Subsequent Developments
The decentralisation of authority involved in the creation of the Khalsa inevitably brought to an end the long period of the primary theological formulation of Sikhism by Guru Nanak and his successors.
But the new order proved most successful in ensuring the community’s survival during the long succession of wars which followed the collapse of the Mogul Empire early in the eighteenth century, as invaders from Afghanistan battled with the local Muslim governors for control of the Punjab. Inspired by the war-cry raj karega khalsa (‘the Khalsa shall rule’), the Sikh guerrilla bands eventually emerged victorious, and the heroic age of Sikh history culminated in the kingdom established in the name of the Khalsa at Lahore by Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1799-1839).But while the Khalsa thus proved well able to deal with the threat to the community’s existence by hostile Muslim political forces, the rapid reversion to Hinduism by many fair-weather converts following the final British conquest of the Punjab from the Sikhs in 1849 showed it had been less effective in maintaining the distinctive character of the reformist teachings of the Gurus. As was so often the case in colonial history, the loss of political power led to a period of intense self-questioning and the rearticulation of reformist ideals.
Some of the most trenchant of these midnineteenth-century reformers fell foul (through their excessively stated claims to spiritual authority) of the doctrine of the abolition of the living Guruship in Sikhism, and they and their followers were hence regarded as more or less heretical by the main body of Sikhs. As from Guru Gobind Singh’s time, this included not only the baptised Khalsa Sikhs but also large numbers of sahajdhari (’slow-adopting’) Sikhs who followed the Gurus’ teachings and the temple rituals, but without adopting the Khalsa baptism and the discipline thereby entailed.
In this fluid situation, with many families having both Hindu and Sikh members, and many temples having in the course of time fallen into the hands of hereditary quasi-Hindu administrators, it was all too evident to the founders of the main late nineteenth-century reformist movement, the Singh Sabha, that Sikhism risked being reabsorbed totally into the capacious Hindu tradition from which it had been born. An intensive programme of propaganda was accordingly instituted, directed both towards inculcating stricter adherence to the Khalsa discipline within the community, and outwardly to combating the aggressive assertion by such reformist Hindu sects as the Arya Samaj that the Sikhs were no more than heretics to be reclaimed for Hinduism.Largely successful in their primary objectives, the reformers’ campaign assumed an increasingly political emphasis with the struggle in the 1920s to assert the community’s physical control over its major shrines. The British authorities at first supported the legal claims of the traditional administrators, but were eventually forced by the massive demonstrations organised by the newly formed Akali Dal (‘army of the Immortal Lord’) to hand control of the great temples and their massive endowments to the Sikh activists in 1925.