Many Muslims saw their places of worship destroyed or abandoned during the sectarian violence of India’s partition in 1947. Now villagers of many faiths are coming together to revive them
About this content Wed 28 Oct 2026 08.00 CET Last modified on Wed 28 Oct 2026 08.02 CET Share Prefer the Guardian on Google G ajju Khan is smiling as he sits in an unfinished building in the northern Indian state of Punjab in the late afternoon. The 87-year-old is hopeful that before he dies he will hear the azaan , the Muslim call to prayer, echo across his village once again when the mosque is completed.
The last time he heard it here was when he was eight years old, living with his parents in Tira Maloya, a village in Chandigarh, not far from where he lives now.
He is also excited because the mosque has been funded almost entirely by the Sikhs and Hindus living in his village of Jakhiwal, in Fatehgarh Sahib district. Even though he fondly remembers how Sikh neighbours sheltered him and his brothers when brutal sectarian violence erupted during partition in 1947 , he never expected a house of worship to be rebuilt for the 18 Muslim families who remain in the village.
“This was my maternal home. My parents sent my two brothers and me here to save us from the bloodshed – they were killed back in our village,” says Khan. “Sikhs hid us from the patrols of men with sticks and burning torches.”
Khan reserves his deepest gratitude for Bibi Rajinder Kaur, 77, a Sikh villager who persuaded her grandson to donate a parcel of their farmland to build a mosque. She did so, she says, because every other faith had a place to gather, while local Muslims had none.
“There is no deed better than giving someone a place to worship,” Kaur says. “Also, it felt like we needed to appease God for the blood this land had seen. The Muslims in our village had to travel 4km [2.5 miles] to another village just to pray.”
View image in fullscreen Bibi Rajinder Kaur, a Sikh, donated family land to build a mosque in her village. ‘There is no deed better than giving someone a place to worship,’ she says
View image in fullscreen Gajju Khan, who hopes to live long enough to see the mosque in his village completed
During the partition of British India, the border severed Punjab in two , unleashing catastrophic communal blood-letting and forced migrations that virtually emptied the eastern, Indian side of the region of its Muslim population. Hundreds of village mosques were abandoned, desecrated or turned into cattle sheds and storage units.
But over the past decade, several rural Sikh and Hindu communities have quietly stepped forward to restore these places of worship. Even in villages without a Muslim population, people have invited Muslim farmhands and clerics from nearby districts to pray in these newly revived mosques.
About 50 miles fromJakhiwal, in Sangrur district’s Punawal village, Jaspal Sharma, who comes from a family of Hindu priests, donated his land for the construction of a new mosque and hosted a feast for the entire village at its inauguration in February.
Sharma, 48, says the donation was about neighbourly duty. The village has 550 households, of which just a very small proportion are Muslim.
View image in fullscreen Jaspal Sharma says donating some of his land to build a mosque was a neighbourly duty
View image in fullscreen View image in fullscreen The new mosque in Malerkotla, Punjab, welcomes worshippers for evening prayers
“It’s right opposite our hou…