Visitors find a lot to worship in India's historic, friendly Amritsar

We sat on the cool mosaic tile, leaned against the shaded wall and surveyed a parade of women in silk tunics flowing past in shimmering hues of pink and orange, each more brilliant than the next.

Before long, people sitting nearby started making conversation, curious about the foreign visitors in their midst.

"Where are you from? Is this your first time here?" asked a young man in acid-washed jeans and a small black turban. Groups of teenage girls and boys approached to pose for pictures with us.

A procession of barefoot walkers circled an enormous pool of sparkling blue water surrounding one of India's most captivating sights — the Golden Temple, Sikhism's holiest shrine, in the northern Indian city of Amritsar.

This place of worship, or "gurudwara" in Punjabi, kept drawing me back over the course of three days to see its spires in the first rays of morning light or fired by the sunset. While it's not as well known as the Taj Mahal, the Golden Temple rivals it in beauty.

Yet the attraction is not so much the building itself as the life inside it. The Taj Mahal draws throngs of tourists to its magnificent mausoleum, built by a 17th-century shah after his wife's death.

The Golden Temple, by contrast, bustles with life as an active place of worship and welcomes all who enter. More than sightseeing, it offers a chance to engage with local people and learn.

The Golden Temple helps make Punjab a richly interesting and rewarding destination, even for a first-time visitor to India. My two travel companions had seen much of India and were equally enthralled.

Punjab, a northwest state known as India's breadbasket, has climbed to a position of relative prosperity in recent decades, with the country's lowest poverty rate. Yet Punjab's farmers face an uncertain future as acute water shortages threaten their livelihood.

With Sikhs as the majority population, religion here differs from the dominant Hinduism found across India. Sikhs make up about 2 percent of India's population of 1.17 billion people. Prominent Sikhs include India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

Sikhs promote tolerance, an attitude I felt inside the Golden Temple with its four large doors designed to welcome people of every religion or faith.

We entered the large arches of the chalk-white outer square, dropping off shoes at a special collection booth and padding through a small channel of water to wash our feet, then following a strand of jute carpet into the temple. People bathed along the edges of a sacred pool as bright orange fish darted under the surface.

We waited 30 minutes in a thick line of worshippers inching our way to the inner sanctum, where a guru offers prayers for peace from the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book.

Punjab isn't plagued by the regular travel warnings of neighboring Kashmir, which is claimed by both India and Pakistan. But its location also makes it vulnerable if violence spills over the border. A few days before my visit in spring, militants had attacked a police academy near Lahore, less than 10 miles away in Pakistan.

I wondered how this tension might affect the border-closing ceremony at Wagah, the only road crossing between India and Pakistan which is open for only about six hours a day. Every afternoon at closing, the two sides put on a ritual display of patriotism with opposing soldiers marching toward each other as crowds watch and cheer from stands on either side.

We hopped into a guide's beat-up van and set off on an hour's journey along a dusty road toward Attari, the last town before the border. There we joined a largely Indian crowd walking down the road until an official directed us to a security area, where we filed through one at a time and made our way toward the stands reserved for foreign tourists. Above us, young men waved huge Indian flags, and rifle-toting soldiers scanned the grounds below.

My initial nervousness melted away when I saw the crowd, full of excited schoolchildren and people snapping pictures with the atmosphere of a festival. Pop music blared from loudspeakers, and a woman who looked to be in her 60s started dancing in the middle of the road.

Hundreds of onlookers filled the bleachers. When there were no more seats, they spilled out to sit on the road, facing the ornate steel gate leading into Pakistan, a country created by the partition of India in 1947. That also divided the Punjab state, cradle of the 4,000-year-old Indus Valley civilization.

On the other side of the gate, I could see a few people trickling into the nearly empty stands in Pakistan. A loudspeaker broadcast "God is great." Someone next to me explained that the crowds were probably thin on the Pakistan side because of the recent attack.

Troops from the Indian Border Security Force marched into the center, festooned with traditional red and gold hats that resembled an outspread fan. They marched to the line marking the border in an elaborate goose step, turned, gave a little shout and marched back, to wild cheers from the crowd. The Pakistan Rangers in black followed the same pattern, marching in the direction of the Indian side in a show of bravado, stomping their boots within inches of each other.

After about 15 minutes of this patriotic pageantry, the two front soldiers gave each other a quick salute and handshake and retreated. The two countries' flags were lowered together and the gates shut for the night.

The satisfied Indian audience walked back toward their cars, looking as if they'd just enjoyed a concert.

Back in Amritsar, I wandered the narrow streets of the old city again, thinking of how many times the land has changed hands over the centuries, in constant struggle between Muslims and Hindus or colonizers and colonized, back to Akbar, a 16th-century Mughal emperor born in what is now Afghanistan. He is considered among the region's greatest rulers, in part for his tolerance of other religions and opinions.

Visitors to Amritsar can also learn about the event that galvanized Indian national leader Mahatma Gandhi's civil-disobedience movement at Jallianwala Bagh, a garden near the Golden Temple where British troops massacred hundreds of demonstrators in 1919. Bullet holes still mark the wall. More recently, in 1984, troops under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi) fired on Sikh separatists inside the Golden Temple, killing hundreds.

In the old city, I passed a sword shop and a vendor selling T-shirts with the words "Singh is King," a slogan asserting Sikh identity that a Bollywood film also took as its name. In 1699, Sikh Guru Gobind Singh gave all Sikh men the name "Singh" (a common surname that means lion) and all Sikh women "Kaur" as a way to free them from the constraints of the caste system, since individual names denote caste.

Near the end of my journey across northern India, which included visits to the Taj Mahal and the sacred Hindu city of Varanasi, I stopped for a couple of days in Rajasthan. Its high desert forts and sand dunes were picturesque, but I found less of a connection to the local people. Then I noticed a driver waiting near the entrance to my guest house wearing a Sikh turban. Out of the blue, I said "Singh is King."

"Thank you," he said in surprise and delight, offering the warmest smile I'd seen since leaving Punjab.

Kristi Heim: 206-464-2718 or kheim@seattletimes.com