Baba Farid Ji

ਪਾਕਪਟਨ

The shrine of Fariduddin Ganjshakar, Baba Farid Ji, is at Pakpattan in Pakistan's Punjab. His verses are in the Guru Granth Sahib Ji.

The Indian anchor is Faridkot, named for him, where Gurdwara Tilla Baba Farid Ji marks the place he is said to have done chilla.

The story that he was pressed into forced labour by Raja Mokalsi and that the town was renamed as a consequence is tradition, not record.

Ajodhan, the older name, was a crossing on the Sutlej and a station on the road to Multan. Ibn Battuta passed through in the fourteenth century and recorded the shrine already functioning as a centre of pilgrimage.

The Behesht Darwaza, the gate of paradise, is opened once a year during the urs and pilgrims pass through it in enormous numbers. A crush at the gate in 2001 killed dozens. The gate is silver-plated and the opening is controlled by the hereditary custodians, the Diwans of Pakpattan, whose family has held the shrine for seven centuries.

Guru Nanak Dev Ji came here and met Sheikh Braham, a successor in the line, and the shloks of Baba Farid Ji entered the Sikh tradition through that transmission. That is why a Chishti corpus from the thirteenth century is preserved more completely in a Sikh scripture than at the shrine it came from.

What we don't know

  • The Raja Mokalsi story is legend and is presented as such.
  • Which of the 134 shloks are the twelfth-century Farid Ji's and which belong to later successors of the same name.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • faridkot.nic.in
  • Wikipedia entry on Baba Farid Ji.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 122 accounts in Under the Company, the chapter of this site covering British Punjab, from annexation to the canal colonies.