Beyond its use in scripture as a description of individual orientation, the gurmukh ideal became, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the organizing standard of a major Sikh reform movement, showing how a term describing inward orientation can be mobilized for an institutional argument.
The Singh Sabha movement, emerging from the 1870s in reaction to what its leaders saw as the erosion of distinct Sikh identity under British colonial rule, missionary activity and the influence of the Arya Samaj Hindu reform movement, invoked the gurmukh standard directly against practices its reformers judged manmukh-like: idol worship at gurdwaras, Brahminical ritual intermediaries, and the blending of Sikh and Hindu devotional practice common in Punjab at the time. Reformers associated with the Tat Khalsa, the more assertive wing of the movement, argued that authentic gurmukh orientation required the visible removal of practices they judged inconsistent with the Guru Granth Sahib's own teaching, campaigns that led directly to the Gurdwara Reform movement of the 1920s and to the transfer of historical gurdwaras from hereditary custodians to elected management under the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, established by law in 1925 and still the central Sikh religious authority in Punjab today.
The episode illustrates a recurring pattern in Sikh religious history: a scriptural distinction concerned with individual spiritual orientation is drawn on to authorize an institutional program of communal self-definition, the gurmukh-manmukh contrast functioning during the Singh Sabha period as a vocabulary for a modern argument about what distinguished Sikh identity from the wider Hindu religious environment it had long been intertwined with.