Baba Khem Singh Bediਬਾਬਾ ਖੇਮ ਸਿੰਘ ਬੇਦੀ

Baba Khem Singh Bedi (21 February 1832 to 10 April 1905) was a Sikh leader of the British period who founded the Amritsar Singh Sabha in 1873, the first organisation of the Singh Sabha movement. A direct descendant of Guru Nanak Dev Ji in the thirteenth generation, he was one of the most powerful and revered Sikhs of his time: a great landowner in western Punjab, a knight of the British Empire and a member of the Viceroy's Legislative Council. His legacy is still debated. His supporters remember him as the man who woke the Sikh community to reform and opened dozens of schools. His critics in the Lahore Singh Sabha said the honours his followers paid him clashed with Sikh teaching. Both views belong in his story.

Early life: a Bedi of Kallar

Khem Singh was born on 21 February 1832 at Kallar, a small town in Rawalpindi district, in the part of Punjab that is now in Pakistan. His family, the Bedis, traced their descent from Guru Nanak Dev Ji through Lakhmi Das, the Guru's elder son, and Khem Singh was counted as the thirteenth in that line. The Times of London, in its obituary of 1905, called him the fourteenth spiritual head of the Sikhs by direct descent from Guru Nanak. A few later sources give his birth year as 1830, and some give his birthplace as Una, but the Encyclopedia of Sikhism, the fullest account of his life, gives Kallar and 1832.

His father, Baba Atar Singh, was killed in a family feud on 25 November 1839, when Khem Singh was seven years old. He received the rites of amrit, the Sikh initiation, at the hands of the celebrated Baba Bir Singh of Naurangabad. With his elder brother Sampuran Singh, he inherited jagirs, land grants, in the Jalandhar Doab, along with 41 villages in Dipalpur tehsil of Gugera district, later Montgomery district. When the British annexed Punjab in 1849, fourteen of these villages were taken back by the new government. His lands were added to from time to time, and towards the end of his life his holdings in Montgomery district alone amounted to 28,272 acres.

Land, loyalty and the British Raj

During the uprising of 1857, Baba Khem Singh assisted the British in quelling a local revolt in Gugera district. He took part in a number of skirmishes himself, and showed himself an excellent marksman with gun and rifle. While accompanying Extra Assistant Commissioner Berkeley on a drive to reopen communications with Multan, he distinguished himself in a cavalry charge on 21 September 1857. The following day he barely escaped death in an ambush in which Berkeley was killed. The Government of India rewarded him with a khill'at, a robe of honour valued at 1,000 rupees, and a double-barrelled rifle.

Honours followed. He was appointed a magistrate in 1877 and an honorary munsif, a local judge, in 1878. He was made a Companion of the Indian Empire in 1879, was nominated to the Viceroy's Legislative Council in 1893, and when the Indian Councils Act was extended to Punjab in 1897, he was among the first non-official members nominated to the Punjab legislature. He was knighted in 1898, becoming a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire. In 1902 he travelled to London as an official representative of Punjab at the coronation of King Edward VII, where the Lafayette Studio photographed him in his gold brocade choga and the star and badge of his knighthood. His closeness to the British administration brought him honours and influence, and it also drew criticism from Sikh reformers who wanted the community to stand apart from colonial power.

Why did he found the Singh Sabha?

Baba Khem Singh was troubled by the decline he saw in Sikh society after the British occupation of Punjab, and by the inroads of Christian missionaries. The crisis came to a head at the beginning of 1873, when four Sikh students of the Amritsar Mission School announced that they intended to renounce their faith and embrace Christianity. The Sikhs called a meeting at Amritsar on 30 July 1873, led by Baba Khem Singh, Sardar Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia and Kanvar Bikrama Singh of Kapurthala. At a largely attended gathering on Dussehra, 1 October 1873, they founded a society called Sri Guru Singh Sabha. Singh Sabhas soon began to spring up in other towns as well.

The Sabha's purpose was to defend the Sikh faith, to spread education among Sikhs, and to revive Sikh identity at a time when many feared it was fading. Baba Khem Singh's own outlook was traditional. He honoured the older customs of the community, including the reverence shown to the descendants of Guru Nanak, and he believed the Sabha should work with the grain of Sikh tradition rather than against it. That view would soon put him at odds with a younger generation of reformers in Lahore.

The split with the Lahore reformers

A coordinating body, the Khalsa Diwan, was formed at Amritsar on 12 April 1883, with Baba Khem Singh as president and Bhai Gurmukh Singh of Lahore as chief secretary. Serious differences soon arose between the two men. At the Baisakhi divan at Amritsar in 1884, Baba Khem Singh was given the customary cushioned seat in the presence of the Guru Granth Sahib, as befitted a descendant of Guru Nanak in the eyes of his followers. The group led by Bhai Gurmukh Singh protested, and a schism arose. Baba Khem Singh's supporters were mocked by their opponents as the gaddi party, the party of the cushioned seat.

A separate Khalsa Diwan was set up at Lahore in April 1886. Baba Khem Singh, supported by Raja Bikram Singh of Faridkot, the patron of the Amritsar Diwan, secured the excommunication of Bhai Gurmukh Singh under the seal of the Golden Temple. The victory did not restore his standing among the Sikh masses. Henceforth his influence was largely restricted to the Pothohar region and to parts of western Punjab, where he preached among the Sahajdharis, Sikhs who had not taken amrit, and brought a large number into the Sikh fold. The reformers, for their part, argued that no living person should be honoured as a semi-Guru, and that the community's guide was the Guru Granth Sahib alone. After his death, the Amritsar Singh Sabha faded and was gradually merged with the Lahore Sabha.

Schools, charity and the Bedi Palace

Beyond the quarrels of the Sabhas, Baba Khem Singh's lasting contribution was education, especially the education of women. He gave his full support to the Punjab Government's plan to open thirty single-teacher primary schools in every district, and he opened schools of his own in the Rawalpindi division. At least fifty schools for boys and girls were opened in Punjab through his help. At his daughter's marriage in 1893, he donated three lakh rupees, Rs 3,00,000, for religious and charitable purposes. Half of the sum was set aside for a college at Rawalpindi, and as a beginning a vocational school was opened there in early 1894, teaching dyeing, photography, carpentry and tailoring, with subsidised board and lodging for poor students.

He lived in princely style and was revered by hundreds of thousands of followers in western Punjab and in what later became the North-West Frontier Province. His home at Kallar Syedan, the Bedi Palace, known locally as Babay da Mahal, still stands as a mark of that standing. Built in the late nineteenth century, it is a four-storey mansion of local stone, with carved wooden jharokhas, balconies and courtyards, its walls painted with the ten Sikh Gurus, Hindu deities and the Golden Temple. After Partition it served for decades as the Government Boys High School of Kallar Syedan. Today it stands dilapidated, and writers who have visited it call for it to be restored and preserved as a historic landmark of the Pothohar region.

Last years and legacy

He had six sons, and his eldest, Baba Gurbakhsh Singh, succeeded him as the spiritual leader of the Sikhs of Pothohar. In the spring of 1905 Baba Khem Singh was on a tour of the North-West Frontier Province when he suddenly fell ill. On 8 April 1905 he left Peshawar by rail, in a state of serious sickness, and he died at Montgomery, now Sahiwal, on 10 April 1905. He was seventy-three.

His legacy is two-sided, and both sides are remembered. He founded the first Singh Sabha and gave the movement its first organisation, and his gifts built schools that served Punjab for generations. At the same time, the honours his followers paid him split the movement he had founded, and the Lahore reformers, not his Amritsar Sabha, set the course of Sikh reform in the twentieth century. He remains a towering figure of nineteenth-century Punjab: a descendant of Guru Nanak, a landlord, lawmaker and school-builder, a reminder that reform movements can disagree sharply about their own traditions.