The Chief Khalsa Diwan was formed at Amritsar in 1902 to bring together the scattered Singh Sabhas under one body, and it became the principal Sikh organisation of the early twentieth century.
It ran schools, orphanages and an educational conference, published tracts, and represented Sikh interests to the government. Sir Sundar Singh Majithia and Bhai Vir Singh were among its leading figures.
Its method was loyalist and constitutional: petitions, education and negotiation rather than agitation.
It was displaced after 1920 by the SGPC and the Akali Dal, whose method was mass civil resistance and who won the shrines within five years by using it.
The Diwan continues, running educational institutions including the Central Khalsa Orphanage at Amritsar, where Udham Singh was brought up.
It is the institution that built the Sikh educational network and then lost the political argument, and it is barely mentioned in accounts of the period it dominated.
The Sikh Educational Conference, first held at Gujranwala in 1908 and moving from town to town since, is the machinery through which Khalsa schools and colleges were founded across Punjab and outside it. It has met nearly seventy times in all and is still held.
The Anand Marriage Act of 1909 began as a bill brought by Tikka Ripudaman Singh of Nabha in 1908 and was carried through the Imperial Legislative Council by Sundar Singh Majithia, who replaced him on the council, with the Diwan behind it, giving the Sikh marriage ceremony standing in law separate from Hindu personal law. It is what the constitutional method actually delivered, and it is still the statute Anand marriages are registered under.
Bhai Vir Singh's Khalsa Tract Society and the Diwan's presses between them made modern Punjabi prose. The novel, the tract, the newspaper editorial and the school textbook in Gurmukhi all date from this organisation's first twenty years, and the language people write in now was largely settled then.