Hill of the Jogis

At partition, Tilla Jogian fell silent. Those who practiced their creed under its pine trees deserted it on pain of death. For the first time in two thousand years, the monastery stopped humming with the sound of murmured prayer; for the first time there was no one left to repair the walls as they began to crumble

The first ever mention of Tilla Jogian (Hill of the Jogis) is found in the ballad of Puran Bhagat, the prince of Sialkot. His body mutilated and dumped in a well outside the city because of the calumnious accusation by his stepmother, Puran was discovered by the great Guru Goraknath. Miraculously restored to fullness of body by the guru, Puran refused his benefactor’s bidding to return to the palace and apprise his father Raja Salvahan of the truth of the matter.

Instead, he joined the guru’s train and went, in the words of the ballad, ‘to the guru’s Tilla.’ There, under the watchful eye of Goraknath, he practiced the austerities that led to his becoming a great jogi. Now, Salvahan of Sialkot was a contemporary of Raja Vikramaditya of Ujjain, the hero from whose victorious stand against the Central Asiatic Sakas in the year 57 BCE we have our Vikrami era.

We also know that Raja Bhartari, the elder brother of Vikramaditya and the heir to the throne of Ujjain, had abdicated in favour of his brother in order to become a jogi. He too read the discipline under Guru Goraknath at Tilla. That is, the monastery at Tilla Jogian was already functioning in the 1st century BCE.

From other sources, we know that Guru Goraknath, the founder of the Tilla Jogian monastery, also established the Kunphatta (pierced ears) order of jogis. And so Tilla Jogian is sometimes also mentioned in history as Tilla Goraknath.

Referring to the site chosen for the construction of his famed fort of Rohtas near Jhelum, the history of Sher Shah Suri tells us that the fort lay ‘in the vicinity of Tilla Balnath’. Again we hear the same name from Abul Fazal, royal chronicler to Emperor Akbar. In the spring of 1581, Akbar visited the ‘shrine of Balnath’. Abul Fazal writes that even at that time the monastery was ‘so old that its beginning is not known’.

As for Balnath, Abul Fazal says that the man having become an ascetic chose this hilltop ‘in order to mortify his passions’. He also notes that the monastery was visited by people from all over India who held it in high veneration. Twenty-six years later we have Emperor Jehangir taking a detour to visit this hill ‘four kos and three quarters’ from Rohtas. The figure given by the emperor equals twenty-two kilometres, the exact distance between the two places.

But if we are wrestling with the change of name from Tilla Goraknath to Tilla Balnath, we have the civil servants Ibbetson, Maclagan and Rose causing yet another confusion. Compiling their very useful Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of Punjab in the early years of the 20th century, they noted that Goraknath lived in the 15th century.

To begin with, not everything British civil servants wrote was authentic. Here they are clearly far off the mark. Not only does Abul Fazal write of the great antiquity of Tilla, the poet Damodar, the first to preserve in writing the tale of Heer and Ranjha in the 15th century, also tells us of the latter’s sojourn at Tilla. We can be sure that the characters Heer and Ranjha, if they did exist, lived sometime in the 14th century. If, on the other hand, they were pure fiction, the story was nevertheless being told at that time. Goraknath therefore would have pre-dated the period the Glossary assigns him.

As for Balnath whose name replaced, without any explanation, that of Goraknath’s, I have a theory. I believe that Balnath, like his illustrious predecessor Goraknath, was a great teacher of the order of Kunphatta jogis who may have lived sometime in the 15th century. In the eyes of his disciples, his eminence was so great that for a time the ancient hilltop monastery came to be known after him. That was what misled the compilers of the Glossary.

And so we have Tilla Goraknath, or Balnath or Jogian, a solitary hill that rises out of the flat country southwest of Jhelum town. There on its 1000 metre-high top, shaded by ancient wild olive and pipal trees, sit the ruins of Goraknath’s monastery. Here are temples, samadhs and domed rooms where great masters of the past prayed and practiced the austerities of their order.

The ruins sit on a low mound and if one looks carefully, the remains of earlier buildings buried under are clearly discernible. Here a length of wall partially buried and lying athwart of the walls of the domed cubicle above, there an archway poking out of the ground and leading nowhere. And yet again rooms that once looked out on a pretty vista but over which new buildings have grown.

A short way to the southwest lies a large water tank of Mughal design. It is complete with a private bathing room where the ladies of the royal entourage would have attended to their ablutions. A tablet on an outside wall of this facility bears an unmistakable signature of a Central Asian master mason: a double-humped Bactrian camel. This was no simple ornament; it was the mason’s signature. Even if the tablet does not reveal his name, it tells us that the mason was a native of the distant steppe land.

Dhido Ranjha, heartbroken after Heer’s forcible marriage into the Khehras, travelled along the river from Jhang and ended up at Tilla. He too became a jogi with his pierced ears adorned with the prescribed wooden rings and returned home to serenade his lost love. The spot where he spent his time in meditation lies to the north of the ruined monastery right by the side of the path leading up to the peak.

Not long after him, Guru Nanak, then still searching for the truth that was to be the basis of the Khalsa religion, visited Tilla. A ledge on the extreme western side of the mountain overlooking a wonderful vista is where this great man performed his forty days of penance. Much after his time, a tiny domed cubicle was built to mark the site.

After the Raj had established its hold on Punjab, the district of Jhelum found the cool, trees-shaded height of Tilla a handy spot to make the summer headquarter for the Deputy Commissioner. Every year after the Bisakhi festival was over, the DC sahib moved up to Tilla to spend the next five months here.

In those days, the Bisakhi celebration at Tilla drew crowds from all across India. Thirty years ago, there were dozens of elderly men in the villages around the foot of Tilla who recalled the time when they would porter for rich yatris coming for the festival. But with them gone, fewer and fewer now realise the importance of this hilltop monastery.

At partition, Tilla Jogian fell silent. Those who practiced their creed under its pine trees deserted it on pain of death. For the first time in two thousand years, the monastery stopped humming with the sound of murmured prayer; for the first time there was no one left to repair the walls as they began to crumble.

Since my first visit in 1974, I have returned several times. Each time I have seen newer and newer signs of destruction: the handiwork of mindless treasure hunters. Mindless because they know not that those who peopled Tilla Goraknath gave up their crowns to become penniless mystics. They could not have brought any wealth to this pristine hill. But there are no limits to human ignorance and avarice and Tilla Jogian continues to suffer.