I have been in Islamabad for five months now. It has been interesting to see and slowly get to know the other side of the fence, a more or less unknown quantity until I stepped across it into Pakistan - an adventure, no less!
The thrill of that crossing notwithstanding, it paled a little and was replaced by the adventure of meeting scores of Pakistani people, of learning first hand about the living, breathing linkages between them and their families still in India, of hearing about those who grew up in India but came across and made Pakistan their home after marriage, of experiencing complete ease of communication in a foreign land....
It was not long before I visited one of the main tourist attractions in Islamabad - a temple and gurdwara complex that stands in a prominent position on a slight elevation in the tiny village of Saidpur, just 10-15 minutes out of the capital, in the shadow of the Margalla Hills! Not more than seventy-five meters away from the complex stands an old mosque, making this tiny piece of land in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan rather interesting and thought provoking, and bringing a multitude of quite random thoughts about how things used to be, rushing to my mind ....
The tiny temple (top) has had no deity and the even tinier gurdwara (above), has lain empty since the Partition of India in 1947. This did not stop my imaginings taking me on an instant journey to a time when this tiny village was obviously inhabited or frequented by a sizeable number of Hindus and Sikhs along with Muslims ... sizeable enough to warrant the construction of these holy buildings. The emptiness of both the places of worship was food for more imaginings - which Hindu deity was worshipped in this little temple? Was there ever enough space to keep the holy Guru Granth Sahib AND have devotees step inside the miniscule gurdwara? Every internet source I looked at revealed that Lakshmi and Kali were the temple's presiding deities.
The temple and gurdwara stand opposite each other, flanking a dharamshala or sarai (hostel) for pilgrims, all three structures being confidently identified by our enthusiastic guide. The dharamshala has a single, huge, high-ceilinged hall on the ground floor - ideal, I thought, for a fairly large number of tired pilgrims to spread their beddings and grab some rest (the pic above shows the arches on the porch outside the large downstairs room of the dharamshala).
While the temple as pointed out by our guide is quite clearly a temple, judging by its architecture, there is a little confusion with regard to which building exactly is the gurdwara! Our guide and the internet clearly are not completely in agreement on this! While the latter source claims that the building in the above picture is the gurdwara, I took at face value our guide's information that the picture is of the dharamshala. Anyway, this difference of opinion is not of any importance to this blog. The fact is that the complex comprises of the two places of worship and the dharamshala.
Upstairs, one level above the big hall of what I call the dharamshala, and accessed by an outdoor staircase, is a more private part of this building. This part was presumably reserved for families with women and children, judging by the set of two rooms (now kept under lock and key), one of which has an embedded memorial stone complete with writing in Devnagari and Urdu and the auspicious Hindu symbol of Om above the door frame. The brief message on the stone is still completely and clearly legible ..... it goes thus "Yeh kamra Shrimati Ramkali Vora - suputri Lala Prabhu Dayal Khanna, Rawalpindi nivasi ki yaadgaar mein banaya gaya".
So what is the story of Ramkali Vora, the woman mentioned in the memorial stone and in whose memory the upstairs room was built? Thoughts about the young (presumably) lady came unbidden - was she sick, did she die young, was she happily married or had she been abandoned by her husband, is that why she was cherished by her doting father and not her husband? Did she have children? Was her father a rich man? How many years before Partition was this room built? Why did her father decide to donate towards the building of this room in this dharamshala? Did he pray for her here at the little temple in Saidpur? Were his prayers answered? Did he leave Rawalpindi at the time of Partition, or did he stay behind? Did he leave Pakistan with his beloved daughter's children? Did he survive that tumultous time? Was he a victim of the savagery of that time? Where are his descendants today? Do they even know about the existence of this stone and the story it tells? So many questions, all completely devoid of any importance now, yet so fascinating to me, these stories of ordinary people written in stone for posterity.
For these are not just the workings of my overactive imagination....people do not just disappear without a trace into thin air .... somewhere in India, or in Pakistan, or in the world at large, are people related to Ramkali Vora or to her father Lala Prabhu Dayal Khanna, who would probably be intrigued to see this engraving in a slab of marble set in the wall of an obscure building in a little village in Pakistan!
An old fashioned verandah shelters the two upstairs rooms from the harsh sun...a lovely, airy space with privacy, where women would come out and sit perhaps, while their children played and ran about after a tiring journey!
The fact that the dharamshala was taken over and turned into a government school after Partition is not at all surprising, considering its size and its graceful and fairly impressive architecture, which looks to me like a style from the 1920s or 1930s perhaps. The more intriguing question is, why was this tiny temple and gurdwara in a tiny village on the outskirts of modern day Islamabad (which of course did not exist till well after Partition) so important that it attracted so many devotees as to warrant the building of a well appointed dharamshala? Weren't there bigger, more important temples and gurdwaras in nearby Rawalpindi, a big, important and old city? Or was pre-Partition Saidpur itself a thriving, bustling and important enough village to attract pilgrims from all around?
While I do not have or plan to find the answers to these questions, it is clear that this was a village that had a healthy respect and tolerance for religions other than Islam, and that it was home to and visited by considerable numbers of Hindus and Sikhs, who lived in harmony with their fellow Muslim villagers. That is something to aspire to once again, if only to honour the memory of the human stories contained silently in the marble plaques embedded in the floor and walls of the complex!
The thrill of that crossing notwithstanding, it paled a little and was replaced by the adventure of meeting scores of Pakistani people, of learning first hand about the living, breathing linkages between them and their families still in India, of hearing about those who grew up in India but came across and made Pakistan their home after marriage, of experiencing complete ease of communication in a foreign land....
It was not long before I visited one of the main tourist attractions in Islamabad - a temple and gurdwara complex that stands in a prominent position on a slight elevation in the tiny village of Saidpur, just 10-15 minutes out of the capital, in the shadow of the Margalla Hills! Not more than seventy-five meters away from the complex stands an old mosque, making this tiny piece of land in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan rather interesting and thought provoking, and bringing a multitude of quite random thoughts about how things used to be, rushing to my mind ....
 |
| The temple |
 |
| The gurdwara |
The tiny temple (top) has had no deity and the even tinier gurdwara (above), has lain empty since the Partition of India in 1947. This did not stop my imaginings taking me on an instant journey to a time when this tiny village was obviously inhabited or frequented by a sizeable number of Hindus and Sikhs along with Muslims ... sizeable enough to warrant the construction of these holy buildings. The emptiness of both the places of worship was food for more imaginings - which Hindu deity was worshipped in this little temple? Was there ever enough space to keep the holy Guru Granth Sahib AND have devotees step inside the miniscule gurdwara? Every internet source I looked at revealed that Lakshmi and Kali were the temple's presiding deities.
The temple and gurdwara stand opposite each other, flanking a dharamshala or sarai (hostel) for pilgrims, all three structures being confidently identified by our enthusiastic guide. The dharamshala has a single, huge, high-ceilinged hall on the ground floor - ideal, I thought, for a fairly large number of tired pilgrims to spread their beddings and grab some rest (the pic above shows the arches on the porch outside the large downstairs room of the dharamshala).
While the temple as pointed out by our guide is quite clearly a temple, judging by its architecture, there is a little confusion with regard to which building exactly is the gurdwara! Our guide and the internet clearly are not completely in agreement on this! While the latter source claims that the building in the above picture is the gurdwara, I took at face value our guide's information that the picture is of the dharamshala. Anyway, this difference of opinion is not of any importance to this blog. The fact is that the complex comprises of the two places of worship and the dharamshala.
Upstairs, one level above the big hall of what I call the dharamshala, and accessed by an outdoor staircase, is a more private part of this building. This part was presumably reserved for families with women and children, judging by the set of two rooms (now kept under lock and key), one of which has an embedded memorial stone complete with writing in Devnagari and Urdu and the auspicious Hindu symbol of Om above the door frame. The brief message on the stone is still completely and clearly legible ..... it goes thus "Yeh kamra Shrimati Ramkali Vora - suputri Lala Prabhu Dayal Khanna, Rawalpindi nivasi ki yaadgaar mein banaya gaya".
For these are not just the workings of my overactive imagination....people do not just disappear without a trace into thin air .... somewhere in India, or in Pakistan, or in the world at large, are people related to Ramkali Vora or to her father Lala Prabhu Dayal Khanna, who would probably be intrigued to see this engraving in a slab of marble set in the wall of an obscure building in a little village in Pakistan!
An old fashioned verandah shelters the two upstairs rooms from the harsh sun...a lovely, airy space with privacy, where women would come out and sit perhaps, while their children played and ran about after a tiring journey!
The fact that the dharamshala was taken over and turned into a government school after Partition is not at all surprising, considering its size and its graceful and fairly impressive architecture, which looks to me like a style from the 1920s or 1930s perhaps. The more intriguing question is, why was this tiny temple and gurdwara in a tiny village on the outskirts of modern day Islamabad (which of course did not exist till well after Partition) so important that it attracted so many devotees as to warrant the building of a well appointed dharamshala? Weren't there bigger, more important temples and gurdwaras in nearby Rawalpindi, a big, important and old city? Or was pre-Partition Saidpur itself a thriving, bustling and important enough village to attract pilgrims from all around?
While I do not have or plan to find the answers to these questions, it is clear that this was a village that had a healthy respect and tolerance for religions other than Islam, and that it was home to and visited by considerable numbers of Hindus and Sikhs, who lived in harmony with their fellow Muslim villagers. That is something to aspire to once again, if only to honour the memory of the human stories contained silently in the marble plaques embedded in the floor and walls of the complex!
Visiting abandoned places always stirs up memories and stokes the imagination ..... Indeed the possibilities are endless
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