Nankana Sahib, 1921: The Sunday Massacre That Won Back the Gurdwaras

Nankana Sahib, before dawn on Sunday, 20 February 1921. Through the cold fields west of Lahore walks a column of men in black turbans. Most are village men. They have been walking most of the night.

At their head is Bhai Lachhman Singh of Dharowal, a well-off Sikh who had already helped free the gurdwara at Tarn Taran. Ahead of them, in the old town once called Talwandi Rai Bhoi, stands Gurdwara Janam Asthan, the shrine where Guru Nanak was born.

They pass through the gate as the sky lightens. Lachhman Singh sits down beside the Guru Granth Sahib. The others settle on the marble floor and on the platform around the shrine, and begin to sing the Gurus’ hymns.

Behind them, the heavy gate swings shut.

By noon, by the lowest count anyone has given, more than eighty of them were dead. Some had been shot from the rooftops. Some were cut down with swords and axes in the rooms where they hid. Many were heaped on a fire and burned with kerosene. Their leader was tied to a tree and burned alive.

This is the story of that morning, and of the five years of struggle it set off over who owned the Gurus’ houses.

Most of Punjab’s great gurdwaras in 1920 were not run by the Sikh congregation. They were run by mahants, custodians who passed the shrine from guru to disciple or father to son. Many, like the mahant of Nankana, were Udasis, an order of ascetics who trace their line to Sri Chand, Guru Nanak’s elder son.

The Udasis had earned their place. In the eighteenth century, when Mughal and Afghan governors hunted the Khalsa, Udasi custodians, who did not keep the Khalsa form, kept many shrines open. Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the Sikh chiefs gave them land. Then British canals turned that land into rich farmland. By the 1910s, the former diplomat Navtej Sarna writes, many mahants treated the estates as their own property.

Reformers who wanted the shrines back under the sangat found the law against them. Under the rules of the day, the historian Kiranjeet Sandhu found in her 2011 Guru Nanak Dev University thesis, worshippers who wanted to sue a mahant for misusing funds needed the Deputy Commissioner’s permission, and it was usually refused. At Babe di Ber in Sialkot, a district judge asked the reformers for a court fee of Rs 50,000.

Even the Golden Temple was run by a manager, the sarbrah, appointed by the British. It was that manager, Arur Singh, who honoured General Dyer with a siropa days after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. For many Sikhs, that robe said everything about who the custodians served.

Narain Das, mahant of Nankana, was by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism’s account the richest and most wayward of the Udasi clergy. In 1918 two cases of molestation of women pilgrims were reported at his shrine, and Sikh petitions for his removal went nowhere. Gandhi later wrote that the mahant was said to keep a mistress, and put his income at about Rs 5 lakh a year.

The mahants’ own case deserves a hearing. They had held these shrines for two centuries, often by written grant and under the law. Not all of them were scoundrels. Many Udasis saw themselves as part of a wider Hindu-Sikh world, and were losing their place in a faith that was drawing sharper lines. By 1931, Sandhu found, Udasi sadhus were asking the census to count them as Hindus, not Sikhs.

The spark came from caste.

On 12 October 1920, teachers and students of Khalsa College held a meeting at Jallianwala Bagh for Sikhs from castes the priests treated as low. The next morning the new Sikhs went to the Harimandar Sahib with karah prashad. The priests refused to accept it or to say the ardas for them.

A compromise was found, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records: the Guru Granth Sahib would be opened at random, and its verse would decide. The verse spoke for the outcasts. The priests left, and the reformers found the Akal Takht empty and took over its service.

The government hurried to set up a committee of 36 Sikhs from landed families. Sikhs answered with a bigger one. On 15 November 1920 a mass assembly at the Akal Takht formed a 175-member committee, folding in the 36 government nominees. It was the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the SGPC. At its first sitting in December it chose Sundar Singh Majithia as president.

In December 1920 the more radical reformers formed a volunteer corps to do the hard work: the Shiromani Akali Dal. Its members wore black turbans and moved in jathas, bands of fifty or a hundred.

The first blood was spilled at Tarn Taran. On 20 January 1921 the shrine’s servants attacked a reform jatha there. Hazara Singh of Aladinpur died of his wounds the next day, the first martyr of the movement; Hukam Singh of Vasau Kot died on 4 February.

Narain Das could see what was coming.

In the months before February, he turned his shrine into a fort. Gandhi, who walked through it two weeks after the killing, saw rooms built round the shrine with walls pierced for gunfire, holes between the rooms, and a main door riveted with heavy steel plates.

He also hired men. Wikipedia puts them at about eighty; the historian Mohinder Singh, writing in The Tribune, at nearly 400, including known criminals. The government later arrested 26 Pathan retainers. The British told the House of Lords that the mahant had warned in January that he expected an attack, and had been offered police protection, but did not go to court.

The SGPC planned to approach Nankana in early March. Some in the movement would not wait. At a meeting at Khara Sauda on 16 February, according to accounts collected on Wikipedia, Lachhman Singh and Kartar Singh Jhabbar agreed to send their jathas on the 20th, when the mahant was expected to be away in Lahore.

Jhabbar’s jatha never joined, and a messenger brought the committee’s order to postpone. Lachhman Singh nearly turned back; his companions pressed on.

Behind him came Bhai Dalip Singh, a respected Sikh of the area. The night before, by Gandhi’s own account, Dalip Singh had been talking with him. He had tried to stop his friend. When he could not, he followed him to Nankana.

The jatha entered the precincts in the morning, the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says about 150 strong, and began its hymns. The firing came from the roof of an adjoining building.

Lachhman Singh was hit where he sat in attendance on the scripture. Bullets struck the Guru Granth Sahib itself. That volume, the Shahidi Bir, is preserved at the Golden Temple, and a bullet-marked saroop is shown to the sangat on the anniversary.

Outside the gate, the Encyclopaedia records, Narain Das rode a horse with a pistol in his hand and his face muffled, and shouted an order.

Let not a single long-haired Sikh go out alive.Mahant Narain Das, as recorded by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism

Men who hid in the cells were dragged out and cut down. Dalip Singh, who came to plead with the mahant, was shot dead. Six Sikhs who arrived from outside were killed and thrown into a potter’s kiln. Firewood and kerosene were brought, and the dead and dying were piled on the fire.

Lachhman Singh, wounded, was tied to a tree and burned alive. Sikh tradition remembers it as a jand tree. Gandhi, two weeks later, saw its burnt trunk and the trails of blood.

Not one of the mahant’s men, Gandhi noted, appeared to have been hurt. The Akalis carried kirpans and axes; the Sikhs he spoke to believed they had not struck back.

Help came from an unexpected direction. Bhai Uttam Singh, who owned a factory in the town, sent urgent telegrams to officials and Akali leaders. The Deputy Commissioner reached Nankana around noon. The next day Kartar Singh Jhabbar arrived with about 2,200 Sikhs. The government arrested Narain Das and his men, and handed the shrine to a committee of seven Sikhs under Harbans Singh of Attari.

Nobody will ever know exactly; the fire saw to that. Here is every figure we found, and who gives it.

• 88: the police count, given by the British government in the House of Lords on 31 May 1921.
• 86: an official figure quoted in Sikh histories by Shamsher Singh (1938) and Sher Singh Sher (1982).
• 82 to 156: the range in Punjabi University’s Encyclopaedia of Sikhism.
• 135: the Sikh figure, as the government itself reported it to the Lords.
• 140: the Indian Council of Historical Research’s Dictionary of Martyrs (2011).
• Over 150: Gandhi, in Navajivan, 13 March 1921.
• 200 to 300: Lord Sydenham, a critic of the government, in the Lords; 260: an estimate cited by I.P. Singh in the Times of India in 2021.

On 22 February the Governor of Punjab, Sir Edward Maclagan, came to the shrine. The scientist Ruchi Ram Sahni, in his history of the movement, recorded an old woman who stood before him.

My child, my four sons and a grandson have been massacred.An elderly woman to Sir Edward Maclagan, as recorded by Ruchi Ram Sahni

On 3 March 1921 Gandhi arrived, with the Khilafat leader Shaukat Ali. He came, he told the Sikhs, as a pilgrim. When the telegram reached him, he said, his friends would not believe it without confirmation. The next day he wrote to the Sikhs of Lahore.

A second edition of Dyerism more barbarous, more calculated and more fiendish.Gandhi, message to Lahore Sikhs, 4 March 1921

In his weekly Navajivan he put it more bluntly: the mahant had out-Dyered Dyer.

But Gandhi said something else that the Akalis did not want to hear. If the jatha had gone to take the shrine by a show of force, he wrote, it would bear the taint of violence, and in law the man in possession could use force to repel trespassers. The law courts, he added, had been open to them. In his view nothing excused the murders; but he would not pretend the question did not exist.

He asked for more. The martyrdom, he said, belonged to the whole nation, and the Khalsa could remain free only in a free India. And he asked the grieving to forgive the killers, whether Sikhs, Pathans or Hindus.

Only the strong can forgive.Gandhi, message to Lahore Sikhs, 4 March 1921

The criminal case against Narain Das and his men opened on 5 April 1921, a date Sikhs still keep as a martyrs’ day.

On 12 October 1921 the sessions court gave its verdict. Narain Das and seven others were sentenced to death. Eight were sentenced to transportation for life, and sixteen Pathans to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment each. The rest of the accused were acquitted.

On 3 March 1922 the High Court changed it. Narain Das’s death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. Three of his men were to hang, two were given life, and the others went free.

In London, the House of Lords debated the killing on 31 May 1921, under the heading ‘Affray at Nankana Saheb’. For the government, the Earl of Lytton called it a religious dispute between two sections of the Sikh community. Its policy, he said, was strict religious neutrality, leaving the parties to go to court. The charge that officials had connived he called a mischievous libel.

Nankana changed the movement. Before it, the Akalis had been fighting priests. After it, they were fighting the Raj.

In October 1921 the SGPC demanded the keys of the Golden Temple’s toshakhana, the treasury, from the government-appointed manager, Sundar Singh Ramgarhia. On 7 November the government sent an official, Lala Amar Nath, to take the keys into its own hands.

Sikhs protested across Punjab and courted arrest. The government, already facing Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, gave way.

On 19 January 1922, by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism’s date (Wikipedia has 17 January), a court official handed the keys, wrapped in red cloth, to Baba Kharak Singh, president of the SGPC, before a diwan at the Akal Takht. The prisoners were released. A telegram arrived from Gandhi.

First decisive battle for India’s freedom won.Gandhi, telegram to Baba Kharak Singh, January 1922 (wording varies slightly between sources)

Nankana had already drawn in others. On 15 November 1921, Guru Nanak’s birth anniversary, Baba Gurdit Singh of the Komagata Maru gave himself up at Nankana Sahib after seven years in hiding. (Our long read on the Komagata Maru and the Ghadar movement tells his story.)

Guru ka Bagh, the Guru’s garden, is a shrine near Ajnala, about 20 km from Amritsar. Its mahant, Sundar Das, had handed the gurdwara to the SGPC, but said the land around it was still his.

On 9 August 1922 police arrested five Sikhs for trespass as they cut firewood there for the langar. They were sentenced to six months the next day.

So the jathas began. Every day a band of volunteers set out from the Akal Takht to cut wood, and every day police stopped them on the road. From the end of August the police beat them with lathis, often until they fell senseless. The volunteers had vowed not to strike back. They did not.

On 12 September the English missionary C.F. Andrews, a friend of Gandhi, came to watch. He wrote up what he saw for the British and Indian press, and called it a new lesson in moral warfare. He told the Governor what he had seen. Maclagan came the next day and ordered the beatings stopped, though arrests went on.

By the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism’s count, 5,605 Akalis were arrested over the Guru ka Bagh morcha and 936 needed hospital treatment.

The way out came from a Hindu engineer. On 17 November 1922 Sir Ganga Ram, the engineer whose buildings still stand across Lahore, bought the land from the mahant and gave it to the Akalis. The prisoners were freed in March 1923.

Not every Akali believed in folded hands.

In the Doaba, between the Beas and the Sutlej, a group of ex-soldiers and returned Ghadar men looked at Nankana and Guru ka Bagh and drew the opposite lesson. In August 1922 they formed the Babbar Akali Jatha, the lions, under Kishan Singh Gargaj. Their cyclostyled paper, the Babbar Akali Doaba, called for armed revolt.

From February 1923 they began killing. Their targets were men they called jholi chuks, toadies of the British: zaildars, lambardars, police informers. The dead included Zaildar Bishan Singh, Lambardar Buta Singh and his grandson Surjan Singh, and a patwari, Atta Muhammad. Their own rules, Wikipedia records, forbade looting innocents and harming the families of their targets.

The government declared them unlawful in April 1923 and hunted them down. Kishan Singh was arrested on 26 February 1923. At Babeli, around 1 September 1923, Karam Singh Daulatpur and three companions were shot dead by police after an informer gave them away. In October Dhanna Singh blew himself up when police tried to search him; five policemen and a British superintendent, A.F. Horton, died.

From 1924, 91 accused Babbars were tried in Lahore. Two died in jail and 34 were acquitted. On 27 February 1926 six of the accused, by then convicted and sentenced to death, were hanged: Kishan Singh Gargaj, Santa Singh, Dalip Singh Dhamian, Karam Singh Manko, Nand Singh Ghurial and Dharam Singh Hayatpur.

On 9 July 1923 the British forced Maharaja Ripudaman Singh of Nabha, a ruler friendly to the Akalis, to abdicate in favour of his young son. The British said he went willingly. The Akalis did not believe it.

At Gurdwara Gangsar in Jaito, in Nabha state, Sikhs began an akhand path, an unbroken reading of the scripture, with prayers for the Maharaja. On 14 September 1923 the police removed the reader and put their own man in his place. Sikhs saw the breaking of an akhand path as sacrilege. The Jaito morcha was now about the right to pray.

The SGPC and the Akali Dal were declared unlawful, and all 60 members of the SGPC’s interim committee were arrested for treason. Jawaharlal Nehru, who came to Jaito to see for himself, was arrested too and jailed in Nabha.

On 9 February 1924 a jatha of 500, the Shahidi Jatha, the band of martyrs, marched out from the Akal Takht. A New York Times correspondent, S. Zimand, saw it on the road.

Moving in perfect order and non-violence.S. Zimand, The New York Times, on the Shahidi Jatha, 1924

On 21 February 1924, near Jaito, the jatha refused orders to disperse. The British administrator of Nabha, Wilson Johnston, ordered troops to fire. The official toll was 19 dead and 29 wounded. Akali accounts gave far higher figures; some histories put the dead near 100.

More jathas of 500 kept coming. The morcha ended only on 6 August 1925, when 101 akhand paths had been completed at Gangsar.

A new Governor, Sir Malcolm Hailey, reached Punjab in May 1924, and the government began to look for a way out. Earlier bills, in 1921 and 1922, did not satisfy the Akalis; the 1922 law would have put the shrines under a government-nominated committee, and they rejected it.

On 7 May 1925 Tara Singh of Moga moved a new Sikh Gurdwaras Bill in the Punjab Legislative Council, and Bhai Jodh Singh piloted it. The Council passed it on 7 July. It came into force on 1 November 1925 as Punjab Act VIII of 1925.

The Act listed 241 historic shrines that would pass to an elected Sikh body; 65 of them would end up in Pakistan in 1947. Other shrines could be claimed by 50 worshippers before a tribunal headed by a High Court judge. The Central Board it created took a name already famous: the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee.

Victory split the victors. The government offered to free Akali prisoners who gave a written undertaking to work the Act. A group under Mehtab Singh and Giani Sher Singh signed. Others, including Master Tara Singh and Teja Singh Samundri, refused and stayed in jail. Baba Kharak Singh served his full term, extended twice, and walked out only in June 1927. The historian Mohinder Singh writes that real unity was never achieved again.

The bill for five years, by the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism’s count: about 40,000 jailed (other accounts say 30,000), about 400 dead, 2,000 injured, Rs 16 lakh in fines and forfeitures, and some 700 village officials stripped of their posts.

The Udasis lost. Some fought on in court and won a few cases; many smaller mahants handed their shrines over.

A century of Sikh memory has made the mahants villains and the Akalis saints. Each side had a case, and it is worth hearing in its own words.

Gandhi’s telegram made a claim that historians still argue over. Was the Akali movement a chapter of India’s freedom struggle, or a Sikh religious reform that the Raj happened to stand in the way of?

The British feared the first. In August 1921 a CID officer, D. Petrie, wrote that the Akali campaign was a greater threat than Gandhi’s own, and called it essentially a rural movement. The historian Tan Tai Yong argues the government’s whole response was shaped by fear of losing the Sikh peasant soldier.

Sikh and nationalist historians, Mohinder Singh first among them, see a freedom movement. The Akalis used mass non-violent protest, drew Congress leaders such as Nehru to Jaito, and won. Navtej Sarna writes that it melded into the national struggle.

Others see something more complicated. The historian Rajiv Kapur, in Sikh Separatism (1986), traces the roots of Sikh communal consciousness and organisation to the reform movement of the 1870s to the 1920s. The SGPC, he argues, became the base of a separate Sikh politics. Gandhi himself grew cooler after 1924, wanting to keep religion and independence apart.

Both can be true. The Akalis fought the British, and they also drew a firmer line between Sikh and Hindu, at the Udasis’ cost. The story runs on through the Akali Dal of Master Tara Singh, the Punjabi Suba and the events of 1984.

Strip away the arguments and one fact stands. On a Sunday morning in 1921, men who had come to pray at the birthplace of a Guru who preached that there is no Hindu and no Muslim were shot and burned by the hired men of the shrine’s own custodian. The courts convicted him and his men; three of them were sentenced to hang, and the man who gave the order kept his life.

The record holds less comfortable truths too. The jathas were a show of strength, as Gandhi said, and the law was on the mahant’s side. The British were not neutral in practice: they had kept the custodians in place for seventy years. And the Babbars killed men without trial.

What the reformers did at Guru ka Bagh and Jaito, walking unarmed into lathis and rifles, won the gurdwaras back, and impressed a world that had not yet seen the Salt March. The SGPC they created is now a century old and as argued over as any institution in Punjab. That, too, is a kind of victory: the shrines belong to people who can vote.