Above the town of Jhelum, on a hill about a thousand metres up, stands Tilla Jogian, a monastery of the Nath jogis said to be one of the oldest continuously used religious sites in the Punjab. It is where Ranjha goes in the qissa, after Heer is married off, to have his ears split and become a jogi under Balnath.
Every Punjabi who knows Waris Shah knows Tilla. Very few have been up it. The complex was abandoned in 1947 and its ponds and cells are ruined.
Guru Nanak Dev Ji is recorded in the janamsakhi tradition as having gone up to Tilla to speak with the jogis, and the exchange with the Siddhas in the Siddh Gosht is placed by tradition in that world of hill ascetics.
Rohtas, in the same district, is the fort Sher Shah Suri built in the 1540s to hold the Punjab against the Gakhars and against Humayun's return. It is enormous, four kilometres of wall, and was never besieged.
Jhelum district was among the heaviest recruiting grounds of the Indian Army under the martial races policy, and the pensions of that recruitment are still visible in the villages of the Pothohar.
Tilla Jogian is a hill above the Jhelum with a Nath jogi establishment on it that is very old, and it is one of the places named in the janamsakhi accounts.
The Nath order held sites across the Punjab and this was among the most important of them. Its buildings are ruined and the site is in a restricted military area.
The Sidh Gosht is an argument with the tradition that held this hill. The other side of that dialogue had real institutions and this is where one of them was.