The holiest city of the Sikhs, built around a sacred pool and the Golden Temple — a low shrine open on all four sides to people of every caste and faith — which in the twentieth century became the stage for two of the deepest wounds in modern Indian history: the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the 1984 army assault on the temple complex.
The city's name means "pool of nectar." At its heart sits a shimmering tank of water, and rising from the middle of it a temple covered in gold. The shrine has doors on all four sides, so that anyone from any direction, any caste, any faith, may walk in. Beside it stands a building called the Throne of the Timeless, the seat of Sikh authority. This is the spiritual center of the Sikh world. It is also the place where, in 1919, British troops fired on an unarmed crowd, and where, in 1984, the Indian Army stormed the holiest shrine of a faith. Few places hold such tenderness and such grief in the same small space.