Other faiths and movements

Jatheras and village gods

Most villages and clans keep a jathera, a shrine to the founding ancestor, where new brides and children are taken to pay respect, and a small shrine to the village guardian, Bhumia or Khetrapal. Women made offerings to Sitla Mata to protect their children from smallpox. The Singh Sabha and Arya Samaj reformers fought these practices, but many survive in both Punjabs.

Saints of the people

Long before the reformers drew firm lines between the faiths, Punjabis of every religion went to the same saints. Sakhi Sarwar, Lakhdata, whose shrine is at Nigaha in the Suleiman hills, had Hindu, Sikh and Muslim followers, the Sultanias, who walked there every year. Gugga Pir, the snake saint, is worshipped in the month of Bhadon with fairs at his shrines, and Khwaja Khizr, the green saint of the rivers, is honoured with lamps floated on the water.

Buddhism

From the time of Ashoka, Gandhara and Taxila were among the great centres of Buddhism. Under the Kushans their monasteries filled the valleys around Peshawar and Taxila, and Gandharan sculptors gave the Buddha a human form. After the Hun invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries Buddhism faded from the Punjab, leaving stupas and the stone Buddhas now in the museums of Lahore and Peshawar.

Jainism

Jain merchants and monks lived in the towns of the Punjab for centuries, in Lahore, Multan, Kasur, Gujranwala, Sialkot and Ludhiana, with temples in the old cities. In the nineteenth century Atmaramji, born near Ferozepur, revived the Svetambara order; his samadhi stands in Gujranwala. Most Jains of the western towns moved east in 1947.

Christianity

Presbyterian missionaries opened a mission at Ludhiana in 1834. From the 1870s to the 1930s many thousands of Dalit labourers in the central Punjab became Christian in mass movements. Christians are now the largest religious minority in Pakistani Punjab, and the Punjabi Zabur, the Psalms set to Punjabi folk tunes, is still at the heart of their worship.

Ahmadiyya

Founded at Qadian, in the Gurdaspur district, by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889. After Partition its headquarters moved to Rabwah, now Chenab Nagar, in Pakistani Punjab. In 1974 Pakistan declared Ahmadis non-Muslim by law, and they have faced persecution since.

Ravidassia

Followers of Bhagat Ravidas, strongest among the Dalits of the Doaba around Jalandhar and in the diaspora, centred on the Dera Sachkhand Ballan. In 2010 the community adopted its own scripture, the Amritbani of Guru Ravidas.

The deras

Living teachers and their deras have drawn millions in both Punjabs. The Radha Soami Satsang at Beas, founded in 1891, is the largest, alongside the Nirankaris, the Namdharis and many local deras.

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Within eighty years, printing presses, schools, the census and British rule set every community in the Punjab to defining itself. Most of these movements founded schools and newspapers, and argued with each other in them.