Shaheed Sikh Missionary College

Who: The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), acting on an idea from the managing committee of Gurdwara Nankana Sahib, which had been formed after the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925. The first principal was Ganga Singh, known as an orator with a command of Persian, Urdu and Punjabi.

What: In October 1927 the Shaheed Sikh Missionary College opened at Amritsar to train Sikh preachers, in memory of the Shaheeds who were killed at Nankana Sahib on 20 February 1921 while trying to free the birthplace of Guru Nanak from the mahants. Its roots go back to 1921, when a Shahidi Fund was opened to raise a memorial to the Shaheeds and a Sikh Mission Society was formed to spread Sikh teaching. The College served both purposes.

It teaches Sikh scripture, philosophy, history and music, and trains preachers (parcharaks), granthis and ragis. Its early years were uneven. It closed from 1932 to 1935 and again from 1938 to 1943. In June 1936 the SGPC revived it under a new body, the Sarab Hind Sikh Mission, with Dharamanand Singh as principal, and the scholars Sahib Singh and Taran Singh were also linked to it. Today it is run by the SGPC's Dharam Parchar Committee, which also sets its examinations. Giani Zail Singh, elected President of India in 1982, was one of its alumni. In January 2019 Prof Manjit Kaur became its first woman principal and its 24th head. The Tribune then described its courses as three-year diplomas in parcharak training, gurmat sangeet and tabla, where the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism had listed three diplomas of two years each.

Where: Amritsar.

Why it mattered: Nankana Sahib was the first great sacrifice of the Gurdwara Reform Movement, and the College turned the memory of it into a working institution. Taking over the shrines was only half the task: the reformed gurdwaras needed trained granthis, kirtanis and preachers, and this was the SGPC's own school for them.

The memory work continues. In February 2026 the principal told The Tribune that the families of 86 of the Shaheeds had been traced so far, a board with their names stands in the College, and the research rests largely on the 1930s work of Shamsher Gurbakhsh Singh. She said the British-era FIR, which lists 156 Sikhs killed or wounded and is held in Lahore, could not be used because it had been tampered with. Estimates of the dead vary, from over 150 to between 220 and 240.