Founding of Amritsar

A pool in the forest

The fourth Guru chose a site in central Punjab between the Ravi and the Beas, where a pool of water lay amid forest and the ground water sat close enough to the surface to make a settlement viable.^1,4 Excavation of the tank began around 1577, and a town grew beside it — Ramdaspur, “the city of Ram Das”, also called Chak Ramdas or Chak Guru.^6,7

What the Guru did next is the part that gets least attention and mattered most: he invited traders and craftsmen to come and settle. Ramdaspur was not built as a shrine with a village attached. It was built as a working town with an economy, and it was one of four substantial Sikh towns founded in central Punjab in the last quarter of the sixteenth century — against just two in the community’s entire first half-century.³ Something had changed in scale.

What is disputed. How the land was obtained is not settled. A district gazetteer of 1892–93 records it as a grant from the emperor Akbar, possibly made earlier to Guru Amar Das at Goindval; another tradition has it bought from the villagers of Tung for seven hundred rupees out of the offerings of the sangat.^6,7 Neither account rests on a contemporary document, and the two have been repeated side by side for over a century without resolution.

Nectar gives the city its name

The completed tank was named Amrit Sarovar — the “pool of nectar” — and the city took its name, Amritsar, from the water.⁶ Guru Arjan, who finished what his father began, wrote about it plainly: the Creator caused the tank to be made, and bathing in the pool of Ram Das, all sins are washed away.⁵

At its centre he raised the Harmandir Sahib, set deliberately lower than the surrounding ground so that worshippers step down to reach it, and open on all four sides. In 1604 the newly compiled scripture was installed within it.

What is disputed. A much-loved tradition holds that Guru Arjan asked the Sufi saint Mian Mir of Lahore to lay the foundation stone, around December 1588. It is a story with real theological weight — the holiest Sikh site begun by a Muslim hand — and it is also unverified: the account appears in later sources, and other traditions say the Guru laid the stone himself in January 1589.^2,7 The uncertainty is worth naming rather than smoothing over, because the story is often told as settled fact.

A city that looked like a capital

By Guru Arjan’s time Ramdaspur was not merely large, it was self-governing in a way the Mughal administration noticed. Pashaura Singh describes it as an autonomous power centre, where the Guru had established what the sources call halemi raj — a rule of justice and humility — and where the Sikh bards sang of the Guru’s court in frankly regal metaphors.⁴ An imperial officer, Sulhi Khan, is recorded as having set out to attack the Guru’s establishment there and dying on the way when his horse threw him into a brick kiln.⁴

This is the necessary background to 1606. A community with its own town, its own revenue, its own scripture and its own court looked, from Lahore, less like a devotional movement than like a rival. The execution of Guru Arjan two years after the scripture was installed is hard to read without it.

Centre of the Sikh world

From then on the city’s story tracks the community’s: the Akal Takht raised opposite the Harmandir in 1606, desecrations and rebuildings through the eighteenth century, the gilding under Ranjit Singh that gave the Golden Temple its English name, the Singh Sabha’s founding in 1873, and the tragedies of 1919 and 1984. No place holds more of this history in one square mile.