Gatka is the Punjabi martial art practised with sticks and with edged weapons: sword, shield, spear, chakkar, and the marati, a weighted chain.
It is taught in akharas attached to gurdwaras and deras, and is demonstrated at Hola Mohalla, at nagar kirtans and at village fairs. It is now also organised competitively, with a federation and rules, which is a recent development.
Its relationship to shastar vidya, the older battlefield system claimed by some Nihang lineages, is disputed. One position is that gatka is a nineteenth-century sporting reduction of a fighting art the British suppressed; another is that it is a continuous tradition.
The distinction matters to practitioners and cannot be resolved from the sources, since a fighting art is transmitted by demonstration and leaves almost no documentary trace.
What is not disputed is that a large number of Punjabi children learn it, that it is performed at every major Sikh public occasion, and that the weapons used are real.
The weapon is a stick with a leather guard standing in for the sword, and the practice runs through set patterns of movement, footwork and combination rather than through free sparring.
It is performed at Hola Mohalla and at gurdwara occasions and is taught in akharas across Punjab and in the diaspora, largely to children.
A weapon art leaves no manual and no notation. What can be checked is the surviving weapons, the paintings and the accounts of people who watched the fighting, and none of those tells you what was taught in an akhara. The argument cannot be settled, both sides know it, and it has not slowed down at all.