Amritsar

est. 1577 — the long account

Amritsar takes its name from amrit sarovar, the pool of nectar that the fourth Sikh Guru, Ram Das, began digging in 1577 on land granted by Akbar. His successor Guru Arjan built the Harmandir Sahib in the middle of the tank and installed the Adi Granth there in 1604, deliberately giving Sikhism a capital that was a place, not a throne. The shrine was destroyed more than once — by Afghan invaders in the 1750s and 60s — and rebuilt each time by the Sikh misls, the confederacies that ruled Punjab between the empires.

In 1801 Ranjit Singh united the misls into the Sikh empire and made Amritsar its spiritual and commercial capital: he roofed the Harmandir in gilded copper — the Golden Temple — and rebuilt the Bhangi misl's fort at Gobindgarh. The annexation of Punjab in 1849 made the city a Raj trading hub, and its growing nationalist press made it a target: on 13 April 1919, General Dyer ordered troops to fire on an unarmed crowd in the walled garden of Jallianwala Bagh. The massacre, and the Hunter Commission's whitewash, convinced a generation — from Tagore to Gandhi — that the empire had forfeited its claim to rule.

Partition in 1947 drew the new border thirty kilometers west of Amritsar, cutting the city off from Lahore, its twin and trading partner; the violence and the refugee columns remade its demography in weeks. The city rebuilt itself as a border economy — and, famously, as a food city, its dhabas and kulcha counters a point of Punjabi pride. The events of 1984 in and around the temple complex added another difficult layer to its modern history, one the city holds alongside the older scars.

Amritsar · Sarovar