The Harmandir Sahib states its theology in its architecture, and it is also the site of an event that has not been resolved in law or in memory.
What the building says
Two features are doctrine rendered in stone.
Four doors, one on each side. The temple is open on every side, to people of every caste and every background, entering from any direction. There is no restricted approach and no reserved entrance.
Built below ground level. Worshippers descend to reach it. Every other major religious building in the region is raised up; this one requires you to go down, and the meaning intended is humility.
The langar
The free kitchen serves something over a hundred thousand meals a day, without charge, to anyone who sits in the rows: Sikh or not, rich or poor, of any caste. It is very likely the largest continuously operating kitchen in the world.
The rows are the point. Guru Amar Das required that anyone seeking an audience with him first eat in the langar, seated in line with everyone else. In a society organised around who may eat with whom, that was the substantive claim.
The cooking, serving and washing is seva, unpaid.
The founding
Guru Ram Das founded the town and completed the pool in 1577. Guru Arjan built the temple between 1581 and 1589 and installed the first compilation of the scripture, the Adi Granth, on 16 August 1604.
A widely repeated tradition holds that the Sufi Mian Mir laid the foundation stone. Traditional Sikh sources do not support it and historians treat it as unsubstantiated, which is worth saying precisely because the story is attractive and is cited constantly as evidence of interfaith origins.
Maharaja Ranjit Singh rebuilt it in marble and copper from 1809 and gilded it from 1830, which is where the English name comes from.
June 1984
Between 1 and about 8 June 1984 the Indian Army assaulted the complex on the orders of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, to remove Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and armed men who had fortified it.
Several facts are not in dispute:
- The assault fell on the martyrdom anniversary of Guru Arjan, one of the busiest pilgrimage days of the year.
- Many thousands of pilgrims were inside.
- No evacuation was carried out before the attack began.
- Tanks were used. The Akal Takht was destroyed.
- The Sikh Reference Library, holding manuscripts and historical records, burned.
Casualty figures cannot be reconciled. The government's white paper gave several hundred dead in total. Independent and Sikh estimates run into the thousands. The true number is not established, and no account that states a single confident figure should be trusted.
November 1984
Indira Gandhi was killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984.
Organised violence against Sikhs followed over the next three days, concentrated in Delhi but occurring across northern India. Official counts give some three thousand three hundred dead nationally; independent estimates run considerably higher.
The Nanavati Commission reported in 2005 that Congress figures had incited or assisted the mobs and that police had failed to act. The first conviction of a senior politician came in 2018, thirty-four years afterwards. Most prosecutions have never concluded.
What it is called
Whether those days are properly described as riots, a pogrom, or genocide is itself disputed: by governments, by courts, by scholars and by survivors.
This entry does not adopt any of those terms as its own. It records that the choice of word is contested, and that the contest is about whether the killing was spontaneous or organised, which is a question of fact that the prosecutions were supposed to answer and largely have not.