From Borrowed Rites to a Legally Recognized Ceremony

The Lavan sung during the ceremony is a composition of the fourth Guru, Guru Ram Das, and for a considerable period after its composition Sikh weddings were nonetheless still commonly performed using Hindu ceremonial forms rather than a fully distinct Sikh rite built around it, since a separate, standardized Sikh wedding ceremony took longer to become the general norm than the hymn itself had existed.

The reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the Singh Sabha movement, pushed strongly for Anand Karaj, performed before the Guru Granth Sahib with the couple circling the scripture as the Lavan is sung, to replace these borrowed forms as the marker of a distinctly Sikh identity separate from surrounding Hindu practice. That campaign had a concrete legal outcome under colonial rule: the Anand Marriage Act, passed in 1909, gave Sikh marriages performed as Anand Karaj formal legal recognition as a distinct rite in their own right rather than requiring them to be registered or understood under Hindu marriage law, a milestone Sikh institutions still point to as formal recognition of Anand Karaj's independent status. The ceremony's four circuits around the scripture, each following one stanza of the Lavan, are read as marking four successive stages in the couple's union rather than a single repeated gesture, moving from duty through discipline to detachment and finally to a sense of unity the final stanza describes.