Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, born at Qadian in Gurdaspur district around 1835, founded the Ahmadiyya movement in 1889, taking the first pledge of allegiance at Ludhiana. Qadian became its centre and remains one of its two principal seats, the other being Rabwah in Pakistan.
The movement grew rapidly in Punjab in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and produced an extensive missionary and publishing operation. It also produced immediate and lasting conflict with mainstream Sunni scholarship over its founder's claims.
In 1947 the community's leadership moved to Pakistan and founded Rabwah. Qadian retained a resident Ahmadi population and the movement's original sites.
In Pakistan, Ahmadis were declared non-Muslim by constitutional amendment in 1974, and further legislation in 1984 criminalised a range of Ahmadi religious practice. The community has faced sustained persecution there since.
Qadian in Indian Punjab is therefore the birthplace of a movement whose adherents cannot practise freely in the other Punjab, and its annual gathering draws Ahmadis from many countries.
Qadian was a village of Mughal descended landholders, which the family name carries. The founder was a court clerk's son who wrote in Urdu, Arabic and Persian, and the Barahin-i-Ahmadiyya, begun in 1880, had made his name before any of the claims that separated him from Sunni orthodoxy were made.
The Minaret of the Messiah was begun in 1903 and finished in 1916 and it is what the town is recognised by from a distance. The reserved graveyard is the other principal site, and the annual gathering held there each December brings people from a great many countries into a Gurdaspur district town.
It is one of very few places in Indian Punjab that draws international religious visitors who are not Sikh, and it is absent from the state's tourism material entirely.