https://missionsikhism.org/ Events from the fully-sourced history of the Sikh faith. en https://missionsikhism.org/events/farmers-protests https://missionsikhism.org/events/farmers-protests Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT Farmers, most of them from Punjab and most of those Sikh, camped on the borders of Delhi for a year against three agricultural laws. The government repealed them. It is the largest protest movement in recent Indian history and it was fed, throughout, by langar. https://missionsikhism.org/events/kabul-gurdwara-attacks https://missionsikhism.org/events/kabul-gurdwara-attacks Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT Two attacks by Islamic State Khorasan Province on Kabul's remaining gurdwaras all but ended a Sikh presence in Afghanistan that had lasted centuries. https://missionsikhism.org/events/kartarpur-corridor-opens https://missionsikhism.org/events/kartarpur-corridor-opens Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT Seventy-two years after Partition put it out of reach, a visa-free corridor opened to the shrine where Guru Nanak died — four kilometres of road that Sikhs had been able to see across the fields the entire time. https://missionsikhism.org/events/novellara-gurdwara-opens https://missionsikhism.org/events/novellara-gurdwara-opens Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT The Sikh community of the Po valley — dairymen on the farms that produce Parmigiano-Reggiano — opened a gurdwara built from the ground up with their own money. https://missionsikhism.org/events/disappearance-of-jaswant-singh-khalra https://missionsikhism.org/events/disappearance-of-jaswant-singh-khalra Sun, 01 Jan 1995 00:00:00 GMT A bank official turned investigator found that Punjab's crematoria had burned thousands of bodies logged as unidentified. He published the finding, was abducted by the police he had named, and was killed. Officers were convicted ten years later. https://missionsikhism.org/events/anti-sikh-violence-1984 https://missionsikhism.org/events/anti-sikh-violence-1984 Sun, 01 Jan 1984 00:00:00 GMT Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Over the three days that followed, at least 2,733 Sikhs were killed in Delhi alone. Forty years on, around thirty people have been convicted and no police officer has. https://missionsikhism.org/events/operation-blue-star https://missionsikhism.org/events/operation-blue-star Sun, 01 Jan 1984 00:00:00 GMT The Indian Army assaulted the Golden Temple complex on the martyrdom anniversary of Guru Arjan, destroying the Akal Takht. The casualty figures remain irreconcilable, and the consequences ran on for a decade. https://missionsikhism.org/events/first-gurdwara-australia https://missionsikhism.org/events/first-gurdwara-australia Mon, 01 Jan 1968 00:00:00 GMT Banana growers on the New South Wales coast opened the first gurdwara in Australia — built in local brick and tile, in a town where about one in six people is now Sikh. https://missionsikhism.org/events/punjabi-suba https://missionsikhism.org/events/punjabi-suba Sat, 01 Jan 1966 00:00:00 GMT After nineteen years of agitation, Punjab was redrawn on linguistic lines. The Sikhs got a state where they were a majority for the first time — and a capital neither Punjab nor its new neighbour was allowed to own. https://missionsikhism.org/events/partition-of-punjab https://missionsikhism.org/events/partition-of-punjab Wed, 01 Jan 1947 00:00:00 GMT A line drawn through the Punjab in five weeks divided the Sikh homeland in two, uprooted the entire Sikh population of the west, and left the birthplace of the faith on the far side of a closed border. https://missionsikhism.org/events/makindu-gurdwara-built https://missionsikhism.org/events/makindu-gurdwara-built Fri, 01 Jan 1926 00:00:00 GMT Sikhs who built the Uganda Railway raised a gurdwara at a service stop on the Mombasa–Nairobi road. It has fed and housed every passing traveller, of any faith, ever since. https://missionsikhism.org/events/nankana-sahib-massacre https://missionsikhism.org/events/nankana-sahib-massacre Sat, 01 Jan 1921 00:00:00 GMT An Akali jatha came to take possession of the gurdwara at Guru Nanak's birthplace. Its hereditary custodian had hired men and posted them; between about 140 and 260 Sikhs were killed in the compound. https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-the-sgpc https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-the-sgpc Thu, 01 Jan 1920 00:00:00 GMT Sikhs organised to take their shrines back from hereditary custodians and put them under elected control. Five years of non-violent agitation, several hundred dead and four thousand arrested later, the Sikh Gurdwaras Act made it law. https://missionsikhism.org/events/jallianwala-bagh-massacre https://missionsikhism.org/events/jallianwala-bagh-massacre Wed, 01 Jan 1919 00:00:00 GMT On Vaisakhi 1919, British Indian Army troops fired without warning on a penned-in crowd at Amritsar for around ten minutes. The commanding officer said afterwards that he had meant to produce a moral effect. https://missionsikhism.org/events/komagata-maru https://missionsikhism.org/events/komagata-maru Thu, 01 Jan 1914 00:00:00 GMT A chartered steamship carried 376 British subjects, most of them Sikhs, to Vancouver to test a law written to keep them out. They were held in the harbour for two months, refused, and sent back — and fired on by police when they reached India. https://missionsikhism.org/events/first-gurdwara-united-states https://missionsikhism.org/events/first-gurdwara-united-states Mon, 01 Jan 1912 00:00:00 GMT The Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society opened a gurdwara at Stockton, California — for fifty years the only one on the West Coast, and a headquarters of the Ghadar independence movement. https://missionsikhism.org/events/first-gurdwara-north-america https://missionsikhism.org/events/first-gurdwara-north-america Sun, 01 Jan 1911 00:00:00 GMT The oldest surviving gurdwara in North America opened in British Columbia, built by mill and farm workers who carried the lumber up the hill themselves — during the years Canada was legislating to keep them out. https://missionsikhism.org/events/khalsa-jatha-britain-founded https://missionsikhism.org/events/khalsa-jatha-britain-founded Wed, 01 Jan 1908 00:00:00 GMT Sikhs in London formed the Khalsa Jatha, British Isles — the beginning of organised Sikh religious life in Europe, and the ancestor of today's Central Gurdwara. https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-singh-sabha https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-singh-sabha Wed, 01 Jan 1873 00:00:00 GMT A reform movement founded at Amritsar in 1873 set out to define what a Sikh is — an argument it substantially won, and whose answers are the ones most Sikhs hold today. https://missionsikhism.org/events/british-annexation-of-punjab https://missionsikhism.org/events/british-annexation-of-punjab Mon, 01 Jan 1849 00:00:00 GMT Ten years after Ranjit Singh's death, the East India Company annexed the Punjab, deposed a child Maharaja and took the Koh-i-Noor — ending Sikh sovereignty and beginning a colonial relationship that reshaped Sikh identity. https://missionsikhism.org/events/first-anglo-sikh-war https://missionsikhism.org/events/first-anglo-sikh-war Wed, 01 Jan 1845 00:00:00 GMT Four battles on the Sutlej in three months ended the Sikh Empire's independence in substance if not yet in name. The Treaty of Lahore took territory, cut the army, imposed an indemnity, and put a British Resident in the capital. https://missionsikhism.org/events/death-of-ranjit-singh https://missionsikhism.org/events/death-of-ranjit-singh Tue, 01 Jan 1839 00:00:00 GMT The Maharaja died at Lahore after forty years in power, leaving a state whose institutions had never been separated from his own person. It did not survive him by a decade. https://missionsikhism.org/events/battle-of-jamrud https://missionsikhism.org/events/battle-of-jamrud Sun, 01 Jan 1837 00:00:00 GMT An Afghan force moved on the Sikh fort at the mouth of the Khyber Pass while the court was occupied at Lahore. The fort held and the frontier stayed where it was, but Hari Singh Nalwa was killed defending it. https://missionsikhism.org/events/conquest-of-multan https://missionsikhism.org/events/conquest-of-multan Thu, 01 Jan 1818 00:00:00 GMT After repeated failed attempts across sixteen years, the Sikh army took the fortress of Multan in 1818 — ending Afghan authority in the southern Punjab and opening the campaigns that carried the empire to Kashmir and the Khyber. https://missionsikhism.org/events/treaty-of-amritsar https://missionsikhism.org/events/treaty-of-amritsar Sun, 01 Jan 1809 00:00:00 GMT Ranjit Singh and the East India Company fixed the Sutlej as the limit of Sikh expansion. It bought the empire thirty-six years of peace with the British, and permanently divided the Sikh territories into two halves with different futures. https://missionsikhism.org/events/ranjit-singh-proclaimed-maharaja https://missionsikhism.org/events/ranjit-singh-proclaimed-maharaja Thu, 01 Jan 1801 00:00:00 GMT On Vaisakhi 1801, two years after taking Lahore, Ranjit Singh was proclaimed Maharaja of the Punjab — crowned by a descendant of Guru Nanak, and striking coin not in his own name but in the Gurus'. https://missionsikhism.org/events/ranjit-singh-captures-lahore https://missionsikhism.org/events/ranjit-singh-captures-lahore Tue, 01 Jan 1799 00:00:00 GMT A nineteen-year-old Sukerchakia chief took Lahore and turned a confederacy of twelve misls into a single kingdom — one whose coins and seal still refused to carry his name. https://missionsikhism.org/events/sikh-occupation-of-delhi https://missionsikhism.org/events/sikh-occupation-of-delhi Wed, 01 Jan 1783 00:00:00 GMT Misl forces entered Delhi and occupied the Red Fort. What they took away was not territory but permission — to build gurdwaras on the sites where the Gurus and their followers had been executed, which is why those shrines stand in Delhi today. https://missionsikhism.org/events/bhangi-capture-of-multan https://missionsikhism.org/events/bhangi-capture-of-multan Wed, 01 Jan 1772 00:00:00 GMT A quarrel between rival Afghan claimants let the Bhangi misl into Multan. They held the fortress city for eight years — the first time a Sikh power ruled it, and a rehearsal for the siege that took it for good in 1818. https://missionsikhism.org/events/sikh-capture-of-lahore https://missionsikhism.org/events/sikh-capture-of-lahore Tue, 01 Jan 1765 00:00:00 GMT The Sikh misls took the capital of the Punjab and struck coin in the name of the Gurus — the moment a persecuted community became the province's governing power. https://missionsikhism.org/events/sikh-capture-of-sirhind https://missionsikhism.org/events/sikh-capture-of-sirhind Sun, 01 Jan 1764 00:00:00 GMT The Dal Khalsa took Sirhind and killed its governor. The town had been the seat of the administration that executed Guru Gobind Singh's two youngest sons sixty years earlier, and this time the Sikhs kept it. https://missionsikhism.org/events/vadda-ghallughara https://missionsikhism.org/events/vadda-ghallughara Fri, 01 Jan 1762 00:00:00 GMT Ahmad Shah Durrani's forces killed Sikhs in tens of thousands in a single day near Kup — the gravest catastrophe in Sikh history, and one the community had reversed within three years. https://missionsikhism.org/events/rescue-at-goindwal https://missionsikhism.org/events/rescue-at-goindwal Thu, 01 Jan 1761 00:00:00 GMT Ahmad Shah Abdali went home from Panipat with a column of captives bound for the Afghan slave markets. The Dal Khalsa met it at the Beas crossing, took the prisoners off him, and sent them back to their homes. https://missionsikhism.org/events/defence-of-amritsar https://missionsikhism.org/events/defence-of-amritsar Sat, 01 Jan 1757 00:00:00 GMT Afghan forces blew up the Harmandir Sahib and filled its pool with the carcasses of cattle. Baba Deep Singh, a seventy-five-year-old scholar with no command, raised a force at Damdama Sahib and marched on Amritsar. He did not survive it. https://missionsikhism.org/events/formation-of-the-dal-khalsa https://missionsikhism.org/events/formation-of-the-dal-khalsa Mon, 01 Jan 1748 00:00:00 GMT Two years after Kahnuwan, a Sarbat Khalsa assembly at the Akal Takht folded the surviving Sikh bands into a single army under one commander, divided into the confederacies later known as the misls. It was the constitution the Punjab was won with. https://missionsikhism.org/events/chhota-ghallughara https://missionsikhism.org/events/chhota-ghallughara Sat, 01 Jan 1746 00:00:00 GMT Sikh bands driven into the marshes at Kahnuwan were caught against the Ravi and the hills in the summer of 1746. Around seven thousand were killed and three thousand taken to Lahore and executed — a fifth of the Panth, in a week. https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-bhai-taru-singh https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-bhai-taru-singh Fri, 01 Jan 1745 00:00:00 GMT A young farmer who fed Sikh fighters from his own crop was taken to Lahore and told to cut his hair and convert. He refused, and his scalp was cut away instead. He was about twenty-five. https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-bhai-mani-singh https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-bhai-mani-singh Wed, 01 Jan 1738 00:00:00 GMT The custodian of the Harmandir Sahib was executed at Lahore over an unpaid licence fee for a gathering the authorities had permitted and then set out to ambush — the clearest single instance of how the Panth was administered out of existence in the 1730s. https://missionsikhism.org/events/the-nawabi-of-1733 https://missionsikhism.org/events/the-nawabi-of-1733 Thu, 01 Jan 1733 00:00:00 GMT Unable to suppress the Sikhs, the Lahore government tried buying them: a title, a jagir and an end to the repression. The Khalsa took it in assembly, used the breathing space to reorganise into two standing armies, and lost it again inside three years. https://missionsikhism.org/events/bandai-tat-khalsa-settlement https://missionsikhism.org/events/bandai-tat-khalsa-settlement Wed, 01 Jan 1721 00:00:00 GMT Five years after Banda Singh's execution the Panth had split in two and was close to fighting itself at Amritsar. The dispute was settled at the sacred pool by drawing lots — and the losing side mostly stayed. https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-banda-singh https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-banda-singh Wed, 01 Jan 1716 00:00:00 GMT After an eight-month siege and starvation, Banda Singh Bahadur and some seven hundred companions were taken to Delhi and executed in public batches through the spring of 1716 — an event two English merchants happened to witness and describe. https://missionsikhism.org/events/battle-of-chappar-chiri https://missionsikhism.org/events/battle-of-chappar-chiri Wed, 01 Jan 1710 00:00:00 GMT Banda Singh Bahadur broke a Mughal provincial army at Chappar Chiri and took Sirhind — the first time the Khalsa held territory, and the first Sikh state. https://missionsikhism.org/events/guru-granth-eternal-guruship https://missionsikhism.org/events/guru-granth-eternal-guruship Sun, 01 Jan 1708 00:00:00 GMT Dying at Nanded in October 1708, Guru Gobind Singh closed the line of human Gurus and vested Guruship in the scripture and the community — a succession no rival could seize and no state could arrest. https://missionsikhism.org/events/battle-of-muktsar https://missionsikhism.org/events/battle-of-muktsar Thu, 01 Jan 1705 00:00:00 GMT The forty Sikhs who had abandoned the Guru at Anandpur were shamed back into the field by Mai Bhago, and died covering his position at a water reservoir in the Malwa. He tore up their disclaimer over the dying. https://missionsikhism.org/events/battle-of-chamkaur https://missionsikhism.org/events/battle-of-chamkaur Tue, 01 Jan 1704 00:00:00 GMT Guru Gobind Singh and around forty Sikhs held a mud-walled house against a Mughal army. His two elder sons were killed in the fighting. He left alive because the surviving Sikhs ordered him to — and he obeyed them. https://missionsikhism.org/events/evacuation-of-anandpur https://missionsikhism.org/events/evacuation-of-anandpur Tue, 01 Jan 1704 00:00:00 GMT After a siege of months, Guru Gobind Singh accepted terms sworn on the Qur'an and left Anandpur. The column was attacked at the flooded Sirsa river within hours, and his family was scattered — three generations of it did not survive the fortnight. https://missionsikhism.org/events/execution-of-the-younger-sahibzade https://missionsikhism.org/events/execution-of-the-younger-sahibzade Tue, 01 Jan 1704 00:00:00 GMT Guru Gobind Singh's two youngest sons, roughly nine and seven, were held at Sirhind, offered their lives in exchange for conversion, and executed when they refused. Their grandmother Mata Gujri died in custody the same day. https://missionsikhism.org/events/creation-of-the-khalsa https://missionsikhism.org/events/creation-of-the-khalsa Thu, 01 Jan 1699 00:00:00 GMT On Vaisakhi 1699 at Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa, initiated the first Panj Pyare, took initiation from them in turn, and gave the community a name, a discipline and an identity it has kept ever since. https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-guru-tegh-bahadur https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-guru-tegh-bahadur Tue, 01 Jan 1675 00:00:00 GMT The ninth Guru was executed at Delhi in 1675 under Aurangzeb. His son's own account says he died for the tilak and the sacred thread — the rites of a religion that was not his own. https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-anandpur https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-anandpur Thu, 01 Jan 1665 00:00:00 GMT Guru Tegh Bahadur bought land in the Shivalik foothills and founded Chakk Nanaki, the town that became Anandpur — a defensible seat outside Mughal Punjab, and the cradle of the Khalsa a generation later. https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-akal-takht https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-akal-takht Sun, 01 Jan 1606 00:00:00 GMT Guru Hargobind raised the Akal Takht — the 'throne of the Timeless One' — facing the Harmandir Sahib, giving the community a seat of temporal authority months after his father was executed by the state. https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-guru-arjan https://missionsikhism.org/events/martyrdom-of-guru-arjan Sun, 01 Jan 1606 00:00:00 GMT Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru, died in Mughal custody at Lahore in 1606 on the orders of the emperor Jahangir — the first Sikh martyrdom, and the turning point toward the community's self-defence. https://missionsikhism.org/events/installation-of-adi-granth https://missionsikhism.org/events/installation-of-adi-granth Thu, 01 Jan 1604 00:00:00 GMT Guru Arjan compiled the volume known as the Kartarpur Pothi and installed it in the newly completed Harmandir Sahib in 1604 — the decisive act in a process of scripture-making that began long before him and continued long after. https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-amritsar https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-amritsar Sat, 01 Jan 1577 00:00:00 GMT Guru Ram Das began excavating the sacred pool around which Ramdaspur — later Amritsar, the 'pool of nectar' — grew. Within a generation it was the Sikh world's spiritual centre and a working city with its own economy. https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-kartarpur https://missionsikhism.org/events/founding-of-kartarpur Sun, 01 Jan 1522 00:00:00 GMT Guru Nanak established the first Sikh community at Kartarpur on the Ravi, where devotion, honest work and the shared kitchen became a daily practice — and where, before his death in 1539, he named a successor and handed on a book. https://missionsikhism.org/events/enlightenment-at-sultanpur https://missionsikhism.org/events/enlightenment-at-sultanpur Sun, 01 Jan 1499 00:00:00 GMT By tradition, Guru Nanak received his revelation at the river Bein near Sultanpur Lodhi and declared 'There is no Hindu, no Muslim' — leaving his post as a storekeeper to begin the journeys that carried his message across Asia. https://missionsikhism.org/events/birth-of-guru-nanak https://missionsikhism.org/events/birth-of-guru-nanak Fri, 01 Jan 1469 00:00:00 GMT Guru Nanak Dev Ji, founder of the Sikh faith, was born in 1469 in the village of Rai Bhoi Ki Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib in his honour. The year is settled; the month has been argued over for a century.