What the Movement Settled, and an Argument About It

The list of things decided in these decades is long and most of it is now simply how Sikhism is. Kahn Singh Nabha published the tract We Are Not Hindus in 1898, which set out the case for a separate identity in a form that could be carried in a pocket. Idols kept in the precinct of the Golden Temple were removed. The Anand Marriage Act of 1909 gave the Sikh wedding rite statutory recognition. Khalsa College at Amritsar was founded in 1892, and a network of schools with it. Punjabi in Gurmukhi script was pressed as the language of Sikh education and publication. Standardised rites, catechisms and codes of conduct were drafted, and the line of that work runs directly to the Sikh Rehat Maryada adopted in the middle of the twentieth century.

How to read all that is contested. Harjot Oberoi argued in 1994 that the movement did not recover an original Sikhism but constructed a bounded religious identity out of a plural and overlapping religious world, and that the boundaries now taken as given are a modern achievement. The thesis was influential in the academy and was rejected sharply by many Sikh scholars and institutions, who hold that a distinct Khalsa identity is present in the tradition from the eighteenth century and earlier and that the Singh Sabha defended it rather than inventing it. Both positions are live and the atlas records the disagreement.