Nirankari reform traditions: Rawalpindi, ceremony and displacement

Reform began with worship and everyday conduct

Baba Dayal’s Nirankari movement developed around Rawalpindi during the nineteenth century. Kenneth W. Jones describes its emphasis on Nirankar, the formless divine, and on the authority of Guru Nanak and the Adi Granth. Morning worship, meditation and acts of humble service formed part of the programme. This was reform directed toward householders maintaining work and family relationships, rather than withdrawal into a mendicant order.[1]

Jones also describes efforts to change lifecycle ceremonies. Baba Dayal opposed the treatment of women as impure after childbirth, the display of dowry and reliance on horoscopes to choose ceremonial times. The proposed marriage ritual placed the Adi Granth at its centre. Religious reform therefore concerned childbirth, marriage, mourning and domestic spending as well as a theological insistence on divine formlessness.[1]

Teaching acquired a local organisational network

John C. B. Webster’s encyclopedia account identifies Baba Darbara Singh as Dayal’s successor and describes his hukamnama explaining conduct and ceremonies through scriptural references. It connects his work with the spread of the Anand form of marriage in the Rawalpindi region. Reform was transmitted through instructions for repeated practice, not solely through the memory of a founder’s preaching.[2]

The movement also developed local representatives known as biredars. Alongside gatherings at the Rawalpindi Darbar, they connected congregations outside the main centre with its leadership. Webster later traces youth organisations formed in the 1920s and the publication of tracts recording teachers’ lives and discussing conduct. These developments changed how the community organised itself and narrated its past.[2]

Partition changed the community’s geography

The 1947 division of Punjab displaced a community concentrated around Rawalpindi. Webster describes the relocation of the Darbar to India and its permanent establishment in Chandigarh in 1958, alongside the difficult work of finding dispersed followers. He explicitly distinguishes this older Nirankari Sikh tradition from the Sant Nirankari movement. A shared name does not make their organisations, teachings or subsequent histories interchangeable.[2]