Tours · Amritsar, Punjab

Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple of Amritsar

The holiest Sikh shrine seen from the marble walkway around the Amrit Sarovar, with the gilded sanctum reflected in the water on a May afternoon.

Harmandir Sahib, known to most visitors as the Golden Temple, stands in the middle of a square pool in the old city of Amritsar. It is the holiest shrine of the Sikhs and, according to temple officials, draws 90,000 to 100,000 people on an ordinary day. The panorama was taken on a late afternoon in May from the white marble walkway that runs round the pool. Across the water the gilded sanctum sits on its reflection. Above the walkway rises the red-brick clock tower building with its white minaret, and the walkway is full of pilgrims in orange and blue turbans and head scarves, with a red carpet strip laid along the marble.

How the Golden Temple was built

The pool came first. Guru Ram Das, the fourth Sikh Guru, completed it in 1577 and it became the Amrit Sarovar, the pool of nectar. His successor Guru Arjan began the temple in December 1581 and finished the brick building in 1589. On 16 August 1604 he placed the Adi Granth, the scripture later known as the Guru Granth Sahib, inside it and appointed Baba Buddha as its first granthi. A popular story credits the Sufi saint Mian Mir with laying the foundation stone; historians call this unsubstantiated, and Sikh tradition holds that Guru Arjan laid it himself.

The temple has four entrances, one on each side, which Sikhs read as a sign that people of every caste and creed are welcome. A causeway leads to the sanctum through the Darshani Deori, a gateway of shisham wood faced with silver panels. The shrine suffered badly in the eighteenth century: Ahmad Shah Durrani’s forces polluted the pool in 1757 and blew up the temple with gunpowder in 1762. Rebuilding began in 1764 under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia; the sanctum and gateway were ready in 1776 and the marble walkway, the parikrama, in 1784.

How much gold is on the Golden Temple?

The gold arrived with Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who took Amritsar in 1802 and vowed to rebuild the shrine in marble and gold. The first gilded copper panel went up in 1803, the building was refaced in marble and copper in 1809, and gold leaf covered the sanctum by 1830. The gold leaf gave the shrine its popular name. The weight is quoted differently: the government’s Incredible India page gives about 400 kg on the dome and 750 kg on the upper floors, while the Amritsar district site says roughly 400 kg in all.

The most precise figure comes from the regilding of the 1990s. In 1994 the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), which manages the shrine, gave the work to the UK-based Guru Nanak Sewa Jatha led by Baba Mohinder Singh. Work started on 3 February 1995 and was finished in time for 13 April 1999, the 300th anniversary of the Khalsa. About 500 kg of gold was used, and the old covering of roughly 12 layers of gold leaf was replaced with 24 layers of 24-carat leaf.

The Amrit Sarovar and kar seva

The pool measures about 150 by 150 metres and is 5.1 metres deep. Carp, rohu, mrigal and katla live in the water as natural cleaners. Every few decades the tank is drained and the silt dug out by hand in a kar seva, voluntary service for the community. The first one after the SGPC took charge of the shrine began on 17 June 1923. Further kar sevas followed in 1973, in October 1984 after the army operation at the complex that June, and in 1988. Another opened on 25 March 2004, when five Sikh saints broke the ground with spades and bowls of gold and silver. The fish were moved into one quarter of the pool while crowds of devotees carried out silt in iron bowls and with bare hands, and those who could not get in watched the desilting on television.

The parikrama, the clock tower and the daily routine

The Akal Takht, founded by Guru Hargobind, is the chief seat of authority in Sikhism. It was destroyed in 1984 and rebuilt by the community in 1999. The clock tower building in the panorama replaced a British tower put up between 1862 and 1874, which Sikhs disliked and pulled down in late 1945. The entrance that took its place is still called the Ghanta Ghar Deori, and its first floor houses the Central Sikh Museum, opened by the SGPC in 1958, with paintings of the Gurus and Sikh history, weapons, coins and manuscripts.

The scripture spends about 20 hours a day in the sanctum and four hours at the Akal Takht. In summer the doors of the sanctum open at 2 am with kirtan. At 4 am the Guru Granth Sahib is carried across in a palanquin, the Palki Sahib, for the morning prakash. At sunset Rehras is read, and at about 11 pm the Sukh Asan ceremony takes it back to its resting room for the night.

May is hard on bare feet. In May 2024 the temple reported that heat had cut the number of visitors from outside Amritsar to 50,000–55,000 a day. Staff throw water on the marble, lay jute mats in the shrine and run coolers in the verandahs along the parikrama.

The langar: a free meal for everyone

The langar serves about 100,000 vegetarian meals a day to anyone who comes, whatever their religion or caste. Everyone eats sitting cross-legged in rows on the floor, side by side, in two dining halls that each seat up to 5,000 people at once. A plate usually holds chapati, dal, a vegetable, rice and something sweet. Volunteers do most of the work, from preparing ingredients to washing the steel trays by hand five times before reuse. On festival days a machine adds up to 25,000 rotis an hour to the hand-rolled ones.

Visiting the Golden Temple

• Shoes come off before entering, and every visitor covers their head, men and women alike.
• The complex is open to people of every faith; the langar hall is near the eastern entrance.
• Summer opening hours in 2024 ran from 4 am to 11 pm, and the times change with the season.
• The north gate gives the first view of the gilded dome reflected in the pool.
• Diwali and Vaisakhi are the great festival days; at Diwali the whole complex is lit up at night.
• Amritsar has an international airport, Sri Guru Ram Dass Jee, and its own railway station.