Rajputs: Panjab
This article is an extract from PANJAB CASTES SIR DENZIL CHARLES JELF IBBETSON, K.C. S.I. Being a reprint of the chapter on Lahore : Printed by the Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1916. |
Rajputs: Panjab
(CASTE No. 2)
The distribution of the Rajputs and alhed races is shown in Abstract No. 71, page 219. I do not propose to enter into any detailed description or discussion of the Rajput. He is much the same all over Northern India, and more has been published about him than about any other Indian caste. The great authority is Tod's Rajdsthan, while both Elliott and Sherring give much useful information. I have already expressed in sections 422-3 my views as to the identity of the Jat and Rajput stock as it stands at present, and how the Rajputs merely consist of the royal famihes of that stock. I might indeed have gone further, and have said that a tribe of any caste whatever which had in ancient times possessed supreme power throughout any fairly extensive tract of country, would be classed as Rajput. It seems to me almost certain that some of the so-called Rajput royal famihes were aboriginal ; and notably the Chandel.
How the aborigines of the Nepal Himalayas rose to be Kshatriya is well told by Hodgson in his Essay on the Military Tribes of Nepal. He points out that when the Brahmans were driven up'into the hills by the advancing tide of Mahomedan conquest, they wedded with the aboriginal women whom they found there. But to render this possible it was necessary to conciliate the people among whom they had come to dwell ; and they called their first converts among them Kshatriya, while to their own offspring by the hill women they gave not only Kshatriya rank and privileges, but Brahminical patronymics.
From these two roots mainly sprang the now numerous, predominant, aind extensively ramified tribe of Khas — originally the name of a small clan of creedless barbarians, but now the proud title of the Kshatriya or military order of Nepal. Thus too the key to the anomalous nomenclature of so many stirpes of these military tribes is to be sought in the nomenclature of the sacred order.And even now in spite of the yearly increasing sway of Hinduism, and of the efforts of Brahmans in high office to abolish the custom, the Khas still, insist that the fruits of commerce (for marriage is now out of the question) between their females and males of the sacred order shall be ranked as Kshatriya, wear the thread, and assume the patronymic title. So again, when the Rajput immigrants from the plains took aboriginal women in concubinage (and concubinage among the hill people is for all purposes of legitimacy and inheritance the same as marriage), they were permitted to give their children so begotten the patronymic title only, not the rank of Kshatriya. But their children again, if they married for two generations with the •' Khas, became pure Khas, or real Kshatriyas in point of privilege and rank though no longer so in name. They were Khas, not Kshatriya, and yet they bore the proud title cognominal of the martial order of the Hindus, and were in the land of their nativity entitled to every prerogative which Kshatriya birth confers in Hindustan.
A reference to my description of the Kanets of our hills will show that something of the same sort has gone on in the Panjab Himalayas, though necessarily in a much lower degree, since here the Aryan and not the ahorigine was predominant ; and the description of the Hill Rajputs, and still more of the Thakars and Rathis, which Avill be found in this section under their respective headings, will show how, if the Turanian is not as in Nepal admitted to Kshatriya rank, it is at any rate impossible to draw any line among the Aryan races, all above which shall be Rajputs and all below it non-Rajputs. As the Kangra proverb runs — In the seventh generation the Ghirathni becomes a queen.
The Rajputs of the Panjab are fine brave men, and retain the feudal instinct more strongly developed than perhaps any other non-menial caste, the tribal heads wielding extraordinary authority. They are very tenacious of the integrity of their communal property in the village lands, seldom admit ting strangers to share it with them. Pride of blood is their strongest characteristic, for pride of blood is the very essence of their Rajputhood. They are lazy and poor husbandmen and much prefer pastoral to agricultural pursuits, looking upon all manual labour as derogatory and upon the actual operation of ploughing as degrading ; and it is only the poorest class of Rajput who will himself follow the plough. They are, in most parts of the Panjab plains, cattle-stealers by ancestral profession ; but they exercise their calling in a gentlemanly way, and there is certainly honour among Rajput thieves.
The Rajput tribes of the Panjab
The Rajputs of the Panjab may be broadly divided into four groups, each of which I shall discuss separately in the following paragraphs. First come the Rajputs of the Dehli Territory and Jamna valley, for the most part belonging to the two great tribes of Chauhan and Tunwar which gave Dehli its most famous dynasties. Next come the Rajputs of the river valleys of the Western Plains, many of them hardly or not at all to be distinguished from Jats, and belonging for the most part to the Bhatti of Jaisalraer and Bikaner, and their predecessors the Punwar. The third group is the Rajputs of the western hills including the Salt-range Tract, coinprising both dominant tribes of proud position such as the Janjua and mongrel Rajputs from the Jaramu hills, and descendants either of the Yadubansi (Bhattp dynasty of Kashmir and the mythical Raja Rasalu of Sialkot so famous in Panjab folklore, or of a group of tribes, apparently of Punwar origin, which now hold the hills on either bank of the Jahlam.
Finally we have the Rajputs of the Kangra hills of whom the Katoch may be taken as the type, so ancient that their very origin and advent to their present abodes are lost in the past ; and the Rajputs of the lower hills which fringe the Panjab Himalayas. With the Rajputs I take the Thakar and Rathi who are lower grades of Rajputs rather than separate castes, and the Rawat whose position is still more difficult of definition. It will be noticed that I do not mention the Rajputs of the Sikh tract, of the central districts, and of the Phulkian States of the Eastern Plains. As a fact they are few, and the few there are are unimportant. Nor have I men tioned the Rajputs of the frontier districts, for here again they are insignifi cant both in numbers and importance. The reason why the Rajput disappears before the Sikh, the Pathan, and the Biloch I have already explained in section 4-22. Abstract No. 71, on page 219,* shows the distribution of Rajputs and alhed castes. The small number in the Hill States is curious.
There only the ruling famihes are Rajput; the mass of the peasantry
consisting of Kanets or Ghiraths, if indeed these last ean be separated at
all from Rathis and Rawats. In the Dehli division and Rohtak the Jat has
largely taken the plaee of the Rajput ; but such Rajputs as there are are
Rajputs in very deed. In the Multiln division the number of Rajputs re
turned is very large ; but I have already shown how large a proportion of
them should more properly be classed as Jats, if indeed any distinction can
be drawn between the two.
