The Babbar Akali Movement
Author: Jasbir Singh Sarna
Book Review by
Dr. Devinder Pal Singh
Book Title: The Babbar Akali Movement
Author: Jasbir Singh Sarna
ISBN: 978-81-86741-64-1
Edition: 2026, Price: Rs. 200/-, Pages: 78
Publisher: Sant and Singh Publisher, J&K; Co-publisher: Azad Book Depot, Amritsar
Book Reviewer: Dr. Devinder Pal Singh, Professor, Arihanta Institute, San Jose, California, USA
In the crowded and often contentious field of anti-colonial historiography, certain movements have been systematically consigned to the margins. These are often thought to be too inconvenient for the Gandhian narrative, too religious for secular frameworks, and too short-lived to command sustained scholarly attention. Jasbir Singh Sarna's The Babbar Akali Movement is a determined, well-researched effort to drag one such movement back into the light. The result is a compact yet substantive study that succeeds more often than it stumbles. It makes a convincing case for why the Babbar Akalis deserve a far more prominent place in the story of India's freedom struggle.
The Babbar Akalis were a militant Sikh revolutionary formation active primarily between 1921 and 1923 in the Doaba region of Punjab. It was born from the crucible of the Nankana Sahib massacre, the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity, the betrayal of Sikh soldiers who had served the British Crown, and the perceived corruption of gurdwara management under colonial-supported Mahants. They rejected both constitutional moderation and absolute non-violence. Sarna's central argument is that this rejection was neither irrational nor aberrant. It was, he insists, theologically grounded in the Sikh doctrine of mīrī-pīrī (the inseparability of temporal authority and spiritual sovereignty) and historically continuous with a tradition of Sikh armed resistance stretching from Guru Hargobind and Guru Gobind Singh through the Namdharis and the Ghadarites.
This argument is made persuasively and without romanticization. Sarna neither sanctifies the Babbars as martyred saints nor dismisses them as fanatics. He is candid about their organizational weaknesses: their loosely structured networks, the catastrophic vulnerability to informer infiltration, the inadequate preparation of recruits, and the absence of sustained Panthic unity. Yet he insists, rightly, that these failings do not diminish the movement's historical significance. A small group of peasants, former soldiers, and religious preachers managed to paralyze civil administration across significant parts of the Doaba. Their action deterred colonial authorities from crushing peaceful Akali morchas with the kind of brutality meted out at Jallianwala Bagh. It created what Sarna persuasively terms a "deterrent effect," a revolutionary shadow that gave constitutional Akali leadership room to negotiate.
The book's most valuable contribution is its recovery of the Babbar Akalis' own self-understanding. Drawing on colonial intelligence records, trial proceedings, contemporary Punjabi newspapers, and revolutionary testimonies, Sarna allows the movement's participants to speak in their own idiom. The statement attributed to the accused in the 1925 trial, published in the Punjabi-language newspaper Lehar Pradesi, is particularly striking: "We have fought a war in the spirit of Guru Hargobind and Guru Gobind Singh. When our Gurus, the true emperors of both worlds, did not care for life, how can we fear death?" These were not men who understood themselves as rebels against legitimate authority. They were inheritors of a sovereign tradition responding to what they experienced as systemic colonial violence and religious humiliation.
The book is organized chronologically across seven chapters, moving from ideological foundations through the Baghiana propaganda campaigns, the organizational crisis of late 1922, the movement's ascendancy in early 1923, its brutal suppression, and the trials and executions of 1924–1926. A timeline, bibliography and index at the end of the book are welcome additions. Sarna writes clearly and with appropriate scholarly restraint. However, there are moments when the prose could have breathed more, where a telling detail or individual story might have deepened the narrative beyond the level of organizational chronicle.
The episodes Sarna does render with granularity are genuinely compelling. Kishan Singh Babbar unsheathing his kirpān at government-sponsored "peace meetings" and departing on a motorbike before police could react; the Babeli encounter of September 1923, where betrayed revolutionaries chose death over surrender; Dhanna Singh's extraordinary act of detonating a concealed bomb while in British custody - these moments are narrated with clarity and moral seriousness, and they linger.
There are minor weaknesses. With 78 pages, the book is short enough, and several threads feel underdeveloped. The relationship between the Babbars and the broader peasant population might have received more sustained analysis, as might the movement's gendered dimensions in a deeply patriarchal rural society. The bibliography, though solid, leans heavily on a handful of canonical secondary works. And some readers may wish for deeper engagement with recent scholarship on revolutionary nationalism in colonial South Asia.
But these are quibbles against a work whose core accomplishment is real and necessary. Sarna has produced a study that is evidence-based, analytically serious, and morally clear-eyed - one that challenges the comfortable hierarchies of nationalist historiography without replacing them with a different set of myths. The Babbar Akalis were defeated militarily. Their legacy was suppressed institutionally. This book argues that history owes them a more honest reckoning, and it makes that case with sufficient rigour to be persuasive. It is a valuable addition to the scholarship of Sikh resistance, anti-colonial movements, and the complex moral landscape of India's freedom struggle.
