BIKRAMA SINGH, KANVAR (1835-1887), one of the pioneers of the Singh Sabha movement, was born in 1835. He was the son of Raja Nihal Singh of Kapurthala. As he grew up, he developed interest in classical learning and music. He received several honours and distinctions from the British government. During the 1857 uprising, he commanded a Kapurthala contingent of 300 men, horse and foot, and 2 guns to defend Hoshiarpur.
BUTA SINGH, DIWAN (b. 1826) .journalist, printer and one of the last employees of the Sikh royal household, was born the son of Gurdial Singh at Lahore in 1826. He was a man of wealth and influence, being the owner of a chain of printing presses. In his earlier career, he had served as diwan or household minister to Maharani Jind Kaur in whose cause he had attempted to raise disturbances just before the second AngloSikh war for which he was deported from the Punjab to Allahabad where he was kept a political prisoner for seven years. In 1866, he set up Aftabi Punjab press in Lahore and issued in Urdu a fortnightly law journal, Anwar ulShams.
CHANDA SINGH (d. 1930), better known as Chanda Singh Vakil or lawyer, was born at Kaliarivali, district Sirsa, in the present Haryana state, in a Sikh farming family of moderate means. He was the eldest of the three sons of Dial Singh. An attack of smallpox in his childhood had deprived him of his eyesight, but this did not deter him from carving his way in life. He passed his primary classes from the village school and went to Amritsar for his middle school course. He took his Matriculation at Government High School, Delhi. He was gifted with a phenomenal memory and excelled at studies.
DITT SINGH, GIANI (1853-1901), scholar, poet and journalist, was an eminent Singh Sabha reformer and editor. He was born on 21 April 1853 at Kalaur, a village in Patiala district of the Punjab. His ancestral village was Jhalliari, near Chamkaur Sahib, but his father, Divan Singh, had migrated to his wife`s village, Kalaur. Divan Singh, a Ravidasia by caste and a weaver by trade, was a religious minded person who had earned the title of Sant for his piety.
NAUJAVAN BHARAT SABHA, association of the Indian youth, was established at a convention held on 1113 April 1928 at Jallianvala Bagh in Amritsar at the instance of the management of the radical journal Kirti, including men like Sohan Singh Josh and Bhag Singh Canadian. Like the Kirti Kisan Sabha it aimed at creating a youth wing of peasants and workers with a view to ushering in revolution in the country and overthrowing British imperial rule. Another organization with the same name already existed in Lahore involving mainly the collegians of the city. The Sabha had been active between March 1926 and April 1927, but this was a secret network not known to many outside of Punjab capital.
