Engineer, lecturer and community leader who spearheaded the creation of the Edinburgh Hindu Mandir.
Amrit Lal Tangri, pioneering Mandir president. Born: 9 September 1932 in Jandali Kalan, Punjab, British India. Died: 13 January 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland, aged 93.
Vineet Lal writes about his father who died earlier this year:
On a November evening in 1993, oil lamps illuminated the Edinburgh Hindu Mandir on St Andrew Place in Leith as families gathered to celebrate Diwali. Only a few years earlier the building had stood empty, cold and abandoned, a derelict shell of its former self. Now it had been reborn—a temple, a vibrant cultural centre, a focal point for the community. This remarkable transformation had been achieved thanks to the quiet determination and inspirational leadership of Amrit Lal, whose patience, discipline and steady resolve had turned a long-cherished aspiration into reality.
Amrit, who has died aged 93, lived a life defined by constant upheaval and perseverance in the face of obstacles. Born in rural Punjab, educated in piecemeal fashion in villages and towns across pre-Partition northern India, and forcibly shaped by hardship into a young apprentice, engineer and educator, he eventually settled in Edinburgh, where his enduring legacy would be the Mandir itself. Together with his wife, the trailblazing race relations campaigner Saroj Lal, he gave the city’s Hindu community a permanent spiritual and cultural home.
He was born into crippling poverty on 9 September 1932 in Jandali Kalan, near Ahmedgarh in the Sangrur district of Punjab. His mother, Parvati Devi Dhand, had returned to the parental home for the birth of her first child, as was customary. Amrit’s father, Lachman Dass Tangri, known respectfully as Baoji, came from nearby Maholi Kalan. Baoji was a veterinary surgeon in the Remount Veterinary Corps of the British Indian Army and was frequently posted across the remote north-west region of British India, predominantly in Baluchistan and North West Frontier Province (both now in Pakistan).
Amrit’s early years were marked by deprivation, instability and loss. Three siblings died in infancy – a sister and two younger brothers, Satinder and Bhushan – and he contracted tuberculosis, which lay undetected until much later in life.
His education began late and was erratic in nature. It was repeatedly interrupted as the family was forced to move—Sargodha, Ludhiana, Khanna, Ahmedgarh—whenever Baoji was transferred from one posting to another. His earliest schooling took place in rudimentary village classrooms with a single teacher. He never attended Class 1. In 1938, while his father was stationed in Sargodha, he was placed in Class 2, and later repeated the same class in Ludhiana. His mother and paternal grandparents had had little formal education and were unable to assist with his lessons. Only Baoji would teach him, whenever time allowed.
During the Second World War, Baoji was posted to Aden in Yemen with the Bikaner Camel Corps, known as the Ganga Risala. Amrit and his mother stayed with relatives in Khanna for more than two years. While home on leave in 1942, Baoji and his family were visiting Maholi Kalan when Amrit’s paternal grandfather, Raja Ram, passed away. Baoji faithfully carried out the last rites – the cremation before sunset, the immersion of the ashes—in only a few short days before returning to military duty. The memory remained with Amrit for the rest of his life.
Greater stability came when Amrit’s maternal uncle, Jagiri Mal Dhand, himself a teacher, took responsibility for the boy’s schooling, enrolling him into Class 8 as a boarder at Khalsa High School in Kila Raipur in 1945. Amrit still saw himself as an unpromising student, conscious of the gaps left by weak foundations, patchy teaching and years of disrupted education. Yet he persisted.
In the summer of 1947 he was visiting Baoji, who was by this time posted to Fort Sandeman (now Zhob, Pakistan), when rumours about Partition started to circulate and the family was moved to a Sikh regiment in Kohat for safety. In August 1947, as the violence and bloodshed began, they were evacuated in a military plane to Chaklala Cantonment near Rawalpindi before being taken across the newly drawn border in a special train. Amrit managed to return to Kila Raipur amid the chaos and streets littered with corpses, and passed the all-important Class 10 ‘matriculation’ exam in August 1948.
He then joined DAV Post Graduate College in Dehra Dun to study English, physics and chemistry. His first experience of English-medium education, however, proved difficult and he initially failed his final exams. Hurt but not defeated, he took a year out, returned, and finally passed, two years late, in the spring of 1952.
A decisive turning point came the very morning after his exams. Through a series of contacts, Baoji introduced Amrit to a British automotive representative in Delhi who arranged an apprenticeship with Albion Motors in Scotstoun, Glasgow.
‘You’re going!’ declared Baoji. Amrit sailed from Bombay on the MS Batory later that year, docking in Southampton on 11 November 1952. He arrived in a cold and unfamiliar city with little money, limited English and no contacts. His weekly wage was just over £3 – too little even to afford the YMCA – and he initially lived in shared accommodation with other Indians at 42 Kelvinside Gardens.
For the next three years he combined his apprenticeship with day release courses at Stow College of Engineering. Once it was over, he worked for a series of Glasgow-based firms (including the North British Locomotive Company Ltd and Mavor & Coulson Ltd) while continuing his studies through evening classes. Determined not to burden his father, he refused to ask for financial help, believing his two younger brothers (Darshan, born 1943, and Shashi, born 1947) should have the educational opportunities he himself had lacked. That resilience would define him. From the poorest of foundations, he gradually accumulated a portfolio of professional qualifications in mechanical and production engineering.
In 1962 he finally returned to India where he was introduced to Saroj Chanana, an economics graduate from Panjab University. They were married on 11 December 1962 and began life together in Madras (now Chennai) where Amrit worked for Binny Engineering. Their first child, a daughter named Pansy, was born in Ludhiana on 14 November 1963 but fell seriously ill and died on 25 January 1964 – a loss they both carried quietly throughout their lives.
In August 1964 the couple moved to Singapore, where Amrit became a lecturer at Singapore Polytechnic and where their son Vineet was born in June 1965. Still conscious of the gaps in his education, however, he and Saroj moved to the UK in 1967 where he become a postgraduate student at the University of Birmingham. His Glasgow qualifications and experience had been recognised as being equivalent to a degree, and enabled him to study for an MSc in quality and reliability engineering. The conferring of his MSc in December 1968 was an achievement of deep personal significance—proof that the little boy with fragmented schooling had finally prevailed.
Saroj had fallen in love with Edinburgh during a short holiday, and shortly afterwards Amrit accepted a lectureship at Napier College of Science and Technology. The family settled in the city in November 1968 and their second daughter, Kavita, was born there in May 1969.
The early years in Edinburgh were challenging. The family initially lived in one room on Smith’s Place in Leith before saving enough to buy their first home on Oxford Street. Saroj was also an educator, but in the mid-1970s she and Amrit both left teaching in search of greater flexibility to raise their young family. Their first small business, Lal’s Store on Balgreen Road, brought long-term financial security, while in the mid-1980s Fabina on Marchmont Crescent, offering Asian fabrics, musical instruments and Bollywood movies, became a popular meeting place for Edinburgh’s growing South Asian community.
From 1987 to 1988, Baoji came to live with Amrit for an entire year – a time both men deeply valued, allowing them to share, at last, the companionship that had been largely absent during Amrit’s childhood. Baoji died just days after returning to India in September 1988.
It was during this period that Amrit’s most significant contribution to the city began to emerge. In the early 1980s Edinburgh’s Hindu families had no permanent place of worship. Prayer meetings and festivals were held in borrowed halls, offices and community centres. In 1981 a small group formed an organising committee, and in 1984 Amrit became president of the Edinburgh Hindu Mandir, leading the project through its critical formative years.
His outlook was shaped by an Arya Samaj upbringing, grounded in the teachings of the Vedas and a belief in gender equality, education and seva (service). Those principles informed the way he led. He believed institutions had to be built carefully, honestly and for the long term. Amrit brought credibility, discipline and integrity to the task. Every decision had to stand scrutiny; every pound was accounted for.
In 1989, following negotiations with the City of Edinburgh Council led by Saroj, the organisation acquired a disused church on St Andrew’s Place for a peppercorn sum. The building was cold and derelict, requiring extensive refurbishment. The ground floor was made habitable in 1991. Amrit oversaw fundraising, planning and renovation, working with committee members and volunteers to create a temple on a new first floor and a cultural centre downstairs. He also helped with funding applications and strategic business plans that persuaded public bodies that the project was sound and sustainable. On 13 November 1993 the Mandir celebrated its first Diwali in its impressive new home.
The Hindu Mandir was one of two gifts from Amrit and Saroj to the city. Supported by Amrit, Saroj campaigned for and established Ganga Ghat on the River Almond – a first for the UK. This was a dedicated site where families of any faith could immerse the ashes of their loved ones in accordance with their beliefs. Amrit was present for the first official immersion – the ashes of Surendra Chandarana – on 17 July 1994.
From the 1990s onwards, Amrit enjoyed travel and family life, spending time with his son in France, Japan and the USA. He was closely involved, along with Saroj, in building the city’s emerging inter-faith networks and served on the board of MECOPP, supporting minority carers. He survived serious illness – including two heart attacks – more than once and remained fully engaged with the world, following Indian politics closely, embracing new technology and taking pleasure in family milestones. After Saroj’s death in March 2020 he lived more quietly, sustained by his memories and nostalgia for his childhood in Punjab.
Amrit will be remembered as a true gentleman: a noble, caring man of huge integrity and principles, who left behind a legacy that will long outlast him and his beloved Saroj.
The First Minister, John Swinney MSP, said: “Together, Amrit and Saroj embodied compassion, courage and community. Their impact endures in the lives they shaped, the institutions they strengthened, and the principles they championed. Their legacy remains an inspiration to us all.”
And in the stones of the Edinburgh Hindu Mandir, and in the sacred waters of Ganga Ghat where, fittingly, Amrit’s ashes and those of Saroj were finally laid to rest, their shared vision for the city lives on.
