On the spot
Tavleen Singh
An international Sufi festival took me to Amritsar last week and as I always do whenever I return to this city that once was the epicenter of the ‘Punjab problem’ I found myself marveling at the normality that now exists. There is a new airport, glittering new malls, excellent new hotels and heritage walks that take you through the ancient bazaars around the Golden Temple. It is hard to believe that not so long ago this temple was a place of hatred and violence and that in these bazaars lurked young men who believed that killing innocent people was justified in what they thought was a new ‘freedom movement’.
The Sufi festival was organized by SAARC (South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation) and I was invited by the celebrated Punjabi novelist, Ajeet Caur, who has in recent years given up writing to dedicate her time to bringing together writers and poets from SAARC countries. At this festival were writers, musicians and Sufi scholars from Turkey, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan. They gathered in the grand hall of Khalsa College. It was my first visit to this famous institution of learning and I was stunned by its beauty. It is the finest example of Punjabi architecture that I have seen on either side of the border. The only other building that compares is the Wazir Khan mosque in Lahore which is built of the same unpainted red brick that was once the defining characteristic of Punjabi architecture.
At the festival we spent the day listening to speakers describe the virtues of the Sufi idea of religion and in the evening, under a sky of dark velvet, we congregated in a courtyard to watch performances by whirling dervishes from Lahore, a Sufi group from Turkey, dancers from Uzbekistan and, incredibly, a ghazal singer from Afghanistan. How had he survived the Taliban, we wondered, as he sang what sounded like sad love songs. The performances were of such high quality that the Governor and Chief Minister of Punjab stayed much longer than their official duties required. The Chief Minister announced that he would like the Sufi International Festival to be held every year in Amritsar because it was a city whose foundation had been laid by a Sikh guru who believed so much in religious harmony that he invited a Sufi called Mian Mir to lay the founding stone of the Golden Temple.
In between Sufi speeches and performances I made time to take a ‘heritage walk’ in the old city organized by the Punjab government’s tourism department. In the eighties it was in these very streets that I saw the beginnings of the violent movement for Khalistan. In these bazaars that I had secret meetings with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s followers after Operation Blue Star drove them out of the temple. Memories flooded back of heavily armed young men in medieval Sikh attire who wandered about the precincts of the temple as if it was their personal property. I was not an eyewitness to Operation Blue Star but four years later when Khalistani terrorists returned to the temple and shot a police officer making Operation Black Thunder necessary I was an eyewitness.
I wrote then for the Sunday Times, London, and went into the temple during what seemed like a ceasefire and ran into a young man whom I later discovered was called Penta. When he surrendered with a large group of militants at the end of a ten day siege he swallowed a cyanide pill and killed himself. Some of his comrades blamed me for identifying him and there followed months of death threats and lurking danger. So last week as I went on my ‘heritage walk’ with my guide from the tourism department it made me happy that those bad times were now a distant memory but it made me sad to see the criminal neglect of this most historical part of the city.
The bazaars around the Golden Temple are full of charm, beauty and historical monuments but the streets are so filthy that all I ended up thinking about were the open drains and the mounds of rotting garbage. I asked my guide why her department’s restoration efforts could not include covering the drains and cleaning the streets and she said with a sad smile that they were trying but that they got no cooperation from either the shopkeepers or the municipality.
It is in the bazaars of the old city that you find Jallianwallah Bagh and ‘crawling street’. Indians were made to crawl through it by some tyrannical British ruler in order to humiliate them enough to forget about rebellion. It is in the bazaars of the old city that you come upon a 16th century painted arch that was built by Maharajah Ranjit Singh to commemorate the exact spot where the Guru stood and pointed to where he wanted the Golden temple. And it is in these bazaars that still exists a monument to Sikh soldiers who died fighting Pathans who outnumbered them hugely on a battlefield. But, when their British officers ordered them to retreat they refused because they said they had vowed never to retreat. This monument could soon disappear because of vandalism on the part of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak committee (SGPC) that is building over it a hideous new hostelry for pilgrims. This faces an equally hideous new multi-level car park.
At the end of my tour I had a cold coffee with a high official from the SGPC and asked him why they were building such ugly structures and he looked puzzled. It was as if it had not occurred to him that it was possible to build new things that kept intact the architectural aesthetic of older times. He was more vocal when I asked why the bazaars around Sikhism’s holiest shrine were so filthy. If Sikhs could do ‘kar sewa’ to keep the temple clean, I asked, why could they not do the same in the streets around the temple. ‘That is the job of the municipality,’ he said ‘what do we pay taxes for if the municipality cannot do what it is supposed to do? How much can we do on our own?’ He had a point, I conceded, but came away from my heritage tour feeling deeply depressed at the destruction of the most historical part of Amritsar city. Why do Indian city planners have such contempt for history? Why do we allow historical cities to disappear under mountains of filth?
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