The Second Closure

Partition, Refugee Displacement, and the Remaking of Sikhism, 1947–1971

VK Singh Vashisht · Gurmat / Sikh Philosophy · September 21, 2026 · 16,434 words · ICS-2026-009

Editor’s noteWorking paper, not yet peer-reviewed. Published under the author's attestation; the claims register (167 entries) remains open and every footnote is reproduced so readers can check the sourcing themselves.

For my great-great-grandmother Jaswant Kaur Sood and her son, my great-grandfather Sadhu Ram Sood — Lahori Sehajdhari Sikhs. This paper is about the world they belonged to.

Abstract

The transformation of a plural early-modern Sikh tradition into a bounded, Khalsa-normative religion is conventionally credited to the Singh Sabha movement (1873–1925), while the Partition of 1947 is studied as a political and demographic catastrophe for the Sikh community. No sustained scholarship connects the two processes: the boundary-construction literature terminates analytically in the colonial period, and Partition studies treats Sikhs as political actors and mnemonic subjects rather than as bearers of religious traditions. This paper argues that Partition completed demographically what the Singh Sabha began discursively — that discursive boundary-making (1880–1925) was followed by demographic boundary-making (1947–1971). Drawing on colonial and Pakistani census series, statutory records, institutional resolutions, and the recent scholarship on Sindhi and Frontier Sikhs, it shows that displacement selectively excised the regions where non-Khalsa Sikh life — Sahajdhari, Nanakpanthi, Frontier, and Pothohari — was institutionally concentrated. Between 1.6 and 1.7 million Sikhs enumerated in 1941 in the territories that became Pakistan had vanished from Pakistan’s 1951 census, which no longer enumerated Sikhs as a category; the Sahajdhari share of Punjab’s Sikhs fell from 20 per cent (1891) to 6.5 per cent (1931) before the category vanished from enumeration; and the Sikh share of Punjab’s population rose from roughly 13 per cent in 1941 to over 60 per cent in the redrawn state by 1971, supplying the demographic base for Khalsa-normative institutional hegemony. The displaced plural traditions were channelled into Khalsa-normative refugee institutions, an expansive Hindu container, or — as an explicitly flagged hypothesis, not a finding — the new religious movements founded and refounded in 1947–48. The paper reframes Partition as an event in the religious history of Sikhism, not only in the political history of the Sikhs.

I. Introduction

Indore, January 2023

On 11 January 2023, representatives of Indore’s Sindhi community carried some fifty saroops of the Guru Granth Sahib out of the temples and darbars in which they had been installed and handed them over to Gurdwara Imli Sahib.¹ Their explanation was brief. “The group of Sikhs that came from Punjab said that you people are not maintaining the Guru’s dignity,” Prakash Rajdev and Naresh Fudwani told the local press; “the Sindhi saints held a meeting and decided to return Sri Guru Granth Sahib.”¹ The Sikhs from Punjab were Nihangs, whose objection — that “other deities and religious texts should not be kept together” with the Granth — had circulated in a video of idols being removed from a Sindhi temple.² The secretary of the local Guru Singh Sabha confirmed that its members had “visited several places where the Guru’s maryada was not being followed,” and that the gurdwara had “accepted” the surrender.¹ Within days the Sindhi Samaj announced that the Granth would be replaced in its temples by the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana; further handovers followed in Rajasthan.³

Three features of the episode organize this paper. First, the norm enforced was not timeless. Its public career began with the removal of idols from the precincts of the Harmandir Sahib in 1905 and its codification in the Sikh Rehat Maryada of 1945, whereas the form it condemned — the Sindhi tikana housing the Granth among Hindu images — is documented from the Udasi foundations of the 1820s and from Richard Burton’s Sindh of 1851 (Section 3).⁴ Second, the Sindhis did not contest the norm’s authority. They conceded it, and in conceding it took the only other container on offer. Third, the institution that authored the norm disowned its enforcement: the president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee distanced his body from the Nihangs and called for unity with Sehajdhari Sikhs — seven years after the same body had secured the 2016 amendment striking Sehajdharis from its own electoral rolls (Section 5).³

How did a boundary its author will not enforce come to be enforced anyway, and conceded by those on its far side? This paper’s answer is that the boundary ceased to be institutional long before 2023. It was drawn discursively between 1873 and 1925, and it was made demographic between 1947 and 1971, when Partition removed from the Sikh world precisely the populations — Sindhi Nanakpanthis among them — who had lived as though it did not exist, and resettled them within reach of the institutions that insisted it did. Indore is not an aftershock of that closure. It is the closure, running without its author.

The political meaning of 1947 for the Sikhs has never been in doubt: Master Tara Singh’s bitter question of 1961 — “The Hindus got Hindustan, the Muslims got Pakistan, what did the Sikhs get?” — anchors a well-developed literature of loss and grievance.⁵ This paper poses a prior question: not what Sikhs failed to win in 1947, but what happened to Sikhism — to its Sahajdhari, Sindhi Nanakpanthi, Frontier, and Pothohari plurality — when two-fifths of its people and the western half of its sacred and institutional geography were uprooted within a single year.⁶ Indore is where that question surfaced, seventy-five years late.

The standard narrative and its critics

The prevailing answer locates the making of a bounded, Khalsa-centred Sikhism entirely in the colonial period. In Harjot Oberoi’s canonical study, the precolonial Panth was a multiplex formation whose adherents moved among Udasi, Nirmala, Nanakpanthi, Sahajdhari, and Khalsa modes; the Singh Sabha, “aided by social and cultural forces unleashed by the British Raj,” recast this plurality into a single, exclusivist tradition.⁷ J. S. Grewal objected that eighteenth-century fluidity never precluded a strong corporate identity, nor did identity require uniformity; W. H. McLeod, Oberoi’s own mentor, allowed that the tradition’s “boundaries” might have been indistinct but not its “centre.”⁸ ⁹ Arvind-Pal Mandair radicalized rather than resolved the debate: Sikh tradition was “reinvented as ‘religion’” between the 1880s and 1920s by Orientalist scholars and Sikh reformers alike.¹⁰

This paper does not arbitrate that controversy; it changes the evidentiary register. Whatever the discursive standing of “Sanatan Sikhism,” the census, statutory, and institutional record documents plural practice well into the twentieth century, and can be read forward past 1947 as none of the protagonists — for whom the story ends with the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 — has attempted. Where Oberoi and his critics argue about what the Singh Sabha said, this paper asks what Partition did.

Research gap

Two canons that never met

The boundary-construction literature terminates analytically in the colonial period: Oberoi’s endpoint is the Singh Sabha settlement, Mandair’s the world-religions discourse of the same decades; neither follows religion-making into the era of mass displacement.7 10 The Partition canon knows the Sikh refugee well but treats Sikhs as political actors or mnemonic subjects — victims, perpetrators, citizens-in-the-making — never as bearers of a tradition being reconfigured. Zamindar’s “long partition,” in which states construct national difference “where it was the most blurred,” is developed for Muslim families divided between Delhi and Karachi; no equivalent exists for intra-Sikh boundaries.¹¹ Ravinder Kaur’s ethnographic history of Delhi’s Punjabi migrants treats Hindus and Sikhs from the Frontier and West Punjab as one undifferentiated stream (Section 2).¹² Shyamal Kataria’s programme analyzes victimhood as a political resource, not sectarian change (Section 2).5

The gap named and deferred

The gap has been named, and then declined, from within the literature itself. In the single article touching the paper’s thesis directly, Rita Kothari and Jasbirkaur Thadhani observe that after Partition “Sindhi Sikhs were pulled in the direction of mainstream Sikhism identified with the Punjab region,” only to declare that “[t]he nature of negotiation, and the respective consequences, may be different, but are beyond the scope of this paper.”¹³ Takhar and Jakobsh likewise note that the Sindhi mandir tradition has “escaped academic attention.”¹⁴ No scholarship located for this study connects Partition displacement to Sikhism’s internal reconfiguration; this paper takes up the deferred question.

Thesis and contributions

From discursive to demographic boundary-making

The argument in one sentence: Partition completed demographically what the Singh Sabha began discursively — the closure of Sikhism’s plural periphery. The discursive closure was real but incomplete: roughly 20 per cent of Punjab’s enumerated Sikhs were Sahajdhari in 1891, and the share still stood at 6.5 per cent in 1931, with “considerable Sahajdhari populations” in the North-West Frontier Province and Sindh beyond the reformers’ reach.¹⁵ The demographic closure was near-total and took months rather than decades: the roughly 1.6 to 1.7 million Sikhs recorded in 1941 in the territories that became Pakistan¹⁶ had, by the 1951 Census of Pakistan, ceased to be an enumerated category at all; the residual figure of 1,476 sometimes cited is an inference from the census’s “Others” column, not a count.¹⁷¹⁸ Inside India the displaced reconcentrated, from 13.22 per cent of undivided Punjab — with a majority in none of its twenty-nine districts — to 60.22 per cent of the redrawn state by 1971.¹⁹ The claim is not that the Singh Sabha failed; it is that it succeeded only where its population remained, while the periphery it could not convert was amputated.

Four contributions

Four contributions follow, each stated to be testable. First, periodization: the boundary-making frame is extended to 1947–1971, the second closure effected through censuses, statutes, and resettlement rather than tracts and polemic. Second, a geography-of-loss overlay: the pre-1947 institutional map of plural Sikhism — the Sahajdhari diwans of Multan, Panja Sahib, and Campbellpore; Sindh’s tikana network; the Frontier’s urban mercantile communities — coincides nearly exactly with the territory west of the Radcliffe Line (Section 3). Third, an institutional paradox: the SGPC lost over three-quarters of its historically significant shrines²⁰ yet emerged with pan-Sikh hegemony, while refugee demography in the capital produced the Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1971, whose keshdhari-only franchise shows refugees not merely receiving Khalsa normativity but legislating it (Section 5). Fourth, an explicitly flagged hypothesis: that the Punjabi new religious movements founded or refounded on refugee geography in 1947–48 — the Sant Nirankari Mandal in Delhi, Dera Sacha Sauda at Sirsa, Ruhani Satsang, an expanding Radha Soami Satsang Beas — absorbed disproportionate numbers of displaced, urban, non-Khalsa Sikhs. Existing scholarship establishes only that the Radha Soami following comprised “middle-class merchants and administrators”; the stronger membership claim is advanced as a hypothesis to be tested archivally, not as a finding.²¹

Sources, method, and paper organization

Sources and method

The paper is a work of demographic and institutional history in dialogue with memory studies. Its quantitative spine is the census series 1881–1951 — Sahajdhari enumerations, district-level concentrations, the 1951 endpoints on both sides of the border — read against the statutory record (the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925 with its 1944 and 1959 amendments; the Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1971) and against institutional resolutions, above all the SGPC General House resolutions of 1973 and 1976 declaring the post-Partition Sahajdhari institution defunct (the resolution’s wording is quoted in Section 10). Oral-history scholarship — Butalia, Kataria, the 1947 Partition Archive — supplies the experiential register.2 5 The framing device is Zamindar’s “long partition”: displacement as a years-long, state-mediated process rather than a single event.11 Where figures conflict, both are reported with their scopes: the 1941 census stock of 1.6–1.7 million coexists with Khushwant Singh’s conventional, higher flow estimate of 2.5 million displaced, and the two measure different things.16 17

Organization

Section 2 situates the argument within the Oberoi controversy and Partition historiography. Section 3 reconstructs the pre-1947 geography of plural Sikhism; Section 4 demonstrates its selective excision west of the new border. Section 5 develops the SGPC’s institutional paradox; Section 6 reads the refugee colony as a boundary machine worked by Hindu-absorptive and Khalsa-normative projects alike. Section 7 traces the transplanted heterodoxies of 1948; Section 8 stages Sindh as counterfactual. Section 9 takes up Thoa Khalsa and memory as Khalsa-ization; Section 10 concludes with the SGPC’s 1973–76 resolutions and returns to Indore as the closing bracket of the process begun in 1947.

II. Two Literatures, One Silence: Sikh Studies and Partition Studies

Two historiographies hold this paper’s evidence between them; neither has posed its question. Sikh studies explains how Sikhism became a bounded religion but closes before 1947; Partition studies explains what 1947 did to Sikhs but treats Sikhism as a fixed identity, not a tradition in flux.

The boundary-construction canon and its limits

Oberoi’s thesis and its critics

Harjot Oberoi’s The Construction of Religious Boundaries (1994) is the field’s most ambitious account of how plural Punjabi religious life became a bounded Sikhism: a tradition in which “most Sikhs recognized multiple identities grounded in local, regional, religious, and secular loyalties” was, under a Singh Sabha movement “aided by social and cultural forces unleashed by the British Raj,” purged of diversity.7 Crucially, Oberoi’s own inventory of the pre-reform Panth — Udasi, Nirmala, Nanakpanthi, Khalsa, Sahajdhari, Kuka, Nirankari, Sarvaria — catalogues precisely the traditions Partition would later disperse.²²

J. S. Grewal judged the “Sanatan Sikhism” hypothesis “vague and vacuous,” showed that “Oberoi’s Sahajdharis are virtually ‘Udasis,’” and held that what the Singh Sabha added was “rational argument for a distinctive Sikh identity with its political implications, and not Sikh identity itself.”²³ ²⁴ McLeod, Oberoi’s mentor, allowed that “the ‘boundaries’ might be indistinct but not the ‘centre,’” citing identity-consciousness in Guru Arjan and Bhai Gurdas.²⁵ Anne Murphy found the opposition of folk “Sanatan” tradition to a Khalsa episteme empirically shaky, a nostalgia for a non-existent “proto-multiculturalism.”²⁶ Cynthia Mahmood objected that Oberoi omits the eighteenth-century persecution era in producing heightened Sikh identity.²⁷ A polemical tier — the 1995 volume Invasion of Religious Boundaries, litigation threats, personal attacks — drove Oberoi from his University of British Columbia chair in 1997, a measure of how charged the plural Sikh past remains.²⁸ ²⁹

Arvind-Pal Mandair radicalized rather than refuted the constructionist reading: “religion” itself is a colonial-universal category into which Sikh tradition was “reinvented” between the 1880s and 1920s by Orientalists (Trumpp, Macauliffe) and reformers (Kahn Singh Nabha, Bhai Vir Singh, Teja Singh, Jodh Singh).10 McLeod’s Who is a Sikh? The Problem of Sikh Identity (1989) supplied the durable taxonomy — amritdhari, keshdhari, sahajdhari — while framing marginal identity as a doctrinal-historical problem; Grewal’s memorial assessment faulted the center/periphery model while granting its historical framing.³⁰ 8 Barrier’s The Sikhs and Their Literature (1970) fixed the canon’s archival base in the Singh Sabha period (1873–1925).³¹

Why the debate stops at 1925

These antagonists share a chronology: boundary-making is colonial and discursive, its story closing with the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925. Oberoi ends in the early twentieth century; Mandair at decolonization; McLeod treats Sahajdhari marginality without reference to displacement. Richard Fox’s census reading supplies the crucial caveat: the Sahajdhari share of Punjab’s Sikhs fell from 20 per cent in 1891 (397,000) to 6.5 per cent in 1931 (282,000), yet the decline came “in part because Singh reformism led the former Sajdharis to report themselves either as Hindus or Singhs” — classificatory politics as much as demographic disappearance.³² 15 Paul Brass likewise observed that “the sahajdari Sikhs, while not formally excluded, are considered less ‘genuine’” — a continuing process, not a completed event.³³ The undrawn implication is that the discursive closure of 1873–1925 left the plural constituency intact but subordinated — and concentrated, as Section 3 will show, in the territory Pakistan would take.

Partition studies and the Sikh subject

Sikhs as subjects of violence and memory, never a tradition reconfigured

Partition studies rebuilt itself around memory, gender, borders, and state-formation; in each register Sikhs appear as subjects of violence or remembrance, never as a tradition reconfigured. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence established the memory agenda; her account of Thoa Khalsa — ninety-three women who “voluntarily” jumped into a well, commemorated at a Delhi gurdwara “as martyrdom, not suicide” — shows refugee memory folding 1947 into the Guru-period martyrology that Louis Fenech identified as Khalsa identity-constituting currency.2 ³⁴ Gyanendra Pandey read Partition violence as constitutive, not aberrant, of postcolonial national-religious identities.³⁵ Vazira Zamindar’s The Long Partition recast 1947 as an ongoing state-making process constructing “national difference where it was the most blurred” — but her subjects are Muslim families between Delhi and Karachi, and the insight has never been turned on intra-Sikh boundaries.11 Talbot and Gurharpal Singh’s standard synthesis urges looking “beyond events in the Punjab and the immediate period of division,” yet their frame remains political and territorial.³⁶ Ishtiaq Ahmed’s The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, the fullest provincial account, frames 1947 as “the first major case of ethnic cleansing after the Second World War,” a frame that stops at the border.³⁷ Pippa Virdee comes closest to this paper’s premise — “None paid the price of partition like the pluralistic, pre-partition Punjab” — but her frame is Punjabiyat, not Sikh religious traditions.³⁸ Chhanda Chatterjee’s The Sikh Minority and the Partition of the Punjab 1920–1947, the nearest monograph with both terms in its title, is a political history of leadership choices ending, as announced, in 1947.³⁹ Joya Chatterji’s Bengal study supplies the template this paper adapts: two decades (1947–1967) of refugee management and state category-making remaking a region’s social structure.⁴⁰ Even Shyamal Kataria’s Sikh-specific Partition program, documenting refugees who insist “it is almost our destiny to die a violent death,” analyzes memory as political resource, not sectarian change.5

Ravinder Kaur’s undifferentiated refugee stream

Ravinder Kaur’s Since 1947, the closest ethnographic history of Punjabi refugee resettlement, follows Hindus and Sikhs from the North-West Frontier Province and West Punjab into Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar and Karol Bagh (1947–1965), tracing how “refugees” became citizens.12 Precisely because it is closest, its limitation matters: Kaur treats Hindus and Sikhs as a single migrant stream, so whether displaced Sahajdhari or Nanakpanthi families re-identified differently from Khalsa refugees falls outside her frame. The oral-history record inherits the same undifferentiation; even Kingsway Camp, sheltering up to half a million mainly West Punjab refugees between 1947 and 1955, is “poorly documented in the extensive secondary literature of Partition.”⁴¹

The gap and this paper’s positioning

The closest works and the methodological imports

The gap is named from within both fields. Rita Kothari and Jasbirkaur Thadhani’s “Sindhi Sikhs in India: The Missing People” (2017) observes that Sindhi Sikhs “do not figure in studies on Sikhism, Sindh or Partition,” and that after 1947 they “were pulled in the direction of mainstream Sikhism identified with the Punjab region” — then expressly defers the question: “The nature of negotiation, and the respective consequences, may be different, but are beyond the scope of this paper.”13 Takhar and Jakobsh likewise note that the Sindhi mandir has “escaped academic attention… partially because of the geographical boundaries of Sikh and Panjab studies.”14 A 2022 Michigan conference on “the Partition of India and the Sikhs” has produced no locatable proceedings.⁴²

This paper therefore argues demographically rather than discursively, sidestepping the Oberoi controversy: whatever the status of “Sanatan Sikhism,” the census, legal, and institutional record documents plural practice, and Partition physically removed its carriers. It imports Zamindar’s processual “long partition” and Chatterji’s two-decade state-category window — 1947–1967, approximated here as 1947–1971 — with Pandey’s premise that violence produces rather than interrupts religious identity; and it applies the boundary vocabulary of Oberoi, McLeod, and their critics to an event none of them theorized. Section 3 begins where both literatures stop: the geography of plurality on the eve of 1947.

III. The Geography of Plurality: The Sikh World Before 1947

To interpret 1947 as a transformation of Sikhism rather than merely of Sikh demography, the world it destroyed must first be reconstructed. The claim of this section is cartographic: non-Khalsa Sikh life in the early twentieth century was not a diffuse residue scattered across undivided Punjab but a structured geography of institutions, castes, and cultic traditions whose density increased westward — toward Multan and the Derajat, across the Pothohar plateau and the Frontier, and down the Indus into Sindh. Because that geography lay overwhelmingly west of the boundary drawn in August 1947, Partition did not strike the Sikh world uniformly; it amputated the regions where its plural forms were institutionally concentrated.

The Sahajdhari–Khalsa duality

The first axis of that geography was categorical. Alongside the initiated Khalsa, the Sikh tradition contained a second, uninitiated mode of belonging — demographically large, socially elite, and increasingly contested.

Who the Sahajdharis were

A Sahajdhari (early contrast: Khulasa, against Khalsa) was an uninitiated Sikh who affirmed the ten Gurus and the Guru Granth Sahib without taking amrit or, typically, maintaining unshorn hair.15 W. H. McLeod’s standard taxonomy gave the category a distinctive social profile: Sahajdharis were “often of a relatively high-caste background (mostly trading-castes and rarely Jats),” the label applying above all to Khatris and Aroras.⁴³ The category subsumed whole devotional orders — Udasis, Sevapanthis, Nanakpanthis — that had carried Sikh affiliation far beyond the agrarian heartland.⁴⁴ The Panth’s caste constituency, as recorded in the 1881 and 1931 censuses, paired two mercantile castes (Khatri, Arora) with two agrarian ones (Jat, Kamboh); the Aroras were concentrated in western Punjab and the Derajat, precisely the zone lost in 1947.⁴⁵ ⁴⁶

The duality was quantifiable. The census series compiled in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records the Sahajdhari (or “Sikh Nanakpanthi”) share of Punjab’s Sikhs falling from a fifth in 1891 to barely a fifteenth by 1931, with “considerable Sahajdhari populations” in the Frontier and Sindh lying outside these Punjab figures.15

Census year	Sahajdhari Sikhs (Punjab)	Share of Sikh population
1891	397,000	20.0%
1911	451,000	14.9%
1931	282,000	6.5%

These numbers must be read as indices of classificatory politics, not simple demography. Richard Fox shows that the 1891 and 1901 enumeration instructions restricted “Sikh” to uncut-haired, tobacco-abstaining Singhs, that Sahajdhari protest defeated the rule, and that after 1901 “whoever claimed to be Sikh was so recorded”; in 1891 over a third of self-described Sikhs claimed Hindu religion, and the Sikh population was “almost evenly divided between Singhs and Sajdharis.”31 The post-1911 decline thus measures partly the re-labelling of former Sahajdharis as Hindus or Singhs under Singh Sabha pressure — but the reform could reclassify people only where its institutions reached them.31

The western institutional geography

Sahajdhari self-organization, where it crystallized institutionally, did so in the west. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records their societies as “confined mainly to north-western India prior to the migrations of 1947”: the Sahajdhari Committee of Multan, the Guru Nanak Sahajdhari Diwan of Panja Sahib at Hasan Abdal — which “attained the status of their central forum” — and the Sri Guru Nanak Sahajdhari Jatha of Campbellpore (Attock); their all-India conference first convened on 13 April 1929 under Sir Jogendra Singh.15 Every named seat lay in territory that would become Pakistan. The same western districts furnished the sharpest resistance to Khalsa redefinition during the Gurdwara Reform struggle: Udasi mahants convened a “Sanatan (orthodox) Sikh Conference” in February 1921; a “large party” of Sahajdhari Sikhs attempted to expel Akalis from a Montgomery-district shrine that April; and Hindus and Akalis clashed over a jointly claimed Rawalpindi shrine in January 1924.31 The boundary war of 1921–25 was fought hardest where the plural constituency was densest — a coincidence of geography that 1947 would resolve by removing the constituency itself.31

The western periphery: Sindh and the Frontier

The Sahajdhari–Khalsa duality was thus not merely a taxonomy but a spatial order. Beyond Punjab proper, in Sindh and on the Frontier, non-Khalsa affiliation was not a declining minority form but the normal idiom of Sikh presence.

Sindhi Nanakpanthis: tikanas and late growth

Sikhism reached Sindh through trade and asceticism rather than conquest: Nanakpanthi traders of the Arora and Khatri castes and Udasi saints from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with scholarship variously stressing Multani firms relocating to Shikarpur (Levi) and the Lohana caste “in the orbit of Sikh cultural hegemony” (Cook).⁴⁷ The result was a form of affiliation Richard Burton, surveying Sindh in 1851, could describe only as “heterodox Sikhs” in whom the two practices had “so intermingled … that we can scarcely discern the line of demarcation.”⁴⁸ Its institution was the tikana: a Nanakpanthi or Sevapanthi temple housing the Guru Granth Sahib alongside images of Hindu deities — a structural hybridity that Takhar and Jakobsh identify as the neglected site of pre-Partition coexistence, whose adherents did “not find Hinduism as conflictual with Sikhism.”14 The Jagiasi line founded tikanas at Khairpur, Hyderabad, Halani, and Kandyaro.⁴⁹ The Udasi island complex of Sadh Belo near Sukkur, founded in 1823 by Baba Bankhandi, kept shrines to Annapurna, Hanuman, Ganesh, and Shiva beside a seat for the Granth — Sikhism institutionalized outside Khalsa norms.⁵⁰

Khalsa penetration came late and from outside. The 1901 census recorded only about a thousand Sikhs in Sindh; Chief Khalsa Diwan preachers, touring the province from 1907 and intensively in the 1930s, together with the indigenous convert Sant Thahriya Singh (d. 1927), raised the enumerated total to 32,627 by 1941 — 31,011 excluding Khairpur State.⁵¹ ⁵² A caveat is required: the Chief Khalsa Diwan-linked claim of “40,000 Khalsa Sikhs by Partition” exceeds the official census total and is best treated as movement self-report. The trajectory — a roughly thirty-to-forty-fold rise over four decades — is confirmed by the census; the number is not.51

Frontier and Pothohar Sikhs: urban, mercantile, Hindu-fluid

The Frontier presented the same profile in sharper relief. The 1941 census counted 57,939 Sikhs in the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province (62,411 including states and agencies) — only 1.9 per cent of the province, but 7.5 per cent of its urban population.⁵³ 17 The 1931 provincial census report describes these Sikhs as disproportionately traders, soldiers, and government employees, with “a higher proportion of literate persons than either of the other two main religions.”⁵⁴ It also documents a community in categorical motion: the superintendent attributed much of the 1921–31 increase (28,040 to 42,510) to persons who had earlier recorded themselves as Hindus, “preferring to regard Sikhism as a part of Hinduism,” and who now re-registered as Sikhs amid propaganda driven by “the allotment of seats in the Legislative Council.”53 Hindu–Sikh fluidity, and its hardening under electoral incentive, was thus a frontier phenomenon documented in the state’s own voice. Hazara’s 9,220 Sikhs included a strikingly prominent Sahajdhari ritual class: the scholar-memoirist Bhai Harbans Lal records the contractor Bhai Lakshmi Chand, the raagi Bhai Moti Ram at the head of a Sahajdhari kirtan jatha, and the kathavachak family of Bhai Fakir Chand Batra — non-Khalsa Sikhs supplying the community’s preachers and exegetes.⁵⁵ Across the Pothohar plateau, small-town Singh Sabha gurdwaras and sants’ deras anchored a comparable village Sikhism around Rawalpindi and Gujar Khan.⁵⁶

The Khalsa heartland

The Khalsa heartland and its canal-colony export

Against this plural periphery stood the agrarian Khalsa core — and, straddling the two, a third formation that complicates any simple west–east binary. The demographic and institutional weight of the Khalsa — its Jat peasant base, its martyrology, its emerging gurdwara-management apparatus — lay in Majha and Malwa, districts that would fall east of the Radcliffe Line.16 The major Sikh presence in the west was itself partly an export of that heartland: between 1885 and 1940 the canal-colony project resettled hundreds of thousands of central-Punjab Sikhs onto newly irrigated land in Lyallpur, Montgomery, and Sheikhupura.⁵⁷ The 1911 census recorded Jats as over twenty-three per cent of Chenab Colony immigrants, forty per cent of them Sikhs drawn chiefly from Amritsar, Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Ludhiana, and Gurdaspur.⁵⁸ Ravinder Kaur reads these colonists as “auxiliary colonists” of the colonial project, “a separate class among Punjabis … mobile, resourceful, and modern in its outlook,” and conservatively estimates that one in five Hindu and Sikh Partition migrants were such colonists or their descendants.⁵⁹ Their idiom was emphatically Khalsa: the Akali movement’s newspaper and party owed their name to “Master” Sunder Singh Lyallpuri, and the Nankana Sahib martyrs of 1921 included canal-colony settler families.⁶⁰ The western Sikh world was therefore bifurcated — an indigenous plural periphery of diwans, tikanas, and Sahajdhari preachers, overlaid by a transplanted Khalsa-Jat agrarian bourgeoisie — and both formations stood west of the line Radcliffe would draw through this geography in August 1947.

IV. Selective Excision: The Violence and the Numbers, 1946–1948

The plural geography mapped in Section 3 was destroyed in barely fourteen months. This section reconstructs the sequence, quantifies the displacement, and overlays the two maps: the geography of loss was the geography of plurality.

The sequence of cleansing

Hazara to Karachi: the sequence and its framings

The violence did not begin at independence. It opened in December 1946 in Hazara district of the Frontier Province, where, by the provincial finance minister’s April 1947 accounting, attacks had left 400 Hindus and Sikhs dead and fifty places of worship burned.⁶¹ When Khizar Hayat Tiwana’s Unionist ministry collapsed on 2 March 1947 and Master Tara Singh brandished his kirpan outside the Lahore Assembly the next day, organized mobs — “orchestrated by Muslim National Guards and ex-servicemen” and “condoned by Muslim League politicians,” Governor Jenkins reported — put Sikh and Hindu villages across Rawalpindi, Attock, Jhelum and Campbellpore “to the sword” between 6 and 13 March; some 40,000, mainly Sikhs, fled into camps.⁶² The death toll is unresolvable: the Punjab government’s communiqué admitted 2,049 dead while conceding its Rawalpindi and Attock figures unreliable, and scholarly estimates run from Ishtiaq Ahmed’s “more than 2000” to seven or eight thousand.60 ⁶³ At Thoa Khalsa on 12 March, after a siege demanding conversion, some two hundred Sikhs were killed and ninety-three women drowned themselves in a well; the SGPC’s 1950 report acclaimed the “epic resistance,” and the episode was, in Gyanendra Pandey’s analysis, immediately “canonised” as martyrdom.1 34

The Radcliffe Award of 17 August opened a second phase. Sheikhupura district — nearly a fifth Sikh in 1941 and the site of Nankana Sahib — had remained calm until allotted to Pakistan; organized killing followed from 24 to 26 August, abetted by military, police and Muslim League National Guards. Pippa Virdee records G. D. Khosla’s verdict that the district became “a by-word” for “murder, loot, arson and rape,” with 10,000 killed in the town within twenty-four hours; Nehru’s touring estimate reached 22,000.37 ⁶⁴ From Sindh, whose Sikhs had quit the large towns by August, evacuees were massacred at Karachi (6 January 1948), in the Gujrat train massacre (11 January), and at Parachinar (23 January).60

Responsibility remains tri-perspectival. The SGPC-commissioned history by G. S. Talib framed the violence as a pre-planned Muslim League campaign of “organised butchery” beginning in Hazara, before any Sikh provocation.60 Pakistani historiography inverts the sequence: “the riots were started by the Sikhs and the RSS,” and Tara Singh’s kirpan — “this will decide” — opened “a horrible chapter of carnage.”⁶⁵ ⁶⁶ Muhammad Munir, a former Pakistani chief justice, conceded that “the first large-scale communal attack in Punjab occurred in the Rawalpindi region in March 1947… and its perpetrators were Muslims,” while repeating the charge of a Sikh plan in the east.⁶⁷ Ahmed’s synthesis adjudicates: Muslims “took the initiative in western Punjab,” yet “in the end, more Muslims were killed in East Punjab”; Nehru had concluded as much by 22 August — “the Sikhs were the aggressors.”⁶⁸ ⁶⁹ Talbot, finally, ties Sikh militancy to the stakes of the boundary itself: “the loss to Pakistan of the rich Sikh farmlands of Lyallpur and the shrine of Nankana Sahib.”⁷⁰

The demographic measure

The 1941 census enumerated 1,509,499 Sikhs in West Punjab (including Bahawalpur), 62,411 in the North-West Frontier Province, 32,627 in Sindh and 12,044 in Baluchistan — roughly 1.6 to 1.7 million (6.1 per cent) in the territories that became Pakistan, densest in Lahore, Lyallpur and Sheikhupura (18–19 per cent Sikh each); by 1951 the Census of Pakistan no longer enumerated Sikhs as a category; the figure of 1,476 sometimes cited derives from its “Others” column.16 17 These figures measure different things. The 1941 figure is a stock; the conventional “2.5 million displaced” is a flow estimate: Khushwant Singh’s much-quoted “two and half millions… expelled from Pakistan” folds six years of natural increase and rounding into a figure exceeding census arithmetic by perhaps half.⁷¹ The more defensible proportion — some 40 per cent of the entire community “rendered refugees” — appears in Talib’s 1950 report and is restated by the Minority Rights Group.60 6 The census stock also undercounts plurality: as Section 3 notes, Nanakpanthi and Sahajdhari populations were partly enumerated as Hindus, vanishing from the Sikh column.31 Hill and his collaborators’ reconstruction of 2.3 to 3.2 million persons missing in 1947 — deaths plus unrecorded migration, all communities — is the scholarly corrective to partisan tolls.⁷²

The loss of sacred geography

The losses were institutional as well as human; the enumerations differ by denominator. Pakistan’s Department of Archaeology listed 130 important historical gurdwaras in West Pakistan in 1962, a count excluding endowments such as the Nankana Sahib estate — some 17,000 to 18,750 acres, which passed with other shrine properties to the Evacuee Trust Property Board.⁷³ Urvashi Butalia counts “over 250 historic Sikh shrines” abandoned; Pannu estimates that the Panth lost open access to “more than 75 percent of their most historically significant gurdwaras,” including Guru Nanak’s birthplace at Nankana Sahib and the site of his death at Kartarpur; Pakistani official accounts today list 195 gurdwaras, naming Panja Sahib at Hasan Abdal among the five most significant.2 19 ⁷⁴

The overlay argument

The geography of loss overlays the geography of plurality

Master Tara Singh’s later lament (quoted in Section 1) captures the catastrophe but not its structure.⁷⁵ Superimpose Section 3’s institutional map on the Radcliffe Line and the selectivity comes into focus. The Sahajdhari Committee of Multan, the Guru Nanak Sahajdhari Diwan of Panja Sahib (the “central forum” of uninitiated Sikhism) and the Sri Guru Nanak Sahajdhari Jatha of Campbellpore all lay west of the line, and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism concedes the consequence from within the tradition’s reference apparatus (the sentence is quoted in Section 6).15 Zahida Jatt confirms the pattern: the great West Punjab Udasi centres — Dera Baba Bhumman Shah, Gujranwala, Bhai Pheru, Lahore — were “abandoned and deserted” in 1947.⁷⁶ The Frontier communities were likewise urban and mercantile: Sikhs were 7.5 per cent of urban NWFP in 1941,17 and the province’s 1931 census superintendent described its indigenous Sikhs as “for the most part traders following the same occupations as Hindus”;53 Hazara’s conspicuous Sahajdhari class of contractors, ragis and kathavachaks was expelled wholesale.54

Because the expelled were disproportionately the urban Khatri and Arora carriers of non-Khalsa affiliation, while the population remaining in India was anchored in the Khalsa-Jat heartland, the migration functioned as a selective excision rather than a neutral transfer: it amputated precisely the periphery that Singh Sabha discourse had never fully converted. This is a structural claim about geography, not an allegation of coordinated intent. And the excision carried a paradox to which Section 5 turns: the catastrophe that decapitated plural Sikhism simultaneously empowered the Khalsa-normative institutions that absorbed its refugees.

V. Amritsar’s Wound, Delhi’s Empire: The Institutional Paradox

Partition presented Sikh institutions with a paradox that this paper treats as the institutional signature of the second closure. The event that severed the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) from most of its shrine patrimony concentrated the Sikhs into a compact, governable territory and generated—in the refugee-swollen capital—a counter-site with membership rules stricter than Amritsar’s own. Territorial catastrophe and pan-Sikh hegemony were two faces of a single displacement.

Consolidation at the center

Territorial loss, liturgical permanence

The wound is quantifiable, though the enumerations measure different things. Pannu’s proportion is that Partition deprived Sikhs “of open access to more than 75 percent of their most historically significant gurdwaras,” including Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur—a significance-weighted share, not a headcount.⁷⁷ Pakistan’s Department of Archaeology counted 130 “important historical” gurdwaras in 1962; Urvashi Butalia counts over 250 abandoned historic shrines.72 2 All register the same structural fact: after 1947 the geography of sacred memory no longer coincided with that of the surviving community.

The SGPC’s response was to convert loss into liturgical permanence. Having demanded in January 1948 an “immediate resolution” of the Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur lands—even exploring purchase or exchange—the Akali establishment settled for memorialization.⁷⁸ On 25 January 1952 the Akal Takht issued a hukamnama, on lines agreed by the SGPC, mandating insertion into the daily Ardas of a petition for “khulhe darshana didar te seva sanbhala” of the shrines “jinhan ton Pantha nun vichhoria gia hai”—from which the Panth had been separated.77 The vichhora entered the most-repeated text of Sikh corporate life; every recitation of the Ardas re-enacts the amputation. The hukamnama’s text and date, though reported in peer-reviewed scholarship, await confirmation against printed collections; its liturgical consequences remain audible. Within India, meanwhile, control of the gurdwaras made the SGPC, in Shani and Mandair’s assessment, “the ‘authoritative voice’ of the Sikhs”—an authority rendered more nearly absolute by the elimination of the western constituencies that might have moderated it.⁷⁹

Demographic concentration and the Punjabi Suba

The demographic basis of that authority was new. Sikhs had been “barely 13.22 per cent of the population of pre Partition Punjab (1941 census),” with a majority in none of its twenty-nine districts; the exchange of populations made them 38.5 per cent of combined East Punjab and PEPSU, majorities in four of East Punjab’s thirteen districts, and at 49.29 per cent the largest group in PEPSU.18 16 Kataria, developing Robin Jeffrey’s account, identifies the Punjabi Suba movement (1948–66) as disproportionately refugee-led.16 Its outcome, the Punjab Reorganisation Act effective 1 November 1966, created a state in which Sikhs “constituted almost 60 percent of the population”—60.22 per cent in the 1971 census.⁸⁰ 18 The wound in the west and the majority in the east were arithmetically one event, and the SGPC presided over the gain.

The definitional narrowing

The statutory sequence, 1925–1959

Consolidation was accompanied by a narrowing of who counted as a Sikh, accomplished by amendment rather than at the founding statute. The Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925, s. 2(9), defined a Sikh broadly as “a person who professes the Sikh religion,” formally including Sahajdharis.⁸¹ Punjab Act XI of 1944, moved by Giani Kartar Singh, inserted the categories “Amritdhari” and “Patit” and—in the Punjab and Haryana High Court’s reading—added to ss. 49 and 92 a bar on anyone who “trims or shaves his beard or Keshas except in case of Sehajdhari Sikhs,” creating the first hair-based disqualification while expressly exempting Sehajdharis.⁸² Punjab Act 1 of 1959 supplied the first formal definition, s. 2(10-A): a Sehajdhari performs ceremonies according to Sikh rites, uses no tobacco or kutha meat, is not a patit, and can recite the Mul Mantar.⁸³ The sequence disciplines this paper’s claim: within the 1947–1970s window, Sahajdhari marginalization was definitional and institutional, not electoral. Actual disenfranchisement arrived only with the Union notification of 8 October 2003, was quashed on 20 December 2011—the scheme had “stood the test of time for over 75 years”—and was reimposed by the Sikh Gurdwaras (Amendment) Act of 2016.81 ⁸⁴ The post-Partition decades supplied instead the cultural machinery of narrowing: the patit category, through which—as Amandeep Sandhu documents—the SGPC reclassified trimmed Sikhs as apostates rather than Sahajdharis—what SGPC member Kiranjot Kaur called “a very thin definition.”83

That machinery was assembled on the eve of the deluge. The Sikh Rehat Maryada, deliberated from 1936 and approved by SGPC Resolution No. 97 on 3 February 1945, was published that year and issued in English in 1950; it is widely described as enshrining “the Tat Khalsa narrative.”⁸⁵ The drafting body anticipated the code: participants had to be Khalsa-initiated, and only one Sahajdhari attended, once.⁸⁶ A rule of orthopraxy written almost entirely by Khalsa Sikhs thus governed a Panth reconstituted by Partition, in which—as Paul Brass observed—“the sahajdari Sikhs, while not formally excluded, are considered less ‘genuine.’”32

Article 25 and the juridical subsumption

The narrowing was defensive as much as disciplinary. Article 25, Explanation II construed “Hindus” as including “persons professing the Sikh, Jain or Buddhist religion,” a clause the Drafting Committee extended to the three Indic traditions after initial resistance.⁸⁷ Both Sikh members of the Constituent Assembly, Sardar Hukam Singh and Bhupinder Singh Mann, refused to sign the Constitution; Hukam Singh recorded that “the Sikhs feel utterly disappointed and frustrated… My community cannot subscribe its assent.”⁸⁸ Personal law followed suit: Sikh protest had “virtually no effect,” Sekhon and Singh conclude, the Anand Marriage Act of 1909 being displaced by the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955.⁸⁹ Master Tara Singh’s lament of 1961 (quoted in Section 1) condensed the grievance into a sentence of refugee-era political theology.5 Against a state that numbered Sikhs among Hindus, definitional policing acquired existential warrant: if the outer boundary could not be secured constitutionally, it would be secured internally.

The refugee capital as counter-site

Delhi: refugees legislating Khalsa normativity

Delhi demonstrates that this normativity was hegemonic, not merely imposed. The city’s Sikh population rose more than eightfold, from 16,167 in 1941 to 137,096 in 1951, overwhelmingly through refugees from the plural western districts.⁹⁰ The institutional consequence, in the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism’s prose, was that “the authority of DGPC [the Delhi Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee] began to be challenged. Attempts were made to dispossess the committee functioning under the auspices of the SGPC. Litigation and use of physical force from both sides were tried.”⁹¹ On causation the sources divide. The Encyclopaedia locates the break in refugee demography—the newcomers, “mostly artisans, businessmen and industrialists,” overwhelming the old establishment.90 Akali institutional memory instead credits Sant Fateh Singh’s 1971 morcha—the jatha from the Akal Takht on 22 July, the mass arrests, the government’s promise of legislation.⁹² The two are positions, not refutations: demography supplied the constituency, the morcha the trigger.

The settlement both produced was the Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1971 (Act 82 of 1971), and the elected Delhi Sikh Gurdwaras Management Committee of 1974, independent of Amritsar.90 ⁹³ Here lies the anomaly. As McLeod observed, where the 1925 Act required only that a voter “profess the Sikh religion,” the Delhi Act added the clause “and keeps unshorn hair,” exacting the declaration “I solemnly affirm that I am a Keshdhari Sikh … and that I have no other religion”; Committee membership required amritdhari status, unshorn kesh, abstinence, and Gurmukhi literacy.⁹⁴ The city with the densest concentration of refugee, disproportionately non-Khalsa Sikhs thus adopted the strictest membership regime in Sikh institutional life—through its own elected body. The SGPC’s later account concedes the direction of travel: it “contributed its mite in getting the definition of Sikh adopted by the Parliament which made it mandatory for a Sikh to be Keshadhari,” and adopted the Delhi definition for the draft All-India Gurdwara Act—a transcription requiring verification against the proceedings.⁹⁵ Refugees, in short, legislated Khalsa normativity rather than merely receiving it. Yet statutes govern shrines, not streets: in the refugee colony—where a Hindu relief apparatus and the Singh Sabha idiom competed household by household for the displaced—the narrowing met its only real rival (Section 6).

VI. The Refugee Colony as Boundary Machine

If the Singh Sabha built the ideology of Khalsa exclusivity and the 1925 Act its legal scaffolding, it was the refugee colony that did the demographic work of erasure. The state’s rehabilitation apparatus sorted, housed, compensated, and renamed the displaced; in doing so it created the dense urban sites where the intermediate categories of Sikh life — Sahajdhari, Peshawari, Hazarawal, Sindhi Nanakpanthi — were processed out of existence. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism concedes the mechanism in a single, unreconstructed sentence: “Consequent upon the partition of India in 1947, Sahajdharis became widely dispersed in the country.”15 This section traces how dispersal became dissolution: first the geography and economy of resettlement, then the two competing boundary projects that worked the colonies, and finally the measurable decay of the sub-identities the refugees had carried east.

Dispersal and resettlement

The geography of resettlement

The official enumeration of October 1948 counted 4,424,000 displaced persons from West Pakistan in India, of whom 31.5 per cent — roughly 1.4 million — were Sikh.⁹⁶ Their distribution was double-edged: East Punjab and PEPSU absorbed about 63 per cent, but the remainder dispersed across the Union — Delhi 377,117, the United Provinces 412,287, Bombay 264,023, the Rajasthan princely states some 260,000 combined.95 For Sikhism this meant that the carriers of the tradition’s plural periphery were scattered among far larger non-Sikh populations at precisely the moment their home institutions had been amputated. Resettlement followed a camps-to-colonies sequence. Kingsway Camp in Delhi held some thirty thousand refugees at a time before its site was reborn as Guru Tegh Bahadur (GTB) Nagar; Punjabi Bagh was officially “Refugees Colony” until 1960; Faridabad was purpose-built from May 1949 for some 30,000 North-West Frontier Province refugees; and in Bombay, wartime barracks at Sion-Koliwada sheltered roughly 10,000 mostly Hazara-district Sikhs until the Central government constructed the Punjabi Refugee Colony in 1958 — likewise renamed GTB Nagar.12 ⁹⁷ ⁹⁸ ⁹⁹ The state deliberately preserved “regional affinity” in allotment, clustering refugees by district and even village of origin, as in Faridabad’s New Industrial Township; yet this administrative courtesy fixed frontier identities as addresses rather than as living traditions.¹⁰⁰

Occupational transformation

Resettlement re-made the refugees’ class position, and unequally. V.N. Datta’s foundational study records that 70 per cent of Delhi’s displaced persons entered trade, transport, and services, against 20 per cent in manufacturing — a wholesale urbanization of a population that in West Punjab had spanned peasantry and bazaar alike.¹⁰¹ Ravinder Kaur’s “second migration” thesis explains the differential: Khatri and Arora trading castes, already mobile and capital-holding from the canal-colony era, reconstituted themselves in urban commerce, while Jat Sikh colonists were re-agrarianized on evacuee land.58 Rural compensation ran through “graded cuts” — progressive reductions whereby a thousand-acre proprietor received barely 176 — while urban claimants faced a compensation pool of roughly Rs 185 crore against claims estimated at Rs 450 crore, paid years late and excluding movables.¹⁰² ¹⁰³ Dalit refugees fared worst: against demands for 500,000 acres for Dalit families, East Punjab offered some 75,000, and in Delhi they were segregated into inferior sites such as Rehgar Pura.¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰⁵ The political consequence for urban trading-caste Sikhs was stark: in the Punjab Assembly elections of 1952 and 1957, not a single urban Sikh of the trading castes was elected, driving this displaced elite toward cultural and religious leadership instead.¹⁰⁶ Their public culture, meanwhile, was absorbed into an East-Punjab Jat idiom — the printed turbans of Rawalpindi and Lahore giving way to solid colours, Pothohari and Saraiki speech receding.¹⁰⁷

Two boundary projects in the colonies

The colony was thus never a neutral container. It was worked simultaneously by two boundary projects — one absorbing refugees into an expansive Hindu nation, the other disciplining them into Khalsa normativity — and the speed of the intermediate categories’ dissolution is best explained by this competition rather than by either project alone.

Hindu absorption

From the Hindu-nationalist side, relief work doubled as recruitment. Jaffrelot’s standard account holds that Partition “nationalized” the RSS, whose Delhi relief operations “won over a section of the refugees”; critics such as Noorani read the same operations as ideological grooming — both readings should be retained as positions, since the Sangh’s own literature is celebratory and its critics’ adversarial.¹⁰⁸ The RSS’s Hindu Sahayata Samiti issued questionnaires to refugees on their background and training, an early fusion of welfare and cadre-building.¹⁰⁹ Electorally, the Jana Sangh’s Delhi organization rested on what contemporaries criticized as a “Punjabi refugee” and “local Bania” alliance, performing strongly in the municipal elections of 1954 and 1958.¹¹⁰ The boundary-blurring was explicit in the Hindu Mahasabha’s programme, which promised “relief to displaced Hindus (including Sikhs)” — a primary-text subsumption of Sikh refugees into the Hindu category, though the document’s partisan provenance requires that it be read as a programme, not a description.¹¹¹ Sangh-affiliated accounts place women’s shakhas from 1960 precisely in the refugee belt of Lajpat Nagar, Karol Bagh, and Punjabi Bagh.¹¹²

Khalsa normativization

From the Sikh side, refugees themselves built in the Khalsa-normative idiom. Within about a year of settlement, refugees from Rawalpindi, Sargodha, and Lyallpur pooled funds for the “Gurudwara Refugee Singh Sabha” on Deshbandhu Gupta Road in Karol Bagh — displacement encoded in an institution named, significantly, not for a lost frontier diwan but for the Singh Sabha. The detail rests on journalism with named oral sources and should be treated as indicative rather than archival.¹¹³ Sacred objects crossed the border into the same idiom: the revered “Bhai Banno Wali Bir” of Mangat, in Gujrat district (today Mandi Bahauddin), was carried to Kanpur in August 1947, a literal transplantation of West Punjab sacrality into a United Provinces refugee city — a striking but single-sourced episode.3 Even toponymy was Khalsa-ized: the renaming of both Delhi’s Kingsway Camp and Bombay’s Sion-Koliwada as Guru Tegh Bahadur Nagar overlaid refugee space with the martyrology of the Khalsa canon, in the Bombay case overwriting the claims of the local Koli community.¹¹⁴

Dissolution of the intermediate categories

Language as secular conversion

The cleanest time-series evidence of dissolution is linguistic. Punjabi mother-tongue declarations in Delhi peaked at 13.3 per cent in the 1961 census and fell to 5.2 per cent by 2011, even though ethnic Punjabis remained a large plurality of the city; in West Delhi, the refugee heartland, only 14.52 per cent reported Punjabi against an estimated 60 per cent ethnic-Punjabi population.96 Oral testimony dates the shift to the first generation: “schools were all Hindi… we were totally Punjabi speaking and there it was all Hindi,” one refugee’s daughter recalled, remembering that “people would make fun of her language.”¹¹⁵ In Punjab itself the same decades saw Arya Samaj and Jana Sangh campaigns pressing Punjabi-speaking Hindus — including refugee Khatri and Arora families — to record Hindi as their mother tongue.¹¹⁶ Hindi adoption, in short, did more to erase frontier distinctiveness in the diaspora than any doctrinal intervention: a secular conversion that reclassified refugee households inside the Hindu-majority national mainstream without any formal change of religion.

Sub-identity decay

The associational forms that had carried frontier identity decayed within one to two generations. Amritsar’s Peshawari Mohalla held over five hundred Peshawari families, Hindu and Sikh, keeping Peshawari dress and Hindko speech — but, the record notes, “the younger generation is not fluent in these languages.”¹¹⁷ Bombay’s Hazara Society at Chunabatti and Delhi’s All India Mianwali District Association, which had built Mianwali Nagar, persisted as named spaces before withering, by the late 2010s, into “largely social and cultural” vestiges.¹¹⁸ 99 Yet dissolution was contested at the household level. The Munjal family of Kamalia, West Punjab, donated its Guru Granth Sahib to the local gurdwara as it adopted Arya Samaj rites — and yet, per the family’s oral history, “her descendants to this day hold both Arya Samaj traditions as well as Sikh prayers at their homes and factories.”¹¹⁹ A single oral-history case cannot bear statistical weight, but it documents what the census cannot: lived fluidity surviving inside households while both institutional poles policed its boundaries. Those whom neither container could hold — who sought a living guru, a frontier liturgy, or a Sindhi-inflected devotion that neither the colony gurdwara nor the shakha accommodated — gravitated toward the new religious movements taking shape on refugee geography, the subject of Section 7.

VII. Transplanted Heterodoxies: Partition and the New Religious Movements

If the refugee colony channelled displaced Sikhs into two great normative containers — Khalsa gurdwara and Hindu nation — it also filled a third. The Punjabi new religious movements that expanded so dramatically after 1947 were not parallel phenomena to the refugee catastrophe but products of it: genealogically Partition-born, staffed by refugee founders, and planted on refugee geography. The Radha Soami and Nirankari formations had “emerged out of a devotional milieu of Sikh and Hindu beliefs and practices,” then been “modernized so as to meet the unique needs of worshippers”;¹²⁰ Partition made them receptors for the plural, non-Khalsa populations the remade Panth could no longer hold.

A genealogy of 1948

The institutional record permits this claim without hedging. Delhi alone absorbed roughly 450,000 refugees, mainly from West Punjab — about a third of the city’s population (the October 1948 enumeration counted 377,117; Section 6) — and by the 1950s had, in V.N. Datta’s phrase, “emphatically become a Punjabi city.”¹²¹ 113 In this demographic sea the formation-year 1948 recurs too often to be coincidental.

Sant Nirankari Mandal

The Sant Nirankari Mission was born in the Frontier, not in Delhi: it dates its formal beginning to 25 May 1929, when the Peshawar-based kirtani Baba Buta Singh — no refugee; he died in 1943 — met his disciple Avtar Singh.¹²² The refugee was Avtar Singh (b. 1899, Latifal, Jhelum district), who ran a bakery in Peshawar and then Rawalpindi, migrated to Delhi in 1947, set up headquarters in Paharganj, and registered the Sant Nirankari Mandal under the Societies Registration Act in 1948.121 ¹²³ His successor Gurbachan Singh (b. 1930, Peshawar; matriculated from Khalsa School, Rawalpindi) was himself a camp refugee: movement history has him staffing the Wah camp and loading devotees’ belongings onto a goods train for India.¹²⁴ The Mission’s own chronicle admits that in Delhi “the Mission was still trying to recover from the shock of Migration,” its sangats “confined to Paharganj.”¹²⁵ Under Avtar Singh it acquired its own scripture, the Avtar Bani (1957; enlarged 1965, its Urdu and Sindhi stanzas marking its western origins), and by 1973 counted 354 branches.¹²⁶ The older Nirankari (Baba Dyal) sect — a Sahajdhari-origin body of “Khatri, Arora and Bhatia traders, bankers and shopkeepers” of the Pothohar — likewise migrated en masse from its Rawalpindi darbar at Partition, re-establishing itself at Chandigarh in 1958.¹²⁷ ¹²⁸

The Beas succession and its refugee offshoots

Radha Soami Satsang Beas stood at the storm’s eye: in 1947 Sawan Singh “provided shelter and aid to refugees of all faiths at the Dera,” while his lieutenant Kirpal Singh evacuated the Lahore satsang’s families and more than 150 Muslims fleeing East Punjab violence took refuge at Beas.¹²⁹ ¹³⁰ Formalization began in the Partition year itself — RSSB’s own records show a Scheme of Management and Administration of 1947 — culminating in Charan Singh’s 1957 registration of the society, the mitti-seva construction of the Dera township, and expansion to over ninety countries.¹³¹ 128 The succession crisis after Sawan Singh’s death in April 1948 — the pivot of the critical literature on succession¹³² — scattered rival lineages onto refugee geography: Kirpal Singh, born in Rawalpindi district and employed in Lahore’s Military Accounts Department, re-founded his mission in refugee Delhi (first initiations December 1948; Sawan Ashram, Shakti Nagar, 1951);¹³³ and at Sirsa, in the refugee-receiving Bagar region, Sawan Singh’s Balochistan-born emissary Shah Mastana — deputed before Partition to preach across Balochistan, Sindh, and the West Punjab districts of Multan, Lyallpur, and Montgomery — founded Dera Sacha Sauda on 29 April 1948, reconstituting east of the border the western satsang network he had served.¹³⁴

The receptor argument

Genealogy, however, establishes only the supply of institutions; why displaced Sikhs should have entered them requires a further step, taken in two grades of confidence.

The genealogically adjacent tradition

The first step is well documented. Radha Soami was itself a Nanakpanthi offshoot: Shiv Dayal Singh’s parents were Nanakpanthi Sikhs, and his disciple Jaimal Singh — effectively the tradition’s Sikh successor — planted the lineage at Beas.20 The movement occupied a deliberate boundary position, retaining Punjabi Sikh idiom — Gurbani vocabulary, head-covering, shoe removal, karah prasad, langar — while discarding the Adi Granth as final authority in favour of a living Satguru — hence “its teachers often being cited as either Hindus or Sikhs.”¹³⁵ ¹³⁶ The post-1947 drift of displaced Sahajdhari, Nanakpanthi, and Frontier Sikhs toward such formations is best read not as conversion but as return to a genealogically adjacent living-guru tradition that replicated gurdwara-centred religious sociology without requiring Khalsa identity — an institutionalized Sahajdhari space at the very moment the Sahajdhari category was being legislated out of the Panth.

The demographic-base hypothesis

The stronger claim — that these movements’ post-1947 expansion drew disproportionately on displaced urban Khatri and Arora non-Khalsa Sikhs — is this paper’s explicit, testable hypothesis, not an established finding. What the scholarship documents is sociological adjacency, not refugee composition: Juergensmeyer characterizes the following as “middle-class merchants and administrators” and RSSB as “generally a middle-class sect” (with stronger lower-caste recruitment in Malwa, a caution against overgeneralization); Sandhu’s ethnography describes “former government servants, teachers, public sector employees.”¹³⁷ ¹³⁸ ¹³⁹ Dera sociology supplies the mechanism — “an alternative space for social, spiritual and cultural fulfilment” that “welcomes people, irrespective of their religion or caste” — developed for later decades, applied to 1947 here as analytical extension.¹⁴⁰ The motivating observation is a correlation: every major 1948 expansion node — Paharganj, Shakti Nagar, RSSB’s Pusa Road office in Delhi’s refugee-colony belt, Sirsa — sits on refugee resettlement geography, and the movement most compositionally documented, the Asli Nirankaris, was precisely a Khatri-Arora trading-caste body transplanted whole.126 ¹⁴¹ Whether displaced non-Khalsa Sikhs specifically swelled dera constituencies has never been studied; the question awaits the physical text of Radhasoami Reality’s social-composition chapters and Kaushal’s history of the movement.20 ¹⁴²

Backlash and boundary closure

The corridor these movements kept open — Sikh idiom without the Khalsa boundary — was what the consolidating Panth could not tolerate, and the resulting boundary war was a direct post-Partition phenomenon.

From skirmish to excommunication

Sikh–Sant Nirankari clashes began in the early 1950s and simmered through the 1960s, with the Damdami Taksal and Akhand Kirtani Jatha mobilizing against Nirankari influence; in 1973 the Golden Temple head priests declared the Nirankaris enemies of the Panth.¹⁴³ The doctrinal flashpoint was the living-guru claim compounded by scripture: from 1957 the Avtar Bani functioned as an alternative to the Guru Granth, which mainstream authorities came to rank among the most “dangerous” sectarian texts; Khushwant Singh framed the fundamental difference as the Nirankaris “worshiping gurus other than the 10 recognised by the Sikhs.”¹⁴⁴ ¹⁴⁵ On 13 April 1978 a Nirankari convention in Amritsar, permitted by the Akali-led government, was confronted by roughly two hundred Sikhs led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and Fauja Singh; sixteen people — thirteen Sikhs and three Nirankaris — were killed (the casualty narrative remains contested; the accused were acquitted on self-defence grounds in January 1980).142 The Akal Takht hukamnama of 10 June 1978 ordered Sikhs to sever all relations with Nirankaris;¹⁴⁶ Gurbachan Singh was assassinated in Delhi on 24 April 1980.142 The clash is widely treated as a turning point — the opening episode of the crisis that culminated in 1984.¹⁴⁷ That the Panth’s most violent twentieth-century boundary enforcement fell on a refugee-founded movement from Peshawar completes this paper’s arc; Section 8 turns to a community that carried much the same Nanakpanthi substrate but met a different container.

VIII. Sindh as Counterfactual: The Container That Expanded

The Sindhi refugee experience serves as this paper’s control case: a community carrying much the same Nanakpanthi substrate as Punjab’s Sahajdhari periphery, displaced along the same routes in 1947, yet processed by a different boundary regime — isolating institutional choice from demographic inevitability.

Jhulelal refashioned

Panjwani’s Bombay project and the portable flame

Sindhi refugee religion rebuilt itself around its hybridity rather than despite it. Before 1947, Jhulelal (Uderolal) was one deity among several — patron of the Daryapanthi river cult, identified with Varuna and with the Muslim Khwaja Khizr — not the community’s collective emblem.¹⁴⁸ In the 1950s a Bombay circle led by the Larkana-born singer Ram Panjwani undertook what Falzon calls self-conscious “identity mongering”: pamphlets, images, and devotional songs circulated in their thousands, and temples were established in which “Jhulelal had pride of place — these usually also include the Granth Sahib and Hindu murtis.”¹⁴⁹ Khan dates the movement’s formal launch to 1959, when Panjwani proclaimed Cheti Chand, the new moon of Chaitra, as Sindhyat divas, the “day of Sindhism”; the organizing committees culminated in the Bharatiya Sindh Sabha (1979).¹⁵⁰ Boivin reads the reinvention as the symbolic acceptance of permanent exile, the nexus by which “a new Sindhi group appeared, knowing they will never go back to their motherland.”¹⁵¹

Sanctity itself was made portable: the Chaliha Sahib temple at Ulhasnagar houses an eternal flame (akhand jyot) that community tradition holds was carried from the Pir jo Goth shrine at Partition, anchoring the cult in the refugee city.¹⁵² ¹⁵³ The refugee milieu likewise generated new organizations of Sindhi pedigree: the Brahma Kumaris, founded by the Hyderabad diamond merchant Dada Lekhraj, relocated from Karachi to Mount Abu on 5 May 1950;¹⁵⁴ Sadhu T.L. Vaswani re-established his mission at Pune in 1949,¹⁵⁵ its satsangs under Dada J.P. Vaswani continuing to “include mainstream Hindu as well as Nanakpanth elements.”148 Boivin documents, in parallel, recreated Sufi darbars retaining a “trans-religious” identity “amidst the rigidification of official religions in both India and Pakistan.”¹⁵⁶

The asymmetry

The elastic Hindu container and the Khalsa-or-Hindu binary

What distinguishes the Sindhi case is not hybridity — Punjab’s periphery had that too — but the container that received it. Burton had observed in 1851 that in Sindh “many castes have so intermingled the religion of the Sikhs with their original Hinduism, that we can scarcely discern the line of demarcation,”47 and the tikana housing the Guru Granth Sahib beside Hindu murtis — a formation that, Takhar and Jakobsh note, has “escaped academic attention” — was reproduced across refugee India.14 ¹⁵⁷ Crucially, this fluidity survived inside an elastic “Hindu” label: the container’s subsequent Hinduization — Jhulelal recast as Varuna, Gita in hand, Cheti Chand aligned to the Brahmanical calendar — proceeded through the community’s own entrepreneurs rather than by external expulsion.147 On the Sikh side no equivalent container existed. Kothari and Thadhani argue that “straitjacketed definitions of a ‘Hindu’ or a ‘Sikh’ make invisible those who, in the logic of modern nations, appear to have oxymoronic identities,” and document post-Partition Sindhi Sikhs “pulled in the direction of mainstream Sikhism identified with the Punjab region” — the Khalsa-or-Hindu binary whose consequences they defer as beyond their paper’s scope.13 Kothari’s earlier formulation names the mechanism: Partition hardened previously porous identities.¹⁵⁸ The asymmetry is thus institutional, not demographic: two regimes processed the same substrate, one absorbing it, the other expelling it.

Diagnostic endpoint: the 2022–23 saroop handovers

The episode with which this paper opened renders this asymmetry visible. It lies outside the paper’s period and is offered as a diagnostic endpoint, not as evidence of origins. In December 2022–January 2023, Nihang Sikhs demanded that Sindhi institutions around Indore either remove the murtis placed alongside the Guru Granth Sahib or surrender the scripture; on 11–12 January 2023 Sindhi families handed over saroops — “from around 153 of their Mandirs/ Tikana,” in one community account — to Gurdwara Imli Sahib, with parallel handovers reported in Kota, Beawar, Jodhpur, and Bhopal.¹⁵⁹ 46 The counts in circulation measure different things — roughly 153 institutions in the first account, more than ninety saroops (scripture copies) in a second — and the sources are partisan on both sides.46 Hindu outlets framed the events as Sindhis “forced to return the Guru Granth Sahib and assert their primary identity as Hindus”; Sikh reporting framed them as maryada enforcement, the Nihangs “alleging that the sanctity of Guru Granth Sahib was not being maintained in the Deras and Temples.”¹⁶⁰ ¹⁶¹ This paper adjudicates neither framing. The structural point stands regardless: seventy-five years after Partition, communities whose tikanas had refused the Hindu–Sikh binary were compelled at last to enact it. The boundary logic traced here from 1947 did not terminate in 1971; it awaited only its occasion.

IX. Memory as Khalsa-ization

Demography and law do not exhaust the mechanisms of the second closure; the refugees’ own memory-work completed it in the register of narrative. The evidence assembled below suggests that Partition suffering was not merely remembered by Sikh institutions but translated — folded into the Guru-period martyrological sequence in a way that reclassified who the dead had been.

Martyrological absorption

Thoa Khalsa into martyrology

The Thoa Khalsa episode (Section 4) returns here as evidence. On 12 March 1947, after a siege of Thoa Khalsa village (Kahuta tehsil, Rawalpindi district) by a mob demanding conversion, some two hundred Sikhs were killed and ninety-three women drowned themselves in a well rather than submit.1 What matters analytically is the afterlife of the episode: as Urvashi Butalia documented, the village’s survivors, resettled as refugees, commemorate the dead annually on 13 March at a Delhi gurdwara, “referring to the deaths as martyrdom, not suicide.”2 Gyanendra Pandey identified the same process as “canonisation”: the SGPC’s own 1950 report acclaimed the village’s “epic resistance,” elevating one locality’s catastrophe into exemplary panthic history.34 Louis Fenech’s study of Sikh martyrdom supplies the mechanism. Martyrdom, he argues, has functioned since the Guru period as the Panth’s identity-constituting currency — suffering willingly embraced in defense of the faith, patterned on Guru Arjan and Guru Tegh Bahadur.33 To narrate the Thoa Khalsa dead as shahids is therefore not neutral commemoration; it recruits ambiguous, gendered deaths into a Khalsa martyrological sequence in which, doctrinally, only steadfastness-unto-death within the rahit counts as shahidi.

Shyamal Kataria’s interviews show this translation operating across the refugee generation as a self-conscious “victimhood-rich” memory: refugees claimed foremost-victim status — “the Sikhs were the worst losers of Partition” — and folded 1947 into sacred history, as in the Sheikhupura canal-colonist’s formulation that “if you look at Sikh history from the time of our Gurus till now, you can say it is almost our destiny to die a violent death.”5 The refrain had a political author as well: Master Tara Singh’s endlessly paraphrased 1961 question (quoted in Section 1) crystallized loss into communal grievance.5 Kataria’s wider research program documents the subsequent diffusion of this refugee narrative beyond the refugees themselves: to non-refugee Sikhs of East Punjab who had experienced 1947 very differently, and onward into the Punjabi Suba agitation and, eventually, Khalistani legitimation.¹⁶² ¹⁶³ Memory, in short, was not preserved but propagated — and propagated in a martyrological idiom.

The paradox of conscripted suffering

Conscripted suffering, institutional silence

Here this paper advances its own interpretation, which should be read as such rather than as established historiography. The populations who died and fled in the western districts were, as Sections 3 and 4 documented, disproportionately the bearers of plural, non-Khalsa traditions: the urban Khatri and Arora trading castes of the canal-colony towns and the Frontier; the Sahajdhari congregations of Multan, Panja Sahib, and Campbellpore — the very belt in which Thoa Khalsa lay; the Nanakpanthi networks of Sindh. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism’s terse notice of the post-Partition dispersal (quoted in Section 6) records the demographic fact.15 The paradox is that the suffering of precisely these populations was narratively conscripted to consolidate the Khalsa-centered identity that marginalized the traditions they carried. The dead of the Pothohar entered panthic memory not as Sahajdhari or plural Sikhs but as shahids of an undifferentiated Khalsa Panth; their commemoration ratified the boundary that their own religious lives had ignored. Victimhood, converted into martyrological capital, enriched the identity that had least room for the victims.

The opposite pole of the same process is institutional silence. Kanika Singh’s study of Delhi’s gurdwara museums observes that the DSGMC’s shrines — institutions of the refugee city par excellence — long mounted no commemoration of Partition at all, and that “the blanking out of any reference to the Partition is intriguing.”¹⁶⁴ Silence and martyrological absorption are less contradictory than they appear: both decline to remember the victims as the plural Sikhs they were. Martyrology was deployed where memory served panthic consolidation; silence, where the refugee past’s non-Khalsa texture was institutionally inconvenient. What both registers foreclose is any commemorative space in which the dead of 1947 could be mourned in their own traditions. The Conclusion takes up the definitional endpoint of this trajectory: the SGPC’s 1973 General House resolution on the Sahajdhari institution (quoted in Section 10), and the keshdhari-only definitions adopted in its wake.94

X. Conclusion

The second closure restated

This paper has argued that the making of modern Sikhism proceeded in two closures, one discursive and one demographic. The Singh Sabha–Tat Khalsa project of 1873–1925 supplied the ideology, legal vocabulary, and machinery of Khalsa exclusivity; what it could not supply was a population. Colonial Punjab remained measurably plural — Sahajdhari Sikhs still 14.9 per cent of Punjab’s Sikhs in 1911, down from 20 per cent in 1891, with “considerable” Sahajdhari populations in the Frontier and Sindh.15 Partition removed that population: between 1.6 and 1.7 million Sikhs enumerated in 1941 in the territories that became Pakistan had disappeared from the 1951 Census of Pakistan’s enumeration, and the geography of the excision was almost exactly the geography of plurality.16 What remained consolidated: from 13.22 per cent of undivided Punjab in 1941, Sikhs became 60.22 per cent of the redrawn state by 1971 — the demographic foundation of Khalsa-normative hegemony.18 The paper’s single most important claim follows: the modern Sikhism that presents itself as timeless was produced less by reformist persuasion than by the selective removal, dispersal, and reclassification of those who embodied its alternatives.

The SGPC’s verdict

The Panth’s own institutions pronounced the verdict. In a General House resolution of 1973 — its text circulating in SGPC-adjacent collections, pending verification against the proceedings — the Committee recorded that “after partition of the country this institution of Sehajdhari Sikhs has virtually ceased to exist”: some “have become Singhs,” the rest “have fallen back to the fold of Hindu culture.”94 Joginder Singh corroborates the substance: the SGPC’s general meeting of 31 March 1976 concluded that Sehajdharis “either had become Amritdharis or merged into the Hindu social order.”¹⁶⁵ Khushwant Singh had already supplied the aphorism: Sahajdhari Sikhism, once “the half way house” to the Khalsa form, had reversed direction and “become a halfway house to Hinduism.”¹⁶⁶ The two exits named in 1973 and 1976 — Khalsa normativization and Hindu absorption — are the boundary machines traced above through the refugee colonies, the new religious movements, and the Sindhi tikanas. The 2022–23 handovers of Guru Granth Sahib saroops by Sindhi communities (Section 1) close the bracket: the binary the 1973 resolution announced as fact was still being policed seventy-five years on.

Implications and future research

Tests and limits

The paper’s claims are unevenly evidentiary, and its future agenda follows from that unevenness. The institutional genealogy of the 1947–48 movements is established; the hypothesis that displaced non-Khalsa Sikhs supplied their demographic base is not — Juergensmeyer’s characterization of the Radha Soami following as “middle-class merchants and administrators” is the strongest existing support, and the linkage has never been studied.¹⁶⁷ It is testable: Kaushal’s 1984 Panjab University doctoral thesis, RSSB and Dera Sacha Sauda membership records, and colony-level gurdwara and satsang registers in Delhi, Sirsa, and Bombay would confirm or falsify it, as would the 1947 Partition Archive’s oral histories re-coded for pre-Partition tradition rather than event narrative.¹⁶⁸ Three limits stand. The absence-of-linking-literature claim carries the risk of an overlooked work, though the closest scholarship (Section 2) itself observes the pull toward “mainstream Sikhism” and defers its analysis. Post-1971 material — the saroop handovers above all — is diagnostic, not evidentiary: it illustrates a boundary logic’s persistence, not its origins. And the NRM-absorption hypothesis remains exactly that: advanced to be tested, not a finding to be cited.

“Indore: Sindhi community returns copies of Guru Granth Sahib to Gurdwara after Nihangs object to the scripture being placed beside idols in temples,” Free Press Journal (Indore), 13 January 2023, https://www.freepressjournal.in/indore/indore-sindhi-community-returns-copies-of-guru-granth-sahib-to-gurdwara-after-nihangs-object-to-the-scripture-being-placed-beside-idols-in-temples. The handover took place on Wednesday, 11 January 2023. Counts vary by source: fifty saroops from fifty temples and darbars (FPJ); more than ninety saroops, or “around 153” institutions, in community and partisan accounts. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The video and the Nihang objection were reported by partisan outlets on both sides and are cited here as evidence of framing, not of fact. See, e.g., OpIndia, “Video of Nihangs removing Hindu idols from Sindhi temple goes viral,” January 2023, https://www.opindia.com/2023/01/video-of-nihangs-removing-hindu-idols-from-sindhi-temple-goes-viral/. ↩
“Sindhi Temples Return Saroops of Shri Guru Granth Sahib: How SGPC Has Tied Itself Up in Knots on the Issue,” Swarajya, 23 January 2023, https://swarajyamag.com/commentary/sindhi-temples-return-saroops-of-shri-guru-granth-sahib-how-sgpc-has-tied-itself-up-in-knots-on-the-issue — reporting SGPC president Harjinder Singh Dhami’s statement distancing the SGPC from the Nihangs and calling for unity with Sehajdhari Sikhs; the Sindhi Samaj’s decision to replace the Granth with the Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana; and further handovers in Rajasthan. Dhami’s statement should be verified against The Tribune or the SGPC’s own release before journal submission. ↩ ↩²
On the 1905 removal of idols from the Harmandir Sahib precincts under the manager Arur Singh, see Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries (1994); on the Rehat Maryada’s approval on 3 February 1945, see the Rehat Maryada note in Section 5. The Rehat Maryada’s prohibition governs gurdwaras; the Nihangs extended it to Sindhi temples. Nihang jathebandis follow their own maryada rather than the SGPC code, so the genealogy given here is of the norm, not of the enforcers’ authority. ↩
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“1978 Sikh–Nirankari Clash.” Wikipedia, accessed 2025. [Background section consulted also via Bharatpedia mirror; assassination of Gurbachan Singh, 24 April 1980.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_Sikh%E2%80%93Nirankari_clash ↩
Bochkovskaya, Anna. “Satguru’s Word, Online and Offline.” Postscripts (Equinox), 2021. https://journal.equinoxpub.com/searc/article/view/23924 ↩
Singh, Khushwant. A History of the Sikhs. Vol. 2: 1839–2004. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004, 216–34. ↩
The Sikh Times. “Sikhism Timeline.” N.d. http://www.sikhtimes.com/sikhism_timeline.html ↩
Singh, Kuldip. “Sikh Ethnonationalism and Its Contested Articulation During Militancy in Punjab.” Journal of Punjab Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara), n.d. https://punjab.global.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.gisp.d7_sp/files/sitefiles/3-Kuldip%20Singh%20FINAL%2022.1.pdf ↩
Rajpal, Bhavna. From Hindu to Hinduized. PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), 2022. https://theses.fr/2022EHES0149.pdf ↩
Falzon, Mark-Anthony. Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora, 1860–2000. Leiden: Brill, 2004, 60. As quoted in Rajpal 2022. https://sanipanhwar.com/uploads/books/2024-08-28_16-36-43_45242bd5581840e038115d40a90dc2a9.pdf ↩
Khan, Dominique-Sila. “Jhulelal and the Identity of Indian Sindhis.” In Sindh through History and Representations, edited by Michel Boivin. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008. https://drpathan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Sindh_Through_History_And_Representations-Michel_Boivin-2008-cs.pdf ↩
Boivin, Michel. Introduction to Sindh through History and Representations, edited by Michel Boivin, xii. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008. [Quoted in Rajpal 2022.] https://drpathan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Sindh_Through_History_And_Representations-Michel_Boivin-2008-cs.pdf ↩
Boivin, Michel, and Bhavna Rajpal. “From Udero Lal in Sindh to Ulhasnagar in Maharashtra: Partition and Memories across Borders in the Tradition of Jhulelal.” In Partition and the Practice of Memory, edited by Churnjeet Mahn and Anne Murphy, 43–62. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. [Bibliographic verification via https://iris.unive.it/retrieve/b96ed43a-36e5-4ca1-aa5e-3278ee45667d/journey-among-dervishes.pdf.] ↩
SindhiWiki. “Chaliha Sahib Festival.” N.d. [Community source; the akhand jyot transfer narrative is widely repeated and attributed in the text as community tradition.] https://sindhiwiki.org/index.php/Chaliha_Sahib_Festival ↩
Brahma Kumaris. “The Brahma Kumaris Story.” Official institutional history, n.d. [Corroborated by standard reference entries, e.g., Howell 2005, Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements.] https://www.brahmakumaris.org/about-us/the-brahma-kumaris-story ↩
eSamskriti. “All You Wanted to Know about Sadhu Vaswani Mission.” N.d. [Community portal; institutional chronology (Hyderabad, Sindh → Pune, 1949).] https://www.esamskriti.com/sa/SPECIAL-SECTIONS/All-you-wanted-to-know-about-SADHU-VASWANI-MISSION-1.aspx ↩
Boivin, Michel. The Hindu Sufis of South Asia: Partition, Shrine Culture and the Sindhis of India. London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2019. Open-access text: https://hal.science/hal-03959109/document ↩
Ramey, Steven W. Hindu, Sufi, or Sikh: Contested Practices and Identifications of Sindhi Hindus in India and Beyond. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ↩
Kothari, Rita. “Sindhis: Hardening of Identities after Partition.” Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 35 (2004): 3885–88. Bibliographic record: https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/dhasa/article/download/5009/4122/21414 ↩
eSamskriti. “Why Do Sindhis Worship Granth Sahib and They Were Stopped from Doing So in Indore.” January 26, 2023. [Community account (pro-Hindu framing); figures quoted with attribution in the text.] https://www.esamskriti.com/e/History/Indian-History/Why-do-Sindhis-worship-Granth-Sahib-and-they-were-stopped-from-doing-so-in-Indore—1.aspx ↩
HinduPost. “Why Were Sindhis Forced to Return the Guru Granth Sahib and Assert Their Primary Identity as Hindus?” February 14, 2023. [Partisan (Hindu-right) outlet; title quoted verbatim in the text as one framing.] https://hindupost.in/dharma-religion/why-were-sindhis-forced-to-return-the-guru-granth-sahib-and-assert-their-primary-identity-as-hindus/ ↩
SikhNet News. “Sindhi Hindus & Nanakpanthis.” February 7, 2025. [Sikh-community outlet; quoted verbatim in the text as the maryada/beadbi framing.] https://sikhnet.com/news/sindhi-hindus-nanakpanthis ↩
Kataria, Shyamal. “The Diffusion of Sikh Refugee Memory to Non-Refugee Sikhs.” Journal of South Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (2017); and Kataria, “Memory as Khalistan Justification,” Sikh Formations 14, no. 1 (2018). Cited via Shyamal Kataria, curriculum vitae, University of Sharjah. https://www.sharjah.ac.ae/-/media/project/uos/sites/uos/academics/faculty-and-staff/cv/shyamal-kataria.pdf ↩
Kataria, Shyamal. “Sikh Refugee Contribution towards Khalistani Nationalism.” Migration Letters 21, no. 1 (2024): 547–60; and Kataria, “Evolution of the Sikh Partition Narrative since 1947,” Sikh Formations 17, no. 3 (2021): 334–57. https://migrationletters.com/index.php/ml/article/download/5314/3666/14972 ↩
Singh, Kanika. “The Story of a Sikh Museum.” Seminar 701 (2018). https://www.india-seminar.com/2018/701/701_kanika_singh.htm ↩
Singh, Joginder. “Sikhism in the Present-day Punjab.” Journal of Sikh and Punjab Studies 30, no. 1 (2023). Guru Nanak Dev University. https://giss.org/jsps_vol_30/05-singh.pdf ↩
Singh, Khushwant. A History of the Sikhs. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966, 305. As quoted in “Who Is A Sehajdhari Sikh?,” Sikh Philosophy Network. https://www.sikhphilosophy.net/threads/who-is-a-sehajdhari-sikh.23743/ ↩
Juergensmeyer, Mark. Radhasoami Reality: The Logic of a Modern Faith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991; and Kaushal, Om Parkash. “The Radha Soami Movement in the Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, 1903–1974.” PhD diss., Department of History, Panjab University, Chandigarh, 1984. Both as catalogued in “Radha Soami Satsang Beas,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Soami_Satsang_Beas ↩
The 1947 Partition Archive. Oral-history corpus; Story Scholars program. https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/storyscholars/ ↩