The Udasi tradition affirms a path of ascetic renunciation and celibate monasticism, unusual within a Sikh milieu that generally upholds the householder life. Tracing itself to Sri Chand, a son of Guru Nanak, the Udasis formed an order of renunciant ascetics who, drawing on both Sikh teaching and older Indian traditions of world-renunciation, tended shrines, preserved and propagated scripture, and lived apart from ordinary family life. Their practice blends devotion to the Gurus' teaching with the disciplines of the wandering mendicant.
Because Udasi ascetics did not maintain the visible Khalsa markers that made Sikhs targets under eighteenth-century Mughal and Afghan persecution, Udasi mahants (custodian-superintendents) came to manage many major Sikh gurdwaras, including for periods the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) itself, blending Sikh and broader Hindu ascetic practice in ways reform-minded Sikhs later judged to have diluted the tradition's distinct identity.
The Singh Sabha movement of the late nineteenth century and the subsequent Gurdwara Reform Movement of the 1920s campaigned to remove Udasi and other non-Khalsa mahants from gurdwara control, a struggle that culminated in the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925, which transferred management of historic gurdwaras to the elected, Khalsa-normative Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee.