The Jats took up arms against the Mughal Empire during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.[11]Gokula, a Hindu Jat landlord was among the earliest rebel leaders who fought against the Mughal rule during Aurangzeb's era.[12] The Hindu Jat kingdom reached its zenith under Maharaja Suraj Mal (1707–1763).[13] The community played an important role in the development of the martial Khalsapanth of Sikhism.[14] By the 20th century, the landowning Jats became an influential group in several parts of North India, including Punjab,[15]Western Uttar Pradesh,[16]Rajasthan,[17]Haryana and Delhi.[18] Over the years, several Jats abandoned agriculture in favour of urban jobs, and used their dominant economic and political status to claim higher social status.[19]
By the time of Muhammad bin Qasim's conquest of Sind in the eighth century, Arab writers described agglomerations of Jats, known to them as Zutt, in the arid, the wet, and the mountainous regions of the conquered land of Sindh.[31] The Arab rulers, though professing a theologically egalitarian religion, maintained the position of Jats and the discriminatory practices against them that had been put in place in the long period of Hindu rule in Sind.[32] Between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, Jat herders at the Sind migrated up along the river valleys,[33] into the Punjab,[8] which may have been largely uncultivated in the first millennium.[34] Many took up tilling in regions such as western Punjab, where the sakia (water wheel) had been recently introduced.[8][35] By early Mughal times, in the Punjab, the term "Jat" had become loosely synonymous with "peasant",[36] and some Jats had come to own land and exert local influence.[8] The Jats had their origins in pastoralism in the Indus valley, and gradually became agriculturalist farmers.[37] Around 1595, Jat Zamindars controlled a little over 32% of the Zamindaris in the Punjab region.[38]
According to historians Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot,[39]
The Jats also provide an important insight into how religious identities evolved during the precolonial era. Before they settled in the Punjab and other northern regions, the pastoralist Jats had little exposure to any of the mainstream religions. Only after they became more integrated into the agrarian world did the Jats adopt the dominant religion of the people in whose midst they dwelt.[39]
Over time the Jats became primarily Muslim in the western Punjab, Sikh in the eastern Punjab, and Hindu in the areas between Delhi Territory and Agra, with the divisions by faith reflecting the geographical strengths of these religions.[39]
During the decline of Mughal rule in the early 18th century, the Indian subcontinent's hinterland dwellers, many of whom were armed and nomadic, increasingly interacted with settled townspeople and agriculturists. Many new rulers of the 18th century came from such martial and nomadic backgrounds. The effect of this interaction on India's social organization lasted well into the colonial period. During much of this time, non-elite tillers and pastoralists, such as the Jats or Ahirs, were part of a social spectrum that blended only indistinctly into the elite landowning classes at one end, and the menial or ritually polluting classes at the other.[40] During the heyday of Mughal rule, Jats had recognized rights. According to Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf:
Upstart warriors, Marathas, Jats, and the like, as coherent social groups with military and governing ideals, were themselves a product of the Mughal context, which recognized them and provided them with military and governing experience. Their successes were a part of the Mughal success.[41]
As the Mughal empire faltered, there were a series of rural rebellions in North India.[42] Although these had sometimes been characterized as "peasant rebellions", others, such as Muzaffar Alam, have pointed out that small local landholders, or zemindars, often led these uprisings.[42] The Sikh and Jat rebellions were led by such small local zemindars, who had close association and family connections with each other and with the peasants under them, and who were often armed.[43]
These communities of rising peasant-warriors were not well-established Indian castes,[44] but rather quite new, without fixed status categories, and with the ability to absorb older peasant castes, sundry warlords, and nomadic groups on the fringes of settled agriculture.[43][45] The Mughal Empire, even at the zenith of its power, functioned by devolving authority and never had direct control over its rural grandees.[43] It was these zemindars who gained most from these rebellions, increasing the land under their control.[43] The triumphant even attained the ranks of minor princes, such as the Jat ruler Badan Singh of the princely state of Bharatpur.[43]
In 1669, the Hindu Jats, under the leadership of Gokula, rebelled against the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in Mathura.[46] The community came to predominate south and east of Delhi after 1710.[47] According to historian Christopher Bayly
Men characterised by early eighteenth century Mughal records as plunderers and bandits preying on the imperial lines of communications had by the end of the century spawned a range of petty states linked by marriage alliance and religious practice.[47]
The Jats had moved into the Gangetic Plain in two large migrations, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively.[47] They were not a caste in the usual Hindu sense, for example, in which Bhumihars of the eastern Gangetic plain were; rather they were an umbrella group of peasant-warriors.[47] According to Christopher Bayly:
This was a society where Brahmins were few and male Jats married into the whole range of lower agricultural and entrepreneurial castes. A kind of tribal nationalism animated them rather than a nice calculation of caste differences expressed within the context of Brahminical Hindu state.[47]
By the mid-eighteenth century, the ruler of the recently established Jat kingdom of Bharatpur, Raja Surajmal, felt sanguine enough about durability to build a garden palace at nearby Deeg.[48] According to historian, Eric Stokes,
When the power of the Bharatpur raja was riding high, fighting clans of Jats encroached into the Karnal/Panipat, Mathura, Agra, and Aligarh districts, usually at the expense of Rajput groups. But such a political umbrella was too fragile and short-lived for substantial displacement to be effected.[49]
When Arabs entered Sindh and other Southern regions of current Pakistan in the seventh century, the chief tribal groupings they found were the Jats and the Med people. These Jats are often referred as Zatts in early Arab writings. The Muslim conquest chronicles further point at the important concentrations of Jats in towns and fortresses of Lower and Central Sindh.[50][51] Today, Muslim Jats are found in Pakistan and India.[52]
While followers important to Sikh tradition like Baba Buddha were among the earliest significant historical Sikh figures, and significant numbers of conversions occurred as early as the time of Guru Angad (1504–1552),[53] the first large-scale conversions of Jats is commonly held to have begun during the time of Guru Arjan (1563–1606).[53][54]: 265 While touring the countryside of eastern Punjab, he founded several important towns like Tarn Taran Sahib, Kartarpur, and Hargobindpur which functioned as social and economic hubs, and together with the community-funded completion of the Darbar Sahib to house the Guru Granth Sahib and serve as a rallying point and center for Sikh activity, established the beginnings of a self-contained Sikh community, which was especially swelled with the region's Jat peasantry.[53] They formed the vanguard of Sikh resistance against the Mughal Empire from the 18th century onwards.
It has been postulated, though inconclusively, that the increased militarization of the Sikh panth following the martyrdom of Guru Arjan (beginning during the era of Guru Hargobind and continuing after) and its large Jat presence may have reciprocally influenced each other.[55][full citation needed][56]
At least eight of the 12 Sikh Misls (Sikh confederacies) were led by Jat Sikhs,[57] who would form the vast majority of Sikh chiefs.[58]
According to censuses in gazetteers published during the colonial period in the early 20th century, further waves of Jat conversions, from Hinduism to Sikhism, continued during the preceding decades.[59][60] Writing about the Jats of Punjab, the Sikh author Khushwant Singh opined that their attitude never allowed themselves to be absorbed in the Brahminic fold.[61][62] The British played a significant role in the rise of Sikh Jat population by encouraging Hindu Jats to convert to Sikhism so as to get larger number of Sikh recruits for their army.[63][64]
According to anthropologist Sunil K. Khanna, Jat population is estimated to be around 30 million (or 3 crore) in South Asia in 2010. This estimation is based on statistics of the last caste census and the population growth of the region. The last caste census was conducted in 1931, which estimated Jats to be 8 million, mostly concentrated in India and Pakistan.[67] Deryck O. Lodrick estimates Jat population to be over 33 million (around 12 million and over 21 million in India and Pakistan, respectively) in South Asia in 2009 while noting the unavailability of precise statistics in this regard. His estimation is based on a late 1980s population projection of Jats and the population growth of India and Pakistan. He also notes that some estimates put their total population in South Asia at approximately 43 million in 2009.[68]
In India, multiple 21st-century estimates put Jats' population share at 20–25% in Haryana state and at 20–35% in Punjab state.[69][70][71] In Rajasthan, Delhi, and Uttar Pradesh, they constitute around 9%, 5%, and 1.2% respectively of the total population.[72][73][74]
In the 20th century and more recently, Jats have dominated as the political class in Haryana[75] and Punjab.[76] Some Jat people have become notable political leaders, including the fifth Prime Minister of India, Charan Singh[77] and the sixth Deputy Prime Minister of India, Chaudhary Devi Lal.[78]
The Jat people were designated by officials of the British Raj as a "martial race", which meant that they were one of the groups whom the British favoured for recruitment to the British Indian Army.[84][85] This was a designation created by administrators that classified each ethnic group as either "martial" or "non-martial": a "martial race" was typically considered brave and well built for fighting,[86] whilst the remainder were those whom the British believed to be unfit for battle because of their sedentary lifestyles.[87] However, the martial races were also considered politically subservient, intellectually inferior, lacking the initiative or leadership qualities to command large military formations. The British had a policy of recruiting the martial Indians from those who has less access to education as they were easier to control.[88][89] According to modern historian Jeffrey Greenhunt on military history, "The Martial Race theory had an elegant symmetry. Indians who were intelligent and educated were defined as cowards, while those defined as brave were uneducated and backward". According to Amiya Samanta, the martial race was chosen from people of mercenary spirit (a soldier who fights for any group or country that will pay him/her), as these groups lacked nationalism as a trait.[90] The Jats participated in both World War I and World War II, as a part of the British Indian Army.[91] In the period subsequent to 1881, when the British reversed their prior anti-Sikh policies, it was necessary to profess Sikhism in order to be recruited to the army because the administration believed Hindus to be inferior for military purposes.[92]
The Indian Army admitted in 2013 that the 150-strong Presidential Bodyguard comprises only people who are Hindu Jats, Jat Sikhs and Hindu Rajputs. Refuting claims of discrimination, it said that this was for "functional" reasons rather than selection based on caste or religion.[93]
There are conflicting scholarly views regarding the varna status of Jats in Hinduism. Historian Satish Chandra describes the varna of Jats as "ambivalent" during the medieval era.[95] Historian Irfan Habib states that the Jats were a "pastoral Chandala-like tribe" in Sindh during the eighth century. Their 11th-century status of Shudra varna changed to Vaishya varna by the 17th century, with some of them aspiring to improve it further after their 17th-century rebellion against the Mughals. He cites Al-Biruni and Dabistan-i Mazahib to support the claims of Shudra and Vashiya varna respectively.[96]
The Rajputs refused to accept Jat claims to Kshatriya status during the later years of the British Raj and this disagreement frequently resulted in violent incidents between the two communities.[97] The claim at that time of Kshatriya status was being made by the Arya Samaj, which was popular in the Jat community. The Arya Samaj saw it as a means to counter the colonial belief that the Jats were not of Aryan descent but of Indo-Scythian origin.[98]
Female infanticide and status of woman in society
During the colonial period, many communities including Hindu Jats were found to be practicing female infanticide in different regions of Northern India.[99][100]
A 1988 study of Jat society pointed out that differential treatment is given to women in comparison to men. The birth of a male child in a family is celebrated and is considered auspicious, while the reaction to the birth of a female child is more subdued. In villages, female members are supposed to get married at a younger age and they are expected to work in fields as subordinate to the male members. There is general bias against education for the female child in society, though trends are changing with urbanisation. Purdah system is practiced by women in Jat villages which act as hindrance to their overall emancipation. The village Jat councils which are male-dominated mostly don't allow female members to head their councils as the common opinion on it is that women are inferior, incapable and less intelligent to men.[101]
^ ab"Glossary: Jat: title of north India's major non-elite 'peasant' caste."[5]
^ ab"... in the middle decades of the (nineteenth) century, there were two contrasting trends in India's agrarian regions. Previously marginal areas took off as zones of newly profitable 'peasant' agriculture, disadvantaging non-elite tilling groups, who were known by such titles as Jat in western NWP and Gounder in Coimatore."[6]
^ ab"In the later nineteenth century, this thinking led colonial officials to try to protect Sikh Jats and other non-elite 'peasants' whom they now favoured as military recruits by advocating legislation under the so-called land alienation."[7]
^According to Susan Bayly, "... (North India) contained large numbers of non-elite tillers. In the Punjab and the western Gangetic Plains, convention defined the Rajput's non-elite counterpart as a Jat. Like many similar titles used elsewhere, this was not so much a caste name as a broad designation for the man of substance in rural terrain. … To be called Jat has in some regions implied a background of pastoralism, though it has more commonly been a designation of non-servile cultivating people."[24]
^Khanna, Sunil K. (2004). "Jat". In Ember, Carol R.; Ember, Melvin (eds.). Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World's Cultures. Vol. 2. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. p. 777. ISBN978-0-306-47754-6. Notwithstanding social, linguistic, and religious diversity, the Jats are one of the major landowning agriculturalist communities in South Asia.
^Gould, Harold A. (2006) [2005]. "Glossary". Sikhs, Swamis, Students and Spies: The India Lobby in the United States, 1900–1946. SAGE Publications. p. 439. ISBN978-0-7619-3480-6. Jat: name of large agricultural caste centered in the undivided Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh
^Khazanov, Anatoly M.; Wink, Andre (2012), Nomads in the Sedentary World, Routledge, p. 177, ISBN978-1-136-12194-4, retrieved 15 August 2013 Quote: "Hiuen Tsang gave the following account of a numerous pastoral-nomadic population in seventh-century Sin-ti (Sind): 'By the side of the river..[of Sind], along the flat marshy lowlands for some thousand li, there are several hundreds of thousands [a very great many] families ..[which] give themselves exclusively to tending cattle and from this derive their livelihood. They have no masters, and whether men or women, have neither rich nor poor.' While they were left unnamed by the Chinese pilgrim, these same people of lower Sind were called Jats' or 'Jats of the wastes' by the Arab geographers. The Jats, as 'dromedary men.' were one of the chief pastoral-nomadic divisions at that time, with numerous subdivisions, ....
^Wink, André (2004), Indo-Islamic society: 14th – 15th centuries, BRILL, pp. 92–93, ISBN978-90-04-13561-1, retrieved 15 August 2013 Quote: "In Sind, the breeding and grazing of sheep and buffaloes was the regular occupations of pastoral nomads in the lower country of the south, while the breeding of goats and camels was the dominant activity in the regions immediately to the east of the Kirthar range and between Multan and Mansura. The jats were one of the chief pastoral-nomadic divisions here in early-medieval times, and although some of these migrated as far as Iraq, they generally did not move over very long distances on a regular basis. Many jats migrated to the north, into the Panjab, and here, between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, the once largely pastoral-nomadic Jat population was transformed into sedentary peasants. Some Jats continued to live in the thinly populated barr country between the five rivers of the Panjab, adopting a kind of transhumance, based on the herding of goats and camels. It seems that what happened to the jats is paradigmatic of most other pastoral and pastoral-nomadic populations in India in the sense that they became ever more closed in by an expanding sedentary-agricultural realm."
^Catherine Ella Blanshard Asher; Cynthia Talbot (2006). India before Europe. Cambridge University Press. p. 265. ISBN978-0-521-80904-7.
^The Gazetteer of India: History and culture. Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, India. 1973. p. 348. OCLC186583361.
^Karine Schomer and W. H. McLeod, ed. (1987). The Sants: studies in a devotional tradition of India. Motilal Banarsidass Publ. p. 242. ISBN978-81-208-0277-3.
^Carol R. Ember; Melvin Ember, eds. (2004). Encyclopedia of medical anthropology. Springer. p. 778. ISBN978-0-306-47754-6.
^Sunil K. Khanna (2009). Fetal/fatal knowledge: new reproductive technologies and family-building strategies in India. Cengage Learning. p. 18. ISBN978-0-495-09525-5.
^Alavi, Seema (2002). The eighteenth century in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. p. 67. ISBN0-19-565640-7. OCLC50783542. The Jat power neat Agra and Mathura arose out of the rebellion of peasants under zamindar leadership, attaining the apex of power under Suraj Mal...it seems to have been an extensive replacement of Rajput by Jat zamindars...and the 'warlike Jats' (a peasant and zamindar caste).
^Judge, Paramjit (2014). Mapping social exclusion in India: caste, religion and borderlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 112. ISBN978-1-107-05609-1. OCLC880877884.
^Stokes, Eric (1978). The peasant and the Raj: studies in agrarian society and peasant rebellion in colonial India. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 185. ISBN978-0-521-29770-7. OCLC889813954. n the Ganges Canal Tract of the Muzaffarnagar district where the landowning castes – Tagas, Jats, Rajputs, Sayyids, Sheikhs, Gujars, Borahs
^Khan, Zahoor Ali (1997). "ZAMINDARI CASTE CONFIGURATION IN THE PUNJAB, c.1595 — MAPPING THE DATA IN THE". Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 58: 336. ISSN2249-1937. JSTOR44143925. The number of parganas with Jat zamindaris (Map 2) is surprisingly large and well spread out, though there are none beyond the Jhelum. They appear to be in two blocks, divided by a sparse zone between the Sutlej and the Sarasvati basin. The two blocks, in fact, represent two different segments of the Jats, the western one (Panjab) known as Jat (with short vowel) and the other (Haryanvi) as Jaat (with long vowel).
^Ramaswamy, Vijaya (2016). Migrations in Medieval and Early Colonial India. London: Taylor and Francis. p. 59. ISBN978-1-351-55825-9. OCLC993781016. Out of the 45 parganas of the sarkars of Delhi, 17 are reported to have Jat Zamindars. Out of these 17 parganas, the Jats are exclusively found in 11, whereas in other 6 they shared Zamindari rights with other communities.
^Dhavan, Purnima (2011). When sparrows became hawks: the making of the Sikh warrior tradition, 1699–1799. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 54. ISBN978-0-19-975655-1. OCLC695560144. Muzaffar Alam's study of the akhbarat (news reports) and chronicles of the period demonstrates that Banda and his followers had wide support amongst the Jat zamindars of the Majha, Jalandhar Doab, and the Malwa area. Jat zamindars actively colluded with the rebels, and frustrated the Mughal faujdars or commanders of the area by supplying Banda and his men with grain, horses, arms, and provisions. This evidence suggests that understanding the rebellion as a competition between peasants and feudal lords is an oversimplification, since the groups affiliated with Banda as well as those affiliated with the state included both Zamindars and peasants.
^Alam, Muzaffar (1978). "Sikh Uprisings Under Banda Bahadur 1708–1715". Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 39: 509–522. ISSN2249-1937. JSTOR44139389. Banda led predominantly the uprisings of the Jat zamindars.It is also to be noted that tha Jats were the dominant zamindar castes in some of the parganas where Banda had support. But Banda's spectacular success and the amazing increase in the strength of his army within a few months*6 does not cohere with the presence of a few Jat zamindaris…we can, however presume that the unidentified zamindars of our sources who rallied behind Banda were the small zamindars (mah'ks) and the Mughal assessees (malguzars). It is not without significance that they are almost invariably described as the zamindars of village (mauza and dehat). These zamindars were largely the Jats who had settled in the region for the last three or four centuries.
^Syan, H.S. (2013). Sikh Militancy in the Seventeenth Century: Religious Violence in Mughal and Early Modern India. I.B. Tauris. p. 40. ISBN978-0-7556-2370-9. Retrieved 2 August 2022. Guru Nanak's father- in-law, Mula Chonha, works as an administrator for the Jat landlord, Ajita Randawa. If we expand this train of thought and examine other Janamsakhi figures we can detect an interesting pattern…All of Nanak's immediate relatives were professional administrators for local or regional lords, including Jat masters. From this we can infer that Khatris did seem to occupy a position as a professional class and some Jats held the position of being landlords. There was clearly a professional services relationship between high-ranking Khatris and high-ranking Jats, and this seems indicative of the wider socio- economic relationship between Khatris and Jats in medieval Panjab.
^Jakobsh, D.R. (2010). Sikhism and Women: History, Texts, and Experience. Oxford University Press. p. 139. ISBN978-0-19-806002-4. Retrieved 23 September 2024. Jatni ( female Jat ) , portrayed as stitching her own wedding clothes , personified the Victorian ideals both of morally superior rural handicraft production and of women's proper domestic work within a male - dominated lineage
^Jackson, Peter (2003), The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History, Cambridge University Press, p. 15, ISBN978-0-521-54329-3, retrieved 13 November 2011 Quote: "... Nor can the liberation that the Muslim conquerors offered to those who sought to escape from the caste system be taken for granted. … a caliphal governor of Sind in the late 830s is said to have … (continued the previous Hindu requirement that) … the Jats, when walking out of doors in future, to be accompanied by a dog. The fact that the dog is an unclean animal to both Hindu and Muslim made it easy for the Muslim conquerors to retain the status quo regarding a low-caste tribe. In other words, the new regime in the eighth and ninth centuries did not abrogate discriminatory regulations dating from a period of Hindu sovereignty; rather, it maintained them. (page 15)"
^Grewal, J. S. (1998), The Sikhs of the Punjab, Cambridge University Press, p. 5, ISBN978-0-521-63764-0, retrieved 12 November 2011 Quote: "... the most numerous of the agricultural tribes (in the Punjab) were the Jats. They had come from Sindh and Rajasthan along the river valleys, moving up, displacing the Gujjars and the Rajputs to occupy culturable lands. (page 5)"
^Ludden, David E. (1999), An agrarian history of South Asia, Cambridge University Press, p. 117, ISBN978-0-521-36424-9, retrieved 12 November 2011 Quote: "The flatlands in the upper Punjab doabs do not seem to have been heavily farmed in the first millennium. … Early-medieval dry farming developed in Sindh, around Multan, and in Rajasthan… From here, Jat farmers seem to have moved into the upper Punjab doabs and into the western Ganga basin in the first half of the second millennium. (page 117)"
^Ansari, Sarah F. D. (1992). Sufi saints and state power: the pirs of Sind, 1843–1947. Cambridge University Press. p. 27. ISBN978-0-521-40530-0. Retrieved 30 October 2011. Quote: "Between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, groups of nomadic pastoralists known as Jats, having worked their way northwards from Sind, settled in the Panjab as peasant agriculturalists and, largely on account of the introduction of the Persian wheel, transformed much of western Panjab into a rich producer of food crops. (page 27)"
^Khan, Iftikhar Ahmad (1982). "A Note on Medieval Jatt Immigration in the Punjab". Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 43: 347, 349. ISSN2249-1937. JSTOR44141246.
^McLeod, W. H. Who is a Sikh?: the problem of Sikh identity. The Jats have long been distinguished by their martial traditions and by the custom of retaining their hair uncut. The influence of these traditions evidently operated prior to the formal inauguration of the Khalsa.
^The transformation of Sikh society — Page 92 by Ethne K. Marenco – The gazetteer also describes the relation of the Jat Sikhs to the Jat Hindus ... to 2019 in 1911 is attributed to the conversion of Jat Hindus to Sikhism. ...
^Social philosophy and social transformation of Sikhs by R. N. Singh (Ph. D.) Page 130 – The decrease of Jat Hindus from 16843 in 1881 to 2019 in 1911 is attributed to the conversion of Jat Hindus to Sikhism. ...
^Singh, Khushwant (2004). A History of the Sikhs: 1469–1838 (2, illustrated ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 15. ISBN0-19-567308-5. OCLC438966317. The Jat's spirit of freedom and equality refused to submit to Brahmanical Hinduism and in its turn drew the censure of the privileged Brahmins ... The upper caste Hindu's denigration of the Jat did not in the least lower the Jat in his own eyes nor elevate the Brahmin or the Kshatriya in the Jat's estimation. On the contrary, he assumed a somewhat condescending attitude towards the Brahmin, whom he considered little more than a soothsayer or a beggar, or the Kshatriya, who disdained earning an honest living and was proud of being a mercenary.
^Heather Streets (2004). Martial Races : The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914. Manchester University Press. p. 174. ISBN0719069629. Others were even more candid about the necessity-and feasibility -of 'creating' Sikhs for the army. One contributor to the Indian Army's Journal of the United Services Institute of India proposed a scheme that would change Hindus to Sikhs for the specific purpose of recruitment. To do this, the Sikh recruiting grounds would be extended and Hindu Jats encouraged to take the pahul (the conversion ritual to martial Sikhism)'. He went on to say that these latter might not be as good stuff as that procurable from the present Sikh centres but they would, if of good physique, compare favourably (as regards field service qualifications) with the weedy specimens sometimes enlisted'. In this officer's view, then, the army could 'encourage' Hindus to become Sikhs simply to increase their overall numbers.
^Kaushik Roy (2015). Harsh V. Pant (ed.). Handbook of Indian Defence Policy. Taylor & Francis. p. 71. ISBN978-1317380092. The British policy of recruiting the Sikhs (due to the imperial belief that Sikhism is a martial religion) resulted in the spread of Sikhism among the Jats of undivided Punjab and conversion of the Singhs into the 'Lions of Punjab'.
^Hughes, Julie E. (2013). Animal Kingdoms (illustrated ed.). Harvard University Press. p. 237. ISBN978-0674074781. While the rulers of Patiala were Jat Sikhs and not Rajputs, the state was the closest princely territory to Bikaner's northwest.
^ abLodrick, Deryck O. (2009). "JATS". In Gallagher, Timothy L.; Hobby, Jeneen (eds.). Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life. Volume 3: Asia & Oceania (2nd ed.). Gale. pp. 418–419. ISBN978-1414448916. Retrieved 30 January 2020.
^Robin, Cyril (2009). "Bihar: The New Stronghold of OBC Politics". In Jaffrelot, Christophe; Kumar, Sanjay (eds.). Rise of the Plebeians?: The Changing Face of the Indian Legislative Assemblies. Routledge. p. 66. ISBN978-0415460927. Retrieved 30 January 2020.
^Sukumar Muralidharan (April 2001). "The Jat patriarch". Frontline. Archived from the original on 15 March 2014. Retrieved 2 March 2021.
^K L Sharma:The Jats — Their Role and Contribution to the Socio-Economic Life and Polity of North and North West India, Vol.I, 2004. Ed. by Vir Singh, page 14
^Britten, Thomas A. (1997). American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War (illustrated, reprint ed.). University of New Mexico Press. p. 128. ISBN0-8263-2090-2. The Rajputs, Jats, Dogras, Pathans, Gorkhas, and Sikhs, for example, were considered martial races. Consequently, the British labored to ensure that members of the so-called martial castes dominated the ranks of infantry and cavalry and placed them in special "class regiments."
^Philippa Levine (2003). Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. Psychology Press. pp. 284–285. ISBN978-0-415-94447-2. The Saturday review had made much the same argument a few years earlier in relation to the armies raised by Indian rulers in princely states. They lacked competent leadership and were uneven in quality. Commander in chief Roberts, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the martial race theory, though poorly of the native troops as a body. Many regarded such troops as childish and simple. The British, claims, David Omissi, believe martial Indians to be stupid. Certainly, the policy of recruiting among those without access to much education gave the British more semblance of control over their recruits.
^Amiya K. Samanta (2000). Gorkhaland Movement: A Study in Ethnic Separatism. APH Publishing. pp. 26–. ISBN978-81-7648-166-3. Dr . Jeffrey Greenhunt has observed that " The Martial Race Theory had an elegant symmetry. Indians who were intelligent and educated were defined as cowards, while those defined as brave were uneducated and backward. Besides their mercenary spirit was primarily due to their lack of nationalism.
^Ashley Jackson (2005). The British Empire and the Second World War. Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 121–122. ISBN1-85285-417-0.
^Jhutti, Sundeep S. (2003). The Getes. Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania. OCLC56397976. The Jats of the Panjab worship their ancestors in a practice known as Jathera.
^Habib, Irfan (2002). Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception. Anthem Press. p. 175. ISBN978-1843310259. Retrieved 29 March 2020. A historically singular case is that of the Jatts, a pastoral Chandala-like tribe in eighth-century Sind, who attained sudra status by the eleventh century (Alberuni), and had become peasants par excellence (of vaisya status) by the seventeenth century (Dabistani-i Mazahib). The shift to peasant agriculture was probably accompanied by a process of 'sanskritization', a process which continued, when, with the Jat rebellion of the seventeenth century a section of the Jats began to aspire to the position of zamindars and the status of Rajputs.
^Vishwanath, L. S. (2004). "Female Infanticide: The Colonial Experience". Economic and Political Weekly. 39 (22): 2313–2318. ISSN0012-9976. JSTOR4415098. The 1921 census reports classifies castes into two categories, namely, castes. having a tradition' of female infanticide and castes without such a tradition (see table). This census provides figures from 1901 to 1921 to show that in Punjab, United Provinces and Rajputana castes such as Hindu rajputs, Hindu jats and gujars with 'a tradition' of female infanticide had a much lower number of females per thousand males compared to castes without such a tradition which included: Muslim rajputs, Muslim jats, chamar, kanet, arain, kumhar, kurmi, brahmin, dhobi, teli and lodha
^VISHWANATH, L. S. (1994). "Towards a Conceptual Understanding of Female Infanticide and Neglect in Colonial India". Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 55: 606–613. ISSN2249-1937. JSTOR44143417. By 1850, several castes, in North India, the Jats, Ahirs, Gujars and Khutris, and the Lewa Patidar Kanbis in Central Gujarat were found to practice female infanticide. The colonial authorities also found that both in rural North and West India, the castes which practised female infanticide were propertied (they owned substantial arable land), had the hypergamous marriage norm and paid large dowries.
^Mann, Kamlesh (1988). "Status Portrait of Jat Woman". Indian Anthropologist. 18 (1): 51–67. ISSN0970-0927. JSTOR41919573.
^Singh, Kumar Suresh (1992). People of India: Haryana. Anthropological Survey of India. p. 425. ISBN978-81-7304-091-7. Ror clans: Sangwan, Dhiya, Malik, Lather, etc, are also found among the Jats. From an economic point of view the Rors living in Karnal and Kurukshetra districts consider themselves better off than their counterparts in Jind and Sonepat districts.
^ abAhmed, Mukhtar (18 April 2016). The Arains: A Historical Perspective. Createspace. p. 95. ISBN978-1-5327-8117-9. Some clans of the Arains which is also shared by Rajputs and the Jats. Bhutto is another variant of Bhutta. Some important Arian clans overlap with the Rajputs, for instance: Sirohsa, Ganja, Shaun, Bhatti, Butto, Chachar, Indrai, Joiya...
^Marshall, J. A. (1960). Guide to Taxila. Cambridge University Press. p. 24.
Schwartzberg, Joseph (2007). "Caste Regions of the Northern Plain". In Singer, Milton; Cohn, Bernard S. (eds.). Structure and Change in Indian Society. Transaction Publishers. pp. 81–114. ISBN978-0-202-36138-3. Retrieved 15 October 2011.
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