RIKABGANJ AGITATION (1913-20) marked the Sikh protest against the demolition by the British of one of the walls of the historical Rikabganj shrine in New Delhi. Gurdwara Rikabganj, sacred to the memory of Guru Tegh Bahadur, at present a. splendid marble edifice, was, in the early

MALUK SINGH converted to the Kuka or Namdhari faith in 1864. With a band of 50 of his companions, he set up what he called a Kuka government in his village, Tharajvala, in Firozpur district, by declaring British rule as having ended. He was arrested and imprisoned for this.

THAKAR SINGH, DOCTOR (1885-1945), a Ghadr activist who also took part in the Akali movement of 1920-25, was the son of Sher Singh of Ikulaha, a village 6 km southwest of Kharina (30"42`N, 76°13`E) in Ludhiana district of die Punjab. He was an undergraduate at Khalsa College, Amritsar, when he

SINGH SABHA MOVEMENT, a reform movement among the Sikhs which assuming a critical turn in the seventies of the nineteenth century, became a vitally rejuvenating force at a time when Sikhism was fast losing its distinctive identity. Following closely upon the two successive movements, Nirankari and Namdhari, it was an

SARMUKH SINGH (1893-1952), the middle one of the trio of the Jhabal brothers and the first president of the Shiromani Akali Dal, was born in 1893 at Jhabal, in Amritsar district of the Punjab. He received his education at Khalsa College, Amritsar, and started taking interest in social and

SAKA PANJA SAHIB, the heroic event which took place at Hasan Abdal railway station, close to the sacred shrine of Pahja Sahib on the morning of 30 October 1922 and which has since passed into folklore as an instance of Sikh courage and resolution. A nonviolent morcha or agitation to

RIPUDAMAN SINGH, MAHARAJA (1883-1942), ruler of the princely state of Nabha from 1912 to 1923, was born at Nabha on 22 Phagun 1939 Bk/4 March 1883, the only son of Maharaja Hira Singh (1843-1911) and Maharani Jasmer Kaur. His father having resisted British advice to send his heir to

RAM SINGH, BABA (1816-1885), leader of the Namdhari or Kuka movement in the Punjab, was born on 3 February 1816, in the village of Bhaini Araiari, in Ludhiana district. Ram Singh was the eldest among the four children of Jassa Singh and his wife, Sada Kaur. Ram Singh was

PARTAP SINGH KAIRON (1901-1965). political leader of wide influence and chief minister of the Punjab from 1956 to 1964, was born on 1 October 1901 in the village of Kairon, in Amritsar district of the Punjab, in a farming family of modest means. His father Nihal Singh, who had

NIRANKARIS, a sect of the Sikhs born of a reform movement which arose in northwest Punjab in the middle of the nineteenth century aiming to restore the purity of Sikh belief and custom. Its founder, Baba Dayal (1783-1855), was a contemporary of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. A man of humble

NANKANA SAHIB MASSACRE refers to the grim episode during the Gurdwara Reform movement in which a peaceful batch of reformist Sikhs was subjected to a murderous assault on 20 February 1921 in the holy shrine at Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak. This shrine along with six others in

MORCHA, in Persian murchah or murchal meaning entrenchments, fortification or battlefront, has, apart from its usage in military strategy, entered Indian political vocabulary via the Gurdwara Reform or Akali movement of the early 1920`s. In that prolonged agitation for the liberation of Sikh historical shrines from the control of a