The Mahants, the Jathas and the Morchas

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.