Colonial Punjab

Maharaja Duleep Singh was placed under Dr John Login and moved to Fatehgarh in 1850. He was baptised a Christian there on 8 March 1853 and sailed for England in April 1854. Maharani Jindan Kaur escaped from Chunar Fort to Nepal, reaching Kathmandu on 29 April 1849, and lived there under British watch until she joined her son in Calcutta and went with him to England. She passed away at Kensington on 1 August 1863.

Bhai Maharaj Singh, a religious leader who had fought at Chillianwala and Gujrat, tried to keep the resistance alive. He was arrested on 28 December 1849 and deported to Singapore, where he passed away in solitary confinement on 5 July 1856.

Akali units were disbanded after annexation. Government reports of 1851-52 and 1855-56 predicted that the Khalsa would fade and that Sikhs would return to Hinduism. Census figures later showed only a few hundred Nihangs left by 1901.[EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS]

Baba Dayal, born at Peshawar in 1783, preached at Rawalpindi against image worship and ceremonial, and married by the anand rite in 1808. His followers became the Nirankaris, after his teaching of Nirankar, the Formless One.

Baba Balak Singh of Hazro taught a simple devotional life. Baba Ram Singh, who met him while serving in the Sikh army, left the service after the first Anglo-Sikh war and set up his centre at Bhaini. On Vaisakhi in 1857 he laid down a code for his followers, the Namdharis, also called Kukas from their ecstatic cries.

The Namdharis forbade meat, liquor and tomb worship, forbade female infanticide and dowry, and refused British schools, courts and goods in favour of homespun cloth. They ran their own postal service under twenty-two appointed subas. The government kept Baba Ram Singh confined to his village for some years from 1863.

Namdharis killed butchers at Amritsar and Raikot in 1871 over beef shops. On 15 January 1872 over a hundred of them attacked the treasury at Malerkotla. Sixty-eight were blown from guns on 17 January without trial, and Baba Ram Singh was exiled to Burma, where he passed away on 29 November 1885.[EoS][EoS][EoS]

Two events in 1873 set the movement going. Four Sikh pupils at the Amritsar Mission School announced they would become Christians, and Pandit Shardha Ram spoke disrespectfully of the Gurus at Amritsar. Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia, Baba Khem Singh Bedi, Kanwar Bikrama Singh and Giani Gian Singh called a meeting on 30 July, and the Sri Guru Singh Sabha held its first formal session before the Akal Takht on 1 October 1873.

Its aims were to teach Sikh religion, publish Punjabi books and reform Sikh practice. A more radical Sabha followed at Lahore on 2 November 1879, led by Bhai Gurmukh Singh and joined by Giani Ditt Singh. The Amritsar leaders kept closer ties with Hindu practice and the Bedi and Sodhi families, while the Lahore group saw Sikhs as a separate faith with no caste privilege.

The argument centred on whether Sikhs were Hindus. Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha published Ham Hindu Nahin in 1898. Khalsa College, Amritsar, had its foundation laid on 5 March 1892, and the Chief Khalsa Diwan was set up on 30 October 1902.

Bhai Vir Singh founded the Khalsa Tract Society in 1894 and the weekly Khalsa Samachar in 1899, and through his novels and poems helped create modern Punjabi literature. The Anand Marriage Act of 1909 gave legal standing to the Sikh wedding rite.[EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS]

In England the Maharaja lived at Elveden in a grand style and ran into debt. He pressed the India Office over his family's private property, and in 1884 Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia came to read Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji with him and to bring prophecies of his restoration.

He sailed for India on 31 March 1886 and was stopped at Aden, where he took the Sikh vows on 25 May. Rumours in the Punjab said he would come with a Russian army. Thakur Singh ran his cause from Pondicherry until he passed away on 18 August 1887, and the Maharaja went to Russia that year without result.

After a stroke he passed away in a Paris hotel on 22 October 1893. He was buried at Elveden.[EoS][EoS]

Sikh men became a large part of the British Indian Army and travelled the empire with it. At Saragarhi on 12 September 1897, a garrison of the 36th Sikhs held a signal post for six hours against thousands of Orakzai and Afridi tribesmen, and none survived. Sources count between 21 and 22 men, and the Encyclopaedia includes one non-combatant sweeper.

Shrinking farms drove men abroad as well, first to East Asia and then to North America. Malaya had a Khalsa Diwan from 27 December 1903. Some 5,000 Indians, most of them Sikhs, had reached Canada by 1908, and the Canadian government responded with the continuous-journey rule and a higher landing fee.[EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][Web][Web][Web]

Faced with racism on the Pacific coast, Indian workers formed the Hindustani Association of the Pacific Coast with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president and Lala Har Dayal as secretary. Its weekly Ghadar, meaning revolt, first appeared in November 1913, and the movement took its name. Most of its members were Sikhs, and its aim was armed revolution in India.

In 1914 Baba Gurdit Singh chartered the Japanese ship Komagata Maru, renamed Guru Nanak Jahaz, to test the Canadian ban. It reached Vancouver on 23 May with 376 Indians aboard, and only a few were allowed to land. Sent back after two months, it reached Budge Budge near Calcutta on 29 September, where a clash with troops and police left about twenty dead.

Thousands of Ghadarites came home once war broke out. Their rising, moved up to 19 February 1915, was given away by the informer Kirpal Singh. The Lahore conspiracy trials sentenced 42 of 291 accused to death, among them Kartar Singh Sarabha, and 114 to transportation for life. Soldiers at Singapore mutinied in February 1915, and that revolt was also crushed.[EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][EoS][Grewal]

In May 1913 the government pulled down a wall of Gurdwara Rakab Ganj in Delhi to tidy the setting of the new capital. Sikh protest ran through the war years, and in 1920 a band of volunteers set out to rebuild it, but the government rebuilt the wall itself.

In April 1919 protests against the Rowlatt Act reached Amritsar. The governor, Sir Michael O'Dwyer, had two local leaders deported on 10 April, and troops fired on the crowd that marched in protest. Rioters then killed five Europeans. Brigadier-General Dyer banned all meetings on 12 April.

On Vaisakhi, 13 April, people gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, among them many Sikhs in the city for the festival. Dyer arrived at about 5.15 pm and, without warning, had his men fire 1,650 rounds into the crowd. The official count was 379 dead and 1,200 wounded. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya's inquiries gave more than 1,000 dead.

The Hunter Committee faulted Dyer, who was removed and retired early. When the priests of the Darbar Sahib honoured him, the anger of Sikhs fed the demand to take back the gurdwaras. Udham Singh, a Sikh orphan who was at the Bagh that day, shot O'Dwyer in London on 13 March 1940 and was hanged on 31 July.[EoS][EoS][EoS][Grewal]