In the early 1920s, a quiet but determined campaign swept across Punjab, aiming to return the community's most sacred places to the community itself. Known both as the Gurdwara Reform Movement and the Akali Movement, it sought to free Sikh gurdwaras, the places of worship, from the grip of hereditary custodians who had come to treat the shrines and their offerings as private property. What set the movement apart was its method. Rather than meeting force with force, its volunteers chose nonviolent resistance, enduring beatings, arrest, and worse without striking back. Within five years their persistence reshaped how Punjab's historic shrines would be governed.
The Problem of the Mahants
For generations, many gurdwaras had been managed by custodians known as mahants, along with Udasi priests, whose control over the shrines had become hereditary. Over time a number of these custodians grew corrupt. They came to regard the offerings of pilgrims as personal income and, in some cases, allowed practices at the shrines that ordinary worshippers found deeply improper. Reformers argued that the shrines belonged to the whole Sikh community and ought to be managed openly and accountably rather than left to private families who answered to no one.
Roots in the Singh Sabha
The movement did not appear from nowhere. It grew directly out of the Singh Sabha, the religious and educational revival that had taken shape in the late nineteenth century. The Singh Sabha had renewed interest in Sikh teaching, encouraged literacy, and sharpened a sense of distinct identity. Once a generation had been taught to look closely at how their faith was practised, the condition of the shrines became impossible to ignore. The reform impulse of the earlier movement flowed naturally into the campaign for the gurdwaras.
Building a Community Structure
To manage the shrines on behalf of the community, Sikh leaders gathered in a general assembly in November 1920 and elected a representative body of 175 members. This became the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, or SGPC, formed to oversee the major gurdwaras and historical sites. Around the same time, in December 1920, the Shiromani Akali Dal was organised as the volunteer body of the movement. Together these two organisations gave the campaign both an administrative structure and a disciplined corps of activists.
The Morcha at Nankana Sahib
The first great test came at the birthplace of Guru Nanak. In February 1921, a body of Sikhs who had come peacefully to the shrine at Nankana Sahib was attacked, and roughly 130 people were killed. The scale of the bloodshed shocked Sikhs across Punjab and beyond. Within days the authorities transferred control of the gurdwara to the reformers. The tragedy hardened resolve rather than breaking it, and it gave the movement a powerful sense of sacrifice that would mark the years to come.
Guru ka Bagh and Jaito
Two further campaigns showed how far the volunteers were willing to go. At Guru ka Bagh in 1922, jathas, the organised groups of volunteers, came forward to gather firewood for the community kitchen and were arrested in large numbers, with thousands taken into custody over the weeks of the protest. Many were beaten as they waited without resistance. The Jaito morcha, which stretched into 1924 and 1925, saw further mass arrests and casualties as volunteers pressed their cause.
The volunteers came forward in waves, unarmed and unresisting, accepting blows and imprisonment as the price of returning the shrines to the community.
The Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925
The long campaign reached its goal in 1925. After years of agitation, arrests numbering in the tens of thousands, and hundreds of deaths, the government passed the Sikh Gurdwaras Act. Adopted in July 1925 and taking effect that November, the Act placed the historic shrines under the control of an elected committee, confirming the SGPC as their legal custodian. Among the great shrines affected was the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the spiritual centre of the faith. Management now rested with representatives chosen by the community rather than with hereditary families.
A Legacy of Disciplined Sacrifice
The Gurdwara Reform Movement is remembered above all for the discipline of its volunteers. Faced with violence, they held to nonviolence, and their willingness to suffer without retaliating drew wide attention to their cause. The campaign carried forward the spirit of reform that had begun under the Singh Sabha and connected ordinary worshippers to the long tradition stretching back to the Ten Gurus. When the historic shrines passed into elected hands in 1925, the movement had achieved what it set out to do: to place the gurdwaras of Punjab in the care of the community they served.