Durgiana: The Temple Built to Look Like the Golden Temple

The decision to build a Hindu temple in the form of the Harmandir Sahib is worth thinking about carefully, because the obvious readings are both partly right and partly wrong.

Reading one: emulation. The Harmandir Sahib is a superb building and the most successful piece of religious architecture in the region.

• Its form is beautiful and everybody in Amritsar knew it
• It works: a shrine in water, approached across a causeway, is a genuinely powerful arrangement
• Building in an admired local idiom is what architecture normally does

Reading two: competition. The 1920s in Punjab were a period of active religious boundary drawing.

• The Singh Sabha movement had worked since the late nineteenth century to define Sikh practice as distinct from Hindu
• The Arya Samaj was active and was making its own claims
• The Gurdwara Reform movement and the Akali agitation over gurdwara control ran through the early 1920s
• Communal identity was being consolidated on all sides, driven partly by the colonial census

A Hindu temple built in the Sikh idiom in that period can be read as making a claim: that the form belongs to a shared regional tradition rather than to one community.

Reading three: shared inheritance. As set out at Mansa Devi, the Punjab religious landscape was historically much less divided than the categories of the 1920s suggest.

• Hindu and Sikh families were frequently the same families
• The Harmandir Sahib itself draws on a shared architectural vocabulary of the region
• A temple in that form is not necessarily borrowing from another community; it may be using a common language

Which is right. Probably all three, in different measures, and the intentions of the people who built it in 1921 are not fully recoverable.

What can be said is that Madan Mohan Malaviya laid the foundation stone, and Malaviya was a significant figure of the period.

Malaviya:

• Founder of Banaras Hindu University
• Four times president of the Indian National Congress
• A leading figure of Hindu reform and consolidation in the period
• A campaigner against untouchability in specific respects, including for temple entry, while remaining conservative on other questions

His involvement places the temple firmly within the Hindu consolidation of the period, and that is part of the honest reading of it.

And what it is now. A busy temple, a hundred years old, that a very large number of people visit, some of whom go to the Harmandir Sahib the same day.

A note on visiting both. It is worth doing, in either order, and the comparison is instructive.

The Harmandir Sahib is older, is the more accomplished building, and carries an architectural argument about access that the form was designed to make.

Durgiana is the form applied to a different tradition, a century ago, in a period when the two traditions were actively defining themselves against each other.

Standing in both in one afternoon tells you a great deal about Punjab, and it is not a comparison in which one has to win.

The other thing worth saying. The Harmandir Sahib is open to everybody and receives very large numbers of Hindu visitors, and has for centuries.

A temple built to resemble it, two kilometres away, is part of the same landscape rather than a rival to it, whatever the arguments of the 1920s.

The most distinctive thing associated with the Durgiana complex is not at the main temple but at the Bara Hanuman temple adjoining it, and it is genuinely unlike anything else.

What happens:

• During Navratri in Ashwin, generally September or October, boys are dressed as langoors, monkeys
• They wear red or orange costumes with a tail, a cap and bells
• They observe a vow for the duration, generally the nine or ten days
• They walk barefoot
• They observe restrictions on food and behaviour
• They come to the temple daily
• The vow is undertaken by families, usually for a child, and frequently in fulfilment of a request such as for the birth of a child

Why langoors. The connection is to Hanuman.

• The Bara Hanuman temple is the site
• The tradition connects it to the Ashvamedha episode of the Ramayana's later portions
• In that episode, Luv and Kush, Rama's sons, capture the sacrificial horse released for the ashvamedha
• Hanuman comes to recover it and is bound by the boys
• The temple is identified as the place, and Hanuman is shown bound
• Boys dressed as monkeys, undertaking a vow at that temple, are participating in that story

The scale. Very large numbers of children participate, and during Navratri the streets around the temple are full of small boys in monkey costumes accompanied by their families.

It is one of the more visually striking festivals in Punjab and it is little known outside Amritsar.

How to think about children's vows. This is worth setting out because it appears across India.

• Children undertake vows in many traditions, including the Langoor Mela, the kavadi at Thaipusam and various regional observances
• The vow is generally undertaken for the child by the family, in fulfilment of a request
• The child participates and, in most cases, enjoys it
• The restrictions are usually modest and appropriate to a child

And the limits. A guide should say this.

• A vow undertaken on a child should not involve anything that harms them
• Physical austerity appropriate for an adult is not appropriate for a child
• A child who is distressed should not be made to continue
• Barefoot walking in heat, prolonged fasting and physical mortification are not suitable for children and should not be imposed

The Langoor Mela, as observed, is a costume, a walk to the temple and some dietary restriction, which is well within reasonable limits and is why it works.

Amritsar's other festivals:

• Baisakhi, in April, which is the harvest festival and the anniversary of the founding of the Khalsa in 1699, and which at Amritsar is very large
• Guru Nanak Gurpurab, at Kartik Purnima
• Diwali, which at the Harmandir Sahib is Bandi Chhor Divas, marking Guru Hargobind's release from imprisonment at Gwalior along with fifty two rajas, and when the complex is illuminated
• Navratri and the Langoor Mela
• Ram Navami and the Ramlila

Bandi Chhor Divas deserves a note. Guru Hargobind was imprisoned at Gwalior fort by Jahangir and, on being released, is said to have refused to leave unless the fifty two rajas imprisoned with him were released too.

The condition set was that only those who could hold his cloak could leave. He had a cloak made with fifty two tassels, and all of them came out.

That is why Diwali at the Golden Temple is a Sikh festival with its own name and its own meaning, and the illumination of the complex on that night is among the great sights in India.

The city around this temple carries a great deal and a visitor should know what.

The founding:

• Established by Guru Ram Das, the fourth Sikh Guru, in the sixteenth century
• Built around the Amrit Sarovar, the tank, from which the city takes its name
• The Harmandir Sahib built under Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru
• The Adi Granth installed in 1604
• Grew as a trading city on the routes between Punjab, Kashmir and Central Asia

Under Ranjit Singh:

• Maharaja Ranjit Singh, ruling the Sikh empire from Lahore from 1801 to 1839, gilded the Harmandir Sahib
• Amritsar grew substantially in the period
• The Ram Bagh and other constructions date from it

The twentieth century. Amritsar carries two of the most significant events in modern Indian history and they should be set out.

Jallianwala Bagh, 1919:

• On 13 April 1919, Baisakhi day, a large crowd gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed ground with limited exits, in defiance of a prohibition on assembly
• Brigadier General Reginald Dyer brought troops, blocked the main exit and ordered them to fire without warning
• Firing continued until the ammunition was nearly exhausted
• The official figure was 379 dead; Indian estimates were considerably higher, with the Congress inquiry putting it at over a thousand
• Many died in the well in the compound, jumping in to escape the firing
• Dyer was subsequently removed but was defended by significant sections of British opinion, which did more damage to the imperial relationship than the shooting itself
• The massacre was a decisive moment in the freedom movement and hardened opinion across India

The site is preserved, with the bullet marks visible in the walls and the well enclosed, and it is one of the most affecting places in India. It should be visited quietly and photographed sparingly.

Operation Blue Star, 1984:

• In June 1984, the Indian Army conducted an operation in the Harmandir Sahib complex against armed militants who had fortified it, including the Akal Takht
• The operation caused very substantial loss of life, including of pilgrims present, and severe damage to the Akal Takht
• It occurred during a period of insurgency in Punjab in which very large numbers of people were killed by militants and by the state over more than a decade
• Indira Gandhi was assassinated in October 1984 by two of her Sikh bodyguards
• That was followed by organised anti Sikh violence, principally in Delhi, in which thousands of Sikhs were killed over several days, and accountability for which has been very substantially incomplete

That is recent history, it is deeply felt, and a visitor should know that people they meet in Amritsar lived through it.

How to visit Amritsar responsibly:

• Go to Jallianwala Bagh and read what is there
• Go to the Partition Museum, which is at the Town Hall and is the only museum in the world dedicated to Partition, and is very well done
• Go to the Harmandir Sahib, cover your head, and eat in the langar
• Do not treat the 1984 events as a topic to raise casually with people you meet
• Understand that Punjab's recent history is not settled and is not a subject for a visitor's opinion

The Partition Museum deserves emphasis. It documents the 1947 partition of Punjab and Bengal through oral history, objects and records.

Punjab was cut in half. Somewhere between ten and twenty million people moved, and estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand to two million. Amritsar was on the border and received an enormous number of refugees while its Muslim population left.

Every family in Punjab on both sides of the line has a partition story, and the museum is where they have been collected.

Wagah. The border ceremony at Attari Wagah, about 30 km, is attended by very large numbers.

It is a piece of nationalist theatre performed daily by both sides. Whether you find it stirring or uncomfortable is a matter for you, and both reactions are common among people who go.

Two institutions define the religious landscape of Amritsar, and both are worth understanding.

The sarovar:

• The tank at the Harmandir Sahib, the Amrit Sarovar, gave the city its name
• The Durgiana temple has one
• Gurdwaras across Punjab and beyond have them
• The tank is where devotees bathe before entering

How the sarovar works at a gurdwara:

• Devotees bathe or wash before entering
• The water is regarded as amrit, nectar
• The Harmandir Sahib's sarovar is fed by a channel from the Ravi system and is periodically drained and desilted, an operation performed by volunteers in enormous numbers, which is itself a substantial event
• Fish live in it and are protected

The desilting deserves a note. When the sarovar at the Harmandir Sahib is drained for cleaning, which happens at intervals of years, volunteers come from across Punjab and beyond to carry out the silt by hand, in a continuous chain, day and night, until it is done.

That is kar seva, voluntary service, and it is one of the most impressive things in Indian religious life. Tens of thousands of people, of every background, doing manual labour for free because the work needs doing.

Langar:

• Described at Kapal Mochan and worth restating here because Amritsar is where it operates at the largest scale
• The Guru ka Langar at the Harmandir Sahib serves tens of thousands of meals daily, and more on festivals
• It is free, it is open to everybody, and everybody sits on the floor in a line
• It runs on donation and volunteer labour
• The kitchen operates continuously

What it was designed to do:

• Guru Nanak established the practice and the later Gurus formalised it
• Its purpose was explicitly to break caste commensality, since who may eat with whom was the most strictly enforced boundary in the caste system
• Guru Amar Das, the third Guru, required that anybody seeking an audience with him must first eat in the langar, which meant that a raja and a labourer sat on the same floor and ate the same food before either could speak to him
• Akbar is recorded as having done so

That is a direct, practical and enforced assault on a social structure, built into the daily operation of a religious institution, and it has run continuously for five centuries.

Eating in the langar. Do it. The correct way:

• Cover your head and remove your shoes
• Wash your hands
• Join the line and sit where you are directed, on the floor
• Accept what you are served, with both hands or with a gesture of thanks
• Eat what you take and do not waste
• Take your plate to the washing area, or accept when somebody takes it
• Offer to help. Washing dishes in the langar is service and anybody may do it

The scale at Amritsar. The langar hall, the kitchens, the roti making machines and the washing operation are worth seeing as an operation in themselves.

It is one of the largest continuously running free kitchens in the world, it has functioned for centuries, and it is entirely voluntary.

A closing observation on both institutions. A tank and a kitchen.

One provides water and a place to wash before you approach. The other provides food and a place to sit that does not care who you are.

Between them they cover the two things anybody needs and the one thing the society most needed to be forced to do, which is to sit down together.

Whatever else is true about religion in Punjab, those two institutions have been running the whole time, and they are still running today.

Getting there

• Durgiana temple, near Lohgarh gate, Amritsar, Punjab
• About 2 km from the Harmandir Sahib
• Amritsar Junction railway station is close and is very well connected
• Sri Guru Ram Dass Jee International Airport, Amritsar, about 12 km
• Autos and cabs within the city

Timings

• The temple opens early and runs through the day. Check current timings
• Aratis morning and evening

When to go

• Navratri, in Ashwin, generally September or October, for the Langoor Mela at the adjoining Bara Hanuman temple
• Diwali, when the temple is lit and the city generally is at its most spectacular
• Ram Navami and Janmashtami
• October to March for weather. Amritsar is very hot from May to July and cold in January

At the temple

• Traditional dress is appropriate; head covering is customary
• Footwear is left outside
• Walk the causeway and look back at the composition, which is the point of the design
• The silver doors are worth looking at

Combining the visit

• Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, 2 km, which should be done in the same visit
• Jallianwala Bagh, adjoining the Golden Temple complex
• Partition Museum, at the Town Hall
• Bara Hanuman temple, adjoining Durgiana
• Ram Bagh and the Maharaja Ranjit Singh Museum
• Gobindgarh Fort
• Wagah Attari border ceremony, about 30 km
• Tarn Taran, about 25 km, with a large gurdwara and sarovar
• Khadur Sahib and Goindwal Sahib, associated with the second and third Gurus
• Pul Kanjari, a small site associated with Ranjit Singh, near the border

Visiting the Harmandir Sahib. Since almost everybody who goes to Durgiana also goes there, the guidance is worth giving.

• Cover your head. Scarves are provided if you do not have one
• Remove footwear, which is deposited free
• Wash your feet in the channel at the entrance
• Do not carry tobacco onto the premises, which is prohibited
• Do not smoke or drink anywhere in the complex
• Walk clockwise around the parikrama
• Sit by the water. Most people rush to the shrine; the sarovar's edge in the early morning or late evening is the better experience
• Eat in the langar
• Photography is permitted in the parikrama but not inside the shrine
• Go at night if you can. The complex illuminated and reflected in the water, with the kirtan audible, is among the great sights anywhere

Amritsar food. It is a serious food city and this belongs in any guide.

• Amritsari kulcha, baked in a tandoor, with chole
• Amritsari fish, battered and fried
• The dhabas of the old city, several of which have been operating for generations
• Lassi, in the enormous glasses the city is known for
• Jalebi and gulab jamun
• The langar at the Golden Temple, which is free and which very large numbers of visitors eat in as their principal meal

A closing thought. Two kilometres apart, in one city, there are two shrines in the middle of two tanks, reached by two causeways.

One was built in the seventeenth century with four doors, deliberately below ground level, by a tradition making an argument about who is allowed in.

The other was built in 1921, in the same shape, by a different tradition, at a moment when both were working out what separated them.

Go to both. It is a short walk and it is the most interesting two hours in Punjab.