Chandigarh: The ongoing demolition of colonial-era buildings at what is Punjab’s only surviving example of such architecture – Dera Baba Nanak railway station on the Pakistan border – ostensibly to modernise it, will permanently erase a site steeped in the history and stories of both pre- and post-Partition eras.

Vociferous attempts by locals to preserve these structures – built in 1927 in the village of Sikhism’s founder, Guru Nanak – and once part of a rail network linking Amritsar to Sialkot and even Lahore – proved futile. All their appeals were ignored by the Railways, which insisted that the station’s renovation could not be delayed, even if it meant wiping out the last surviving fragments of its nearly century-old, charming and fascinating heritage. 

“Repeated pleas to the Railways over the past six months to preserve the cluster of Dera’s historically significant station buildings went unanswered,” lamented Baldev Singh Randhawa of the Virasti Manch, or Heritage Forum, in the nearby town of Batala. "They simply ignored our appeals and continued with the demolitions," said Randhawa, whose Manch works to preserve the historic architecture and cultural legacy of Gurdaspur district, at the western edge of which Dera lies.

According to The Tribune newspaper, many Dera residents, who also lobbied for the station buildings to be accorded heritage status, like Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or be handed over to the Archaeological Survey of India for conservation, were similarly disappointed.

Even Gurdaspur MP Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa bemoaned the ‘senseless demolition’ of the station buildings, which included 14 railway staff quarters, a modest goods shed, a guard hut, cavernous waiting rooms, and assorted related structures – all built in the inimitable colonial style that typified railway station architecture across Punjab and north India in the early 20th century.

The MP who belongs to Dharowali village adjoining Dera, told The Tribune last weekend that the ‘magnificent stations edifice, which had a thousand tales attached to it, would now crumble, ending for all time its rich past. 

For two decades after its inception in 1927, Dera station – situated on the left bank of the Ravi river – served as a modest, yet vital link in the pre-Partition rail network of undivided Punjab. As an important stop on the Amritsar–Sialkot line, it also had a steady flow of passenger and goods trains travelling to Narowal, some 37 km distant, and onward to Lahore, tying this small holy village of my ancestor Nanak to united Punjab’s wider provincial commercial and social circuits.

The station’s growing traffic gradually transformed its initially modest surroundings to include booking offices, staff quarters, warehousing sheds, restrooms, and ancillary service buildings, all of which were currently being flattened. And by the 1930s, traders ferried produce from Dera station across Punjab, workers commuted to factories in Sialkot – the region’s sports-goods hub – students travelled to educational institutions in what is now Pakistan, and pilgrims visited sites associated with Guru Nanak and early Sikh history.

A part of the past

But as Partition – and Independence Day on August 15, 1947 – dawned, the atmosphere in Dera shifted almost overnight.

A heavy, disquieting stillness settled over the town, as for the next 48 hours, confusion reigned: no one knew whether Dera, or even Gurdaspur – the largest and most strategically important district of pre-Partition Punjab – would fall to India or Pakistan. Everyone tensely awaited the Radcliffe Award, the hurried boundary decision named after the British civil servant tasked with dividing Punjab and Bengal, which was to be formally made public two days later, on August 17.

In that limbo period, rumours multiplied with a speed and intensity that village elders recounted decades later. They said panic spread through Dera and its surrounding hamlets, as government officials abandoned their posts under the cover of darkness and Sikh and Hindu families began vacating homes they feared would soon lie in Pakistan.

At the railway station, staff reinforced security around platforms, signal cabins, and outlying buildings as tensions escalated. Irregular militias appeared on both sides of the Ravi, a stark reminder of how rapidly order was unravelling, as eyewitness accounts filtered in of widespread massacres on trains traveling in either direction to the newly created countries of India and Pakistan.

When the boundary award was finally announced, relief swept through the region: Gurdaspur – and with it Dera – remained in India, while only Shakargarh, one of its four tehsils, was assigned to Pakistan. Yet the turmoil of those days left its own mark, albeit benign. As millions fled Pakistan from all directions, thousands of refugees paused briefly in Dera, carrying whatever valuables they could conceal. Many secretly embedded gold coins and jewellery into the mud walls of the houses they occupied for a night or two, hoping to reclaim them later – but never did.

Decades later, some of these hidden caches surfaced, including one uncovered in my grandfather’s house in the village centre during heavy monsoon rains, sparking wild tales of buried treasures that continue to circulate even today. Locals whisper that for every cache found, many more still lie hidden, waiting to reveal the secrets of a long vanished era.

However, back at Dera’s station, from where the last train to Narowal departed in September 1947, bringing to a close not just a railway route but an entire era and ending, forever, the journeys, associations, stories, and generations of camaraderie that had long connected diverse communities across undivided Punjab. Almost immediately thereafter, Dera station became merely a terminal point for the short line to and from Amritsar, some 50 km to the southeast – a role it continues to play – settling into a quiet, peripheral, and somnolent existence with a truncated staff.

Despite its diminished importance, however, the station’s colonial-era structures – red-brick buildings, elegant arches, and thoughtfully arranged outbuildings – continued to impress for decades, serving as a nostalgic reminder of the region’s pre-Partition stature under the British, for whom rail links through Gurdaspur, Batala, and Dera were tactically vital. These lines provided the only reliable artery from the Punjab plains into the sensitive Jammu and Kashmir province and enabled rapid troop movement towards the restive North-West Frontier Province to quell warring Pathan tribesmen.

Meanwhile, in 2019, Dera’s station briefly sprang back to life with the opening of the Kartarpur Corridor – reconnecting the village to the sacred site in Pakistan where Guru Nanak spent his final 18 years. For 72 years, animosity, wars and turbulent relations between India and Pakistan had kept devotees from Kartarpur, located just 4.7 km inside Pakistan, but the Corridor restored this historic connection, allowing worshippers to visit the spectacular gurdwara and walk once again in Nanak’s footsteps. Since May, however, travel across the Corridor has been suspended following India’s four-day war with Pakistan, and it remains unclear when it will reopen.

That being said, Dera railway station faces a quieter, but no less significant threat – the rapid erasure of its living history. Virasti Manch’s Randhawa highlighted the striking irony surrounding officials responsible for it.

He said the central government, which constantly stresses the importance of India’s past, is ironically tearing down Dera station’s old structures even as senior leaders in Delhi trumpet the need to preserve memories, connections, and curate history through festivals, museums, and official narratives.

Yet when confronted with a real, living piece of that history – a station whose walls and platforms witnessed traders, pilgrims, and families through Partition and beyond – it is treated as expendable, the conservation activist maintained. “By demolishing these structures, the authorities erase not just buildings but a tangible, irreplaceable link to the past,” Randhawa said. Dera station, he disconsolately added, loses more than just a few historic edifices; it loses a direct connection to its own history – something no reconstruction, narrative, or museum display can ever replace.

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