Gurdwara Reform Movement

By the early twentieth century most of the historic Sikh shrines of the Punjab were held by hereditary custodians, the mahants, who had come to treat the endowments as family property and whose practice at several shrines had drifted a long way from what reformers thought a gurdwara should be. The legal position was that the courts treated the mahants as proprietors, so the campaign to remove them could not simply be litigated.

What was organised instead was a sequence of morchas, campaigns, prosecuted by volunteer bands called jathas who went to a shrine unarmed and in numbers and refused to leave. The pattern was set early and it was costly. At Nankana Sahib in February 1921 a jatha entering the birthplace shrine of Guru Nanak was attacked and a large number of Sikhs were killed. At Guru ka Bagh in 1922, successive jathas were beaten by police as they arrived, day after day, in front of witnesses including foreign observers, without retaliating. The keys of the Golden Temple toshakhana were seized by the administration and had to be surrendered back after a campaign in 1921 and 1922. The Jaito morcha ran on into 1924 and 1925.

Tens of thousands were arrested across the campaigns. The discipline of not striking back was deliberate and was maintained under conditions that made it very difficult.

The campaign ended in legislation. The Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 transferred the historic gurdwaras of the Punjab from their hereditary custodians to a statutory elected body, provided a judicial commission to determine which shrines were covered, and set out how the managing committee was to be constituted and elected.

Three consequences outlasted the dispute that produced them. The first is the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee itself, which acquired legal standing, an income and a permanent administrative machine. The second is that the Act had to define who counted as a Sikh, because somebody had to be entitled to vote in the elections, and a statutory definition of religious membership is a durable thing to create. The third is the Shiromani Akali Dal, formed to run the campaign, which became and remains a political party.

The result is that gurdwara administration in the Punjab is conducted through elections held under a statute, contested by parties, with an electorate defined by law. A religious reform movement that set out to remove unsuitable custodians ended by fusing the management of shrines with electoral politics, and every subsequent argument about Sikh religious institutions has taken place inside the structure the Act of 1925 created.