Gurdwara Tuti Gandi Sahib, Muktsar

The event the gurdwara at Muktsar marks is a desertion reversed. During the siege of Anandpur a group of Sikhs left Guru Gobind Singh's service, and tradition holds that they signed or gave a written disclaimer of their allegiance. They were sent back, in the usual telling by the women of their own households, and they caught up with the Guru near the pool at Khidrana, where they fought and were killed holding off a pursuing force. The Guru is said to have found one of them still alive, and to have torn up the document of desertion at his request.

From that act the shrine takes its name, Tuti Gandi, the broken bond. The forty are remembered as the Chali Mukte, the forty liberated ones, and the town was renamed Muktsar, the pool of liberation, for them. Their memory is not confined to the site. They are named in the Ardas, the prayer recited at the close of Sikh congregational worship anywhere in the world, in the sequence that recalls those who kept faith under pressure, so a Sikh in any country hears the reference regularly whether or not the place is ever visited. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records the episode as it is held in the tradition, and notes that the details of the written disclaimer come from the tradition rather than from a surviving document.

The annual gathering at Muktsar falls at Maghi, in January, when large numbers come to bathe in the sarovar and attend the diwan. Maghi is one of the festivals kept across the Sikh world, and at Muktsar it carries the specific commemoration of the forty. The fair that grows around it is a substantial regional event, with the religious programme at its centre and a cattle and trade fair alongside, which is a common pattern at Punjabi shrines. Muktsar is also a working example of how Sikh institutions are governed.

Historic gurdwaras in Punjab came under elected management through the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925, which followed a long campaign to remove hereditary custodians from control of shrine property and revenue, and the resulting committee structure still administers them. That is unusual among religious institutions in the region and it has shaped Sikh public life, since control of the shrines carries control of substantial funds and of a platform. The atlas records the arrangement as a matter of the tradition's own law and institutions. The Sikh Rehat Maryada, the code of conduct issued by that same body, sets out how worship at a gurdwara proceeds, and the observance at Muktsar follows it.