Golden Temple

• 1. Introduction

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  The Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, receives more than 150,000 worshippers every single day. It is a gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, and it stands as the pre-eminent spiritual site of Sikhism. Only two other places hold comparable rank for Sikhs: the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur and the Gurdwara Janam Asthan in Nankana Sahib. Both of those lie across the border in Pakistani Punjab.

  The name Golden Temple is an outsider's label, taken from the gold leaf on its sanctum. Sikhs call it Harmandir Sahib, also spelled Harimandar or Harimandir Sahib. The word joins Hari, which scholars translate as God, to mandir, meaning house. Sahib is an honorific that Sikh tradition attaches to revered places. Several other gurdwaras share the Harmandir name, including those in Kiratpur and Patna, but the Amritsar shrine is the most revered of them. It is also called Durbar Sahib, which means sacred audience. The complex has been nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status and sits on the organisation's tentative list.

  This documentary asks how such a place came to exist and why it kept having to be built again. It asks who paid for the gold and what the architecture is meant to say. It also asks what happens each day inside the walls, and what the complex has meant to Sikh history and politics.

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• 2. A Pool Before a Temple

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  In 1574, Guru Ram Das succeeded Guru Amar Das as the fourth Sikh Guru and inherited an unfinished plan. According to Sikh historical records, Amar Das had chosen the ground, then called Guru Da Chakk. He wanted a new town built around a man-made pool, and he asked his disciple Ram Das to find the land. Digging began in November 1573.

  Ram Das faced hostile opposition from the sons of Amar Das, but he went ahead and founded the town of Ramdaspur. He completed the pool with the help of Baba Buddha, a figure the source takes care to distinguish from the Buddha of Buddhism. Ram Das built his home and headquarters beside the water. He also invited merchants and artisans from other parts of India to settle there.

  How the land was acquired is told two ways. One version, drawn from a gazetteer record, says Sikhs raised 700 rupees in donations and paid the people and owners of the village of Tung. The other says Emperor Akbar gave the land to the wife of Ram Das.

  In 1581, Guru Arjan began the construction of the shrine itself. The pool was kept empty and dry while the work went on, and the first version of the Harmandir Sahib took eight years. Brick walls were finished in 1589. A later belief holds that Arjan invited the Sufi saint Mian Mir of Lahore to lay the foundation stone, a gesture meant to show that Sikhs welcomed everyone. The source calls that belief unsubstantiated. Traditional Sikh sources such as the Sri Gur Suraj Parkash Granth say Arjan laid the stone himself. Only after the inauguration was the pool filled with water.

  Arjan built the gurdwara lower than the surrounding city. Visitors had to step down to reach it, a design meant to teach humility and the shedding of ego before meeting the Guru. He also insisted that the compound stay open on every side, so that all could enter. The sanctum in the pool, where his Guru seat stood, had a single bridge. The scholar Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair reads this as a statement that the end goal is one. The complex today has four entrances, while the sanctum is reached by only one causeway.

  On the 16th of August 1604, Arjan finished expanding and compiling the first version of the Sikh scripture and placed a copy of the Adi Granth inside the gurdwara. He named Baba Buddha its first Granthi. A raised canopy on the marble path around the pool is called Ath Sath Tirath, the shrine of 68 pilgrimages. W. Owen Cole and other scholars explain that the name reflects a belief that a visit here equals visiting 68 Hindu pilgrimage sites across the subcontinent. Mandair adds that the finished shrine gave Sikhs a central pilgrimage place and a rallying point within a busy trading hub.

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• 3. Inside the Sanctum

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  The sanctum of the Golden Temple measures 12.25 metres on each side, and it rises two storeys to a dome covered in gold leaf. It sits on a marble platform of 19.7 by 19.7 metres, set inside a nearly square pool of 154.5 by 148.5 metres. The pool is 5.1 metres deep. A marble walkway 3.7 metres wide circles it, and worshippers walk that path clockwise. A causeway links the sanctum to the platform, entered through a gateway called the Darshani Deorhi.

  The Darshani Deorhi is itself a two-storey building. It houses the temple management offices and the treasury. At the exit of the path leading away from the sanctum, volunteers serve a flour-based sweet offering called karah prasad. Pilgrims typically circle the pool before they cross to the shrine.

  The ground floor of the sanctum is lined with white marble, and the exterior carries gilded copper plates. The doors are copper sheets covered in gold leaf, worked with birds and flowers. On the upper floor, a gallery reached by stairs has a gilded, embossed ceiling set with jewels. A pavilion on the second floor is called the Shish Mahal, the mirror room. Verses from the Sikh scripture appear in gold letters across the arches. The floral designs on the marble wall panels are Arabesque, and the frescoes favour animals, birds and plants over pure geometry.

  For those who wish to bathe, the temple provides a half-hexagonal shelter and steps known as Har ki Pauri. Many Sikhs believe that bathing in the pool restores health and purifies karma. Some carry bottles of the water home for sick friends and relatives.

  Observers have never agreed on how to classify the building. In 1875, the colonial government of Punjab published a list of notable structures and claimed that Ranjit Singh's version was ultimately modelled on the shrine of the Sufi saint Mian Mir. James Fergusson saw it as one form that Hindu temple architecture took in the 19th century. In 1882, Louis Rousselet called it a handsome style of Jat architecture. Major Henry Hardy Cole saw mainly Islamic sources with significant Hindu input. Percy Brown also found a synthesis of Islamic and Hindu styles, but he noted original touches too. Hermann Goetz called it a Kangra transformation of Oudh architecture and praised it, though he thought the rococo art typical of Indian gurdwaras looked gaudy. Ian Kerr and other scholars describe a blend of Indo-Islamic Mughal and Hindu Rajput work.

  No account, depiction or record survives of the building raised by the Gurus themselves. Kanwarjit Singh Kang believes it closely resembled the structure said to date from 1764.

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• 4. Ruin and Gold

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  In 1606, Mughal Emperor Jahangir ordered the arrest of Guru Arjan, whose growing influence had drawn imperial attention. Arjan was asked to convert to Islam. He refused, was tortured and was executed. His son Guru Hargobind fought a battle at Amritsar and left the area for Kiratpur in 1635. For roughly a century afterwards, a group called the Minas held the temple. In the 18th century, Guru Gobind Singh sent Bhai Mani Singh to take it back, after he created the Khalsa.

  Mughal rulers and Afghan sultans regarded the shrine as the centre of the Sikh faith, so it stayed the chief target of persecution. In 1709, the governor of Lahore sent troops to stop Sikhs gathering for Vaisakhi and Diwali, and Sikhs gathered at the temple anyway. In 1716, Banda Singh and many others were arrested and executed.

  In 1737, the Mughal governor had the temple's custodian, Mani Singh, captured and executed. He then appointed Masse Khan as police commissioner, who occupied the shrine, turned it into a place of entertainment with dancing girls and fouled the pool. Sikhs avenged the insult by killing Masse Khan inside the temple in August 1740.

  In 1746, a Lahore official named Diwan Lakhpat Rai filled the pool with sand, seeking revenge for the death of his brother. Sikhs restored it in 1749, when Muin ul-Mulk eased Mughal pressure and asked for their help in a campaign at Multan.

  In 1757, the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani, also called Ahmad Shah Abdali, attacked Amritsar and desecrated the temple. He had waste and the entrails of slaughtered cows poured into the pool. Then, in 1762, he returned and had the temple blown up with gunpowder. Sikhs came back and celebrated Diwali among the ruins.

  In 1764, Jassa Singh Ahluwalia collected donations to rebuild. A new gateway, causeway and sanctum were completed in 1776, and the floor around the pool followed in 1784. The Sikhs also dug a canal to bring fresh water from the Ravi River. Even so, Afghan forces under Durrani attacked again on the 1st of December 1764. Baba Gurbaksh Singh and 29 other Sikhs made a last stand against the far larger force and were killed. Durrani then destroyed the temple for the third time.

  During this violent century, Sikh misl chiefs and wealthy communities built more than 70 towers, called bungas, around the complex. According to Fenech and McLeod, they served as watchposts, barracks and lodging for pilgrims, and in the 19th century as centres of learning. The two tall red sandstone towers of the Ramgarhia Bunga survive. They are named for the warrior and Ramgarhia misl chief Jassa Singh Ramgarhia, and sentinels used them to watch for approaching raids. Most other bungas were demolished during British rule.

  In 1802, Ranjit Singh took Amritsar from the Bhangi misl at the age of 22. He paid homage at the temple and announced that he would rebuild it in marble and gold. The gilded copper panels he donated for the roof were worth 500,000 rupees in the currency of the day. He entrusted the roofing to Mistri Yar Muhammad Khan, supervised by Bhai Sand Singh, and the first panel went up in 1803. The renovation in marble and copper followed in 1809. In 1830, Ranjit Singh donated gold to cover the sanctum in gold leaf. An inscription at the entrance to the shrine proper says: "The Great Guru in His wisdom looked upon Maharaja Ranjit Singh as his chief servitor and Sikh and, in his benevolence, bestowed on him the privilege of serving the temple."

  Ranjit Singh was far from the only donor. Tara Singh Gheba, Partap Singh and Jodh Singh helped embellish the ceiling of the first floor, and Ganda Singh Peshawari sent his gift in 1823. Raja Sangat Singh of Jind State helped fund the gilding of the Darshani Deori. The 7th Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, began yearly grants after hearing of the shrine through Ranjit Singh. So many hands contributed that the source calls a full chronology of the temple's decoration near-impossible.

  British officials took a different approach. After the Second Anglo-Sikh war and the annexation of the Sikh Empire, they wanted to demolish a building now called the lost palace. Sikhs objected, but the objection was ignored, and a clock tower rose in its place. John Gordon designed it as a red-brick Gothic cathedral-style tower, and building ran from 1862 to 1874. The Sikh community pulled it down about 70 years later and put up a north entrance more in keeping with the temple. That entrance still has a clock and is still called ghanta ghar deori.

  The first floor of that entrance holds a Sikh history museum with paintings of Gurus and martyrs, along with swords and other historical items. A newer underground museum stands near it, outside the courtyard. Louis E. Fenech judges the displays partly ahistorical and one-sided, yet significant as art. Memorial plaques at the main entrance also name Sikh soldiers who died in the two World Wars and in the Indo-Pakistan wars.

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• 5. Daily Rites and Daily Bread

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  At about dawn each day, the Guru Granth Sahib is lifted from its bedroom on the first floor of the Akal Takht. It is carried on the head, placed in a flower-decorated palanquin, and borne across the causeway with chanting and bugle calls. This opening rite is called prakash, meaning light. After singing of the Var Asa kirtans and a prayer, a page is opened at random. That page is the mukhwak of the day, read aloud and then written out for pilgrims to read.

  The scripture rests in the lower sanctum floor for about 20 hours a day. For the remaining four hours, it is taken back to its bedroom. At night, after devotional singing and a three-part prayer, the closing rite called sukhasan takes place. The book is closed, carried on the head and placed in a pillow-bed palanquin decorated with flowers. When it arrives at its bedroom, it is tucked into bed. These rites treat the scripture as a living Guru.

  The Akal Takht, whose name means throne of the Timeless, faces the causeway. Guru Hargobind founded it as a place for ceremonial, spiritual and secular business, and from it he could issue binding writs to gurdwaras far away. Sikhism recognises five Takhts, at Anandpur, Patna, Nanded, Talwandi Sabo and Amritsar. The Amritsar one is the chief. It issues edicts, called hukam, on matters of faith and community unity. It also serves as the headquarters of the Punjab political party Shiromani Akali Dal. Nearby, the Teja Singh Samundri Hall houses the office of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which oversees major Sikh temples.

  Behind the temple proper, a section of Har-Ki-Pauri lets pilgrims sip water from the tank. Water from there is mixed with milk and used to wash the temple surfaces every day. Keeping the pool itself clean falls to volunteers doing kar seva, community service. They drain it and remove silt at intervals. The first modern cleaning of this kind took place on the 17th of June 1923. A hansli, or water channel, built by the Udasis of Brahm Buta Akhara in 1783, once fed the pool. Since 1866, water has arrived from the Jethuwal distributary of the Upper Bari Doab through a link from the Kaulsar Sarovar.

  Three jujube trees, called Ber trees, survive in the walled courtyard. Beside the clock-tower entrance stands Ber Baba Buddha, where Baba Buddha is said to have sat while supervising construction. Laachi Ber is the tree where Guru Arjan rested during the building. The third, Dukh Bhanjani Ber, across the pool from the sanctum, is said to mark the place where a Sikh was cured of leprosy after bathing. Its name means suffering remover, and a small gurdwara sits beneath it. Charles Townsend notes that devotees believe bathing near this spot gives the benefit of 68 pilgrimages.

  The Guru Ram Das Langar stands on the east side of the courtyard, near that tree. Anyone may eat there, whatever their faith, gender or wealth. The vegetarian meal is served by volunteers, and everyone sits in rows on the floor as equals. More than 100,000 meals leave the kitchen every day.

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• 6. The Art Beneath the Marble

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  More than 300 different design patterns are scattered across the walls of the Golden Temple, yet the art of the shrine has rarely been studied seriously. Small pieces of mirror are inlaid into the walls and ceilings of the Shish Mahal and framed with floral decoration. Craftsmen also worked with embossed copper, gach, tukri, jaratkari and inlaid ivory.

  Gach is a gypsum-like stone, made into a paste and applied like lime plaster. Once applied, it was carved with steel cutters and other tools. When coloured glass pieces were pressed into it, the technique was called tukri. Jaratkari, by contrast, meant setting cut stones of different colours into marble. On the lower exterior walls, panels of this kind use semi-precious stones such as lapis lazuli and onyx. The Mughals used the same techniques, but Sikh craftsmen added human and animal figures that Mughal jaratkari does not show.

  Beaten copper plates on the outer upper walls carry raised designs, mostly florals and abstract patterns. Two copper panels at the front are exceptions. One shows Guru Nanak with his companions Bhai Mardana and Bhai Bala on either side. The other shows Guru Gobind Singh on horseback.

  The Darshani Deori is made of shisham wood, with silver across its front. The back carries panels of florals and geometry, along with deer, tigers, lions and birds. Its doors have inlaid ivory, partly tinted red or green, which H.H. Cole praised as harmonious.

  The naqqashi painters who decorated the walls developed their own vocabulary for their themes. The most prominent category was dehin, described as the imaginative study of idealised forms of the artist's own creation. Its base was gharwanjh, a device of knotted grapples between animals. At the temple, that means cobras, lions and elephants clutching each other or carrying flower vases. The border of a dehin design was called patta, usually made of creepers. Gian Singh Naqqash painted many of the murals.

  The only mural of human figures within the temple proper hangs behind the narrow northern staircase. It shows Guru Gobind Singh on horseback with his retinue, leaving the fort of Anandpur, and adapts a Kangra miniature. When H.H. Cole wrote about the murals, he saw many scenes from Indian mythology. These have since been lost. W. Wakefield claimed in 1875 to have seen erotic scenes on the walls, but Kanwarjit Singh Kang rejects the account as probably false because no other source supports it.

  The oldest surviving murals date to the 1830s. Losses began in the last years of the 19th century, when devotees were allowed to donate inlaid marble panels. Panels fixed over painted walls hid or destroyed the work beneath. Demolishing the bungas, which had been rich collections of murals, destroyed more. Marble over the Darshani Deori also hid paintings by Mahant Ishar Singh.

  Almost none of the makers can be tied to a particular work. A traditional Sikh artist named Hari Singh, who had worked at the temple, wrote down every craftsman's name he could recall, among them Kishan Singh, Bishan Singh and Mistri Jaimal Singh.

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• 7. Reform and Protest

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  In 1905, the Tat Khalsa campaign succeeded in removing idols and images from the Golden Temple. For at least a century before that, the temple had Brahmin priests and images that drew both pious Sikhs and Hindus. The Singh Sabha movement, which began in the 1870s, set out to revive and reform Sikhism at a time when Christian, Hindu and Muslim preachers were competing for converts. It was triggered when Ranjit Singh's son Duleep Singh and other well-known figures converted to Christianity. Of the three main groups in the movement, the Tat Khalsa had become dominant by the early 1880s. Reformers attacked the temple's idols in the 1890s. The movement also restored the Khalsa to gurdwara administration, taking it back from the mahants, a priestly class that had gained control of major gurdwaras during the Mughal period.

  On the festival of Baisakhi in 1919, Sikhs gathered at the temple as tradition required. Many then walked to the neighbouring Jallianwala Bagh to hear speakers protest the Rowlatt Act and other colonial policies. Colonel Reginald Edward Harry Dyer ordered ninety soldiers, from the 9th Gorkha Rifles and the 59th Scinde Rifles, to surround the garden and fire into the crowd. 379 people died and thousands were wounded. The massacre hardened opposition to colonial rule, especially among Sikhs, and set off large non-violent protests. Under that pressure, the British government handed control of the temple's management and treasury to an elected body, the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee, which still runs the Golden Temple.

  In April 1948, the Shiromani Akali Dal first set out a demand for a Punjabi Suba, a Punjabi-speaking state, within post-independence East Punjab. The Golden Temple complex became the main base of the movement. The government raided it in 1955, and the Amritsar Convention that year conveyed Sikh sentiment to the central government. The complex also hosted speeches, demonstrations and mass arrests, and leaders lived in huts there during hunger strikes. The movement ended in 1966 with the setting of the current borders. Punjab's borders, and the official status of Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script, are its result.

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• 8. Operation Blue Star

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  Between the 1st and the 8th of June 1984, the Indian Army carried out Operation Blue Star inside the Golden Temple complex. Its target was the militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers. In the early 1980s, several groups had occupied the Golden Temple and Akal Takht, including the Dharam Yudh Morcha under Bhindranwale, the Babbar Khalsa, the AISSF and the National Council of Khalistan. Akali Dal president Harchand Singh Longowal had invited Bhindranwale to live in the complex. Under the military leadership of General Shabeg Singh, the group built bunkers and observation posts, and the temple became a site of weapons training. Shabeg Singh's expertise is credited with defences so effective that a commando raid on foot became impossible. Supporters also circulated maps showing the historic and future boundaries of the Khalsa Sikhs, with varying claims on different maps. The government said Bhindranwale turned the sacred complex into an armoury and headquarters.

  The decision to attack rested with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. On the 1st of June 1984, after negotiations with the militants failed, she ordered the army to act, and scores of gurdwaras across Punjab were attacked at the same time. Army and paramilitary units surrounded the complex on the 3rd of June. Fighting began on the 5th of June and lasted three days. A clean-up operation across Punjab, codenamed Operation Woodrose, followed.

  The army had underestimated the militants' firepower, which included Chinese-made rocket-propelled grenade launchers able to pierce armour. Tanks and heavy artillery attacked the heavily fortified Akal Takht, and the defenders answered with anti-tank and machine-gun fire. After a firefight of 24 hours, the army controlled the complex. Official figures list 83 army dead and 249 injured, with 1,592 militants apprehended and nearly 500 militant and civilian deaths combined. The government attributed the high civilian toll to militants using trapped pilgrims as human shields. The operation badly damaged the complex and destroyed the Akal Takht.

  Brahma Chellaney, the South Asia correspondent for the Associated Press, was the only foreign reporter to stay in Amritsar through the media blackout. His dispatches, sent by telex, were the first non-governmental accounts of the fighting. The first appeared on the front pages of The New York Times, The Times of London and The Guardian. It put the death toll at about twice the official admission, with about 780 militants and civilians and 400 troops dead. He reported that eight to ten suspected militants were shot with their hands tied. He also interviewed a doctor who said the army had forced him to carry out postmortems despite his having no experience. The Indian government called the report baseless and charged Chellaney with violating press censorship, with fanning sectarian hatred and later with sedition.

  Sikhs worldwide condemned the operation as an attack on their religion. Many Sikh soldiers deserted their units, and about 2,000 mutinied and tried to reach Amritsar to free the temple. Several Sikhs resigned civil offices and returned government awards. On the 31st of October 1984, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, the Sikh bodyguards of Indira Gandhi, assassinated her. Public fury over her death led to the killing of more than 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi alone.

  A few months after the operation, volunteers drained and cleaned the pool in a major kar seva. The government demolished hundreds of houses to create a security corridor around the compound called Galliara, which opened as a public park in June 1988. That year, the Burj Gianian, one of the main bungas, was also destroyed. In 1986, Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother as Prime Minister, ordered repairs to the Akal Takht Sahib. Those repairs were removed, and Sikhs rebuilt the Akal Takht Sahib themselves in 1999.

  Violence has returned since. In December 2021, a young man allegedly jumped a railing during the evening prayer, Rehras Sahib, and seized the sword lying before the scripture. He was overpowered by pilgrims and died from head injuries. Blasts struck the Golden Temple area on the 7th of May and the 9th of May 2023.

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