The gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur was rebuilt in the twentieth century after floods had repeatedly damaged the site, with funds from a Punjab ruler. In 1947 the line drawn at partition left it in Pakistan, about four kilometres beyond the frontier, while the community that venerated it was largely on the Indian side. For seventy years the usual way to see it was through binoculars mounted on a platform at Dera Baba Nanak, where pilgrims looked across the fields at a white building they could not reach.
An agreement between the two governments opened a corridor in November 2019, timed to the five hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the guru's birth, allowing Indian pilgrims to cross for the day without a visa. It is one of very few arrangements of its kind anywhere, and it exists because a religious site of the first importance to a community in one country sits inside another with which relations are difficult.
A second Kartarpur, near Jalandhar in Indian Punjab, is a different place with its own significance. A family there holds the manuscript known as the Kartarpur Bir, which many scholars and the Sikh institutions regard as the volume Guru Arjan had compiled in 1604, dictated to Bhai Gurdas. Its status has been examined and argued over, in part because access to it has been limited, and the question of what exactly the manuscript is remains contested rather than closed.