The library occupied a building at the southern gate of the parikrama, the marble circumambulatory path around the Golden Temple's sacred pool. It was one of several repositories within the complex: the Toshakhana held physical treasures at the Darshani Deori, the Central Sikh Museum occupied the upper floor of the main eastern gate, and the Guru Ram Das Library sat near the Guru Ram Das Sarai. But the Reference Library was different in kind. Its collection spanned languages and centuries -- Punjabi texts on Sikhism alongside works in Assamese, Bengali, Sindhi, English, and French. The scope reflected the intellectual ambition of the Sikh scholarly tradition, which has never confined itself to a single language or discipline. Among the holdings were approximately 550 manuscripts of the Guru Granth Sahib, 75 Dasam Granth manuscripts, and 1,300 general manuscripts. Some of these were handwritten originals of incalculable historical value.

Operation Blue Star began on June 1, 1984, when the Indian Army moved to remove militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his armed followers from the Golden Temple complex. Fighting was heaviest between June 5 and 7. According to V. M. Tarkunde, a civil liberties advocate who investigated the aftermath, the library was still intact on June 6 after the army had gained control of the temple. Sometime between June 6 and June 14, the building was burned. The contents had already been removed -- confiscated by the Central Bureau of Investigation. The empty shelves were what caught fire. What remained was a gutted shell and an absence: thousands of manuscripts, carried away by the very government that was supposed to protect the temple's heritage, with no public accounting of where they went.

The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which manages Sikh gurdwaras, has spent decades trying to recover the confiscated materials. Progress has been glacial and contradictory. In May 2000, Defense Minister George Fernandes wrote to the SGPC acknowledging that the army had taken books and documents from the library and handed them to the CBI. In April 2004, the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered the central government, the Punjab state government, and the CBI to return everything seized during Operation Blue Star. Then in 2009, Defense Minister A. K. Antony told Parliament that the army no longer possessed any library materials -- a claim the SGPC called misleading. Meanwhile, 117 items were reportedly destroyed by the government for being classified as "seditious" materials. What has been returned amounts to a few office files and passports. The vast majority of the collection remains unaccounted for.

The library did not die. It started over. Working from nothing, the SGPC began reassembling a collection that now numbers 24,540 books, according to a 2017 estimate. New manuscripts of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Dasam Granth, and other Sikh texts have been acquired, though no hukamnamas -- edicts signed by the Sikh Gurus -- have been recovered for the revived collection. A fumigation chamber protects the new holdings from insects and environmental damage. In 2008, digitization work began, driven by the hard lesson that a physical collection concentrated in a single location can be destroyed in days. The original library building, a small two-story structure, still stands in the temple complex, and there is debate about whether to keep it there as a witness to history or relocate to a larger facility at Bhai Gurdas Hall to accommodate the growing collection. Plans also exist for a Guru Granth Sahib Bhawan, where historical scripture manuscripts would be displayed publicly.

Numbers tell one version of the story: 20,000 works lost, 24,540 acquired since, a collection that is numerically larger than what was destroyed. But the arithmetic is misleading. The original library held handwritten manuscripts from specific centuries, edicts bearing the signatures of the Gurus, documents from the independence movement that existed nowhere else. These were not books that could be repurchased. They were unique artifacts of Sikh intellectual and spiritual life, accumulated over generations. Their loss is not a gap that new acquisitions can fill -- it is a different kind of absence, one measured not in volume but in irreplaceability. The library's story resonates beyond Sikh history because it poses a question that every cultural institution must eventually face: who is responsible for protecting a community's memory, and what happens when the protector becomes the threat? Four decades on, the answer remains incomplete, the manuscripts remain missing, and the shelves that hold the new collection stand where the old ones burned.