The Founding of the SGPC and the Akali Movement

Who owned the gurdwaras

By the early twentieth century most historic Sikh shrines were held by mahants — hereditary custodians, many of them Udasi rather than Khalsa Sikh — who had acquired control across the eighteenth century, when the Panth was proscribed and someone had to hold the buildings, and had never given it up.

Under British rule the arrangement hardened. Custodianship came with the revenues of substantial endowed lands, was heritable, and was backed where necessary by the colonial administration and its courts. Complaints about how shrines were run, what was practised in them, and where the offerings went had been accumulating since the Singh Sabha began arguing about Sikh practice in the 1870s.^1,2

Organising

In November 1920 a conference at the Akal Takht in Amritsar constituted the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee — a body of 175 members to oversee the gurdwaras. Its first session met that December, and days later the Shiromani Akali Dal was formed alongside it as the movement’s organising and political wing.^1,3

The choice of the Akal Takht is not decoration. The seat Guru Hargobind raised in 1606 exists for exactly this: temporal decisions binding on the Panth, taken in assembly. A movement to reclaim the shrines convened itself at the institution whose whole purpose was collective Sikh authority.

Method

The campaign was conducted as non-violent occupation. Groups of Akali volunteers — jathas — would present themselves at a gurdwara and take possession, or court arrest trying, and be replaced by the next group when they were beaten or jailed.

It was expensive. By 1925 something over five hundred Sikhs had been killed and around four thousand arrested across the movement’s various actions, of which Nankana Sahib in 1921 was the worst single day.^1,2

The discipline held, and that was the point: the volunteers submitted to being beaten without returning it, in front of witnesses, repeatedly, for five years. Contemporary observers — including Indian nationalists watching closely — took note of what that achieved.

The Act

The Sikh Gurdwaras Act was passed by the Punjab legislative council on 9 July 1925 and came into force on 1 November. It transferred the historic shrines to a statutory elected board, which is the SGPC as it exists today.^2,3

What it produced, and what it cost

The SGPC still administers the major historic gurdwaras, still holds their revenues, and is still elected. It produced the Sikh Rehat Maryada, the code of conduct agreed after roughly fifteen years of consultation and still the standard reference for Sikh practice.

It also made the management of Sikh shrines a permanently electoral matter, and therefore a permanently political one — the Akali Dal, founded in that same December of 1920 as the movement’s wing, became and remains a party of Punjab politics. Whether a religious body whose leadership is won at the ballot box was the right end point for a reform movement is an argument that has never really stopped.