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Truth Tribe show, Surrey, BC (2026)

09/29/2026

Maharaja Ranjit Singh bowed to him in public. He was a direct descendant of Guru Nanak. In the 1870s, when Sikh identity was under threat, that bloodline made Baba Khem Singh Bedi

the most powerful man in the room before he opened his mouth.

The British colonial education system was pulling Sikh youth toward Christianity. The Arya Samaj was arguing Sikhism was simply a branch of Hinduism. A generation of educated Sikhs was asking a question no one had formally answered: what does it mean to be Sikh and not something else?

The Singh Sabha was founded in Amritsar in 1873 to answer that question. Baba Khem Singh Bedi stood at its centre. Other leaders had education and political connections. He had the bloodline of Guru Nanak. When he endorsed something, it carried the weight of ancestral sanction. No one else in the room could offer that.

But his vision was resistant to the direction the reform movement wanted to go. The Tat Khalsa pushed for a Sikhism sharply distinct from Hindu practice. Baba Khem Singh Bedi stood with the Sanatan wing, which held that Sikh identity did not require that break.

His refusal was not a small thing. A man with his lineage saying no was a door that closed.

He died in 1905. Within two decades the Tat Khalsa’s vision had prevailed. The Gurdwara Reform Movement completed what the Singh Sabha began.

The man closest to Guru Nanak by blood did not determine where the river went.

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POLL: Baba Khem Singh Bedi’s resistance to the Tat Khalsa was...

09/28/2026

The British banned sati in 1829. Ten years later it happened at the funeral of the most powerful Sikh ruler in history. The British political agents who were present at the Lahore court said nothing.

Not one protest. Not one diplomatic note. Not one official objection through any channel.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh died on June 27, 1839. Four of his wives and seven slave women died on his funeral pyre. This was witnessed. It was documented in British dispatches. The accounts exist in the archive.

The British had spent a decade calling the ban on sati proof of their civilizing mission in India. They pointed to it as evidence that India needed British law and British governance.

The reason is not mysterious. In 1839, the British had just invaded Afghanistan. Lord Auckland needed the Sikh Empire as his buffer against everything he feared beyond the Khyber Pass. A diplomatic confrontation at Ranjit Singh’s funeral would have cost him that alliance at the worst possible moment.

So they stayed quiet.

The Sikh Empire would fall ten years later anyway. The British would then use that same civilizing argument to justify taking it.

The principles a power preaches are never as revealing as the moments it chooses to stay quiet.

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POLL: The British silence in 1839 was...

09/27/2026

After 1857, the British rewarded Patiala with territory, elevated status, and a knighthood. They paid exactly what they owed.

The Sikh Empire had been gone eight years. Narinder Singh had watched it fall. Then he helped the people who brought it down keep everything else.

History calls it loyalty.

Punjab has never fully settled what to call it.

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POLL: What Narinder Singh did in 1857 was...

09/25/2026

Khalsa College is still teaching. Punjab National Bank is still operating.

A cowherd’s blessing outlasted everything.

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POLL: The Phulkian states sided with the British over the Sikh Empire in 1809. That choice was...

09/25/2026

They built it to protect Sikh identity from British influence. Then they handed the founding committee to a British colonel, the foundation stone ceremony to the British Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, and the principal's office to an Englishman.

Khalsa College (founded 1892) was the Singh Sabha movement's answer to British schools steadily absorbing Sikh culture across Punjab. After fourteen years of internal fighting, a rival faction, and at least one excommunication, the reformers agreed on one thing: they needed a building.

What they built required compromises that tested the whole idea.

The college's founding committee was chaired by Colonel W.R.M. Holroyd, the British Director of Public Instruction for Punjab. The foundation stone was laid not by a Sikh reformer but by Sir James Lyall, the British Lieutenant Governor. The first principal was Dr. William Rattigan, an Englishman.

The building said something different. Bhai Ram Singh, the Sikh architect who had already designed the Durbar Room at Osborne House for Queen Victoria, gave the college domes and colonnades that looked unmistakably Sikh, whoever was signing the paperwork.

The Maharajas of Patiala, Nabha, and Kapurthala funded it. Ordinary Sikh families across Punjab gave what they could.

In 2016, Punjab passed the Khalsa University Act. The same legislature repealed it a year later. In 2024, India's Supreme Court struck it down.

More than a century later, the question of who actually controls Khalsa College is still being settled in court.

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POLL
What Khalsa College's founding actually proved is...

09/24/2026

His family challenged his will in court. Lost. Took it to appeal. Lost. Went all the way to the Privy Council in London.

They lost every single time.

Dyal Singh Majithia (1848–1898) was born into one of the most powerful Sikh noble families in Punjab. His father governed Lahore under Maharaja Ranjit Singh. His family administered the Golden Temple for thirty years.

He used that inheritance to build things that outlasted him.

He co-founded The Tribune in 1881. Built to argue back against British propaganda. It is still printing from Chandigarh today.

He helped establish Punjab University in 1882. Three years later he was a founding member of the Indian National Congress.

He co-founded Punjab National Bank in 1894. The first bank started purely with Indian capital that is still operating.

When he died at forty-nine, he left his 26 properties not to his family but to three public trusts: a college, a library, and the newspaper.

His relatives went to court. All the way to London. They lost every time.

Pakistan kept his name on Dyal Singh College and Dyal Singh Library after Partition, when most non-Muslim institution names across the border were removed.

More than a century later, a proposal to rename Dyal Singh College in Delhi reignited the same fight his family lost in 1898.

People are still arguing about who gets to keep his name.

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Poll: What Dyal Singh Majithia did with his fortune was...

09/23/2026

Four teenage boys nearly became Christian.
That's what started the Singh Sabha, the movement built to save Sikh identity in 1873.

Six years later, it split. One faction was aristocratic and comfortable treating Sikhism as close to Hinduism. The other was younger and more radical, insisting Sikhs were not Hindus at all. They mocked their rivals as the "Gadaila Party," over a literal cushion.

In 1887, the Akal Takht excommunicated Professor Gurmukh Singh, one of the movement's own founders.
His faction is the one that actually won. Khalsa College, the modern definition of Sikh identity, almost all of it traces back to the side that got cast out.

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Poll: Did the internal split help or hurt Sikhs?

09/21/2026

He lost his throne at ten.

At fourteen, in a private ceremony arranged by the men who took it, Duleep Singh was baptized into the Church of England.

Lord Dalhousie approved it personally. In his own private letters, he admitted exactly why: it would destroy whatever influence the boy still held over Punjab. It worked. Sikhs stopped recognizing him as their Maharaja that same day.

Britain called it the first conversion of an Indian prince to the Church. A year later he was in England, playing with Queen Victoria's own children.

In 1886, at forty-seven, he renounced it all and returned to Sikhism. He never said which one had actually been real.

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Poll: Was his faith real?

09/21/2026

Every Sikh general surrendered to the British in 1849.
Bhai Maharaj Singh didn't.

He fought alone for nine more months. Got a ₹10,000 bounty on his head. Was shipped to Singapore. Held in solitary for six years. Went blind in his cell.

In 1855, someone in Lahore found a 115-year-old Guru Granth Sahib and shipped it across the ocean to him. It arrived in time.

He died in 1856. Still a prisoner of a war everyone else had already lost.

Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in Singapore still visit his shrine today.

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Poll: Should he have kept fighting?

09/20/2026

A twelve-year-old boy was offered his life back. All he had to do was say he wasn't Sikh anymore. He grabbed the executioner's beard instead.

In January 1872, a cow was slaughtered in the open in Malerkotla, Punjab. To the Namdhari Sikhs nearby, a reform sect founded fifteen years earlier that treated cow protection as an article of faith, it read as deliberate provocation. A band of them armed themselves, failed to seize a fort, then failed to take the town itself. Some died fighting. The rest were captured.

Deputy Commissioner John Lambert Cowan arrived, telegraphed his superiors that "tranquility" had been restored, and was told to hold the prisoners for trial.

He did not. On the evening of January 17th, he had them tied backward across the mouths of cannons on the parade ground and fired on in groups. A telegram arrived mid-execution ordering him to stop. He kept going. Forty-nine were dead by sunset.

Among them was Bishan Singh, twelve years old. Accounts say Cowan offered to spare him if he renounced his faith. The boy refused and grabbed Cowan by the beard before he was killed.

Sixteen more were executed the next morning. The final count still isn't settled between sources, somewhere between sixty-five and sixty-six people, in front of a crowd Cowan ordered to watch.

Cowan was dismissed from his post, for ignoring the order to wait, not for the killings. He was never charged. A British civil servant who witnessed the aftermath later wrote he could recall nothing in his career more shocking.

A sixty-six foot memorial stands on that same parade ground today, marked with sixty-six holes. Punjab made January 17th an official day of remembrance in 2015.

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Poll: What actually happened to Cowan?

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