# An Institution Built in an Earlier Revolution

*Khalsa College, the print revolution that built it, and the network revolution after*

Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD · November 7, 2026 · Becoming a Doctor

In the fifth book of Victor Hugo's *Notre-Dame de Paris*, published in 1831, the archdeacon Frollo receives two visitors in his cell in the cathedral one night in the fifteenth century. One of them, a man calling himself Tourangeau, asks him what his books are. The archdeacon opens the window and points to the church itself, its two towers black against the stars. Then, Hugo writes, he stretched out his right hand toward the printed book that lay open on his table and his left toward Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from the book to the church, said: "Alas, this will kill that."

The other visitor, Jacques Coictier, who in Hugo's story is the king's physician, looks at the book and cannot see what the fuss is about. It is a gloss on the epistles of St Paul, printed at Nuremberg by Anton Koberger in 1474, a commentary by Peter Lombard that scholars had been reading for three centuries. "This is not new," he says. "Is it because it is printed?" The archdeacon tells him he has understood exactly. The threat lies not in what the book says but in how it was made.

Hugo then stops the novel for a whole chapter to explain what the archdeacon meant. The first meaning, he says, was a priest's fear: the press will kill the church, because thought set free by printing will escape the institutions that had held it. The second meaning was an artist's: printing will kill architecture. Until the fifteenth century, Hugo argues, architecture was the great book of humanity, the form in which every civilisation wrote down what it believed; after Gutenberg, "the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable." The book will kill the edifice.

Khalsa College in Amritsar is a standing refutation of the archdeacon. Its main building, designed by Bhai Ram Singh and completed only around 1911, is as deliberate a book of stone as any in Punjab. And it was built by a movement that lived on paper: on presses, weeklies, tracts, grammars and dictionaries. In Amritsar, at the end of the nineteenth century, the book did not kill the edifice. It commissioned one.

That is the earlier revolution of this essay's title, and the symmetry it implies is simple to state. The college was founded in 1892, in the middle of a revolution in print. I studied there, in the pre-medical sciences, from 1994 to 1996, in the years when a second revolution in the making and moving of text, the networked one, reached India. The symmetry is visible from here; this essay does not claim, and does not reconstruct, what a student of those years knew or noticed of the college's history. Another essay on this site, [on Khalsa College in 1995](../khalsa-college-1995/index.html), describes the laying of the foundation stone and the building itself, and the uncertainty of a student's year. This one goes elsewhere: to the question of what the earlier revolution actually was, what it needed a college for, whom it served and whom it left out, and what its history might say about the revolution that came later.

## What the Revolution Was

"Revolution" is a word that can do the work of thought while saving the trouble of it, so exactness matters here. The change in question was not a single event. It was a transformation, over roughly three decades, in who could make and circulate text in Punjabi, in what script, and for whom.

Printing in Gurmukhi had begun earlier and from outside. Christian missions, at Serampore in Bengal and above all at Ludhiana, where a mission press was set up in 1835, printed Gurmukhi translations, grammars and dictionaries; the first Punjabi dictionary, compiled by the missionary J. Newton, was published in 1854. The colonial administration that annexed Punjab in 1849 preferred Urdu, written in the Perso-Arabic characters, for its offices and its schools, and literary historians have argued that official patronage of printing tilted heavily toward it. A Sikh who wished to read his own tradition in his own script, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, depended largely on manuscripts, on the memory of teachers, and on presses run by people who did not share his faith.

The Singh Sabha movement changed that. The first Sabha was founded in Amritsar in 1873, in response, among other things, to the conversion of four Sikh students at the Amritsar mission school that year and to the competitive religious politics of the province. Among the aims its founders set themselves were the promotion of Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script in education, in place of Persian, and the opening of Sikh schools and colleges. In 1882 Lahore's Sabha asked the Lieutenant-Governor, Charles Aitchison, to make Gurmukhi a language of teaching in the schools, at least for Sikh pupils. In 1886 Bhai Gurmukh Singh founded the *Khalsa Akhbar*, a weekly published from Lahore in Punjabi in Gurmukhi script, whose most famous editor, Giani Ditt Singh, appears again below. In Amritsar, around 1891, a press called the Wazir-i-Hind was established, a lithographic press whose first commission, according to one account, was the writing and printing of geography textbooks for schools. Three years later came the Khalsa Tract Society, issuing low-cost publications on Sikh theology, history and social reform. Historians of Punjabi literature call the two decades from 1880 to 1900 its age of inauguration.

Notice what is being built in those dates. Not only books, but a whole apparatus: presses, type and engravers; periodicals with subscription lists; a cheap format for wide circulation; a campaign for the script in schools; and, to complete the chain, institutions where readers and writers would be made. A movement that has decided to live in print needs people who can read what it prints, and teachers who can teach them, and writers who can supply the next generation of tracts. It needs schools, and above the schools, a college. Khalsa College, whose foundation stone was laid in March 1892, is the summit of that apparatus. It is the institution of a print revolution, in the way a cathedral is the institution of a faith.

## Three Things Print Does

The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein, in *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change*, published in two volumes in 1979, argued that the press transformed European learning through three functions above all: dissemination, standardisation and preservation. Her subject was post-Gutenberg Europe, and her claims have been argued over ever since. But the three functions make a useful lens for the Punjabi case, because the Singh Sabha's work can be sorted under them almost line by line.

Dissemination is the obvious one. A tract printed in thousands reaches villages that no preacher could visit, and a weekly reaches the same readers again and again. Benedict Anderson, in *Imagined Communities* in 1983, added something important to the account. He argued that printed newspapers and novels allowed people who would never meet to think of themselves as members of a single community, each reader aware that thousands of others were reading the same words at roughly the same time. Whatever one makes of Anderson's larger theory of nationalism, the mechanism is easy to see at work in a Gurmukhi weekly of the 1880s. Its readers were scattered across a province and beyond it; what they shared, besides their faith, was the experience of reading the same columns in the same week. The Singh Sabhas themselves spread in the same way. Accounts of the movement record branches not only across Punjab and other parts of India but abroad, from London to Shanghai, wherever Sikh soldiers, traders and students had gone. A community that reads together can remain a community at a distance, and print was the first technology that let Punjabis far from Punjab take part, week by week, in the arguments of home. That capacity has a long afterlife. Readers of a site like this one, scattered across continents, are its heirs.

Standardisation is subtler and more consequential. Print fixes forms. It settles spellings, regularises a script, establishes which version of a text is the version, and gives a definition the authority of the page. In 1898 the scholar Kahn Singh Nabha published *Ham Hindu Nahin*, *We Are Not Hindus*, an argument about the distinctness of Sikh identity, and the title alone shows how much of the period's argument was conducted as a matter of definition. Kahn Singh's greatest work, the encyclopaedic dictionary *Gur Shabad Ratnakar Mahan Kosh*, begun in 1912, completed in 1926 and published by the state of Patiala in 1930, runs to more than three thousand pages. A work of that kind does what only print can do: it gathers the meanings of words from scattered usage and fixes them in an order that every later reader can consult. Max Arthur Macauliffe's six volumes of *The Sikh Religion*, published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford in 1909, were another such fixing, in English, produced with the close help of Sikh scholars, Kahn Singh among them.

Preservation is the third function, and here the college itself became an instrument. In 1930 its management committee created a department of Sikh history, to write and publish that history from a modern historical perspective; the historian Ganda Singh took charge of it in October 1931 and travelled for years through libraries, archives and private collections in search of sources. The centre that grew from it now holds books, manuscripts and paintings, and newspapers going back to 1904. A college, in a print culture, is not only where readers are made. It is where texts are gathered, compared and kept.

## Paper That Built Stone

Hugo's archdeacon was right that a new medium threatens old institutions. He was wrong to think the threat runs only one way. In Punjab the print revolution created institutions, and the reasons are instructive.

The first reason is competition. Khalsa College was not founded in a vacuum. Historians of the Singh Sabha note that its establishment in 1892 was spurred by the founding in 1886 of the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore by the Arya Samaj. Each community in the province's crowded religious field was building its own institutions, and each institution was, among other things, a claim in print given walls. The Sikh princes contributed heavily to the college's founding and received seats on its governing board, and reference accounts describe its establishment as the work of the Singh Sabha and the Sikh notables and princely states it persuaded, in a province governed by a colonial administration whose recognition the college needed.

The second reason is that print disseminates and standardises but does not, by itself, teach anyone to read critically, or certify what a reader has learned, or hold a community's texts in trust. Those are institutional tasks. A press can produce a tract in a day. It takes years, and a building, and a faculty, to produce a person who can judge the tract.

The third reason is political, and the history of the college shows it vividly. A building is a place that can be governed, and therefore a place that can be fought over. By the early twentieth century the colonial government had come to exercise substantial control over the college's management. In 1919 the newly formed Central Sikh League listed among its objectives the return of Khalsa College to the control of representatives of the Sikh community, and in November 1920 that control was regained, by the device of refusing government grants. The book of paper could circulate anywhere. The book of stone stood in one place, and who held its keys mattered.

Hugo's argument has a further turn that the Amritsar case brings out. The book of paper, he said, is more durable than the book of stone, because it exists in thousands of copies and cannot be destroyed by destroying any one of them. A building is a single copy. It can be burned, neglected, sold or repurposed, and once it is gone it is gone. What keeps an institution alive is therefore not its masonry but something closer to what keeps a book alive: it must be used, again and again, by people who find it worth using. A college survives by being copied into each new class of students, who carry away some version of what it taught and spread it further than the building could ever reach. In that sense the edifice and the book were never really opponents. Each needs the other's kind of durability to make up for its own.

The college's later history is a succession of such arrangements. In 1969, Guru Nanak Dev University was established in Amritsar on adjoining land, and Khalsa College became one of its affiliated colleges. In 2017 the University Grants Commission recognised it as a heritage educational institution. Each change altered what the institution was for, who governed it and to whom it answered. The founding purpose did not carry itself unchanged across those eras; it was renegotiated in each of them.

## English for the Examination

There is a paradox at the centre of the college's founding that the anniversary histories tend to pass over, and it says a good deal about education under colonial conditions. The movement that built Khalsa College had campaigned, with some success, for Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script to take a place in the province's education that Persian had once held. But the prestige of a college in late nineteenth-century Punjab did not rest on Punjabi. It rested on recognition by the University of the Punjab at Lahore, founded in October 1882, which, like the other colonial universities of its time, chiefly set examinations and affiliated colleges whose students sat them. Higher learning, and above all the sciences, was conducted largely in English. A college that wished its students to enter the professions, the courts, the services of the state, had to prepare them for that examination and in that language.

So the institution of a vernacular print revolution was, from its first years, also an English-medium college preparing young men for the certificates of an imperial university. I do not think this was hypocrisy. The founders wanted two things at once, the continuity of a tradition in its own script and access for its young people to the professions and offices from which they would otherwise be shut out, and they built an institution that tried to hold both. Bhai Gurmukh Singh, one of the college's chief promoters, had himself taught Punjabi at the Oriental College in Lahore, an institution of the same colonial university. The movement did not stand outside the colonial system of education. It worked inside it, bent it where it could, and paid for its gains in the currency the system accepted.

The paradox did not end with the empire. A century later, medicine in India was still taught almost entirely in English, in cities like Amritsar where the language of the street, the shop and the home was Punjabi; another essay on this site considers what that means for a physician whose [mother tongue is Punjabi](../punjabi-as-a-first-language-of-medicine/index.html). Every revolution in information has a language, and the language decides who arrives already fluent and who must translate before they can begin.

## The Editor and the Lawsuit

Revolutions in print are usually told as histories of ideas. They are also histories of money, quarrels and individual careers, and the career that shows the Punjabi revolution most fully belongs to a man who helped set up Khalsa College and wrote textbooks for its students.

Giani Ditt Singh was born around 1850; even the year is uncertain, given variously as 1850, 1852 and 1853. His family's origins lay in a community that the caste order of the time placed low, and they had come to identify with the Ravidasia weavers, a group the historian Anshu Malhotra has described as an upwardly mobile section of that community. As a boy he studied Gurmukhi, Urdu and Persian, prosody and philosophy with teachers in Ambala district. He became a preacher in the Gulabdasi sect, came under the influence of the Arya Samaj, and was drawn into the Singh Sabha by Bhai Gurmukh Singh. In 1886 he passed the Giani examination, was appointed a teacher at the Oriental College in Lahore, and became first a principal contributor to the new *Khalsa Akhbar* and then its editor. He wrote, by the usual count, more than seventy books and pamphlets: theology, history, polemic, verse, accounts of the eighteenth-century martyrs. He died in Lahore in 1901.

The story that tells most about the revolution he served is a lawsuit. When the Amritsar Khalsa Diwan, the more conservative of the movement's two centres, moved to excommunicate Gurmukh Singh, Ditt Singh answered in print, publishing in the *Khalsa Akhbar* extracts from a satire of his, *Svapan Natak*, that ridiculed the Amritsar leaders. One of its targets sued. The case was eventually dismissed, but defending it cost the paper so much time and money that it shut down in 1889. It resumed in 1893 only with the support of the Maharaja of Nabha. In four years the episode shows nearly everything about a print revolution that its celebrations leave out. The new medium multiplied quarrels as efficiently as it multiplied hymns. It exposed writers to law and to debt. And it survived, when it survived, because a patron with money decided that it should.

His career also shows what the revolution made possible. A man of modest origins and a plural religious formation, who had passed through a sect, a rival reform movement and a long apprenticeship in languages, became through the press and the colleges one of the most prolific writers of the movement and a teacher of its students. Whatever narrowness the institutions of the period had, and the next section takes it seriously, they were also routes by which people outside the old elites could reach a public.

How to read such a life is itself contested, which is a useful warning for any essay about origins. In recent decades some writers have sought to recast Ditt Singh as a hero of the community from which his family came. Malhotra has argued that such a recasting says more about the motives of present-day researchers than about the effects of social status on Ditt Singh himself. The caution applies well beyond his case. Every generation reads the founders of its institutions through its own needs, and the anniversary narrative and the corrective narrative are both tempted to find in the past exactly the figure the present wants.

## Whose Education

An institution's founding mission is not the same thing as its practice, and an anniversary history is the form least likely to notice the difference. So it is fair to ask whose education the earlier revolution made possible.

In a province where reading was still the possession of a minority, a print culture was by definition a culture of the few, however wide its ambitions. A college was narrower still. Higher education in late nineteenth-century Punjab was, in practice, available to young men whose families had means or patrons, who had come through schools that prepared them for examinations set by the university at Lahore, and who could be spared from the land or the shop. The college's founding was a real widening of access for Sikhs and Punjabis who had none, and it was also an institution for a particular stratum.

Women's education took a separate road. The Singh Sabha movement included branches with active women members, and reformers such as Bhai Takht Singh founded a boarding school for girls at Ferozepur in the 1890s. But in Amritsar a Khalsa College for Women was established only in 1968, as a separate institution under the same charitable society. Whatever the founders of 1892 imagined, a college for both sexes was not what they built.

The obvious reply to this line of questioning is that it is anachronistic. It measures an institution founded in 1892 by standards of inclusion that few institutions anywhere in the world met at the time, and finds it wanting for failing to be a college of 2026. There is force in that. A history that does nothing but tally exclusions tells us more about the historian than about the past. But the question here is not whether the founders were as enlightened as their critics; it is whether the mission stated on paper and the access achieved in practice were the same thing, and that question can be asked by the standards of the period itself. Reformers within the movement were already arguing in the 1890s for the education of girls, and at least one of them had founded a school for it. The standard by which the college's early reach looks narrow was not invented later. It was available to its contemporaries, and some of them were pressing it.

The movement itself was far from united. The Amritsar and Lahore Singh Sabhas were rivals almost from the start, the Amritsar faction dominated by aristocrats and hereditary figures who wanted a greater say, the Lahore faction by reformers such as Gurmukh Singh, and their disputes over authority, ritual and who could speak for the community were conducted, naturally, in print. A revolution in the means of argument is also a revolution in the volume of argument.

And there is a larger interpretive dispute that any honest account of the period must mention. In 1994 the historian Harjot Oberoi published *The Construction of Religious Boundaries*, which argued that for much of their history most Sikhs had recognised multiple identities, grounded in local, regional, religious and secular loyalties, and that the sharp boundaries now taken for granted were drawn largely by the reformers of the Singh Sabha period. The book has been praised by some scholars as a landmark and remains highly controversial within the Sikh community, where many readers reject its account of the tradition. This essay is not the place to adjudicate the argument. What matters here is the shape of it. Print standardises, and standardisation always includes some forms and excludes others. To ask what the earlier revolution left out is not to deny what it achieved. It is to take its own medium seriously.

There is one more symmetry in that date, and it is a small one. Oberoi's book appeared in the year I began at Khalsa College. A scholarly argument about the movement that had founded the college was being conducted in print while the college's pre-medical students were occupied with physics, chemistry and biology. That is how institutions usually stand to their own history: inside it, and mostly occupied with something else.

## Milton's Wager

Every revolution in print rests on a wager, and the classic statement of it in English was made by John Milton in 1644. *Areopagitica*, addressed to Parliament against the Licensing Order of 1643, which had restored the censorship of books before publication, is a defence of unlicensed printing, and its most famous sentences are a theory of what books are.

"For books are not absolutely dead things," Milton wrote, "but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are." Therefore, unless wariness be used, "as good almost kill a man as kill a good book." A little further on comes a sentence that turns on a single word: "revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth." Milton's *revolutions* are not upheavals. They are revolvings, the turning of the ages, in the old astronomical sense of the word. The meaning is that time, however long it turns, does not reliably give back what a society suppressed.

The wager itself comes later in the pamphlet. Let truth and falsehood grapple, Milton says: "who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" More printing, freely made, will on balance produce more truth, because truth wins in open contest. The Singh Sabha's printers and writers, whatever their disagreements, made a version of the same bet: that a tradition printed, studied and argued about in its own script would emerge clearer and stronger than one left to manuscript and custom. By their own measure the bet paid. The tracts were cheap on purpose, and by 1902 there were, by one count, more than a hundred and fifty Singh Sabhas and Khalsa Diwans in existence, each with members who read, subscribed and argued. A movement that had begun in a few meetings in Amritsar and Lahore had become, within thirty years, a public held together largely by paper.

Milton's wager had a limit, and he stated it. Toleration, he wrote, was to be wide, but "I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition." The free and open encounter had a door, and some were kept outside it. That is not a reason to dismiss *Areopagitica*. It is a reason to read every revolution's optimism alongside its exceptions, which are usually written in the same pamphlet.

## The Symmetry

On 15 August 1995, India's state international carrier opened the country's first public internet service, in five cities; another essay on this site, [on where knowledge lived in Amritsar in 1995](../where-knowledge-lived-amritsar-1995/index.html), begins from that date and from the fact that Amritsar was not on the list. The student at Khalsa College in those years stood, without anyone announcing it, at a hinge between two revolutions. Behind him was an institution built by the first. Ahead was a world being rebuilt by the second.

One should be careful about what such a position means, because the symmetry is a retrospective pattern and not an experience. Students do not, as a rule, read the institutions they pass through. They use them. A building is a place where lectures happen and practical examinations are held; its history is ambient, present in a name over a door or a date on a stone, and attended to mainly by visitors and anniversaries. The historian reads the institution without using it; the student uses it without reading it; and the two seldom occupy the same mind at the same time. What the symmetry offers is not a recovered awareness but a second look, from a distance of thirty years, at the shape of the ground the student stood on.

Eisenstein's three functions make the difference between the revolutions vivid, because the second inverts the first. Dissemination, which the press made cheap, the network made nearly free. Standardisation, which the press achieved by fixing a text in thousands of identical copies, the network weakened: a page can now be altered after it is read, every reader can be shown a different version, and the definitive edition dissolves into a stream of revisions. Preservation, which the press achieved by multiplying copies until some survived, has become fragile in a new way; links break, formats die, platforms close, and a text that existed everywhere one year can exist nowhere the next.

Medicine felt both revolutions with particular force, and a physician cannot write about them as though they happened only to scripture and poetry. Print made modern anatomy teachable. When Andreas Vesalius published his *Fabrica* at Basel in 1543, every student who opened a copy saw the same woodcut of the same muscle, labelled in the same way, and that fixity of image and text is the kind of change Eisenstein had in mind when she wrote about standardisation. For four centuries afterward, medicine was in large part a discipline of printed books: textbooks, pharmacopoeias, atlases and journals whose authority rested partly on the fact that every reader held the same page. The network has loosened that. Guidance is revised continuously and silently; a reference consulted on Monday may say something different on Friday; the patient's own record is a document that can be amended after it is read. In the clinic, "which version did you see?" has become a clinical question, and the flagship essay on this site, on [the primary care office after the electronic record](../the-primary-care-office-after-the-ehr/index.html), follows what that change has done to a physician's daily work.

Milton's free and open encounter, meanwhile, is free in a sense he would recognise and open in a sense he would not. Anyone may print. What a reader sees is sorted, ranked and selected by systems no reader inspects, and truth's contest with falsehood is staged on ground that neither of them chose.

The archdeacon's prophecy has returned in this revolution, in a new costume. The screen, it is said, will kill the campus. The lecture can be watched anywhere; the library is a search box; the examination can be taken at home. Perhaps. Prophecies of this kind are cheap, and the history of Khalsa College suggests a reason for doubt. In the first revolution, the new medium did not abolish the institution; it created a demand for one, because a culture that has decided to live in print needs places where readers are made, texts are kept and claims are tested. A culture drowning in text needs those places more, not less. Whether it will build them, or let the old ones decay because their buildings seem to have become unnecessary, is a choice rather than a fate, and I offer this as a view and not as a forecast I can defend.

## An Inheritance Open to Scrutiny

There is a small, satisfying loop in the way the two revolutions now meet. Issues of the *Khalsa Akhbar*, printed in Lahore in the 1890s for readers who would mostly never meet, can now be read as digital scans made by the Panjab Digital Library, a project founded in 2003 to digitise manuscripts, books and newspapers of the region. The products of the first revolution are being preserved by the tools of the second, and read by people the original printers could not have imagined, on screens in cities the original subscribers never saw. Preservation, which the network endangers in one way, it serves in another, provided someone decides that the old paper is worth the labour. That decision is always made by an institution, or by people acting as one.

Gratitude to an institution is easy to express and hard to do well. The easy form is the anniversary narrative, in which every founding intention is fulfilled, every era continuous with the last, and every graduate a confirmation of the mission. The history sketched here does not support that narrative. The college was founded by a movement that argued fiercely with itself, under conditions set by an empire, for a public that was narrower than its rhetoric, and it has been governed and regoverned since by people with different ideas of what it was for.

The better form of gratitude is to use what the institution itself provides for scrutinising it. Khalsa College built, within a generation of its founding, a department whose purpose was to write the history of the Sikhs from a modern historical perspective, to gather documents and test claims against them. That department is the college's own instrument for examining the college. An inheritance that includes such an instrument is an inheritance that expects to be questioned.

Hugo's archdeacon thought the book would kill the edifice. In Amritsar the book built the edifice, and the edifice, in its turn, built a place to keep and judge books. The student who passed through it in the mid-1990s inherited both, the book of paper and the book of stone, at the moment a third kind of book, made of light and revisable at will, was arriving in the country. What the earlier revolution suggests is not that the institutions will survive. It is that revolutions in information have always needed institutions to hold what they release, and that the people who inherit those institutions are responsible for deciding what they will hold next.

## Evidence and Editorial Note

**Documented findings.** The essay relies on the author's public biography: pre-medical sciences at Khalsa College, Amritsar, 1994–1996. Victor Hugo, *Notre-Dame de Paris* (1831), Book Fifth, chapters 1 and 2, quoted from the translation by Isabel F. Hapgood (Project Gutenberg eBook 2610), including Jacques Coictier as the king's physician and the printed gloss attributed to Nuremberg, 1474 (the printer's name is given in the translation as Antonius Koburger). Khalsa College's foundation (1892), first classes (1893), main building by Bhai Ram Singh and its completion in 1911–12, the 1886 founding of the D.A.V. College as a spur, princely donors on the governing board, the Khalsa College for Women (1968), affiliation to Guru Nanak Dev University: Wikipedia, "Khalsa College, Amritsar" and "Singh Sabha movement"; construction 1904–1911 and UGC heritage status (2017): *The Tribune*, "Khalsa College: A heritage marvel" (22 September 2020). The Ludhiana mission press (1835), Newton's Punjabi dictionary (1854), colonial preference for Urdu, the Wazir-i-Hind press (dated 1891 there; other accounts place it only in the early 1890s, after Vir Singh's matriculation that year) and the "age of inauguration" (1880–1900): Wikipedia, "Punjabi literature" and "Gurmukhi". The 1873 Amritsar Singh Sabha and its aims, the Amritsar–Lahore rivalry, women members and Bhai Takht Singh's school for girls: Wikipedia, "Singh Sabha movement"; the 1882 petition to Charles Aitchison: Wikipedia, "Gurmukhi". *Khalsa Akhbar* (Lahore, 1886; Gurmukh Singh; Ditt Singh): Wikipedia, "Khalsa Akhbar" and "Ditt Singh". The Wazir-i-Hind press as a lithographic press whose first commission was geography textbooks: Wikipedia, "Vir Singh (writer)". Giani Ditt Singh's uncertain birth year, family origins and Ravidasia identification (with Anshu Malhotra's characterisation and her caution about recent recastings of his life), schooling, Gulabdasi and Arya Samaj periods, Giani examination and Oriental College post (1886), editorship of *Khalsa Akhbar*, more than seventy works, help in setting up Khalsa College and textbooks for its students, the *Svapan Natak* satire after the move against Gurmukh Singh, the lawsuit, the paper's closure in 1889 and resumption in 1893 with Nabha's support, and his death in 1901: Wikipedia, "Ditt Singh". Kahn Singh Nabha's *Ham Hindu Nahin* (first issued in Punjabi in 1898, the usual date; one reference gives 1897–98) and *Mahan Kosh* (1912–1926; published 1930 by Patiala; 3,338 pages): Wikipedia, "Ham Hindu Nahin" (citing *Encyclopaedia Britannica*) and "Kahn Singh Nabha". Macauliffe's *The Sikh Religion* (six volumes, Clarendon Press, 1909) and his Sikh collaborators: Wikipedia, "Max Arthur Macauliffe". The Sikh History Research Centre (1930) and Ganda Singh's charge from October 1931: Wikipedia, "Sikh History Research Centre" and "Ganda Singh (historian)". The Central Sikh League's 1919 objective and the return of the college to Sikh control in November 1920 by refusing government grants: Wikipedia, "Akali movement". Guru Nanak Dev University (24 November 1969): Wikipedia, "Guru Nanak Dev University". Elizabeth Eisenstein's three functions of print: Wikipedia, "Elizabeth Eisenstein" (the work is dated 1979 by its first publication; some references give 1980). Benedict Anderson, *Imagined Communities* (1983) and print capitalism: Wikipedia, "Imagined Communities", with the reading summarised in the author's words. Harjot Oberoi, *The Construction of Religious Boundaries* (Oxford University Press, 1994), its thesis and reception: Wikipedia, "Harjot Oberoi"; the year of publication is standard reference knowledge. John Milton, *Areopagitica* (1644), quoted from Project Gutenberg eBook 608; the Licensing Order of 1643: Wikipedia, "Areopagitica". India's first public internet service on 15 August 1995, in five cities: B. K. Syngal's account as excerpted by ThePrint, cited in the linked essay on this site. The University of the Punjab (founded 14 October 1882): Wikipedia, "University of the Punjab"; its role as an examining and affiliating body is standard reference knowledge of colonial Indian universities. Vesalius's *Fabrica* (Basel, 1543): standard reference knowledge. The Panjab Digital Library (founded 2003) and its digitised issue of the *Khalsa Akhbar* of 15 May 1893: Wikipedia, "Panjab Digital Library" and "Khalsa Akhbar". More than 150 Singh Sabhas and Khalsa Diwans by 1902: Wikipedia, "Singh Sabha movement". **Vendor representations.** None.

**Recollection and tradition.** That the author studied at Khalsa College from 1994 to 1996 is biography. The essay describes no building, routine, teacher, classmate, examination or conversation from those years, and does not claim what the author knew of the college's history at the time; the observation that students were reading for examinations is a general description of a pre-medical course. Accounts of Sikh history are given as published scholarship and reference summaries, without claims about what all Sikhs believe.

**Analysis and forecast.** The reading of Hugo and Milton, the account of Ditt Singh's career, the application of Eisenstein's three functions to the Singh Sabha and to the networked era, the argument that the print revolution created rather than destroyed institutions, and the view about the future of colleges are the author's interpretation and opinion as of November 6, 2026, offered as reflection rather than prediction. **Independence.** This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer, including Khalsa College.



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