The first Singh Sabha was founded at Amritsar in 1873, prompted by news that Sikh students at a mission school intended to be baptised as Christians, and by the wider pressure of missionary activity and of Arya Samaj polemic that treated Sikhism as a branch of Hinduism. Its leadership came from established families, Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia and Khem Singh Bedi among them, and its temper was conservative: reform of abuses, education, publication, without disturbing the customary religious world of the Punjab in which Sikh, Hindu and Muslim practice overlapped at shrines and in households.
A second Sabha was founded at Lahore in 1879, and its leading figures, Gurmukh Singh and Giani Ditt Singh among them, came from a different social base and took a far sharper line. This wing, which came to be called the Tat Khalsa, the true Khalsa, held that Sikhism was a distinct religion with its own scripture, its own rites and its own boundaries, and that practices shared with neighbours were accretions to be removed.
The two positions could not be held in one organisation. The Khalsa Diwan founded to coordinate the Sabhas split, and after further reorganisation the Chief Khalsa Diwan was constituted in 1902 with the Lahore position effectively in control.