Magazine
All aboard the Guru Express!
The Guru Granth Sahib is carried shoulder high on a palanquin from the railway station to the Makindu Gurdwara. Photo/RUPI MANGAT
Posted Monday, February 22 2010 at 00:00
Trained as a structural engineer, Babaji emigrated to England in the 1960s.
Deeply devoted to the teachings in the Guru Granth Sahib, he is the leader of the Nishkant Sahib, an organisation devoted to Sikhism.
Between 1995 and 1999, the organisation, under his leadership, redid the external gold gilding of the Golden Temple or Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar.
“It was a complex procedure. The first gold gilding of Harmandir Sahib was done by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who consolidated the Sikh empire before he was overthrown by the British. It took him 27 years, from 1803 to 1820, to complete the job, finding time between the many battles he fought to consolidate the Sikh empire. We did it in four years.”
He explains the process. “We put 24 layers of gold leaf on copper plates that are 99.9 per cent copper. It’s almost pure. The gold leaf is pasted on the copper plates with mercury. The gold leaf is made from gold bars cut into pieces of one square centimetre and manually pounded to 120 times per minute till the thickness is 0.76 microns or one thousandth of a millimetre.” I gasp at the sheer thinness of the leaf.
The original leaf coating had 12 layers and lasted almost 177 years.
Babaji’s intention in having 24 layers of gold leaf, is that it will last twice as long — almost four centuries.
“This technology in India goes back to about 600 years and the art is passed from generation to generation and jealously guarded. But l was determined to redo the Golden Temple because it had started to corrode because of the copper within. But some things had to be determined, like the thickness of the gold leaf, which until then nobody knew.
“With my engineering background and being in Birmingham where the Industrial Revolution started, l managed to take an original gold plate to a research institute there. The officer had never seen a hand-beaten gold leaf.”
The holy book is in the care of Mohinder Singh or Babaji as he is fondly called.
Born in Uganda in 1939 but raised and schooled in Kenya, Babaji trained as a structural engineer, and migrated to England in the 1960s.
Deeply devoted to the teachings in the Guru Granth Sahib, he is the leader of the Nishkant Sahib, an organisation devoted to Sikhism.
Between 1995 and 1999, the organisation, under his leadership, redid the external gold gilding of the Golden Temple or Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar.
Babaji is nostalgic about his Kenyan roots. Before inheriting the leadership from Baba Puran Singh from Kericho, the founder of Nishkant Sahib, he was told of the leader’s desire to see the original Granth Sahib returned to Makindu Gurdwara.
“The Guru Granth Sahib was taken from Makindu Gurdwara in 1972,” explains Joginder Kaur who was married in Makindu in 1967 to a railway worker. She still resides in Makindu, the only permanent Sikh resident in town. “There was an accidental fire. A cat knocked down the diya (candle holder) and everything burnt to cinders except the Guru Granth Sahib. It was intact,” she recalls.
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