The order that traces itself to Sri Chand took a form that the Sikh mainstream did not: celibate, itinerant, ascetic in appearance, with matted hair and ash, keeping fires at fixed seats and sending preachers out from them across northern India and beyond. Udasi establishments accumulated land and endowments and functioned as centres of learning as well as of practice.
Their historical importance to Sikhism is not doctrinal but custodial. Through the eighteenth century, when Sikhs under Mughal and Afghan pressure were periodically driven from the plains and open Sikh identity was dangerous, Udasi mahants held and maintained many gurdwaras, including major shrines, and were able to do so partly because they were not read as Sikhs by hostile authorities. The buildings, the endowments and the continuity of worship survived through them.
That custody became the central Sikh political question of the early twentieth century. By then the hereditary mahants were widely regarded as having treated the shrines and their revenues as private property and as having introduced practices the reforming Singh Sabha movement rejected. The Gurdwara Reform Movement campaigned for transfer to elected committees; the confrontations were sustained and in places lethal, and the outcome was the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925, which placed the historic shrines of Punjab under an elected body.
The order continues, as a distinct tradition rather than as a branch of the Sikh Panth, and its relation to Sikhism is defined by that history as much as by anything Sri Chand himself is said to have taught.