Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Mailbox Temple of Amritsar

Pillars of citrine and imperial topaz buttress a glittering temple of gold no bigger than a shoebox. It dazzles viewers floating through the Sir Christopher Ondaatje South Asian Gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum. For those familiar with the jewel of the Punjab, there’s no mistaking that this is an architectural replica of the Golden Temple in the city of Amritsar. The Darbar Sahib (meaning “exalted court”), which is also known as Harmandir Sahib (meaning “abode/temple of God”) is the preeminent gurdwara for Sikhs around the globe. Yet, this replica of the Golden Temple is not some romantic testament to sixteenth-century Sikh architecture. 

In fact, it was a Victorian prince’s mailbox.

Photo Credit to Royal Ontario Museum. “Overview of the Mailbox.”

Guru Nanak—the fifteenth-century spiritual founder of Sikhism whose mystical experience of the supreme divine reality is catalogued in the hagiographical janam-sakhis—believed that the cultivation of virtue and practice of justice in one’s daily life was the path to liberation, and not, notably, ascetic renunciation. In the central holy text of Sikhism, the Adi Granth, he writes that the seeker of divine truth must seek an ethical life: “Truth is the highest virtue, but higher still is truthful living.” Whereas other religious traditions focus on measured attention to the self through abnegation—as in the case of begging, fasting, abstaining—Sikhism is premised on the idea that the key to a righteous life is to provide voluntary serva or service to others.

“With your own hands,” Nanak encouraged, “carve out your own destiny.” 

Each day the Golden Temple upholds this ideal of spiritual discipline through service by welcoming thousands into its shimmering belly to partake in langar, a post-worship vegetarian meal prepared and served by Sikhs. Although the gold veneer laid in the nineteenth century by Maharaja Ranjit Singh may appear to host only the initiated or house the upper echelons of a priestly class, instead one will discover ordinary people, sitting together on the ground, bent knee to bent knee, filling themselves with curry, bean stew, and flat bread. In the egalitarian spirit of Sikh tradition, there are no priests but granthi (readers), men and women who voluntarily act as custodians of the gurdwara. And in those gurdwaras, from Toronto to Amritsar, there are no restrictions barring who can participate or satiate their hunger and thirst.  

Why would a shrine dedicated to freedom, spiritual independence, and the common needs of the human be transformed into an address box for a British royal? Filling up with postages about plantations for the empire rather than filling bellies?

Photo Credit to Royal Ontario Museum. “Close up of a carved blind façade.”

Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism still looms large for European and North American scholars interested in studying cultures of the—always positioned in otherness—East (think Near, Middle, Far). He defines it as the systematic and persistent claim of such scholars to authoritative knowledge over those cultures to reduce their mysteries into reasoned prose. In their project of defining the “Hindoo” as a representative of a false conglomerate, for example, Orientalists have secured a victory in constructing the Other as an aberrant, undeveloped curiosity still unable to understand properly its own sociological and anthropological dimensions.

Presented to the Prince of Wales during his 1874-75 tour through an India still subject to the British Crown (rule lasted from 1858-1947), this address casket meant to hold imperial mail has its little doors crammed full of Said’s observations. If Orientalism is defined in its assertion of an absolute and systematic difference between the West and the “Orient,” this object explains this project by minimizing the holiest site in Sikhism into a desk receptacle for paper correspondence. Its tiny brassy parapets come together with teeny tiled designs to construct a semiotics of subversion and reduction.

The British Army had long relied on Indian troops until the famous Rebellion or Uprising of 1857, when many recruits revolted against the British East India Company. Frustrated by their assumptions to autonomy, the Crown hired colonial ethnographers to reduce the populations of India into a rubric of pliancy. Drafting a “martial race theory,” these Orientalizing ethnographers determined that the demographics least likely to rebel and therefore most suitable for military work were “Pathans, Gurkhas, Dogras, Rajputs and Sikhs.”

Photo Credit to Royal Ontario Museum. “An interior view of the doors.”

In sketching this taxonomy, the sterilizing stylus of the Orientalist scratches and skews South-Asian narratives of regional identity and ethnicity. In so doing, the complexity and vibrancy of Sikh life—among other seemingly tractable minorities—are diminished, whittled down into imperial office furniture.  

In a text known as the Akal Ustat (“praise of the immortal one”), Guru Gobind Singh [b.1666] explains that “humankind is one and all people belong to a single humanity.” Writing in the context of attempting to persuade Mughal rulers to come to fellowship with Hindus and Sikhs, he argued for the commonness of humanity and the error of seeing differences between us as ontological. That principal tenet of Sikh philosophy is manifest in the walls of the glittering temple of Amritsar as it breathes life into the needy and nourishes their bodies and souls. Yet, its transmutation into a royal mailbox overturns these principles of equity. The temple letterbox instead creates a hierarchy with some forms of human life as supreme (read: British, white, royal) and others as exploitable (read: Punjabi, brown, common). It is a thing of beauty reserved only for a prince. It serves the curricula of colonialism rather than the hands of the hungry.

Enthroned now in the museum, its little balconies symbolize the monarchial enterprise of domination over territory, body, and soul. Reframed in the company of the illustrious Kunti and in the shadow of the perpetual dance of the Shiva Nataraja, this object forces viewers to remind themselves of the ever-present itineraries of empire to de-mystify, de-spiritualize, de-tach things of beauty from their moorings in alterity. 

The logic of exploitation and its association with containment and industry, carved into the minute arches of this object, force a broader connotation with the injustice of British rule in India—one which also returns us to the unseated territories upon which the Royal Ontario Museum sits. 

Photo Credit to City of Vancouver Archives. “Passengers from the SS Komagata Maru, 1914.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Canadian Pacific Northwest benefitted from the manual labor of thousands of Punjabis and other South Asians. As their numbers increased, xenophobic Anti-Asian lobbies encouraged Canadian immigration officers to utilize deceptive regulations designed to exclude Indian immigrants, despite their also being part of the British Empire. In 1914, a wealthy Sikh named Gurdit Singh Sirhali hired a chartered ship in Hong Kong known as the SS Komagata Maru to transport Punjabi passengers to Canada. Its main deck was even equipped with a gurdwara for its mostly Sikh travelers.

Despite their status as subjects of the British Empire, the Canadian authorities refused to allow them ashore when they docked at Vancouver in May of 1914. The Immigration department restricted their communications, blocked attempts to take their case to court, and refused to supply the ship with water and food. The British Columbia Court of Appeal denied their entry in July and forced the ship to return to India.

Photo Credit to the Library and Archives Canada. “Passengers aboard the SS Komagata Maru.”

One would think that the colonial rubric of pliancy, which deemed Sikhs as non-violent adherents to British rule, would have granted them safe return to India. In the Pacific Northwest of Canada and the USA, where Punjabi migrant laborers hacked at trees and picked in mines, turbaned men were perceived as unmanly, with their long hair and attention to dressing it. Their perceived disinterest in adhering to colonial standards of masculinity spelled gender confusion—but surely not virile agents of insurrection.

Yet, as Nayan Shah and others have pointed out, the appearance of Punjabi Sikh men complicated the gender binary with their mystifying dress, and that posed a threat to the hegemony of white male supremacy. Turbans became a focal point of abuse and a symbol of the social duplicity of South Asians. Like Pathans and Gurkhas, Sikh men were determined less likely to rebel, but they were still classified as a “martial race,” meaning they were believed to possess biological or cultural dispositions to certain qualities considered essential to victorious warriors. 

While objects like the address casket suggest that Sikhs were perceived to be non-threatening, could be made miniature, and were purely ornamental, what happened when the passengers disembarked revealed white colonial fear of them as duplicitous and dangerous.

After months on board the SS Komagata Maru, the passengers descended onto the port, where at least twenty of them were murdered by British Indian Police. They refused to be forced onto a train bound for the Punjab and paid for their dissent in blood. The remaining survivors were incarcerated in a Kolkata prison until the British inquiry of the affair was completed.

Two containers with a temple complex: a ship and a mailbox. Both drip with blood drawn in white heat of colonial suspicions of rebellion and rights to autonomy. One glittered with the opportunity of financial stability, while the other glittered with the glare of British Imperialism—and continues to on its pedestal at the Royal Ontario Museum. It’s still on loan from Queen Elizabeth II.

While the address casket is built to diminish, minimize, and reduce the strength of Sikhs and force them to conform to colonial compartmentalization schemes, it will never escape from the shadow of the real Golden Temple and its daily cultivation of an ethical code. It will never shrink down or replace the lived realities of Sikhs and their perpetual endeavor of truthful living through helping others.

Wikimedia Commons Photographer (2009). “Sikh Pilgrim at the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in Amritsar, India.”

Some use their hands to build miniature models intended to reduce and possess the Other. But others, as Nanak guides us, can use their hands to carve out their own destiny.

Maggie Slaughter is a Ph.D. student in Religious Studies at Indiana University studying Jewish and Christian histories. Material culture, mortuary practices, and devotional art-making generate and complicate her thinking on religion.