The red dot on the map marks the city of Amritsar in the Punjab in India, about 25km from the border with Pakistan. Within the city is the Golden Temple.

It is a Sikh temple, and because of the adherents’ belief in the importance of maintaining the vibration, music and singing have been a constant since 1604.

I can’t imagine there is anywhere else on Earth that has been vibrating for over four hundred years.

The vibration is maintained by musicians who sit and play 20 hours a day every day.

For those four hours late at night and into the following morning, others take over and recite prayers continuously while around them cleaners clean the place ready for the next day.

I went to Amritsar in the 1990s, specifically to visit the temple, and I recall the room with musicians seated in a circle, a room with open walls supported by slender columns, and a view over the lake, and a causeway that led from the lakeside.

Interruption

The vibrations were interrupted for about a day and a half in 1984 when Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, ordered an assault on the temple because a group of Sikh separatists were headquartered there.

The temple was damaged and hundreds were killed.

Five months later Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for the attack.

It is hard to imagine that Indira Gandhi was at ease with bodyguards from the same group against whom she had ordered an attack. And yet, those are facts.

She was shot in her garden while making her way to an interview with Peter Ustinov, the actor, who was doing a television series on global leaders and wanted to interview her.

Ustinov said later that the experience was surreal. He heard the sounds from the other side of a high hedge and could not believe that they really were shots.

The Golden Temple

I didn’t have a camera with me when I visited the Golden Temple. I don’t recall that I had a camera in those days. Photography meant all the rolls of film one had to carry and the problems with airport scanners fogging film.

Digital photography changed that.

So this image is generated within WordPress. I told AI what to do and it did it. There are many photographs of the Golden Temple from which AI could draw, provided I gave it sufficiently clear guidelines, so I thought it would be a good candidate.

AI added a caption to the image mentioning the Amrit Sarovar, and I had to look it up, and found that The Amrit Sarovar is the holy tank or lake surrounding the Golden Temple. Its name translates to the ‘Pool of the Nectar of Immortality’, and it is from the word Amrit that the city of Amritsar gets its name.

Why I Wrote This Post

I was thinking about the Mousetrap, the play that I wrote about last month, a play that has been running for 74 years, and it got me thinking. And then Amritsar and the Golden Temple came to mind, and the years of music and prayers happening there more or less without interruption since 1604.

All around central London, in the ‘better’ parts of the city, many properties that front onto the street have flowers in window boxes or boxes on the railings that bound the property.

They lift the spirits and who knows how far the good vibrations carry?

Add to this that Westminster Council (and maybe other Councils) hangs baskets of flowers at intervals along the main roads, and the Council tend and waters the flower baskets regularly so that the blooms stay for a long season.

I was out buying stuff today and Tamara told me Notting Hill Carnival was on, so I went. Or rather I walked with thousands of others from Paddington. I didn’t get to see the parade, but I saw a lot of people.

On the way there a notice by a police van said that facial recognition software was being used. On the way back I looked in the van and a man was scanning images, and outside a man in handcuffs was shouting out to his friends – ‘I don’t know why’ and ‘It wasn’t my fault’. I wonder how good the software is?

There were a lot of police along the road – several hundred at a guess, and I was thinking what a time consuming waste it is for the most part. I guess, I should say maybe. I should say that maybe without the big police presence all hell would break loose. is that really what Notting Hill Carnival is like – barely suppressed violence? Everybody knows the Carnival is a touchy subject with a big history.

Afterwards, I thought about it and I knew I was caught a bit on the hop and unprepared for the Carnival, so I did a bit of research and here is what I found out – the history at how it influenced how I felt when I was in the crowd walking.

Where to start?

Start with Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad in 1915. As an eight-year-old she moved with her parents to New York. She grew up in Harlem and became a Marxist and a significant Communist Party figure and did so out of the racial prejudice she saw.

In 1955, during the anti-communist repression of the early Cold War she was imprisoned for nine months and then deported under the Alien Registration Act of 1940 for her political activities.

Her offence was to ‘advocate the overthrow of the US government by force or violence, to organise a group advocating such overthrow, or knowingly to belong to such a group.’

She was deported from the US to Britain because Trinidad was then a British colony. Without that fact she would have been deported to a Communist Bloc country as others were.

Now living in London, in 1958 she founded the West Indian Gazette, that reported on discrimination in employment and housing, reported on racist attacks and on international anti-colonial politics.

Then, in what became know as the Notting Hill race riots, white gangs attacked mostly people from the Caribbean over several days beginning on Bank Holiday August 1958.

Jones wanted a public response to assert the community’s identity and celebrate Caribbean culture, to bring people together and to send out a message saying we are here.

The first festival was held indoors in January 1959.

It was held indoors, but the idea couldn’t be contained and the next major organiser was Rhaune Laslett.

She was local, born in London, and a social worker and activist The National Portrait Gallery describes her as the “principal organiser of the Notting Hill Festival, that evolved into the Notting Hill Carnival.”

Claudia Jones meanwhile, died of a heart attack in London on Christmas Eve 1964, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery next to Karl Marx.

In the 1970s relations between the police and young black Londoners were extremely bad. It was the time of the ‘sus law’ that allowed the police to stop and search anyone they thought might be guilty of an offence, and it was almost entirely young black people who were stopped and searched.

Being on a public street and stopped while all around passers-by were looking and judging, was a major factor in the relations with the police.

The ‘sus law’ was was part of section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 that allowed prosecution of a ‘suspected person or reputed thief’ found loitering in certain places with intent to commit an arrestable offence.

After the Brixton riots in 1981, for which the ‘sus law’ was found to be a major contributory factor, the offence was abolished by section 8 of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981.

But in 1976 the law was still in effect and at the 1976 Carnival there was a major confrontation with the police.

That was then, and since then the Carnival has grown to the size it is today, and over the years there have been hundreds of arrests, dozens of stabbings and some fatalities.

Now the numbers are coming through for this year’s Carnival and I was wrong by a big margin for the numbers of police. In fact, 7,000 police were deployed.

So what should I say about how I felt walking along? Pretty much OK. I was one of the oldest faces on the street, and it’s not my home patch. But did I feel ‘simmering violence’? No. it was just people.

This is the prow of the ship from the previous post