Amritsar

Amritsar, city in northern India, in Punjab State, near Lahore, Pakistan. The city, surrounded by a fertile region where grain, sugar cane, and cotton are produced, is an important trade, transport, and manufacturing centre with extensive textile and chemical industries. The city is named after the sacred Amrita Sar (Pool of the Nectar of Immortality) which surrounds the Har Mandir Sahib or Golden Temple, the most sacred shrine of Sikhism and a major pilgrimage centre. Although the foundation stone of the original Har Mandir Sahib was laid by the Sufi mystic Mian Mir in the time of Guru Arjun Dev, the current shrine dates from the early 19th century when it was reconstructed under the patronage of Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Other points of interest in the city include the Durgiana Temple and the Lakshmi Narayan Temple.

Amritsar was founded in 1574 by Ram Das, the fourth Sikh Guru, on land which had been gifted to him by the Mughal emperor Akbar. The city has long been the scene of violent political conflict. Amritsar was the site of the notorious Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, when British troops fired without warning on a peaceful and unarmed gathering of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs who had met to protest that the additional political representation which they had been promised during World War I had failed to materialize; 379 demonstrators were killed and over 2,000 wounded.

The city was again an arena of conflict in June 1984, when the Indian government, in an effort to check terrorism by Sikhs demanding greater autonomy for the Punjab, sent troops to occupy the entire Golden Temple precinct. In the ensuing confrontation hundreds were killed, the Akal Takht (the seat of Sikh religious authority) was virtually demolished, and the Har Mandir Sahib—which the Indian army was doing its best to avoid targeting—was hit by a number of shells. Its reconstruction took many years but was almost complete by 1997. The attack on the Golden Temple led to the assassination shortly afterwards of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had ordered the troops in, by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Population 1,011,327 (2001).