Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee

The Committee was constituted in November 1920, in the middle of the campaign to take the historic shrines out of hereditary hands, and it was given statutory standing five years later by the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925. It has an elected general house, an executive, a president, and a budget that runs into billions of rupees a year, drawn chiefly from offerings.

Its jurisdiction covers the historic gurdwaras of the Punjab and, historically, of neighbouring territories; a separate committee for Haryana was created by that state in 2014 and the arrangement has been contested. The Golden Temple complex at Amritsar is the largest single charge, with the langar there among the biggest continuously operating free kitchens in the world.

What it runs beyond the shrines is substantial: colleges and schools, hospitals, a printing operation, a network of preaching and educational committees, and the administration of the Akal Takht, whose jathedar it appoints. That last point is the one most often raised in discussion of the Committee, because it places the appointment of the holder of the highest temporal seat in Sikhism within the gift of a body that is itself elected on party lines. The arrangement is a direct product of the 1925 settlement rather than of anybody's design.

The Committee's most far-reaching act was not administrative. The Sikh Rehat Maryada, the code of conduct and conventions, was drafted over many years by a committee of scholars and representatives, approved in the 1930s and 1940s and published in 1945, and it is the document most Sikh institutions treat as the standard for what a Sikh does. It covers personal discipline, the conduct of worship, the ceremonies of naming, marriage, initiation and death, the running of a gurdwara, and the authority of the Panth. It is short, it is prescriptive, and it settled a great many questions that the reform movements of the previous sixty years had opened.

The Committee also holds a custodial role over the scripture. Printing of the Guru Granth Sahib is controlled, the protocols for its transport, installation, reading and rest are set out, and there is an established procedure for the respectful retirement of damaged or worn copies. Those arrangements matter because the Guru Granth Sahib is treated as the living Guru rather than as a book about one, so its handling is a matter of religious obligation and not of library practice.

Between the code and the custody, a committee created to manage buildings ended up holding the two instruments through which Sikh practice is standardised.