History since 1708

Sent north from Nanded by Sri Guru Gobind Singh Ji in 1708, Banda Singh Bahadur took Sirhind in 1710, ruled the land between the Yamuna and the Sutlej from Lohgarh, and held out against imperial armies until his capture in 1715. He and hundreds of his followers were put to death in Delhi in 1716.

After 1716 Sikhs were hunted by Mughal governors and later by Afghan invaders, and suffered the two great losses they remember as the Ghallugharas. In the same decades they organised the Dal Khalsa and the misls, and by the 1760s held most of the Punjab. The century ended with one misl chief, Ranjit Singh, in Lahore.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh turned the Sikh misls into a kingdom stretching from the Khyber to the Sutlej, with a modern army and a court of Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. Ten years of murders and army revolt followed his death in 1839, and two wars with the British ended with annexation in 1849.

Under British rule Sikhs lost their kingdom and, the government expected, their faith. Instead the Namdhari, Nirankari and Singh Sabha movements renewed Sikh religious life, Sikh men filled the Indian Army and went overseas, and the Ghadar rising and the Amritsar massacre of 1919 turned many against the empire.

Between 1920 and 1925 Akali volunteers took the historic gurdwaras from hereditary custodians and the British-backed managers of the Darbar Sahib, at a heavy cost in lives and imprisonments. The Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 placed the gurdwaras under an elected body. Over the same years Sikh soldiers fought in two world wars, and Sikh politics turned on how to survive in a divided Punjab.

The division of Punjab in August 1947 split the Sikh community in two, left Nankana Sahib and many other gurdwaras in Pakistan, and drove almost every Sikh out of West Punjab amid mass killing. Sikhs rebuilt in East Punjab, and the experience shaped their politics for decades.

Sikh leaders campaigned for a Punjabi-speaking state until one was formed in 1966. Disputes over the state's powers, waters and territory then ran alongside rising violence, which led to the army's Operation Blue Star in June 1984, the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the killing of thousands of Sikhs that November. Over a decade of insurgency and counterinsurgency followed. Many of these events are contested, and this page gives each side's account with its source.

Sikhs left Punjab first as soldiers and labourers of the British Empire, then in greater numbers to Britain and North America after 1947. Today there are large communities in Canada, Britain, the United States and elsewhere, shaped by racism, by campaigns for their rights, by the events of 1984 and by their own growing place in public life.