Satguru Ram Singh Ji founded the Namdhari, or Kuka, sect at Bhaini Sahib in Ludhiana district on 12 April 1857, the same year as the revolt.
The movement pushed social reform, refused British courts and schools, and organised a boycott of British goods and postal services well before such tactics became general.
In January 1872, after a Kuka attack on Malerkotla, 66 Namdharis were blown from cannon there without trial. Satguru Ram Singh Ji was deported to Rangoon.
Bhaini Sahib remains the seat of the sect, which keeps its own historiography and its own archive.
The Namdharis kept classical music when the rest of Sikh practice had moved to the harmonium. The rabab, the taus, the saranda and the dilruba were maintained here, and the Namdhari musicians are the reason the current gurmat sangeet revival had living practitioners to learn from.
The sect keeps its own maryada, its own succession of living gurus and its own calendar, and it is not accepted by the mainstream on the living-guru question. It also runs schools, a dairy operation and a substantial charitable establishment.
Bhaini Sahib is a small village in Ludhiana district with a very large annual gathering and an institutional presence out of all proportion to its size, and the standard account of Sikh history mentions it once, for the executions of 1872.