The Sarbat Khalsa

The sarbat khalsa is the whole Khalsa in assembly. It is summoned at the Akal Takht in Amritsar, the seat of temporal authority that Guru Hargobind established facing the Harmandir Sahib, and its resolution, a gurmata, is taken in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib and binds the entire community.

Its working period was the eighteenth century. The Sikh community was under Mughal and then Afghan pressure, organised into misls, fighting bands with their own leaders and territories, and it had no state and no central executive. The sarbat khalsa was how such a body acted as one. The misls assembled at Amritsar, conventionally at Vaisakhi and Diwali, put the question before the Guru Granth Sahib, and took a decision that held across leaders who otherwise answered to nobody.

The theology and the practice fit together exactly. Sikh doctrine holds that the Guru is present in the scripture and in the assembled community, so a decision taken by the whole panth before the scripture is not a majority vote but the Guru's decision. That is what gives a gurmata its force, and it is why a gurmata is distinguished from ordinary resolutions and reserved for matters touching the community as a whole.

The institution lapsed under Ranjit Singh, whose kingdom had no use for an assembly that could overrule it, and did not recover its old function under colonial rule, which built other structures instead.

The twentieth century gave the Sikh community institutions the eighteenth century did not have. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee was constituted to manage the historic gurdwaras and became, in practice, a representative body with elections, revenues and a public voice. The jathedars of the takhts, and the Akal Takht above all, acquired a standing role in speaking for the panth and issuing directions to it.

The sarbat khalsa has been revived several times against that background, and each revival has been contested. The argument is not about whether the institution is genuine; nobody denies that it is, and it is written into Sikh understanding of how the community decides. The argument is about who has standing to summon one, and about whether an assembly called by some Sikhs and not others is the sarbat khalsa at all or a large meeting claiming the name.

Behind that sit the political conflicts of the later twentieth century in Punjab, the events of 1984, and questions about the independence of the takhts from party politics, none of which the atlas is in a position to adjudicate and none of which is settled.

What can be described is the shape of the disagreement. A tradition that vests decisive authority in an assembly of the whole community faces a hard practical problem the moment it also has permanent institutions, because both can claim to speak for the panth and there is no third thing to arbitrate between them. That is a live question inside a living tradition and it belongs to the Sikhs who are arguing it.