Founding of the Singh Sabha

A movement founded in retreat

The Singh Sabha was founded at Amritsar in 1873, a generation after annexation, and its immediate trigger was defensive: Christian missionary activity was making converts, Hindu reform movements were claiming Sikhs as a Hindu sect, and several Sikh students at a mission school had announced their intention to convert.^2,4

What began as a defence turned into the most consequential internal argument in modern Sikh history — and it ran, in one form or another, for over fifty years.⁶

Two Sabhas, two answers

The Amritsar Singh Sabha was led largely by aristocratic families and descendants of the Gurus. Its position — later called Sanatan — held that Sikhism sat within a broadly defined Hindu tradition, tolerated caste distinction and image-veneration in practice, and did not require Khalsa initiation of every Sikh.^2,4

The Lahore Singh Sabha, founded in 1879 and dominated by educated middle-class Sikhs, took the opposite view. This was the Tat Khalsa — the “true Khalsa” — and it argued that Sikhism was a wholly distinct religion resting on the Guru Granth Sahib and Khalsa discipline, with Brahmanical ritual, caste and idol-veneration to be purged from Sikh practice entirely.^2,4

Their slogan was the title of Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha’s 1898 tract: Ham Hindu Nahin — we are not Hindus.³

How the argument was settled

The Tat Khalsa won, and it won in a specifically modern way: through print, schools and statute.

The movement founded newspapers and Khalsa colleges, standardised ritual, and pushed for legal recognition of Sikh practice as separate. The Anand Marriage Act of 1909 gave the Sikh wedding rite legal standing distinct from Hindu marriage law. The Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 — won after the Gurdwara Reform Movement had wrested control of shrines from hereditary custodians, at real cost in lives — put gurdwaras under an elected body, the SGPC, and did something more far-reaching: it wrote a definition of a Sikh into law. I solemnly affirm that I am a Sikh, that I believe in the Guru Granth Sahib, that I believe in the Ten Gurus, and that I have no other religion.⁵

That last clause is the whole argument compressed into six words.

What is disputed

This is among the most contested topics in Sikh studies, and the disagreement is not really about the facts.

Harjot Oberoi’s The Construction of Religious Boundaries argues that before the Singh Sabha, Sikh identity was genuinely plural — most Sikhs held overlapping local, regional and religious loyalties, and the sharp boundary between Sikh and Hindu did not exist in the form now taken for granted. On this reading the Singh Sabha did not recover an authentic tradition so much as construct one, aided by colonial categories of enumeration and classification.¹

The objection, argued forcefully by many Sikh scholars, is that this mistakes lax practice for absent doctrine. The distinctness was there from Guru Nanak’s na koi Hindu onward, through the Khalsa of 1699 and the vesting of Guruship in scripture; what the Singh Sabha did was reassert it against nineteenth-century encroachment, not invent it.

Both sides agree the Singh Sabha changed how Sikhs practise. What they disagree about is whether that change was restoration or creation — and, underneath, whether a tradition’s boundaries are things it discovers or things it makes.