The Nankana Sahib Massacre

The shrine

Nankana Sahib is where Guru Nanak was born, which makes Gurdwara Janam Asthan among the most significant sites the reform movement had in view — and one of the wealthiest, holding extensive endowed land.

Its mahant, Narain Das, had a reputation the reformers cited constantly: the conduct of the shrine under him was the standing example of what the campaign existed to end. He knew a jatha was likely, and he prepared for one. He hired men and armed them.^1,3

20 February 1921

An Akali jatha entered the compound early that morning. The gates were closed behind them and Narain Das’s men opened fire, then went through the compound with blades. Bodies were burned in the precinct afterwards.

The count is not settled and probably cannot be: figures given range from about 140 to about 260 killed.^1,3 The uncertainty is a consequence of what was done to the bodies.

The discipline

The detail the tradition holds onto — and which non-Sikh contemporary observers recorded too — is that the jatha did not fight back. They had come under instruction not to, they were armed only in the ceremonial sense the movement permitted, and they held to it while they were shot and cut down inside a walled compound with the gates shut.^1,2

Whatever one makes of the tactic, its effect was immediate. The colonial administration, which had generally sided with the mahants as lawful proprietors, could not hold that position through the reporting that followed. Control of Janam Asthan passed to a reform committee within days.

What it changed

Nankana Sahib is usually described as the point at which the Gurdwara Reform movement stopped being a dispute about religious management and became a mass political fact in the Punjab. It hardened Sikh opinion, brought the Akali Dal recruits in numbers, and put the administration in a position from which the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 was the only available exit.

It is remembered as Saka Nankana — the Nankana affair — and marked each February.

A note on where it sits

The massacre happened at the birthplace, and that is not incidental to how it is remembered. The same site holds the beginning of the faith in 1469 and this. Since Partition it has been in Pakistan, reachable from India for most Sikhs only on pilgrimage — which is also why the Kartarpur Corridor mattered as much as it did.