The Central Sikh League was formed at Amritsar in December 1919, in the aftermath of Jallianwala Bagh and the martial law period, as a Sikh political body aligned with the national movement rather than with the loyalist Chief Khalsa Diwan.
Baba Kharak Singh was its president. It supported non-cooperation and it provided the political framework within which the SGPC and the Akali Dal were created the following year.
Its formation marks the point at which Sikh politics moved from petitioning to agitation, and 1919 is the hinge: a province that had supplied half of India's soldiers to the war was placed under martial law within months of its end.
The League was absorbed into the Akali Dal's orbit and lost its separate identity within a decade.
The sequence 1919 to 1925, from Jallianwala to the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, is six years in which Sikh political organisation was invented in its modern form, and almost all of it happened in Amritsar.
Its first session was held in the same city and the same season as the national party sessions of that year, which was deliberate. The point was to be seen as a political body rather than as a religious association.
It backed non-cooperation and it was the organisational bridge between the reform societies and the Akali Dal, founded in 1920.
It faded once the SGPC and the Akali Dal held the ground. Its short life is the hinge between loyalist Sikh politics and agitational Sikh politics.