Khalsa College was founded at Amritsar in 1892 by the Singh Sabha, funded by public subscription from Sikh princes, sardars and ordinary villagers, on land outside the city on the Lahore road.
Its building, in an Indo-Saracenic style by Bhai Ram Singh of the Mayo School of Art, is one of the great pieces of nineteenth-century architecture in Punjab. Bhai Ram Singh was a Ramgarhia carpenter's son who also designed the Durbar Room at Osborne House for Queen Victoria.
The college was the seedbed of Sikh public life for half a century: its students and staff ran the Singh Sabha press, the SGPC, the Akali movement and much of the Punjabi literary revival.
It was also under close government supervision, and its managing committee was repeatedly the site of conflict between the administration, the princes and the reformers.
Guru Nanak Dev University and the Khalsa College group of institutions grew from it. The main building is still in use.
The foundation stone was laid on 5 March 1892 by the Singh Sabha and teaching began the following year, with the main building finished around 1911. It was designed by Bhai Ram Singh of the Mayo School at Lahore and is among the largest and most elaborate examples of the Indo-Saracenic manner in northern India.
It was the institution the reform movement built to produce an educated Sikh class, and the leadership of the Akali movement, of the SGPC and of Punjabi scholarship came out of it for decades.
The main building has been used as a location by Hindi and Punjabi cinema for decades, which is how most Indians who have seen it have seen it, generally without being told what it is.
Khalsa College institutional history.