Jat Sikh

Jat Sikh (also known by the more conventional endonym Jatt Sikh) are an ethnoreligious group and a subgroup of the Jat people and the Sikh religious group from the Indian subcontinent. They are one of the dominant communities in the Punjab, owing to their large land holdings. They form an estimated 20%–25% of the population of the Indian state of Punjab. They form at least half of the Sikh population in Punjab, with some sources estimating them to be about 60% to 66% of the Sikh population. Initially, some Jats started to follow the teachings of Guru Nanak, which did much to remove social barriers created by the sāvarṇa caste society. Jats were previously indifferent towards deep religious affairs. 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), the first large-scale conversions of Jats is commonly held to have begun during the time of Guru Arjan (1563-1606). 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. They formed the vanguard of Sikh resistance against the Mughal Empire from the 18th century onwards. Whilst W. H. McLeod was of the position that Jats only began to convert in large numbers to Sikhism and influence the community by the time of Guru Amar Das and certainly by the time of Guru Arjan, Pashaura Singh and Louis E. Fenech on the other hand opine that large scale conversions of Jats into Sikhism came about during Guru Nanak's time settled down in Kartarpur and living an agricultural lifestyle.