sanatanhindusikh
shastarvidiya
theindependent

One of Singh Nihang's top students is Iqbal Singh, a 39-year-old businessman from Slough who had spent many years looking for a master who might be able to reconnect him with his culture's fighting past.

"When I was younger I used to head down to the British Library where there are loads of manuscripts and books from the Sikh empire," he recalls. "I kept dreaming about travelling back to the Punjab to find a master and I always imagined he'd be some grizzled old man living in a hut somewhere. Instead, the person who seemed to know the most about these fighting styles was a factory worker from Wolverhampton."

In fact, it was thanks to the British Raj's obsessive bureaucracy that people like Singh Nihang have been able to reacquaint themselves with their ancestors' past. The physical technique of fighting was taught to him in the Punjab by a septuagenarian Gurdev when he was a teenager but the vast records in the British Library and the V&A Museum enabled him to compile a history of the Akali Nihang warriors in a book called In The Master's Presence.

"That's something that has always amused me," laughs Singh Nihang. "It was British colonialism that nearly destroyed Shastar Vidiya, but it is also colonialism's obsession with book keeping that may save it."