Ghuman

01From Pandharpur to the Punjab

Namdev, the tailor-saint who sang to Vitthal on the banks of the Chandrabhaga, travelled north after the death of his friend Jnaneshwar. The Punjab tradition says he settled at Ghuman, taught there for about twenty years and died there; the Maharashtra tradition places his samadhi at the first step of the Vitthal temple at Pandharpur, the Namdev Payari. Both are honoured, and the two need not be set against each other. What is certain is that his songs reached the Punjab: Guru Arjan placed about sixty of Namdev’s hymns in the Adi Granth in 1604, and they are sung in the gurdwaras every day.

02The shrine at Ghuman

The shrine, called Gurdwara Tapiana Sahib after the place of his tapas, stands near Sri Hargobindpur in Gurdaspur district. Families of the village have served it as granthis and sevadars for generations, and its old walls carried murals of the late eighteenth century. In 1909 Max Arthur Macauliffe published a photograph of it in The Sikh Religion. Pilgrims from Maharashtra come here, and Ghuman links the Varkari path of the Deccan to the Punjab. In April 2015 the Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, the yearly gathering of Marathi letters, was held at Ghuman in Namdev’s honour.

The life of this place