Guardian · 15 hours ago

How Rebuilding Old Mosques Is Bringing Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims Together in Punjab | Global Development | the Guardian

Across villages in Punjab, India, Sikh and Hindu communities have quietly been rebuilding mosques abandoned during the catastrophic violence of the 1947 partition - not as a political gesture, but as something closer to a neighbor returning a borrowed thing long overdue. Over the past nine years, ordinary villagers have contributed land, money, bricks, and cement to restore more than 165 such places of worship, some in villages with barely a handful of Muslim families remaining. When Bibi Rajinder Kaur, a 77-year-old Sikh woman, persuaded her grandson to donate family farmland for a mosque, she offered a simple reason: "There is no deed better than giving someone a place to worship." Eighty-seven-year-old Gajju Khan, whose Sikh neighbors once hid him from partition's killing mobs, now sits in an unfinished mosque hoping to hear the call to prayer echo across his village before he dies - funded almost entirely by those same neighbors' descendants. "Online, there is immense polarisation," observes the current shahi imam of Punjab, "but on the ground in our villages, ordinary people are still choosing to protect each other."