ABCHAL NAGAR, more correctly spelt Abichalnagar (abichal, lit. firmly fixed, unshakably rooted), i.e. City Everlasting, is the name Sikh tradition lias given Nanded, a district town in Maharashtra. The place is sacred to Guru Gobind Singh, who passed away here on 7 October 1708. The shrine honouring his memory is

AHMADlYAH MOVEMENT, started in the late nineteenth century as a reforming and rejuvenating current in Islam, originated in Qadian in Gurdaspur district of the Punjab. In the 1880`s, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, son of the chief landowning family of Qadian, after he had received revelations and preached a renewal of Islamic

AKAL TAKHT is the primary seat of Sikh religious authority and central altar for Sikh political assembly. Through hukamnamas, edicts or writes, it may issue decretals providing guidance or clarification on any point of Sikh doctrine or practice referred to it, may lay under penance personages charged with violation of

AKALI, a term now appropriated by members of the dominant Sikh political party, the Shiromani Akali Dal, founded in 1920, and groups splitting from it from time to time, was earlier used for Nihangs (q.v.), an order of armed religious zealots among the baptized Sikhs. The word Nihang is

AKALI DAL KHARA SAUDA BAR, an organization of Akali reformers working for the liberation of Sikh shrines from the control of conservative Udasi priests or mahants. The organization was originally called Khalsa Diwan Khara Sauda Bar set up in 1912 and comprised volunteers mostly from a cluster of villages

AKALI DAL, CENTRAL, a political organization of the Sikhs set up in March 1934 as a parallel body to the Shiromani Akali Dal. The latter was formed on 14 December 1920 to assist the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee in its campaign for the reformation of the management of the

AKALI DAL, SHIROMANI (shiromani= exalted, foremost in rank; dal = corps, of akali volunteers who had shed fear of death), the premier political party of the modern period of Sikhism seeking to protect the political rights of the Sikhs, to represent them in the public bodies and legislative councils being

AKALI MOVEMENT, variously known as Gurdwara Reform Movement or Gurdwara Agitation is how Sikh\'s long drawn campaign in the early twenties of the twentieth century for the liberation of their gurdwaras or holy shrines is described. The campaign which elicited enthusiastic support, especially, from the rural masses, took the

AKALI SAHAYAK BUREAU, lit. a bureau to help (sahayak, from Skt. sahaya, one who lends one company or support) the Akalis, then engaged in a bitter struggle for the reformation of the management of their places of worship, was a small office set up at Amritsar in 1923 by the

AKALI, THE, a Punjabi daily newspaper which became the central organ of the Shiromani Akali Dal, then engaged in a fierce struggle for the reformation of the management of the Sikh gurdwaras and a vehicle for the expression of nationalist political opinion in the Punjab in the wake of the

ALL-PARTIES CONFERENCES (more aptly, ALL-PARTY CONFERENCES), a series of conventions which took place in 1928 bringing together representatives of various political parties and communities in India with a view to working out a mutually agreed formula for the country\'s constitutional advance in response to the invitation of the British government.

ANAND MARRIAGE ACT was passed in 1909 by the Imperial (i.e. GovernorGeneral`s) Legislative Council to establish legal "validity of the marriage ceremony common among the Sikhs called Anand." The origins of marriage by Anand ceremony go back to early Sikhism. The practice which somewhat lapsed during the time of

ANJUMANIPANJAB, founded in Lahore on 21 January 1865 by the distinguished linguist, Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, who became successively the first principal of the Government College at Lahore and the first registrar of the University of the Panjab, was a voluntary society which aimed at the development of "vernacular literature"