Ram Bagh, Amritsarਰਾਮ ਬਾਗ, ਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤਸਰ

What is Ram Bagh in Amritsar?

Ram Bagh is the great garden palace of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Amritsar: an 84-acre garden in the Mughal style, laid out from 1819 and completed in 1831, with a two-storey red stone summer palace at its heart. The Maharaja, whose capital was Lahore, spent his summers in the holy city, and he named the garden for Guru Ram Das Ji, the fourth Guru, who founded Amritsar. Modelled on the Shalimar Bagh of Lahore, Ram Bagh was his Amritsar court in garden form, and today its palace holds a museum of his reign.

The Maharaja's summer court

Ranjit Singh took Amritsar in 1802 and poured attention on the city that held the Harmandir Sahib. Work on Ram Bagh began in 1819 under courtiers including Fakir Azizuddin, Desa Singh and Lehna Singh Majithia, and the whole project cost about 1,25,000 Nanakshahi rupees. The garden followed the charbagh pattern of water channels, fountains and shaded walks, planted with rare trees and shrubs brought for the Maharaja, some of them unusual in Punjab to this day. Within its fourteen-foot walls and four corner watchtowers, the garden was a palace, a court and a pleasure ground at once.

Inside the garden

The summer palace stands at the centre: two storeys over a basement, built of red stone, with arched windows, balconies and cool underground rooms for the worst of the Amritsar summer. To its northwest lies a hammam, a bath house with a large pool. The main gateway, the deorhi on the southern side, faces towards the Harmandir Sahib and was itself turned into a museum in British times; a second deorhi closes the northern end. Around the palace stand the court's working buildings: the Macchi Ghar to the east, once the darbar's record room and later an aquarium, the Munshikhana staff quarters to the west, and a red sandstone baradari among the trees.

Company Bagh and the club years

After the Maharaja's death in 1839 and the fall of the Sikh Empire, the British took over the garden and renamed it Company Bagh. They leased several of its buildings to three elite clubs, the Amritsar Club, the Lumsden Club and the Service Club, and the clubs stayed on long after 1947, a possession dispute that has reached the courts and slowed the garden's conservation. Protection came in stages: the Punjab government declared the whole complex protected in 1997, and in 2004 the central government made it a Monument of National Importance, with the Archaeological Survey of India responsible for conservation while the Municipal Corporation administers the garden.

The planting was engineering as much as ornament. A planned system of channels carried water through the garden to its fountains and pools, and the Maharaja's gardeners stocked it with rare conifers, herbal plants and flowering shrubs collected from across his territories. Scholars of the complex call it a small masterpiece of landscape design, a Persian charbagh disciplined by Sikh court taste. Many of the old trees survive, which is why the garden still reads as a green room inside the dense city rather than a lawn with monuments on it.

Ram Bagh was also recorded early. The photographer Felice Beato photographed its entrance in 1858 to 1860, within twenty years of the Maharaja's death, and a detailed map of the garden drawn by Tota Ram in 1860 for the Gulgast-i-Punjab shows the palace, walls and water system as they then stood. Lady Canning painted a watercolour of the garden in the same years. Together these images let conservators check what has been lost: the full fourteen-foot walls, more of the planting, and the working fountains.

Ram Bagh today

The palace now houses the Maharaja Ranjit Singh Museum, whose galleries display the weapons, coins, manuscripts and paintings of the Sikh Empire, and a memorial gallery, the Ranjit Singh Panorama, opened beside the garden's northwest corner in 2006. In the grounds stands the much-photographed statue of the Maharaja on horseback. For Amritsar's residents Ram Bagh is also simply their great city park, full of morning walkers under old trees. Visit the museum in the morning (it keeps roughly 10 AM to 5 PM hours and closes on Mondays), then walk the garden, and pair the trip with Gobindgarh Fort and Jallianwala Bagh for a full day of the city's layered history.