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Concept
Jats
Summary
The Jat people (ਜੱਟ, d͡ʒəʈːə; जाट, d͡ʒaːʈ; جاٽ) are a traditionally agricultural community in Northern India and Pakistan. Originally pastoralists in the lower Indus river-valley of Sindh, Jats migrated north into the Punjab region in late medieval times, and subsequently into the Delhi Territory, northeastern Rajputana, and the western Gangetic Plain in the 17th and 18th centuries. Of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh faiths, they are now found mostly in the Indian states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan and the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Punjab.
The Jats took up arms against the Mughal Empire during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Gokula, a Hindu Jat landlord was among the earliest rebel leaders against the Mughal rule during Aurangzeb's era. The Hindu Jat kingdom reached its zenith under Maharaja Suraj Mal (1707–1763). The community played an important role in the development of the martial Khalsa panth of Sikhism. By the 20th century, the landowning Jats became an influential group in several parts of North India, including Punjab, Western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi. 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.
The Jats are a paradigmatic example of community- and identity-formation in early modern Indian subcontinent. "Jat" is an elastic label applied to a wide-ranging community from simple landowning peasants to wealthy and influential Zamindars.
By the time of Muhammad bin Qasim's conquest of Sind in the eighth century, Arab writers described agglomerations of Jats in the arid, the wet, and the mountainous regions of the conquered land of Sindh. 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. Between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, Jat herders at the Sind migrated up along the river valleys, into the Punjab, which may have been largely uncultivated in the first millennium.
Official source
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