The Punjab - Sikh Holy City Amritsar & Chandigarh
Trip Start
Oct 09, 2008
1
9
10
Trip End
Jan 16, 2009
Amritsar,
Punjab,
India
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Next stop after a long train journey was to be the holy city of the Sikh religion, Amritsar. The heart of Amritsar is the Golden temple, a marvel of architecture, spirituality, hospitality and organisation.
For those new to Sikhism, in a nutshell, it's a separate monotheistic religion incorporating elements of Hinduism, and Islam, the other 2 strong faiths in the Punjab. Founded i the 15th century by Guru Nanak who (very basically spoken) found Islam too cruel and Hinduism too laden with idols and superstition and inequalities through the caste system. The result was a proud people worshipping one God with a strict code of moral conduct (e.g. abstaining from alcohol, tobacco and drugs), aiming for righteousness and propegating the equality of all people. The Sikhs were lead by a succession of 10 Gurus who refined the religion over 200 years before the last Guru died and the Sikh holy book was appointed Guru. Sikh women dress equally colourful as Muslim or Hindu women (without the facial adornments), yet men have the obligation to always wear 5 symbols of their faith: uncut hair tucked under a turban and tamed by a comb, an uncut beard, a steel bracelet, baggy underwear (yes, that's right!) and a sword or daggger. As a result of persecution over the centuries the Sikhs are also respected as fearless warriors. A symbol os this is the fact that all men get given the surname Singh (Lion) at birth.
The one thing that stikes anyone visiting a Sikh temple, though, is the unbiased hospitality every respectful visitor is treated with. A Sikh temple (or Gurdwara) is usually a fairly extensive complex comprising free for all guest rooms and a free canteen only funded by voluntary contributions. Before you enter a Sikh temple you need to lose shoes and socks, wash hands and feet and cover your head. We tried to get a room at the Golden Temple, yet all rooms were full so we stayed nearby. We did make it a habbit, though to regularly dine at the canteen, a meticulously well organised 2-story vast complex with armies of volunteers making sure the daily influx of 50-100.000 pilgrims are all served immediately. You sit down in rows after getting plate, cup and spoon. Then men bringing chapatis (flat bread) and bucketfulls of rice, lentils and vegetable curry ladle the goodies into your tray with free refills until you give up and wander off to trade in your dirty plate for an after dinner cup of tea. I have to say that the food I've eaten there was very varied and rates as some of the best food I've ever had!
The first evening we met a charming devout Sikh, Amarjot Singh, who was dealing out Chappatis. He volunteered there every evening after his daytime job as an electrician and gave us a tour: he showed us the massive kitchen, the Chapati machine (churning out 500.000 Chapatis at 50.000 an hour). Afterwards I volunteered for a quarter of an hour, walking along the rows with a big basket full of bread and dealing out chapatis to the guests. I got quite varied responses from nonplused to very positive comments. It certainly felt very humbling to be able to pay back some ot the hospitality we had received.
Afterwards Amarjot took us around for our first tour of the holy complex and on our first visit to the beautifully illuminated Golden Temple. Located at the centre of a large pool, the temple is made entirely of marble, plated on the top story and the domes with 750 kg of gold. The marble inlay work is the best we've ever seen, even besting that inside the Taj Mahal. 24 hours singers recite the important songs and passages from the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, with many others sitting in cubicles around the complex constantly reading copies of the book in shifts. The master copy of the Guru Granth gets a nighttime snooze though: at around 10 pm a sedan chair picks up the book, takes it across the causeway to the Guru's bedroom, where it literally gets tucked in in a proper bed with great ceremony and locked in, only to be awoken and carried back into the temple around 6 am; a site you have to behold to believe and certainly bordering on the surreal in the perceptions of the uninitiated. Somewhat less unusual is the concept of the holy pudding that is offered to the pilgrims after worshipping in the temple.
Altogether we had a marvelous time mingling with the Sikhs in Amritsar and trying to get some understanding of the religion.
Wacky Wagah - The daily carnival at the India/Pakistan border
Hoards of people flock from far away to witness the twice daily border opening/closing ceremony at the Wagah/Attari border between India and Pakistan. This is truly a spectacle to behold: gathered on grand stands on both sides of the border gates proud Indian and Pakistani countrymen are whipped up into choruses of "Hindustan" and "Pakistan", respectively, before the gates are flung open and the guards on both sides march towards one another applying John Cleese's silly walks to perfection and grimacing at one another in clear defiance. This goes on for some time, one guard at a time making the journey, psyched up by the football-crowd atmosphere until the flags are lowered in sync. Then an amiable handshake between the head guard on both sides concludes the ordeal with the gates slammed shut and the flags whisked off. Good fun for all and in these times of tension between the two countries a good way for people on both sides of the fence to vent their anger and go home with a sense of catharsis.
Chandigarh - a modern Indian city
Chandigarh is the pride of Indian city planning. As the Punjab was divided up between India and Pakistan with the former regional capital Lahore ending up on Pakistani soil there was suddenly the need for a new capital city. As a result 2 American city planners were hired to develop this city from scratch. Yet they were forced to pull out of the project due to the death of one of the head planners. A new city architect was subsequently found in the Swiss designer and artist Le Corbusier who with his small Anglo-Swiss-Indian team created the now joint capital of Haryana and Punjab provinces from scratch in the early 1950s. The whole city of 1 Million inhabitants is divided up into 1200x800m super-blocks or "sectors" along a grid incorporating natural boundaries such as rivers. Each block has a residetial, educational, commercial and green area and seen from above the setup very closely resmbles the towns you can build with the computer game Sim City. It was interesting to visit the architectural museum to gain insight into the stages of planning and also look at models and pictures of the provincial government buildings as well as some of the statues and works of art Le Corbusier designed on top of the purely architectural project work.
The result is a pleasant and unusually clean city with wide roads and a commendably well thought through system of cycle routes. At night, though, the many arcades are lined with countless homeless sleeping outside and overcrowding, similar to pretty much all other Indian cities, has added a number of ramshackle tent slums onto the fringes of town.
Sadly we could not look at the actual government buildings, the high court or Le Corbusier's iconic open hand sculpture without a permit from the tourism office in the light of tightened security after the latest blasts. So instead we took a pedalboat onto a local lake for a waterbird spotting spree.
We also wandered through some of the many parks, the most notable of these being the quirky Rock Garden. This was started up in secret and illegally by its initiator, 80 year old Nek Chand, in a plot of woodland and only dicovered years later during a land survey when he had already single-handedly transformed heaps of recycled junk and cement into a few acres of artwork. Rather than demolish everything the council recognised the collection's artistic value and granted Nek a regular salary and a small army of workers to extend his dream. The result of probably one of India's most effective recycling projects is now a world of passages, waterfalls and figures made of concrete, scrap metal and duvets, electrical sockets, bathroom tiles, bangles,etc. The photos speak for themselves.
