Guru Ram Das Sarai

Guru Ram Das Sarai, now called Sri Guru Ram Das Niwas, is a pilgrims' rest house within the Sri Harmandir Sahib complex at Amritsar. Its foundation stone was laid on 17 January 1931 by Sant Sadhu Singh of Patiala, on the initiative of the Local Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee of Amritsar. It has 228 rooms and 18 halls on two floors, and 160 of the rooms are for pilgrims. The SGPC runs it, with no daily charge for pilgrims and a refundable security deposit.

Key moments

• 10 May 1955: on the first day of the Punjabi Suba morcha, when Master Tara Singh and three companions came out of Manji Sahib Diwan Hall to court arrest, a large police force was waiting for them beyond the Sarai, opposite Akhara Beri-wala (the SGPC's history of the morcha, p. 26).
• In the early hours of 4 July 1955, about three or four in the morning in the SGPC's account, thousands of armed police under Deputy Inspector General Ashwani Kumar sealed all the exits of the Sarai and raided it, together with the SGPC and Akali Dal offices, during the Punjabi Suba morcha. Jathas of volunteers from Delhi, Kanpur, Indore, Rajasthan and other places were asleep inside. The history says all were arrested, five or six hundred men, taken in trucks to the kotwali and then to jail; among them were Rajinder Singh, general secretary of the PEPSU Akali Dal, Avtar Singh, the Delhi jathedar, and Hukam Singh of Shahdara. It adds that police took every traveller sleeping there, and that Gurbachan Singh Kalsia, taken but not recognised, was let go with some pilgrims (pp. 73 to 75). SGPC president Bibi Jagir Kaur also puts the police action at midnight of 3 and 4 July 1955 (The Tribune, 2021).
• June 2016: The Tribune reported that Baldev Singh Wadala, president of the Sikh Sadbhawna Dal, urged the SGPC to keep the old building, which the paper calls the oldest serai in the complex, because it was the cheapest place for poor pilgrims to stay. Kar seva for a new building had been entrusted to Baba Kashmira Singh Bhuri Wale.
• August 2021: The Tribune reported that the SGPC had decided to demolish the Sarai for new construction, and that conservationists, among them the retired archaeologist Rajinder Singh Baath and the planner Balvinder Singh, asked that its facade and a few traditional rooms be kept. The reports do not say how the plans ended.

What it means today. For the Panth the Sarai is remembered chiefly for the night of 4 July 1955, when volunteers and pilgrims sleeping in a rest house of the Darbar Sahib complex were arrested. In July 2021 the SGPC marked that police action with a display of the tear gas shells police had fired (The Tribune).