ANT KAL

MEHRAJ, also spoken as Mahiraj or Marhaj, is a village 6 km northwest of Rampura Phul (30°16`N, 75°14`E) in Bathinda district founded in 1627 by Bhai Mohan (d. 1630), aJatt of the Siddhu clan, with the blessings and help of Guru Hargobind. According to Sikh tradition, Mohan with his tribe wanted to settle down in this area but the Bhullars, the local dominating tribe, resisted. Mohan sought Guru Hargobind`s blessing and succeeded in founding a village which he called Mehraj after the name of his greatgrandfather. The Bhullars tried to dislodge him, but were driven away with Guru Hargobind`s help. In the battle Guru Hargobind had to fight here against an imperial force led by Lalla Beg on 16 December 1634, he took up position around a pool of water about 3 km south of Mehraj. Sikhs, though vastly outnumbered, defeated the attacking force. Lalla Beg and several of his officers and men were killed. Guru Hargobind had them buried according to Muslim rites while he had the Sikhs fallen in action cremated. A tower subsequently raised indicates the sites where cremation and burial took place. GURDWARA CHHOTA GURUSAR TAMBU SAHIB, one kilometre southwest of the village, marks the site where Guru Hargobind had his tent (tambu, in Punjabi) set up at the time of his first visit to this place. It is a modestlooking shrine built on a low mound and managed by the village sangat. GURDWARA GURUSAR MEHRAJ marks the site Of Guru Hargobind`s camp during the battle of Mehraj. According to Cur Bilds Chhevm Pdtshdhi, Guru Hargobind had himself named this place Gurusar and declared it a place of pilgrimage, appointing a Ravidasi Sikh to look after it. The old building constructed by Maharaja Hira Singh of Nabha (18431911) was replaced during the 1980`s by the successors of Sam Gurmukh Singh Scvavale. Tlie new building, inside a walled compound, comprises a highccilingcd assembly hall, with the sanctum in the middle marked off by massive square columns and wide arches. Above the sanctum is a domed pavilion lined with glazed tiles and topped by a goldplated pinnacle and an umbrellashaped finial with a khandd at the apex. Domed kiosks adorn the hall corners. The Gurdwara, endowed with 250 acres of land, is affiliated to the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee. People from the surrounding villages throng for a dip in the holy sarovar on every Monday.

MALVA, not to be mixed with a tract of this name in Central India, is one of the three main divisions of the present Punjab state of India, the other two being Majha and Doaba. It is in the shape of a rough parallelogram lying between 29°-30 and 31°-10 North latitudes and 73°-50 and 76°-50\' East longitudes, bounded by the River Sutlej in the north, Haryana in the east and the south, Rajasthan in the southwest corner, and by Bahawalpur state of Pakistan in the west. Malva comprises eleven of the seventeen administrative districts of the Punjab, viz., Firozpur, Faridkot, Moga, Muktsar, Bathinda, Sangrur, Mansa, Ludhiana, Patiala, Fatehgarh Sahib and Ropar excluding its Nurpur Bedi tahsil or sub-division which falls across the Sutlej and geographically lies in the Doaba region. G.A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. IX, Part I, who based his demarcation on the spoken dialect Malvai, would exclude the present Patiala, Fatehgarh Sahib and Ropar districts and part of Ludhiana district from Malva because of a different dialect, Povadhi, spoken there. But because of demographical changes consequent upon partition of the country (1947) and subsequent allocation of a major part of Povadhi-speaking area to the newly created state of Haryana (1966), it is not inappropriate to call the entire cis Sutlej tract of the present Punjab as Malva. Malva is a dialectical variation of the Sanskrit word Mallava which was the name of an ancient tribe (Malloi of the Greek accounts) who challenged, though unsuccessfully, the might of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC and might have later migrated to the south of the Sutlej, giving the name Malva, the land of the Mallavas, to their new homeland. With an area of 32,808 square km and a population of 11,817,142 (1991 census), Malva is the largest region of the present Punjab. It has 65.1 per cent of the total area and 58.5 per cent of the total population 360.1 per square km against 401 per square km for the entire state. The density of population district-wise varies vastly between Ludhiana (629) and Firozpur (272). Till the latter part of the nineteenth century, Malva, leaving aside a narrow strip along the Sutlej, was an arid semi-desert covered with slow-growing trees such as van (Quercus incana) and jand (Prosopis spicigera) and thorny bushes like karir (Capparis aphylla) and malha beri, a kind of jujube. Although by and large a plain country, the region, especially its southern and southwestern parts, had become undulated with mounds of sand blown in from Rajasthan by southwesterly winds. Cultivation was almost entirely dependent upon rain which was erratic and usually scanty. Introduction of canal irrigation with the renovation of Sirhind canal initiated a change which, strengthened by later developments, especially the harnessing of water resources and the availablity of cheap hydro-electricity, culminated in intensive agriculture of the 1960\'s and the following decades, and transformed the face of Malva and helped make Punjab the granary of India. The hardy farmers of the region including those brought here in the aftermath of the partition of the country in 1947 have converted the former forest and sandy mounds into neatly marked lush green farmlands. Major crops grown are wheat, paddy, cotton and oil seeds, sugarcane, cultivation picking up rapidly since the beginning of the 1980\'s. This coupled with the growth of small and medium-scale industry, though at a slower pace, has brought in prosperity which in turn is resulting in a perceptible change for the better in education and cultural fields, although literacy rate (45.6 per cent) still lags behind the state average (49.2 per cent). As in the case of density of population, there is vast variation also in district-wise literacy rate which ranges between 57.2 per cent for Ludhiana (highest in the state) and 32.8 per cent for Sangrur. Yet, of the three universities in the state, two are located in Malva-Punjab Agricultureal University at Ludhiana and Punjabi University at Patiala, besides an autonomous college of engineering and technology at Patiala. Similarly, of the four medical colleges in the whole of Punjab three are located in the Malva region. In the industrial field, Malva, with its two huge thermal plants, one each at Bathinda and Ropar, and industrial complexes at Ludhiana, Rajpura, Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar (Mohali) and Mandi Gobindgarh, is far ahead of the other two regions. According to 1991 census figures, of the ten Punjab towns having a population of over 100,000 each, five lie in Malva. Ludhiana (1, 012, 062, persons) is the most populous city in the state. Malva\'s part in the history of the Sikhs dates back to the time of Guru Nanak, whose peregrinations also covered this ancient land. Guru Angad\'s birthplace, Sarai Nanga, lies in the Malva. Guru Hargobind, Guru Har Rai, Guru Tegh Bahadur and Guru Gobind Singh travelled extensively through this area. Many eminent Sikhs such as Bhai Bhagatu, Bhai Bahilo and Bhai Mani Sihgh came from Malva. The years following the death in 1708 of Guru Gobind Sihgh were the most turbulent period of the history of the Sikhs when the Mughal governors of the Punjab and later the Afghan invaders had let loose a reign of terror and religious persecution against the Sikhs. The jungles of Malva, with their comparative inaccessibility on account of shortage of water and other scarcities impeding large-scale operations, provided the warring Sikh bands from across the Sutlej with a natural sanctuary. Some local Sikh sardars, descendants of Bhai Phul blessed by Guru Hargobind and Guru Har Rai and collectively known as Phulkiari misl, carved out territories over which they ruled as independent or semi-independent chiefs. This is how the former Sikh states of Patiala, Nabha, Jind, Faridkot, Kalsia, Kaithal and Ladva came into existence. When Maharaja Ranjit Singh rose to power north of the Sutlej and started amalgamating other misi territories to his own dominions, the states south of the Sutlej known as cis Sutlej states, sought protection under the British, whose suzerainty they accepted. They became tributaries of the British empire while the districts of Ludhiana and Firozpur came under the latter\'s direct rule. Of these Sikh states, Kaithal lapsed to the British dominions on the death, without a male heir, of its last ruler, Bhai Udai Singh, in 1845, and Ladva was annexed as a punishment to its ruler, Sardar Ajit Singh, for his open support to Sikh government of Lahore during the first Anglo-Sikh war (1845-46). The remaining five Punjab Sikh states and the Muslim state of Malerkotla continued to exist till after the independence of India, 1947. In May 1948, they in combination with Kapurthala in the Doaba region and the submountainous Hindu state of Nalagarh formed themselves into what was called the Patiala and East Punjab States Union, PEPSU for short. In 1956 PEPSU was amalgamated with the Punjab, which was further split into Haryana and the Punjabi speaking state of the Punjab on 1 November 1966.

KOLAYAT, popularly pronounced Kulait, a town 52 km southwest of Bikaner (28"04`N, 73021`E), is famous for a temple dedicated to Kapila Muni, an ancient Hindu sage to whom the Sankhya system of philosophy is attributed. According to Sikh chroniclers, Guru Nanak visited Kolayat. Guru Gobind Singh, at the time of his travels through Rajasthan, is said to have stayed here for twelve days. Here Bhai Daya Singh and Bhai Dharam Singh, who had been to Ahmadnagar to deliver to Emperor Aurahgzib the Zafamamah, the Guru`s letter in Persian verse, rejoined him. However, no Sikh shrine existed here until 1968 when some Sikh residents of the area, led by a Sikh colonizer of Kolayat, acquired a plot of land and constructed a Gurudwara. The Gurudwara is a modest oneroom building with a paved platform all around it. Sikh settlers of the surrounding area gather to celebrate Guru Nanak`s birth anniversary on the fullmoon day of Kartik (OctoberNovember) every year.

KARA, situated in Allahabad district of Uttar Pradesh, on the right bank of the River Gariga, was once a flourishing town and a provincial capital under the Muslim Sultanate and under the Mughals though now it is no more than a large village. Sikh chronicles usually refer to it as KaraManakpur, but Manakpur is a separate village 5 km away on the opposite bank of the Gariga. Guru Tegh Bahadur in the course of his journey to the eastern parts in 166566 halted at Kara on his way from Kanpur to Allahabad. At Kara, he met Sant Maluk Das, a famous Vaisnava saint. Maluk Das had heard about Guru Nanak and the spiritual line issuing from him. He was surprised to see his Ninth successor accompanied by armed disciples who hunted animals. But on beholding Guru Tegh Bahadur, his doubts disappeared as clouds disperse before high winds. He, according to Sn Our Pratdp Suraj Granth, said to himself, "Though the Guru is clad as a prince, his mind is fixed in divine knowledge. He is the occean of qualities. How can an ignorant one like me praise him? Sinner I have been from birth. His sanctity I did not fathom." Maluk Das fell at the Guru`s feet and took him to his hut where he served him with humility. There is no Sikh shrine at Kara at present, but a pamphlet published by the followers of Sant Maluk Das testifies that a Sikh sangat and a Sikh gurudwara once flourished here, and that once in a year a gathering took place here of members of all communities when kardh prasdd was freely distributed. .