ਐਤਵਾਰਸੁਨਾਮ

Sunam, officially Sunam Udham Singh Wala, is a town and tehsil headquarters in Sangrur district of Punjab, India, in the Malwa region. It is the birthplace of Shaheed Udham Singh, who in 1940 shot Michael O'Dwyer in London to avenge the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

Where is Sunam?

Sunam is in the south of Sangrur district, on the flat Malwa plain at about 231 metres above sea level. Sangrur city is 13 kilometres to the north; Patiala is 64 kilometres away, Ludhiana 90, Bathinda 95 and Chandigarh about 129. The town is a tehsil headquarters and a municipal council of 20 wards, and its full official name, Sunam Udham Singh Wala, is also carried by its railway station. Its PIN code is 148028.

History: from Surajpur to a Mughal pargana

Local tradition gives the town an older name, Surajpur, linked to a Suraj Kund tank, and the old town's lanes and gates still carry that layered past. What is documented is Sunam's standing under the Mughals. The Ain-i-Akbari, the great gazetteer of Akbar's empire compiled in the 1590s, lists Sunam as a pargana under the sarkar of Sirhind, assessed at 7,067,696 dams of revenue for the imperial treasury and expected to supply 2,000 infantry and 500 cavalry. It already had a brick fort. In the early eighteenth century the town was among those held under Wazir Khan, the Mughal governor of Sirhind.

For centuries Sunam was a trading town on the routes between the Sutlej country and the south. Before the Partition of 1947 its population was predominantly Muslim, and its shrines and bazaars still show that older Sunam. Partition changed the town's people almost completely, as it did across Punjab, and the Sunam of today was rebuilt by the families who arrived and the families who stayed.

Udham Singh: the son who defines Sunam

Udham Singh was born in Sunam on 26 December 1899. Orphaned young, he was raised in Amritsar, and the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh on 13 April 1919, when British-led troops fired on an unarmed crowd in that city, marked him for life. He joined the revolutionary Ghadar Party in 1924 to work for the overthrow of British rule, and in 1927 he was arrested for illegal possession of firearms and sentenced to five years in prison.

His vow held for twenty-one years. On 13 March 1940, at a meeting in Caxton Hall, London, he shot dead Michael O'Dwyer, who had been Lieutenant Governor of Punjab at the time of the massacre and had defended the action taken there. At his trial he gave his name as Ram Mohammad Singh Azad, a name joining Hindu, Muslim and Sikh identities with the word for freedom. He was hanged at Pentonville Prison on 31 July 1940.

Independent India brought him home. In 1974 his remains were repatriated from London and honoured at Sunam, and the town was officially renamed Sunam Udham Singh Wala in his memory. Every 31 July the town marks his martyrdom day, and his name is carried by its government college, its railway station and its memorial.

Geography and people

The 2011 census counted 69,069 people in Sunam's municipal council together with its outgrowth areas; the council proper counted 55,455. Growth has been steady for a century: 43,909 people in 1991 and 56,251 in 2001 on the wider count. The town covered 22.17 square kilometres at a density of about 3,115 people per square kilometre. Men numbered 36,618 and women 32,451, a sex ratio of 886. Scheduled Castes numbered 16,735, about a quarter of the town.

By faith the census recorded Hindus at 53.7 per cent (37,101 people) and Sikhs at 43.9 per cent (30,326), with small Muslim, Jain and Christian communities. Punjabi is the everyday language. Around the town, the villages of Sunam tehsil farm wheat, paddy and cotton country, and Sunam's grain market and bazaars are where that produce is sold and its earnings spent.

Places of interest

The Shaheed Udham Singh memorial is the town's principal landmark, drawing visitors, school groups and official tributes on his birth anniversary, 26 December, and on martyrdom day, 31 July. His ancestral town also carries his name on its government college and other institutions, so a walk through Sunam is a walk through his story.

Older than the memorial is the Samadh of Baba Bhai Mool Chand, a saint of the seventeenth century whose shrine draws people of all faiths. His descendants and followers are known as the Bhaike, after the village of Bhai Ki Pishour near Sunam, and once a year they gather at Chhajjli, about 10 kilometres away, for the gathering called Babe Mitti. The shrine of Peer Banna Banoi is Sunam's other shared sacred place: local legend tells that the peer gave his life on his wedding day protecting Hindu and Sikh girls from armed kidnappers, and people of every community still pay homage there.

Notable people

Shaheed Udham Singh (1899 to 1940) stands so far ahead of every other name from Sunam that the town has taken his into its own. Baba Bhai Mool Chand, the seventeenth-century saint whose samadh stands in the town, is the other figure Sunam has remembered for centuries. Between the saint and the revolutionary, the town's two landmarks tell its whole story: faith kept across generations, and a single act of vengeance that carried a small Malwa town's name to London and back.

Getting there and Sunam today

Sunam stands on the Ludhiana to Hisar railway line, and its station, renamed Sunam Udham Singh Wala, links it with Sangrur, Ludhiana and the Haryana border towns. By road it is a short run to Sangrur and an easy drive to Patiala, Bathinda and Ludhiana. The town is part of the Sangrur Lok Sabha constituency.

The working town behind the famous name is a market centre: a grain market, wholesale cloth and utensils markets, and a Sarafa Bazar for gold and jewellery, with Naya Bazaar and Peeran Wala Gate among its main shopping streets. Education is a strength, with the Shaheed Udham Singh Government College, the Guru Nanak Dev Dental College and the Ajit Nursing Institute, and schools such as the Hindu Sabha High School, founded on 19 February 1948, that have taught the town's children for generations.