On the Guru Purub evening, here is a lesser known destination that the great Guru travelled half a millennia ago during his journey to Tibet
As we celebrate the 551st birth anniversary of #GuruNanakDevJi, here is a lesser known story of his travel to a remote place tucked away in Arunachal Pradesh in India’s north east.
Early this morning, Aditya Bharat Tiwari, OSD to Arunachal Pradesh, tweeted an old tweet thread about Mechuka in remote Shi Yomi district of his state. (Mechuka is also called Menchuka by some).
“It is believed that on his travel back from Tibet in 16th century, Guru Nanak Dev stayed in Mechuka and meditated. Today there is Gurudwara where Indian Army serves Langar to the devotees. I was fortunate to have visited this place on auspicious day of GuruParv,” he tweeted.
Do explore his entire thread that has beautiful pictures of the place and surrounding areas.
This prompted me to search a little more about Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s travels when I bumped into this blog ‘Path of the Guru: Journeys of Guru Nanak’. On the occasion of Guru Nanak Jayanti (birth anniversary) in 2015, Anurag Mallick and Priya Ganapthy had retraced Guru Nanak’s udasis (epic journeys) across the Indian subcontinent.
The opening lines beautifully sum up the settings at the Arunachal Pradesh destination where Guru Nanak Dev Ji visited about 500 years ago. “The Bamchu, a tributary of the Yargyap Chu (Siyom river) gushed past an overhang of creepers, just below the cave where Guru Nanak had meditated half a millennia ago. Nearly 200 km northwest of Along deep in the upper folds of Arunachal Pradesh, just 20 km short of the Indo-Tibet border, it was surprising to find a cave dedicated to the Sikh Guru, nearly 2,000 km from Punjab! It was even harder to conceive that locals considered him as one of their Guru Rinpoches and worshipped him as Nanak Lama.”
Do read the original post to know more about the epic journeys of the Guru. May the great Guru bless us all.
