Sakhi Sarwar, also called Lakhdata and Sultan, was a twelfth-century Sufi whose shrine is at Nigaha in Dera Ghazi Khan district, at the foot of the Sulaiman range.
His following in Punjab before the twentieth century was enormous and crossed every community. Hindu, Muslim and Sikh households kept his observance, and groups of pilgrims, the sanghs, walked from central Punjab to the shrine annually, several hundred kilometres each way.
Every village had followers and many had a small shrine. The colonial census recorded large numbers of Hindus and Sikhs returning Sakhi Sarwar as their object of worship.
It collapsed. The Singh Sabha campaigned against it from the 1880s as a non-Sikh practice, the Arya Samaj campaigned against it from the Hindu side, and Partition put the shrine in another country.
Within about two generations one of the largest devotional followings in Punjab disappeared almost entirely from the Indian side.
It is the clearest case of a mass religious practice being ended by reform movements, and it is barely mentioned in accounts of either movement.
The observance had its own practitioners, the bharais, who kept the drum, carried the offering and led the parties, and who were paid by the households they served. They were a village functionary of the same kind as the mirasi and they went out with the practice.
The mark of a follower was the sang, a party that walked behind a decorated pole with a drum, and a small mound or a lamp kept in the courtyard at home. Lakhdata, giver of lakhs, was a word in ordinary speech and is now a word nobody uses.
The shrine at Nigaha is still visited from the Pakistani side and the mela there is large. The devotion was not ended everywhere. It was ended on one side of a line by people who set out to end it, which is a different thing from a custom dying of its own accord.