagraon in 1688, gives the town its place in the Ludhiana plain's history.

In the modern era the town's name travels with Happy Raikoti, the singer, lyricist and actor born here in 1992, who took his town's name as his stage name. He began as a lyricist in 2013, made his singing debut with Jaan in 2014 and the album 7 Knaalan in 2015, acted in the film Teshan in 2016, and won the PTC Punjabi Music Award for Best Lyricist for Daata Ji from the film Ardaas. Few small Punjab towns are announced so often, to so many listeners, in their most famous son's name.

Getting there and Raikot today

Raikot is reached by road from Ludhiana, about 40 kilometres north-east, from Jagraon on the Firozpur road, and from Barnala and Moga to the south and west; Ludhiana is the nearest large city and railhead, and buses link the town with the district's towns through the day. The Halwara civil airport, when it opens beside the air base in the tehsil, will put Raikot within a short drive of an international terminal.

Today Raikot is a steady Malwa market town with an outsized history: a Rai chiefs' capital that became a tehsil town, a place where a Muslim chief's shelter of the Guru in 1705 is still its defining story, where the last Maharaja of Punjab spent his last night in his own kingdom, and where a frontline air base is turning into the district's airport. The January fair at Tahliana Sahib and the Duleep Singh museum at Bassian draw the visitors; the grain market and the tehsil villages' trade keep the town.