The magic of Amritsar

When a book is launched by India’s best-known photographer alive, you’d expect a gigantic coffee table edition as heavy as a dumbbell, sizzling with lavish pictures and stylised captions that capture the essence of the theme. With Amritsar- A City in Remembrance, expect differently. For starters, it is compact and most readable in terms of size and scale; for seconds, Raghu Rai is joined by his better half, Gurmeet Sangha Rai, who is an architect and conservationist; and finally, the book hearkens back to the heritage and history of one of India’s more culturally significant cities, all the while using architecture as a foil to tell its tale.

Essentially books like these are about regeneration, and even as the focus zooms in on the Sri Harimandir Sahib temple, and the city of Amritsar, it’s also other elements of the city that include its forts, its labour force, its architecture, and historical events like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre that abandons just the colonial perspective and, instead, tosses up a more native recollection.

Why Amritsar? It was conceived as such because both Rai and his partner had already worked in bits and pieces on structures and projects in Amritsar and because the lensman had shot the city recently and in the past decades. Don’t forget, Amritsar has been host to major disruptions every 40 or 50 years. Starting from Jallianwala Bagh where Reginald Dyer opened fire, India’s Partition, Operation Blue Star, and so on.

The book, funded by the National Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY), is an initiative on the layered history of our cities that, to the authors’ point, possesses monuments, food, crafts, and history that are not recognised by and large.

Sangha Rai who is now part of the architectural and conservation committee for the Parliament project, clearly has an eye for old buildings and their roots, and heritage in terms of how they were designed. Which is why historically, imagery and maps in Amritsar pick up from earlier published maps, texts, and geological surveys. For the unacquainted reader, however, sketching out how residents, families and sociological tapestry grew within the city, means an absence of people, faces, and names.

To that extent, the book is a robust collection of anecdotal and historical descriptors of Amritsar, which is a special city for Sikh Punjabis. But Amritsar goes beyond just being a tome on the epicentre for temples and Sikh religious spiritualism in the country, in many ways. It also does proceed to set the pace for how dozens more—if not hundreds—of books could chalk out narratives and cultural contexts for generations to follow, as well as to the magic that lies within the ramparts of most Indian cities.

For example, the arresting photograph of a rising moon beside the Sri Akal Takht Sahib at Sri Harimandir Sahib is as iconic as any monument in Rome. Rai’s deft camera work is felt throughout the book with his trademark style of capturing human soulfulness in everyday situations: at the bazaar, in prayer, in the streets.

Portions of this work dwells on the spiritual economy of the Golden Temple, which is largely known as the most sacred shrine for Sikhs even as it’s also frequented as a tourist and pilgrimage site of spiritualism by people of multiple faiths. The religion was, of course, founded by Guru Nanak in the late 15^th century, and was followed by close to nine other gurus, many of whom were martyred during the Mughal rule. The authors tell us that the other side of the spiritual-material dialectic, “is that the gold decoration made the temple a unique shrine, its spiritual Mystique also heightened as a result of its Material Transformation”.

That so-called material transformation came when Ranjit Singh became the Maharaja of Punjab by defeating the Mughals and it’s during his reign that the Golden Temple acquired the objective of gold because he provided the gold that adorns it, we are told. Thus, the donation of the gold is an act of spiritual reverence, but what is glossed over in historical narratives is that it was also a political act motivated by material intent for seeking economic and political supremacy. Ranjit Singh was also showing that he was the Supreme Leader of the Sikhs, and not just one amongst several patrons who could give only land grants, but the one who could give the most.

Ultimately, the authors point to how a city never forgets and memories are always replete, which is why looking at the past and remembering it is actually a look forward into its future. This work leaves one wishing for a long list of so many other Indian cities to become the subject of such projects.

(Amritsar- A City in Remembrance by Raghu Rai and Gurmeet S. Rai; Om Books International, ₹3,000)