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Introduction
In the early months of 1873, four Sikh students at the American Mission School in Amritsar—Aya Singh, Attar Singh, Sadhu Singh, and Santokh Singh—announced that they wished to convert to Christianity.1 As the news spread, it created widespread distress among Sikhs since it became coupled with an already existing unease within the Sikh community fostered in part by encroaching Christian missionaries and the outgrowth of other socio-religious movements in Panjab.2 Confronting these threats, on 1 October 1873, a diverse assortment of Sikhs assembled in Amritsar and founded the Sri Guru Singh Sabha Amritsar, which sought to, Jagjit Singh writes, ‘provide the Sikh tradition [with] a correct and coherent mode of ethical being’, to bind an orthodoxy in the face of these threats.3 Soon thereafter a Singh Sabha emerged in Lahore in 1879 and affiliates spread across Panjab.4 Yet the nature of the unity remained tentative, since each organization emerged with, Norman Gerald Barrier argues, their ‘own personality and peculiar interest despite similarity in composition and programme’.5 These organizations were not a site of agreement. ‘The meetings, lectures, and discussion were held in an atmosphere of controversy and denunciation’, as Teja Singh describes.6 Still, in 1883, striving toward coherence through these disputations, Sikhs centralized the Sabhas under a larger umbrella organization, the Amritsar Khalsa Diwan. Controversies and conflict, however, continued and, in 1886, the Khalsa Diwan fragmented into two separate organizations: the Amritsar Khalsa Diwan, which was constituted by the Singh Sabhas in Amritsar, Faridkot, and Rawalpindi, and the much larger Lahore Khalsa Diwan.
Parallel to these developments, in 1884, a founder and the initial president of the Singh Sabha at Amritsar, Thakur Singh Sindhanwalia, left Panjab and travelled to England. His goal was to reveal to his cousin, the deposed and exiled Maharaja of Panjab, Duleep Singh, the extent of Singh's riches that had been stolen by the British Crown.7 Sindhanwalia brought with him news of a community not only excited, but also prepared for their sojourned sovereign's return. The Sikh community's expectancy, Sindhanwalia explained, was cultivated through the extensive circulation of Sikh prophecies, attributed to Guru Tegh Bahadur and Guru Gobind Singh.8 These prophecies asserted that Khalsa Raj (Sikh rule/sovereignty) would emerge through a...