Bhagat Puran Singh

Piara

Born Ramji Das to a Hindu family in 1904, he became a Sikh as a young man while living at a gurdwara in Lahore that fed and housed him. He stayed and did the work of the place.

In 1934 someone left a severely disabled boy at the gurdwara. Nobody claimed him. Puran Singh took him, named him Piara, and carried him on his back — for fourteen years, through the ordinary business of a life, including the flight from Lahore at Partition. That is the origin of everything that followed: he had already decided he was not going to put a person down.^1,2,3

Pingalwara

Puran Singh reached Amritsar on 18 August 1947, at the refugee camp in the Khalsa College grounds, with one sick old man, Piara on his back, and one rupee and five annas in his pocket.⁴ At the camp he took on the duty of looking after the sick, old and disabled people there. When the camp closed at the end of 1947 he was left with seven or eight destitute people, and he moved with them from place to place: first to a spot on the G.T. Road in front of the Chief Khalsa Diwan, then to a footpath at the railway station, and from 1 October 1948 to a banyan tree by the gate of the hospital. By the Pingalwara’s account he moved from one place to another for eleven years, until he bought the present site on 27 November 1958.⁴ The station footpath was one of several places, not the first or the only one.

He begged loaves of bread from houses and eating places to feed them.⁴ Public donations later started to flow in, and paid collectors were employed to gather small coins from sources such as rail and bus passengers.⁵ The All India Pingalwara Charitable Society, which grew from this work, still runs; its home page now reports more than 1,800 residents.⁷ The sources disagree on when it was registered: its own biography gives 6 March 1957, and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism gives 6 March 1967.^4,5

He printed and gave away tracts on whatever he thought people needed to know, and paid for them himself.^1,2,3

The other campaign

From the 1960s the tracts increasingly concerned soil erosion, deforestation, water pollution, and the costs of intensive fertiliser use in Punjab — arguments made while the Green Revolution was being celebrated without qualification, and which have aged extremely well.

He returned India’s Padma Shri in 1984 in protest at Operation Blue Star. He died in 1992.^1,2,3

Seva, literally

Seva in Sikhism means selfless and voluntary service for the benefit of humanity without personal gain,⁶ and langar is its institutional form: a kitchen open to anyone. Bhagat Puran Singh’s Pingalwara is a modern example of what the principle looks like in practice. It began with one man, a boy on his back and one rupee and five annas, and a society was registered only years later.^3,4,5,6