Akali/Gurudwara Reform Movement

The Akali Movement, also called the Gurudwara Reform Movement, was a non-violent agitation launched in 1920 to liberate Sikh shrines from the control of corrupt, often hereditary, mahants (custodians) and the British-appointed managers of the Golden Temple. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many gurudwaras had passed into the hands of udasi and Nirmala priests who treated shrine endowments as private property, permitted practices repugnant to Sikh orthodoxy, and after annexation in 1849 enjoyed the patronage of the colonial state. The reformist impulse drew on the earlier Singh Sabha movement (from 1873) and the Chief Khalsa Diwan, which had revived Sikh consciousness. In November 1920 the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) was formed at the Akal Takht to oversee gurudwara management, and the Shiromani Akali Dal, founded in December 1920, became the volunteer corps and political arm of the movement.

The movement proceeded through a series of dated, disciplined confrontations conducted on Gandhian lines of non-violence and willing suffering. The struggle for the Nankana Sahib gurudwara in February 1921 ended in a massacre when the mahant Narain Das's hired men killed a large body of unarmed Akali volunteers, galvanising Sikh opinion. The Keys Affair of 1921, in which the government seized control of the keys of the Golden Temple's toshakhana, ended in a complete Akali victory in January 1922 when the keys were surrendered — an outcome Mahatma Gandhi telegraphed as the "first decisive battle for India's freedom." The most prolonged campaign was the Guru-ka-Bagh morcha (1922) near Amritsar, where successive jathas of Akalis courted arrest and submitted to brutal police beatings without retaliation. The Jaito morcha (1923–25), arising from the deposition of the Sikh ruler of Nabha, drew nationwide attention and Congress sympathy.

The agitation culminated in the Sikh Gurudwaras Act of 1925, passed by the Punjab Legislative Council, which transferred control of the historic shrines to the SGPC as a statutory elected body — a landmark legislative victory that remains the legal foundation of Sikh shrine administration in 2026, with the SGPC continuing to manage gurudwaras in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal and Chandigarh. The movement strengthened the link between Sikh reform and the broader nationalist struggle: the Akalis allied with the Non-Cooperation and Khilafat agitations, and figures like Baba Kharak Singh and Master Tara Singh emerged as leaders. Its non-violent methods and mass mobilisation marked it as a significant strand of the freedom struggle.

For UPSC Modern History (GS Paper I and the optional), the Akali Movement is tested as a religious-reform movement that converged with mainstream nationalism in the early 1920s. Examiners favour questions linking it to Non-Cooperation, asking candidates to identify the SGPC and Akali Dal, to sequence the Nankana Sahib, Keys Affair, Guru-ka-Bagh and Jaito episodes, and to assess the significance of the 1925 Act. A common analytical angle asks whether the movement was primarily religious or political, requiring candidates to show how shrine reform became a vehicle of anti-colonial mobilisation.