The first
thing we did on arriving in Amritsar is visit the Golden temple. The Harmandir
Sahib also known as Darbar Sahib, is a Golden Gurudwara of Sikhs located in the
city of Amritsar, Punjab, India. It is the holiest Gurudwara and the most
important pilgrimage site for Sikhs. It was founded in 1574 by the 4th
Sikh Guru, Guru Ram Das and completed in 1604. Maharaja Ranjit Singh was the
one who covered it in gold in 1830, two centuries after its construction. This
took 162 kg of 24 karat gold, then worth about Rs 65 lakh, again in the
90s, it was renovated with 500 kg of Gold.
If you have driven to Amritsar in your own car/van, you will
do well to keep it parked in your Hotel premises and commute using the local
autorickshaws/e-rickshaws as the street of old Amritsar where
you have to go
sight seeing and shopping are extremely narrow and the traffic of vehicles and
humans is absolutely chaotic.
Next morning we visited the Jallianwala Bagh, a public
garden which has acquired the dubious fame thanks to the massacre of peaceful
Indians on 13th April 1919, a hundred years back, when troops of the
British Indian Army under the command of Colonel Reginald Dyer fired rifles
into a crowd of Indians who had gathered to celebrate Baisakhi.
Hundreds of people jumped to their death into the well in
the Bagh to escape firing.
The bullet holes in the wall are still preserved as a memory
to the martyrs.
Next visit was to the Durgiana mandir which is modelled on
the lines of the Golden temple. It was
built in 1921 by Guru Harsai Mal Kapoor
in the architectural style of the Sikh Golden Temple and inaugurated by Pandit
Madan Mohan Malaviya an Indian educationist and politician notable for his role
in the Indian independence movement.
The evening was reserved for ‘Beating the Retreat’ ceremony
at Attari, the border between India and Pakistan where every evening when the
respective flags are lowered there is a show of patriotism at
the gate by the
Border Security Forces of both countries supported by nationalist slogans on
either side. It is a spectacle that is very popular and very well orchestrated.
Apart from the sight seeing activity we did thoroughly enjoy
the Amritsari food of kulchas, chhole,
fish and lassi interspersed with
shopping not in malls but in age old shops lined up in the Kartar
market. You can
get Punjabi/Pathani suits for men and women tailored and delivered to your
hotel in a day and get some real bargains on leather jootis (footwear) to top
it off. We did!
