Master Tara Singhਮਾਸਟਰ ਤਾਰਾ ਸਿੰਘ

Who was Master Tara Singh?

Master Tara Singh (24 June 1885 to 22 November 1967) was a Sikh teacher, religious organiser and political leader who shaped Sikh public life for more than forty years. He helped build the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, led the Shiromani Akali Dal through the freedom struggle and Partition, and then led the Punjabi Suba movement for a Punjabi speaking state.

Few figures connect as many chapters of modern Punjab as he does. The campaign to free gurdwaras from hereditary custodians, the argument over what would happen to Sikhs if India were partitioned, and the long post 1947 demand that Punjab be reorganised by language all ran through his speeches, his arrests and his fasts. Supporters remembered his personal austerity and refusal of office or wealth. Critics, including many Sikhs, questioned his tactics at key moments. Both views are part of the record, and this page follows the documented facts of his life.

Early life in Harial and the making of a teacher

He was born Nanak Chand on 24 June 1885 in Harial village, also spelled Haryal, in Gujar Khan tehsil of Rawalpindi district, in what is now Pakistan. His father, Bakshi Gopi Chand, was the village patwari, or revenue record keeper, and the family was a Malhotra Khatri family described in Sikh accounts as Sehajdhari. At sixteen he took Amrit from Sant Attar Singh, took the name Tara Singh, and became, by those accounts, the first member of his family to become a Khalsa Sikh.

His schooling began in the village school and continued at a mission school in Rawalpindi. He went on to Khalsa College, Amritsar, graduating in 1907, and Sikh biographies remember a keen sportsman who captained college hockey and football sides and earned the nickname Pathar, meaning rocklike. After teacher training in Lahore he became headmaster of Khalsa High School at Lyallpur, now Faisalabad. The title Master, which stayed with him for life, came from this classroom career. Sikh accounts of his Lyallpur years say he drew only 15 rupees a month from a salary of 150 and gave the rest to the school funds, an early sign of the austere style he kept in public life.

He also wrote and edited for the Akali press. Accounts of his early public work name two Akali newspapers, Akali in Urdu and Akali te Pardesi in Gurmukhi, through which he argued the case for organised Sikh representation long before he held high office.

Gurdwara reform and building the SGPC

The turning point came in 1921. The killing of Sikh protesters at Nankana Sahib, where more than 200 Sikhs died according to the accounts cited on this page, pushed him to leave teaching and become a full time public worker. The Gurdwara Reform movement sought to remove hereditary mahants, custodians accused of treating historic shrines and their lands as personal property, and to place gurdwaras under a representative Sikh body.

That body was the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, or SGPC, formed in 1920. Tara Singh was among its earliest office bearers: Sikh sources describe him as its first general secretary, and in the July 1921 SGPC election Baba Kharak Singh became president with Tara Singh as vice president. He later served as SGPC president for several terms. His work linked the shrine campaign to the wider non cooperation movement against British rule, which brought the Akali cause into national politics.

The campaign ended in law with the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925, which came into force on 1 November 1925 and placed historic gurdwaras under the elected SGPC. The Act did not end argument over how gurdwaras should be run, and Tara Singh himself later protested against government interference in the SGPC, but it gave Sikhs the institutional base from which he operated for the rest of his career.

Freedom struggle, Partition and opposition to Pakistan

Tara Singh took part in the civil disobedience campaigns of the freedom struggle and, by the count given in the Encyclopaedia Britannica summary of his life, was jailed for civil disobedience 14 times between 1930 and 1966. In 1930, after police fired on protesters in Peshawar, he led a jatha of 101 Sikh satyagrahis from the Akal Takht at Amritsar towards Peshawar in protest. He was arrested, and released after the Gandhi Irwin Pact of 1931.

As the Muslim League pressed its demand for Pakistan after the Lahore Resolution of 1940, Tara Singh and the Akali Dal opposed the partition of India, arguing that Sikhs would face persecution in a state created on religious lines. In March 1947, outside the Punjab Assembly in Lahore, he raised the slogan Pakistan Murdabad, down with Pakistan, before pro Pakistan crowds. Sikh accounts record that he also refused a Muslim League offer of an autonomous Sikh arrangement inside Pakistan. When partition came in August 1947, Punjab was divided and Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims crossed the new border in one of the largest and most violent migrations of the century. Tara Singh spent the following years arguing that the promises made to Sikhs before 1947 had not been kept.

What was the Punjabi Suba movement?

The Punjabi Suba movement was the Akali Dal led campaign for a state in which Punjabi, written in the Gurmukhi script, would be the official language. Tara Singh first presented the demand as Akali policy in April 1948, and on 30 May 1948 a delegate session at Amritsar elected him president of the revived Akali Dal. Supporters presented the demand as linguistic and democratic, of the same kind that later reorganised much of India by language. Opponents in the Congress government, including Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, argued that in Punjab the demand would in practice create a Sikh majority state and cut across India secular framework.

The campaign ran through arrests and bans. Tara Singh was arrested in 1949, 1953, 1955 and 1960 in connection with the agitation. In May 1955, when the Punjab government banned Punjabi Suba slogans, he led the defiance of the ban on 10 May 1955 and thousands courted arrest. In 1961 he began a fast at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, saying he would continue until the demand was accepted. He ended the fast after 48 days, when Nehru promised to consider the issue. Many Sikhs felt he had given up too much for too little, his standing fell sharply, and Sant Fateh Singh emerged as the movement leading figure.

The result he had campaigned for arrived after that eclipse. Under the Punjab Reorganisation Act, the old Punjab was divided on 1 November 1966 into a Punjabi speaking Punjab, a Hindi speaking Haryana, and the union territory of Chandigarh as joint capital, with hill areas transferred to Himachal Pradesh. Questions the settlement left open, including Chandigarh final status, Punjabi speaking areas left outside Punjab, and river water sharing, remained live issues in Punjab politics long after his death.

Final years and legacy

Tara Singh died on 22 November 1967 at Chandigarh, aged 82, a year after the state whose creation he had demanded came into being. His daughter Rajinder Kaur became a journalist and politician. In December 1985, on his birth centenary, India Post issued a 50 paise commemorative stamp in his honour.

His legacy is debated in a way that itself shows his importance. To admirers he was an incorruptible schoolteacher who gave Punjab two lasting institutions, the SGPC and a Punjabi speaking state, and who refused wealth and office throughout. To critics he was a leader whose religious framing of politics narrowed Sikh options, and whose 1961 fast damaged the cause he led. Historians continue to argue both cases from the same record.

One point of chronology matters for readers who meet his name beside later events. The Anandpur Sahib Resolution, the Akali Dal programme of federal and other demands, was adopted in 1973, six years after his death. It belonged to a later generation of Akali leadership, although its arguments for a stronger federal structure grew out of debates about state autonomy that Tara Singh had conducted in his own lifetime. He neither wrote it nor campaigned for it, and careful accounts keep the two apart.