art of travel

I didn’t go to Kolkata to think about it. It wasn’t on the itinerary. But Kolkata has a way of nudging you toward things you didn’t plan for, and didn’t know you were looking for.

Navpreet was my guide for the day. A Sikh. Self-assured, intuitive, focused on the tour ahead. And she was simply excellent. She didn’t bring up her identity, and it never felt like she was trying to represent anything. Only later, did I find myself thinking about the Sikh story in Kolkata. Not because it was being told. But because it never is.

Kolkata doesn’t often bring up its Sikhs. Their story sits at the edge of more familiar stories, the colonial landmarks, the Bengali renaissance, the refugee tides. But they have been here for over a hundred years, in neighbourhoods like Bhawanipore, Cossipore and Howrah. This was a community that came to work, as they have in cities across India and the world. Many joined the railways, the army, the police, or the port. Some were mechanics. Some drove taxis. Some started small businesses that still survive in the quiet backlanes of South Kolkata.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Sikhs ran a significant portion of the city’s transport system. It became common wisdom that if a woman wanted to reach home safely after dark, she should look for a Sikh taxi driver. That sort of trust isn’t built overnight. It comes from years of showing up, doing your job, and treating others with respect.

You can trace the roots of the community through places like Gurudwara Sant Kutiya in Bhawanipore, established in 1910 near what would later become Balwant Singh Dhaba, the city’s oldest Punjabi eatery. Locals still flock there for breakfast and late-night chai, keeping the place alive well past midnight. Or the Dum Dum Gurdwara, founded by working-class families who pooled their savings to build something of their own. These weren’t grand religious structures. They were practical spaces. Places that offered food, shelter, advice and connection. In the absence of formal welfare, they functioned like informal ministries.

The story of Dum Dum’s gurdwara was documented in great detail by Jagmohan Singh Gill, a Kolkata-born entrepreneur and civic chronicler whose father helped establish the shrine. Gill grew up watching the community at work, not just in prayer halls but in kitchens, classrooms, taxi stands and port garages. Decades later, he committed himself to preserving these stories lest they are forgotten.

You won’t find plaques or guided trails to the city’s Sikh landmarks. But the traces are still there if you know where to look. In a 3 am kitchen serving sweetened tea to night-shift workers. In a mechanic’s garage passed down through generations. In names that don’t appear in history books but changed lives quietly. People like Kartar Singh Gill, a taxi driver who later ran a community loan fund and helped build one of Kolkata’s earliest gurdwaras. Or Niranjan Singh Talib, who published the city’s first Punjabi daily and was jailed by the British for his connection to the freedom fighters.

These stories live in memory, in oral accounts, in neighbourhoods that still remember who helped them when it counted. Today, the Sikh community isn’t large. Many of the younger generation have moved on to other cities or overseas. But a few continue to run dhabas, repair cars, organise langars, keep the Gurdwaras going and quietly show up when there is a crisis in Kolkata. They are still here. They remain part of Kolkata’s present.

I didn’t set out to write this. But sometimes, a walk with someone like Navpreet jolts a memory. Not of an event, but of a feeling. That whole communities can shape a city without demanding to be celebrated.

And maybe that is the kind of story worth telling.