Harmandir Sahib

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Harmandir Sahib — “the abode of God,” and widely called the Golden Temple — is the central place of worship of Sikhism, standing at the heart of Amritsar in the Punjab. A low building of marble and gilded copper, it sits at the centre of a large rectangular tank of water, reached by a single causeway, and it draws more visitors than any other Sikh site.

The shrine grew with the early Sikh community. The pool was excavated under the fourth Guru, Ram Das, in the later sixteenth century, giving the surrounding city its name — Amritsar, the “pool of nectar.” His successor, Guru Arjan, built the temple in its midst in the opening years of the seventeenth century and, in 1604, installed within it the newly compiled scripture, the Adi Granth. That act fixed the building’s purpose: it was raised not to house an image but to enshrine a book. The gold and marble that give the temple its popular name came much later, in the early nineteenth century, when the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh had the upper storeys overlaid with gilded plate.

The structure carries its meaning in its plan. Where a great deal of South Asian temple architecture sets the sanctuary high on a platform, Harmandir Sahib sits below the level of the surrounding walkway, so that worshippers descend toward it rather than climb. It opens on all four sides. Tradition reads those four doors as a statement that the shrine receives people of every caste and creed from every direction — a refusal, built into stone, of the social exclusions the early Gurus preached against. Within, there are no statues; the focus is the scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, which Sikhs regard as the living Guru, attended through the day with continuous recitation and song.

For practising Sikhs the site is the holiest of the gurdwaras, though the tradition is careful on this point: the sanctity is understood to belong to the scripture and to the divine word it carries, not to the place as such. The adjoining community kitchen, the langar, serves a free meal to all comers without distinction, a practice that has made the complex one of the most visible expressions of the Sikh principle of equal table-fellowship.

The temple has also been a site of conflict. It was damaged and rebuilt several times during the eighteenth-century wars in the Punjab, and in June 1984 it was the scene of Operation Blue Star, an assault by the Indian army on armed militants who had occupied the complex, which left parts of it in ruins. The assault also killed hundreds of people by the official count, among them pilgrims caught inside the complex; independent estimates put the dead far higher, in the thousands. Within months the prime minister who had ordered the operation, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, and thousands of Sikhs were killed in the pogroms that followed in Delhi and other cities. Restored each time, the building has remained the fixed centre of Sikh devotional life for some four centuries.

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