A Pause in the Punjab

Local wisdom informed us that all you need is a day in Amritsar, but in a rare display of leisurely tourism we gave it two. The capital city of the Sikhs sits on the Pakistan border on the Grand Trunk Road to Lahore, and after emerging from what will be our last overnight train we took the free pilgrim bus to the temple to get our bearings. The Sikh religion is designed to combine the best parts of Islam and Hinduism, but the the most important part to us was that all the tourism stuff is FREE!
Having rejected the free hovel pilgrim dorm, however, our search produced a local guest house where our usual cheap rate got us a lofty 2 piece room complete with telly, hot water, 7 doors and 12 light switches. Content, we dragged ourselves away from the TV and hit the temple.
Surrounded by chaotic streets and tourist stalls, swamped by thousands of glazed-eyed devotees, we weren't expecting much of the temple but found ourselves looking down at a peaceful lake with the temple in the middle and the hushed crowds circling, bathing and praying in an oddly serene environment. The Sikh religion fosters a strong warrior caste, as the British Empire found both fighting against them and with them, and the walls all round the temple are filled with memorial plaques and donations from Sikh military units. There are still plenty of the archetypal tall Pathans about, guarding the temple in their full ceremonial kit with swords and daggers, the kind it was easy to see defending the Koh-i-Noor against Flashman; they all reminded me strangely of Bernard Bresslaw's Afghan Bungd-it-in in Carry on Up the Khyber. It was inside this temple in 1984 that extremists demanding a Sikh state were attacked by Indira Ghandi's Army; this sacrilege led to her assassination by her own Sikh bodyguard later that year.
Crossing the bridge to the temple, we joined those headed for communion where half of a bought offering of sweets (prasaad) is then doled out to pilgrims; this seemed to involve too many pairs of hands for our liking and we declined...

On then to attraction number 2, and more imperial shame for us; in 1919 the garden of Jalianwalla Bagh was the site of a massacre, by British troops, of demonstrators protesting about anti-sedition laws. The troops occupied the only exits and opened fire in a confined space on 20,000 demonstrators killing over 400 of them... the park was a decent enough memorial, but we actually seemed more of an attraction to the national tourists who harangued us for photos, only spared when they couldn't get their cameras to work.
And finally, no trip here would be complete for an Indian without a jibe at the Pakistanis. Every evening, 30km away, a ceremony is conducted to close the border. Thousands trek to fill the purpose-built auditorium with national flags and hats to chant for India and watch the ceremony. Both sides have obviously formalised the procedure but try to out-do each other with lots of arm swinging and high-kicking up to the gate; the drill has come a long way since the Raj and would make a guardsman weep! Though the crowd was far bigger on the Indian side, we secretly preferred the black rig of the Pakistanis to the khaki of our side, the victory complete when one of the Indian sepoys swung a wild arm and knocked off his own hat! 1-0 Pakistan this day!