Durgiana and Devi Talab

The Durgiana Temple at Amritsar is built on the plan of the Harmandir: a temple in the middle of a tank, reached by a causeway, with a domed roof. It was rebuilt in that form in the 1920s.

A Hindu temple deliberately built to the plan of a Sikh shrine, in the same city, thirty years before Partition, is a statement about the relationship between the two communities in Punjab that is more complicated than either the harmonious or the antagonistic version allows.

Devi Talab Mandir at Jalandhar is one of the fifty-one Shakti Peethas and is very old. It has a tank and an annual music festival, the Harivallabh Sangeet Sammelan, held since 1875, which is one of the oldest classical music festivals in India.

The Harivallabh festival was a major event in the north Indian classical calendar and is a Punjabi institution that survived 1947.

Punjab's Hindu institutional history is far less written about than its Sikh one, in Punjab as well as outside it.

The Harivallabh has run each December since 1875 and is among the oldest classical music gatherings in India. It survived 1947, which almost no other Punjabi cultural institution of that age did.

Amritsar also holds the Ram Tirath complex west of the city, the Ram Bagh, and a long list of smaller mandirs inside the katras, most of them rebuilt in the twentieth century over much older foundations.

That the largest Hindu temple in Amritsar was deliberately built to the plan of the Golden Temple is a fact about the city that neither community's account of itself usually includes.

What we don't know

  • The pre-1920s form of the Durgiana site.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Institutional records of the Durgiana Temple and Devi Talab.
  • Harivallabh Sangeet Sammelan records.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 122 accounts in Under the Company, the chapter of this site covering British Punjab, from annexation to the canal colonies.