Ram Bagh and the summer palace

Ram Bagh at Amritsar is a garden laid out for Ranjit Singh Ji from about 1818, named for Guru Ram Das Ji, on the model of the Shalimar at Lahore, with a summer palace in the middle of it.

The palace is now the Maharaja Ranjit Singh Museum, holding arms, paintings, coins and objects of the Sikh period.

The garden was one of a number the Maharaja laid out, at Lahore, Amritsar and Dinanagar, and it is the principal surviving example on the Indian side.

Its structures have been altered repeatedly and part of the garden has been taken for other uses, which is what happens to a public garden in the middle of a growing city.

It is about two kilometres from Jallianwala Bagh, which was also a garden, and which is why it was walled and why the crowd in 1919 could not get out.

Two gardens in one city, one of them a museum of the Sikh state and one of them the site of its most consequential colonial atrocity, within a short walk of each other.

The garden had a wall, gateways and a water channel and was laid out with fruit and flowering trees on a grid. What survives of the planting is later, because the planting is the part of any such complex that goes first.

The palace holds a museum now and the garden is a public park in the middle of the city, used by several thousand people a day.

It is the largest surviving piece of Sikh court architecture in Indian Punjab and the number of visitors to the Golden Temple who also go to it is very small.

What we don't know

  • The original planting and layout, which is not documented.

Where to check this

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

  • Punjab archaeology and museum records for Ram Bagh.

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 30 accounts in The Sarkar, the chapter of this site covering Ranjit Singh Ji's state, 1799 to 1849.