Sant Baba Attar Singh Jiਸੰਤ ਬਾਬਾ ਅਤਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ

Sant Baba Attar Singh Ji (1866-1927) was the Sikh saint of Mastuana who led one of the great religious revivals of modern Punjab. From his centre at Gursagar Mastuana near Sangrur, he preached Naam Simran and the Guru's word across India, administered Amrit to about 1.4 million people, and built schools and colleges that put modern education beside spiritual learning.

Who was Sant Attar Singh Ji?

Sant Attar Singh Ji is remembered as the most widely known and respected saint of modern Sikhism. He was, by one account, the first Sikh in the twentieth century to be given the title of Sant by the Panth itself. He came at a time when the Sikh community was under great strain: Christian missionary work had drawn many away from the faith, and the Sikh population had fallen sharply. His life's work was to bring people back to the Guru, through Amrit, through Gurbani, and through education.

His method was simple and it never changed: walk from village to village, sit with people, recite Gurbani in a voice they could not forget, and give them Amrit. Behind the gentleness was an iron discipline of meditation that he had built over years of wandering on foot across India.

Early life and the army

Attar Singh was born in 1866 in Cheema village in Sangrur district, then part of Jind State, to Baba Karam Singh, a farmer of modest means, and Mata Bholi Kaur. His father could not afford to send him to a school in town, so he learned Gurmukhi and the Sikh scriptures at the village dera under Bhai Buta Singh, and read philosophical works such as the Vichar Sagar. While tending cattle he would lose himself in reciting hymns from the Guru Granth Sahib.

At the age of seventeen he enlisted as a gunner in the Artillery, and was later transferred to the 54th Sikh Battalion stationed at Kohat. In the cantonment gurdwara he took Amrit under the guidance of its granthi, Bhai Jodh Singh, and studied the scripture while still doing his military duty, where he won first place in marksmanship. While in the army he took a vow not to marry. In 1888 he was placed on the reserve list, and in 1891 his name was struck off the rolls so that he could devote himself wholly to preaching.

The long walk to Hazur Sahib

In 1888, after leaving the army, Attar Singh set out on foot from Dera Ghazi Khan to Hazur Sahib in Nanded, the place where Guru Gobind Singh Ji had passed his last days. He spent about two years there in simran and study, then walked on to Hardwar and Rishikesh, where he meditated for about a year, and then travelled on foot through Dehradun, Paonta Sahib, Baru, Anandpur Sahib, Una and Gurdaspur to Sialkot.

From Sialkot he went to Amritsar, where he meditated for three days on the third floor of Gurdwara Baba Atal, and then returned to his village to meet his mother. With her consent he resolved to remain unmarried and free for the service of humanity and the Panth. He completed his formal discharge from the army at Abbottabad, and then withdrew to a lonely place in the forest near Kanoha village, where he meditated in three spells of forty days, six months and a year, taking only a small quantity of food once a day. From that time on, people began to call him Sant Ji.

Mastuana and the revival

In 1902 Sant Attar Singh Ji established his main centre at Gursagar Mastuana, near Sangrur in the Malwa region. From there he toured widely: Jammu and Kashmir, Sindh, the North-West Frontier Province and the Pothohar region, where many Sikhs and Hindus received Amrit at his hands. Master Tara Singh, who later became a famous political leader, and Bhai Jodh Singh, the theologian and educationist, were both administered Amrit by him at Dera Khalsa. By the widely repeated estimate of his followers, about 1.4 million people took Amrit through him in his lifetime.

After 1920 he turned his attention to Damdama Sahib, Talwandi Sabo, where Guru Gobind Singh Ji had stayed in 1706. There he raised a large bunga and built a sarovar, turning it into a major centre for spreading Sikhism. He also sent four young men abroad for higher education and for spreading the Guru's message: Teja Singh, Amar Singh, Dharmanant Singh and Hari Singh Basra. Teja Singh set up the Khalsa Jatha in London, took a Master's degree at Harvard, and lectured on Sikhism across America and Canada, while Dharmanant Singh took a doctorate at London University.

Schools, colleges and the nation

Alongside preaching, Sant Attar Singh Ji worked to give Sikhs a modern education. He opened a school for girls at Mastuana in 1906, before he opened one for boys, and then established Akal College at Mastuana. He helped found Khalsa High School in Lyallpur, Khalsa High School in Chakwal, Missionary College and Guru Nanak Khalsa College in Gujranwala, and Malva Khalsa High School in Ludhiana. He took an active part in the Sikh Educational Conference and presided over its session at Ferozepur in 1915.

His standing reached beyond the Sikh community. In a 1911 report, the intelligence department of the Government of India described him as the inspiration behind the Tatt Khalsa movement of reform. In the same year he rode on an elephant in the Sikh procession at the Delhi Darbar, reciting the shabad that no king or ruler can equal the Almighty God. In 1914, at the invitation of Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, he took part in the foundation ceremonies at Varanasi for the new Hindu university, laying the foundation with eleven bricks of gold supplied by the Raja of Kashi. He also supported the Gurdwara reform movement, took part in the divan at Nankana Sahib in 1921 honouring the martyrs, and was invited to the Bhog ceremonies at the end of the Akali morcha at Jaito.

What did Sant Attar Singh Ji teach?

He taught that every Sikh should rise early, bathe, and meditate on the Name of Waheguru before the day begins, and that the problems of the Panth would be solved if all Sikhs did so. His teaching rested on simran and the daily nitnem banis, joined to a life of love, compassion, humility and selfless service. He preached the oneness of God and the universal brotherhood of all human beings, and he practised what he preached: he refused offerings, ate only in langar, and told people never to beg from anyone.

Death and legacy

During a religious discourse at Gurdwara Bangla Sahib in Delhi, Sant Attar Singh Ji was bitten by a poisonous snake. Despite the best medical treatment then available, he died at Sangrur on 1 February 1927. He was cremated at Mastuana, five kilometres away, in the presence of a vast gathering of his followers, and a gurdwara now stands there in his memory.

His legacy lives on in the institutions he built at Mastuana, in the schools and colleges across Punjab that he helped found, and in the line of his disciples, above all Sant Teja Singh Ji, who carried his message to the West. The revival he led is the reason his name is still spoken with reverence in gurdwaras across Punjab and the diaspora a century later.