Jats

[2][3][a][b][c] Originally pastoralists in the lower Indus river-valley of Sindh, many 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.

[13] By the 20th century, the landowning Jats became an influential group in several parts of North India, including Punjab,[14] Western Uttar Pradesh,[15] Rajasthan,[16] Haryana and Delhi.

[29] 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,[e] in the arid, the wet, and the mountainous regions of the conquered land of Sindh.

[30] 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.

[31] Between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, Jat herders at the Sind migrated up along the river valleys,[32] into the Punjab,[7] which may have been largely uncultivated in the first millennium.

According to historians Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot,[38] The Jats also provide an important insight into how religious identities evolved during the precolonial era.

[38] 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.

[41] 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.

[46] 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.

[46] 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.

[47] 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.

[48]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.

[51] 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),[52] the first large-scale conversions of Jats is commonly held to have begun during the time of Guru Arjan (1563–1606).

[57] 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.

[58][59] 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.

[80] In 2016, the Jats of Haryana organized massive protests demanding to be classified as OBC in order to obtain such affirmative action benefits.

[86] However, the martial races were also considered politically subservient, intellectually inferior, lacking the initiative or leadership qualities to command large military formations.

[90] 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.

[97] Tanuja Kothiyal states that modern research reveals that Jats is one of the communities from which Rajputs have emerged, the others being Bhils, Mers, Minas, Gujars and Raikas.

[98]She points to the fact that "both Rajputs and Jats appear to originate from the mobile cattle rearing and rustling groups", hence it is understandable that they refer to each other in their chronicles, although they try to remain distinct.

[99] 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.

[100] During the colonial period, many communities including Hindu Jats were found to be practicing female infanticide in different regions of Northern India.