Guru Naanak Dev Ji & Sheikh Sharaf

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Sarmad was an Armenian Jewish-born Persian mysticand poet who settled in the Mughal empire during the lifetimes of Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Guru Hargobind Ji, and the succeeding Gurus. He became closely associated with the great Sufi saint Mian Mir, the closest known companion of Guru Arjan Dev Ji, placing Sarmad firmly within the same spiritual and political world inhabited by the Guru period. Through this connection, and their shared presence in Lahore and Delhi, it is extremely likely that Sarmad and the Sikh community were aware of one another, and may have crossed paths. 

Sarmad took the radical step of abandoning clothing altogether, wandering naked through the streets of Delhi as a rejection of pretence, ego, and religious hypocrisy. His teachings challenged both Islamic orthodoxy and imperial authority. His life was also shaped by a deep and loving relationship with Abhai Chand, a Hindu man who became his companion, disciple, and partner. Their bond is openly recorded in multiple Persian and Urdu accounts, one of the clearest examples of same-sex devotion preserved in South Asian history.

Sarmad was executed on the orders of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1661, not for his queer relationship, but for refusing to complete the Islamic declaration of faith, stopping at “There is no god,” a mystical affirmation that the ultimate truth is One, beyond form and doctrine. His death places him among the martyrs of his age, resisting the same Mughal machinery that persecuted the Sikh Gurus.

Though not Sikh himself, Sarmad lived inside the same vibrant network of Sufis, seekers, poets, and revolutionaries who interacted with the Sikh Gurus. 

His life, and his love with Abhai Chand stands as a powerful reminder that queerness, faith, and resistance have always existed within the wider spiritual landscape of Panjab and the Gurus’ time.

Migration, sexuality, and colonial policing

Empire, resistance, and queer life in plain sight 

Catherine Duleep Singh lived in Britain at the height of the British Empire, a period defined by racial hierarchy, imperial extraction, and the denial of political rights to women and colonised peoples. As the daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh and granddaughter of the great Sher-e-Punjab Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Catherine occupied a unique and uncomfortable position within imperial Britain, a Sikh princess raised inside the belly of the empire that had annexed her family’s kingdom.

Although raised and baptised a Christian, Catherine later reconnected with her Sikh heritage. After travelling to Punjab in 1903, including Lahore and Amritsar, she increasingly invoked her Sikh lineage and aligned herself with Sikh and Indian anti-colonial struggles, embracing Sikhi as inheritance and resistance rather than institution.

In the early 20th century, British women were denied the right to vote, and suffragette activism was met with surveillance, arrest, and violence. The suffrage movement was divided between militant and non-militant approaches. While her sister Sophia Duleep Singh became a militant suffragette with the Women’s Social and Political Union, selling Votes for Women outside Hampton Court Palace, refusing to pay taxes in protest, and openly defying the British state, Catherine supported the cause as a suffragist aligned with the non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), using her wealth to fund the movement and organise fundraising efforts. Together, the sisters represented some of the most visible South Asian participation in Britain’s struggle for women’s political rights. 

Catherine never married. After the death of her parents, at the age of 22, she developed a close relationship with her governess, Fraulein “Lina” Schäfer, who was twelve years her senior. Over time, Catherine and Lina travelled extensively through Europe and eventually settled together in Kassel, Germany, Lina’s hometown. Their relationship appears in letters, addresses, and living arrangements rather than through public declaration. This was typical of the period, when same-sex relationships between women were often lived openly in practice but coded carefully in the archive.

In 1938, after Lina’s death and as fascism rose across Europe, Catherine used her status and resources to oppose Nazism and support Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. Her politics did not soften with age. She remained active in anti-fascist and anti-imperial efforts until her death in 1942. In her final act, she was cremated instead of being buried, with some of her ashes scattered in Kassel to rest near Lina, while others were scattered at Elveden, her childhood home.

Like many queer histories, Catherine’s sexuality does not survive in the archive as confession or label. It survives through patterns of life: whom she chose as family, which futures she rejected, and how publicly she resisted power. Her story reminds us that queer Sikh history is not only devotional or symbolic. It is also political, anti-colonial, and lived in full view of the state.

Why this history matters 

Catherine Duleep Singh’s life shows that queer Sikh history did not exist only on the margins. It existed at the centre of the empire, carried by a woman who refused marriage, respectability, and obedience, and who built a life with another woman while confronting the British state directly.

Queer Sikh history is not only found in saints and poets. It is also found in protest lines, domestic partnerships, tax resistance, and anti-fascist struggle. Naming Fraulein ‘Lina’ Schafer alongside Catherine matters because queer history is not abstract. It is relational, shared, and lived.