Singh Sabha

The first Singh Sabha was founded at Amritsar in 1873, prompted by news that Sikh students at a mission school intended to be baptised as Christians, and by the wider pressure of missionary activity and of Arya Samaj polemic that treated Sikhism as a branch of Hinduism. Its leadership came from established families, Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia and Khem Singh Bedi among them, and its temper was conservative: reform of abuses, education, publication, without disturbing the customary religious world of the Punjab in which Sikh, Hindu and Muslim practice overlapped at shrines and in households.

A second Sabha was founded at Lahore in 1879, and its leading figures, Gurmukh Singh and Giani Ditt Singh among them, came from a different social base and took a far sharper line. This wing, which came to be called the Tat Khalsa, the true Khalsa, held that Sikhism was a distinct religion with its own scripture, its own rites and its own boundaries, and that practices shared with neighbours were accretions to be removed.

The two positions could not be held in one organisation. The Khalsa Diwan founded to coordinate the Sabhas split, and after further reorganisation the Chief Khalsa Diwan was constituted in 1902 with the Lahore position effectively in control.

The list of things decided in these decades is long and most of it is now simply how Sikhism is. Kahn Singh Nabha published the tract We Are Not Hindus in 1898, which set out the case for a separate identity in a form that could be carried in a pocket. Idols kept in the precinct of the Golden Temple were removed. The Anand Marriage Act of 1909 gave the Sikh wedding rite statutory recognition. Khalsa College at Amritsar was founded in 1892, and a network of schools with it. Punjabi in Gurmukhi script was pressed as the language of Sikh education and publication. Standardised rites, catechisms and codes of conduct were drafted, and the line of that work runs directly to the Sikh Rehat Maryada adopted in the middle of the twentieth century.

How to read all that is contested. Harjot Oberoi argued in 1994 that the movement did not recover an original Sikhism but constructed a bounded religious identity out of a plural and overlapping religious world, and that the boundaries now taken as given are a modern achievement. The thesis was influential in the academy and was rejected sharply by many Sikh scholars and institutions, who hold that a distinct Khalsa identity is present in the tradition from the eighteenth century and earlier and that the Singh Sabha defended it rather than inventing it. Both positions are live and the atlas records the disagreement.