In 1873, four Sikh boys at the Christian mission school in Amritsar let it be known that they intended to be baptised.

It was not, in itself, a large event. What made it detonate was the timing. Twenty-four years earlier the Sikh kingdom had been annexed and its treasury shipped to London. Twenty years earlier its last Maharaja, Duleep Singh, had been converted to Christianity at fourteen and sent to England. The institutions that had paid for gurdwaras, scholarship and scribes had gone with the state, and into the gap had come mission schools with fees paid and the Arya Samaj with a sharp line in polemic. Four schoolboys in Amritsar looked, to the men who heard about it, like the beginning of the end.

What they founded in response spent the next forty years working out what a Sikh actually was — and the answer they arrived at is the one the Sikh world uses today.

A Community Without a State

Annexation in 1849 removed more than a government. Under the misls and then the empire, Sikh shrines had been endowed with land, and their custodians — mahants and pujaris — held those endowments as hereditary property. With no Sikh state to supervise them, many of these men ran the shrines as private estates, and a fair number were not initiated Sikhs at all.

Practice drifted accordingly. Idols stood in the precincts of gurdwaras. Brahmin priests officiated at Sikh births and weddings. Caste ran through congregations that the Gurus had constituted to abolish it. None of this was novel or scandalous to the people doing it; it was what a religion looks like when it has been absorbed into a wider ritual world for a century.

The reformers were people who had begun to find it intolerable.

Amritsar, 1873

The first Singh Sabha was constituted at Amritsar in 1873, with an early gathering held near the Akal Takht beside the Golden Temple.

Its leadership was aristocratic: Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia, Kanwar Bikrama Singh of Kapurthala, and above all Khem Singh Bedi, a direct descendant of Guru Nanak's family who was treated by his followers with something close to the reverence given a Guru. Their programme was protective rather than radical — restore respect for Sikh teaching, publish, educate, and hold the line against the missionaries.

Crucially, they saw no conflict between being Sikh and belonging to a broad Hindu civilisation. This is the position later called Sanatan Sikhi, and it was not a fringe view. It was, in 1873, the ordinary one.

Lahore, 1879

On 2 November 1879 a second society was founded at Lahore, and it was a different animal entirely.

The Lahore Singh Sabha drew on the new professional class the colonial economy had produced: schoolmasters, clerks, printers, lawyers. Its leading figure was Professor Gurmukh Singh of the Oriental College. It admitted men from castes the Amritsar body treated warily, held that a hereditary descendant of the Guru's family had no special authority, and argued that Sikhism was a religion in its own right, grounded in the Guru Granth Sahib and the discipline of the Khalsa, and answerable to nothing else.

This current took the name Tat Khalsa — the true or pure Khalsa.

The two bodies attempted to work together through a coordinating Khalsa Diwan from 1880, and it failed. By 1886 the Lahore group had constituted a separate Khalsa Diwan of its own. The dispute turned bitter and personal: Gurmukh Singh was excommunicated by an edict issued from Amritsar in 1887, which had no effect on his standing among reformers and a great deal of effect on the standing of the men who issued it.

The Question

Underneath the institutional quarrel sat one question, and everything else followed from it. Were Sikhs Hindus?

The Sanatan position held that they were — a reforming tradition within a larger fold, sharing its festivals, its life-cycle rites and much of its social order. The Tat Khalsa held that they were not, and that a century of accommodation had blurred something the Gurus had drawn sharply.

In 1898 the argument was given its decisive statement by Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha, a scholar in the service of the Nabha court, in a tract called Ham Hindu Nahin — "We Are Not Hindus." Written as a dialogue between a Sikh and a Hindu pandit, it worked through scripture, rite and history to argue the separateness of the faith. Kahn Singh Nabha went on to compile the Mahan Kosh, the great Sikh encyclopaedia that scholars still use.

It is difficult to overstate how completely that position won. The question that consumed Sikh public life for a generation is now not a live question at all.

The Tat Khalsa won because it out-published everyone.

The reformers grasped early that the printing press had changed the terms of religious argument, and they built for it: newspapers, journals, tract societies, and a steady output of commentaries, catechisms and devotional literature in Punjabi, in Gurmukhi. The Khalsa Tract Society pushed out cheap pamphlets by the tens of thousands. The Khalsa Akhbar, edited for a time by Gurmukh Singh, carried the argument weekly.

Among the writers this culture produced was Bhai Vir Singh, who wrote the first Punjabi novels — Sundari and others — as instruments of reform, and effectively founded modern Punjabi literature while doing it.

The consequence outlived the argument. A community that had largely encountered its scripture through recitation acquired a print culture in its own language and script, and Punjabi in Gurmukhi became the settled medium of Sikh religious life. That decision echoes all the way into the twentieth-century fight over language, and into the Punjabi Suba movement.

Institutions

The reformers understood that arguments are lost by whoever runs out of buildings.

A network of Khalsa schools spread across Punjab through the 1880s and 90s, teaching a modern curriculum alongside Sikh instruction. Their great project was Khalsa College, Amritsar, opened in 1892 and paid for by Sikh princes and by public subscription — a deliberate statement that the community could educate its own without the mission schools.

In 1902 most of the local sabhas were federated into the Chief Khalsa Diwan, founded at Amritsar on 30 October, which became the movement's central body and its voice in dealings with the colonial government. It was politically cautious to a fault — its loyalism would later cost it the leadership of Sikh opinion — but it was effective at what it was built for.

The Singh Sabha did not set out to invent a faith. It set out to decide which of the things Sikhs were already doing actually belonged to it.

The Anand Marriage Act

The most concrete victory came in 1909.

Sikh weddings were solemnised by the anand karaj, the rite of circling the Guru Granth Sahib. In colonial courts, that rite had no independent legal existence; questions of Sikh marriage, inheritance and legitimacy were decided under Hindu personal law. The reformers pressed for statutory recognition, against opposition from Hindu bodies and from Sanatan Sikhs who saw no need for it.

The Anand Marriage Act passed the Imperial Legislative Council on 22 October 1909. In practical terms it was a modest piece of legislation. In symbolic terms it was the state conceding, on paper, exactly what Ham Hindu Nahin had argued.

What It Left Behind

The Singh Sabha ran out of road in the 1920s, and it ran out of road because of its own success. Having established that Sikh institutions should be run on Sikh terms, the obvious next question was who controlled the shrines — and the Chief Khalsa Diwan, loyal to the British administration, was not going to take that on.

The energy passed to the Gurdwara reform movement and the Akali agitations, which wrested control of the historic gurdwaras from the hereditary mahants at considerable cost in lives, and produced the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 and the SGPC that still administers them.

There is a live scholarly argument about all this, and it is worth knowing that it exists. Some historians describe the Singh Sabha as having constructed modern Sikh identity — hardening a boundary that had been genuinely fluid, and presenting a nineteenth-century settlement as a timeless one. Others reply that the reformers were recovering a discipline the Gurus had plainly instituted, after a century in which the loss of the state had let it slide.

Both accounts agree on the mechanism. A small number of schoolteachers and printers in Lahore, with no state behind them, argued and published their way to a definition of Sikhism that a hundred and fifty million people now take entirely for granted. Whatever else it was, it is one of the most successful pieces of religious organisation in modern South Asian history.