Companion & devotee
Baba Dyal Singh
ਬਾਬਾ ਦਿਆਲ ਸਿੰਘ
Founder of the Nirankari reform movement at Rawalpindi, which called Sikhs back to worship of the formless God and simple rites.
Dyal Singh was born in 1783 at Peshawar into a family of Sahajdhari Sikhs and settled in Rawalpindi, where he kept a shop.
He founded the Nirankari movement, calling Sikhs back to the worship of the formless God, Nirankar, and away from the Brahmin rituals, idols and pilgrimages that had crept into Sikh life. He introduced the Anand Karaj marriage ceremony around the Guru Granth Sahib, which later became law.
He died in 1855. His followers moved to Chandigarh after 1947. The Sant Nirankari group, which clashed with Sikhs in Amritsar in 1978, is a separate offshoot.