The Singh Sabha Movement and Sikh Reform

Overview

Recall questions on the Singh Sabha movement and its two wings, the Anand Marriage Act, gurdwara reform, the Sikh Rehat Maryada, and Oberoi and the Institute of Sikh Studies on religious boundaries.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

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1. 1

   What prompted the Singh Sabha movement?

   Model answer

   Anxiety in late nineteenth-century Punjab that Sikhs were losing their distinctiveness: Christian missions were making converts, a Hindu reform movement was campaigning to reclaim Sikhs and attacking the Gurus, and Sikh practice at the time included a great deal that reformers regarded as accretion. The first association was formed at Amritsar in 1873 and others followed.

2. 2

   How did the two wings of the movement differ?

   Model answer

   The Amritsar group, led by hereditary religious families, was content to see Sikhism as part of a broader Hindu world and to keep caste distinctions and customary rites. The Lahore group, formed in 1879 and known as the Tat Khalsa, insisted Sikhs were a separate religion with their own rites and code, a case made famously in a tract of 1898 whose title denied that Sikhs are Hindus, and it was this wing that prevailed.

3. 3

   Explain what the Anand Marriage Act 1909 achieved.

   Model answer

   It gave legal recognition to the Sikh marriage rite conducted before the scripture, so that Sikh marriages no longer depended on Hindu law for their validity. The importance is symbolic as much as legal, since the state was persuaded to treat Sikhs as having their own law of marriage.

4. 4

   Outline the gurdwara reform movement and how it ended.

   Model answer

   A campaign from about 1920 to take historic shrines out of the hands of hereditary custodians who had introduced practices reformers rejected and were accused of misusing endowments. It was conducted mainly through non-violent occupations, met with violence at several shrines, and ended in legislation in 1925 placing the shrines under an elected committee.

5. 5

   Trace how the Sikh Rehat Maryada came to be written.

   Model answer

   Once control of the shrines had passed to an elected body, committees worked through the following decades to agree a single code of belief, worship, ceremony and personal discipline, settled in the mid-1940s and published shortly afterwards. It defines who counts as a Sikh, prescribes the daily prayers and the conduct of ceremonies, and standardises what had previously varied from place to place.

6. 6

   Assess the combined effect of the Anand Marriage Act, the gurdwara reform movement and the Sikh Rehat Maryada.

   Model answer

   They made one version of Sikhism official, centred on the Khalsa, with initiation as the norm, distinct rites, and images and Brahminical ritual removed from Sikh shrines, and they gave that version institutions, revenue and legal recognition to sustain it. Older and more plural forms of Sikh practice lost their footing.

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