Bhagat Puran Singh

In more detail

Lahore, 1934. A four-year-old disabled boy was left at the entrance of a gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship. Orphanages had turned him away, and the gurdwara could not keep him. Its head priest handed him to a volunteer: “Puran Singh, only you please look after the child.”

Puran Singh named him Piara, which means beloved, and carried him on his back, everywhere, for fourteen years. In 1947 Punjab was split between India and Pakistan. He reached Amritsar with Piara, then 17, on his back, and one rupee and five annas (there were sixteen annas to the rupee). There he took in the sick, the old and the disabled. They lived on footpaths, and he begged bread to feed them.

That work became Pingalwara, a home in Amritsar for the homeless, the disabled and the old. Puran Singh said that without Piara there would be no Pingalwara. Today it cares for more than 1,800 people.

Notes and caveats

• The fourteen years is Pingalwara’s own figure. By its dates Piara was 17 when they reached Amritsar in August 1947, and a 2001 biography of Puran Singh, as quoted in a review, counts the fourteen years to 1948.
• Accounts differ on who left Piara at the gurdwara and on his condition, so the film says only that he was left, and that he was disabled.
• Pingalwara’s own pages date its beginning both to 1934, with Piara, and to 1947, so the film gives no founding year.
• The sources do not say how they travelled from Lahore to Amritsar, so the film does not say they walked.
• The words on screen at the turn, “If I had not come across Piara, Pingalwara could not have come into existence”, are Puran Singh’s as Pingalwara quotes him. The spoken line is a paraphrase, since his biography words it a little differently.

What the film leaves out

the head priest said a prayer (Ardaas) before handing the child over, which the film neither shows nor says. The refugee camp at Khalsa College closed at the end of 1947, and seven or eight people stayed with him. They moved from place to place: G.T. Road, then a railway station footpath, then a banyan tree near a hospital gate. Pingalwara’s biography says the moving lasted eleven years, until he bought the present site in 1958. One of Pingalwara’s members recalled that her family later cared for Piara at their home in Sangrur. We found no record of when Piara died.