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The question of Jat origin has received a great deal of interest and consideration by Indian and European scholars. From time to time, several arguments and theories have been put forward to shed light on the problem of the origin of the Jats. A wide range of nuances of antiquities and nomenclature of the Jats have been noticed over a period of time which have further complicated the matter. In this study, an attempt has been made to examine the issues pertaining to the Jat origin and place them in correct historical framework.

The main objective of this endeavour is to study the notions of the origin of the Jats and clearly delineate the elements of their origin in correct historical perspective.

In the recent past, few scholarly attempts have been made to trace the origin and antiquities of the Jats. B.S. Nijjar’s ‘Origin and History of Jats and other Allied Nomadic Tribes of India’ (2008) has tried to explore the origins and historical roots the Jats along with other nomadic tribes of India. Another significant work in this category is ‘Origin of Jat Race – Tracing Ancestry to the Scythians of Ancestry’ (2015), written by B.S. Mahal. One of the major studies dealing with the Jat origin on the basis of DNA is that of David G. Mahal’s ‘Ancestral Roots of the Jats – DNA Revelations’ (2015).

James Tod[1] and Alexander Cunningham[2] were the pioneer scholars who formulated the argument that the Jats belonged to the Indo-Scythian stock. Cunningham “identifies the Jats with the Xanthii of Strabo and the Jatii of Pliny and Ptolemy, and fixes their parent country on the banks of the Oxus river between Bactria, Hyrkania and Khorasmia.”[3] He holds that the Jats “probably entered Panjab from their homeland on the Oxus soon after the Meds or Mands, who were also Indo-Scythians, and who moved into the Panjab about 100 BCE. The Jats possibly first occupied the Indus valley as far as Sind, whither the Meds followed them about the beginning of the present era. But before the earliest Mahomedan invasion the Jats had spread into the Panjab proper, where they were firmly established in the beginning of the eleventh century. By the time of Babar, the Jats of the Salt-range Tract had been subdued by the Gakkhars, Awans and Janjuas,while as early as the seventh century the Jats and Meds  of Sind were ruled over by a Brahmana dynasty.”[4] James Tod considers the Jats as one of the great Rajput tribes, and extends his identification with the Getae to both races. But here Cunningham differs, holding the Rajputs to belong to the original Aryan stock, and the Jats to belong to a later wave of immigrants from the North-West, probably of Scythian race.[5] The theory of the Scythian origin of the Jats was based on a premise that the Scythians were foreign invaders and racially distinct from the Aryans. Therefore, the identification of the Jats with the Scythians led to a natural belief that the Jats are also non-Aryans, non-Indians and invaders. This theory found another distinguished adherent— Vincent Smith[6] who argued that when the invaders such as Indo-Scythian, Huns etc. settled down in India, their military leaders and royal houses were absorbed as Rajputs, their cultivating communities were accepted as Jats while their cattle-breeders were adopted as Gujars.

From the beginning of the 20^th century, the theory of Scythian origin of the Jats received a major challenge from the new discoveries and developments in the fields of Philology, History and Anthropology. Grierson, Trump and Beames, taking cue from the language and physical types argued that the Jats are the pure descendants of the Indo-Aryan.[7] According to Grierson[8] Lahnda is the language of Western Panjab which is also known by several other names such as Western Punjabi, Jatki (language of the Jatt tribe), Uchi and Hindki. Taking 74⁰  Long. E. as the line

roughly dividing Lahnda-speaking areas from Panjabi-speaking areas, and taking cue from the traces of Sindi in Multan area,Grierson suggests northward migration of the Jats from Sind into southern Panjab.[9] Trump and Beames argued that ‘both in consideration of their physical type and language, which has been authoritatively pronounced as a pure dialect of Hindi without the slightest trace of Scythian, the Jats are the pure descendants of the Aryans.[10] Though these scholars outright rejected the Scythian origin of the Jats, they shared the notions that Scythians were foreign invaders and hence could not have been the progenitors of the Jats. But the main drawback among these authorities was that they were primarily philologists and philology cannot be trusted in ethnological questions. The voice of the philologists was silenced by the advancement in ethnology, when Cuno remarked—‘Language is neither the proof of a race nor is a race coextensive with language which is stable whereas race is persistent.’[11] The debate between philology and ethnology complicated the problem of the Jat origin mainly because both of them failed to recognize the significance of anthropology which could claim to possess important clue to the origin of races as well as correct and corroborate the conclusions of the two sciences. The Scythian theory of Jat origin received another setback from Herbert Risley,[12] an anthropologist who conducted physical measurements of the people of India with his anthropometrical apparatus and identified the Jats, Rajputs and others as the true representatives of the Indo-Aryans. Similarly some other anthropologists[13] also argued that the Scythians invaders with brachycephalic and mesocephalic heads, straight eyes, platyrrhine noses, short stature and high cheek bones could never have been the progenitors of the dolichocephalic, leptorrhine, tall-statured, broad-shouldered and fair-complexioned Jats, Rajputs and Khatris who share with the Indo-Aryans the same physical features. However, these anthropologists too shared the perception of their predecessors that the Scythians were racially different from the Aryans.

The Scythian theory received a heavy drubbing at the hands of the anthropologists yet it cannot be denied that it possessed an ‘inherent truth’ which was not completely visualized by its antagonists.[14] On the other hand, H.S. Pawar[15] interpreted the Scythian theory in reverse form by arguing that the Scythians were the progenitors of the Jats, not as foreign invaders but as pure Indo-Aryans. To him the confusion of this theory has largely been at the level of the identification of the Scythians who originally belonged to the Aryan stock but due to false notions incorrectly perceived as non-Aryans. The main argument that supports Pawar’s hypothesis is that the Scythians were actually Aryans who on account of their acclimatization to new ecological areas developed certain brachycephalic features.

Cunningham[16] has tried to identify the Jats with the Xanthii of Strabo and the Jatti of Pliny and Ptolemy and on this basis has tried to locate their homeland on the banks of the Oxus river between Bactria, Hyrkania and Khorasmia. According to Pliny, the original home of the Jattis or Jats happened to be Zotale or Yothale, irrigated by Margus river. “Their course from the Oxus to the Indus may, perhaps, be dimly traced in the Xuthi of Dionysius of Samos and the Zuthi of Ptolemy, who occupied the Karmanian desert on the frontier of Drangiana. They may have been best known in early times by the general name of their horde as Abars instead of by their tribal name as Jats. According to this view, the main body of the Jatti would have occupied the district of Abiria and the towns of Pardabathra and Bardaxema in Sind, while the Panjab was principally colonised by their brethren the Meds.” In this context Pritchard observed, “The supposition that the Jats of the Indus are descendants of the Yuetschi does not appear altogether preposterous, but it is supported by no proof except the very trifling one of a slight resemblance of names. The physical characters of the Jats are very different from those attributed to the Yuetschi and the kindred tribes by the writers cited by Klaproth and Abel Remusat, who say they are of sanguine complexions with blue eyes.” Some of the scholar have tried to identify the Jats with the Kshatriya tribe of the Jatharas; but in opposition to this Growse[17] argues that their home is always placed in a south-east quarter, while it is certain that the Jats came from the West. Another theory identifies them with the Jartika, who with the Bahika and Takka are said to have been the original inhabitants of the Panjab. During the time of Justin, the Jats were known as Aratta, i.e. Arashtra, or “people without a king”, and are represented by the Adraistae of Arrian, who places them on the banks of the Ravi[18]. According to Nesfield theory[19] the word Jat is nothing more than the modern Hindi pronunciation of Yadu or Jadu, the tribe in which Krishna was born, which is now represented by the modern Jadon Rajputs.

It has also been argued that the Jats contributed to some extent in the formation of Gypsies. These linkages of the Jats with Gypsies have been traced on grounds of language as well as the movements of the Jats. There are some indications that suggest about six westerly movements of the races of the North-western Frontier, who are often

collectively called as Jats.[20] There are some blurred references to a transplanting of Kerks, Sindis, Kolis, Meds, and other West Indian tribes before the Christian era. It is also evident that the Indian musicians (Luris) were brought to Persia by Bahram Gor in c. 450 CE, from where they dispersed. It is also known that a body of Kerks, Sangars and Jats were deported from the Persian Gulf to Asia Minor. In the wake of the invasion of India by Mahmud Ghazni in 1025, a body of the Jats were deported westward. Similarly, the Jats were again deported westwards following the conquest of the Seljuks in the twelfth century and those of Osmanli Turks in the fourteenth century. A westward movement of the Jats was again reported after Timur carried out ravages in India.

Etymological Roots of ‘Jat’

The nomenclature of the ‘Jat’ is complicated by the fact that more than two scores of the variants of this term have been reported from a wide range of sources from diverse regions. The sixth century Pali inscription in nail-headed character spells this race as ‘Jit’[21] Etymologically the term seems to have originated from the epithet of their supposedly first King, Jit Salindra, mentioned in this inscription.[22] In the opinion of Tod, in Panjab and Rajasthan, the people of this race retained their original name ‘Jit.’[23] According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam[24], the term ‘Djatt’ (‘Jatt’) is employed by the Persian translator of Chachnama, the author of the Tarikh i-Sind and Shah Wali Allah al-Dihalwi in his Persian letters. The term ‘Jatt’ is also referred by Delhi Sultanate chroniclers Alberuni,[25] Gardezi,[26] Baihaqi,[27] and Isami.[28] For the Arabicized form, the term ‘Zat’ or ‘Zutt’ was employed because in Arabic the letter ‘J’ is changed into ‘Z.’ The Arab geographer, Ibn Hauqal also describes the Jats as ‘Zat.’[29] It has been argued[30] that the name ‘Djāt’ (Zutt) is basically an Indo-Aryan form which has a post Sanskritic Indian origin and wide distribution over the Indo-Pak subcontinent, particularly Panjab, Sind, Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh.

It may be noted that the regional variation is amply clear by the differences in pronunciation in two distant but analogous regions, namely the present day Panjab, Pakistan and Afghanistan where they are pronounced as ‘Jatt’ or ‘Jutt’, and north India where they are called ‘Jāt’ with long vowel and a long phonetic ‘a.’[31] In the Sindi dialect, the Jats are pronounced and written as ‘Dyat’ which means ‘a camel driver or breeder of camels.’[32] An interesting fact of phonetic significance, reported by some scholars[33] is that in Pakistan, the camelmen and graziers among the Baloch are shown as a Jat clan within the tribe of the same name, but their name is pronounced with a soft ‘t’ as opposed to the hard ‘t’, used for the cultivator. In the poetic legends of Panjab, they were expressed as ‘Jattā.’[34]

The author of Mujmalu-t Tawarikh tells us that the Hindus were called ‘Jatts’[35]by the Arabs. Ibbetson[36] also suggests that on the Lower Indus the word ‘Jatt’ is applied generically to a congeries of tribes, Jatts proper, Rajputs, lower castes, and mongrels, who have no points in common save their Mahomedan religion, their agricultural occupation, and their subordinate position. The author of Dabistan-i Mazahib[37] (c.1655)mentions that in the dialect of Penjab ‘Jatt’ means a villager or a rustic.’ The Deccani chronicler Ferishta[38] describes them as ‘Juts’ with short vowel ‘u’ and emphasis on ‘t.’ The first historical reference to these people as Jāts with long vowel ‘a’ and hard ‘t’ is found in Ain–i-Akbari.[39]

Since then, in northern India, particularly in the Gangetic Doab, these peasant classes subsequently obtained a perceptible identity as the Jāts.

1. James Tod,Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, 2vols. Delhi, 1971; Also cited by William Crooke,The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western India, vol. 3, Delhi, 1975, p. 26. 2. Alexander Cunningham,Archaeological Reports, II, p. 55. 3. Crooke,op. cit., p. 26. 4. Denzil Ibbetson,Punjab Castes, pp. 97-131. 5. Ibid. 6. Vincent Smith,Early History of India, 1924, p. 411. 7. Hukum Singh Pawar,The Jats: Their Origin, Antiquity and Migrations, Rohtak, 1993, p. 176. 8. G.A. Grierson,Linguistic Survey of India, vol. 1, pt. 1, Delhi, 1990, p. 136. 9. Ibid., Also cited Irfan Habib,op. cit., pp. 93-95. 10. H.M. Elliot,Memoirs of Races of North West Province of India, vol. 1, p. 135; Cited Pawar,op. cit., pp. 176-77. 11. Ibid. 12. Herbert Risley,Peoples of India, London, 1915, p. 289. 13. Ibid., pp. 58-59; Elliot,op. cit., p.134; Haddon,Races of Man, New York, 1925, p. 112. 14. Pawar,op. cit. 178. 15. Ibid. 16. Alexander Cunningham,Archaeological Reports, II, 55. Cited Pawar,op. cit., p. 178. 17. F.S. Growse,Mathura District Memoirs. 1874, p. 18. Cunningham,Bhilsa Topes, 89; Cited Pawar,op. cit., p. 179. 19. Nesfield,Brief View of the Caste System of North West Provinces. Allahabad, 1931. 20. Bombay Gazetteer, XIII, 714. Cited by Crooke,op. cit., p. 30. 21. Tod,Annals, vol. II, Delhi, 1971, pp. 914-17. 22. Syed Jabir Raza, ‘The Jatts of Panjab and Sind: Their Settlement and Migrations (c. 5th –12th) in Vir Singh (Ed.),The Jats. Their Role and Contribution to the Socio-economic Life and Polity of North and North-West India, Vol. I, Delhi, 2004, p. 54. 23. Tod,op. cit., vol. 1, p. 85; vol. II, pp. 138, 180, 299. 24. Encyclopaedia of Islam, (ed.) B. Lewis, vol 2, Leiden, 1965, pp.488-489. 25. Alberuni,Kitab fi Tahqiq mali’I-Hind, (ed.) Edward C. Sachau,Alberuni’s India, New Delhi, 1964, vol.1, p. 401. 26. Gardezi,Zain ul-Akhbar, (ed.) Abdul Hayy Habibi, Iran, 1947, pp. 191-92. Cited by Raza,op. cit., p. 2. 27. Baihaqi,Tarikh i-Baihaqi, (ed.) Q. Ghani and A.A. Fayyaz, Tehran, 1946, p. 434. Cited by Raza,op. cit., p. 2. 28. Abd al-Malik Isami,Futuh’s Salatin, (ed.) Agha Mahdi Husain, vol. 1, Bombay, 1967, p. 125. Cited by Raza,op. cit., p. 2. 29. Ibn Hauqal,Kitab Masalik Wa al-Mamalik, (Tr.) Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians. Delhi, 2001. vol. 1, p. 40. Cited by Raza,op. cit., p. 3. 30. Ibid. 31. G.A. Tiemann,The Jats – An Ethnographic Survey (Unpublished thesis, Univ. of Oxford, 1962), p. 1. Cited Raza,op. cit., p. 3. 32. Richard F. Burton,Sind and the Races that inhabit the valley of the Indus with notices of the Topography and History of Province, New Delhi, 1992, p.411. 33. Baluchistan District Gazeteer Series, Vol. III. Sibi District, Bombay, 1907, p.71; Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch and Heinz Westphal,The Jat of Pakistan, Berlin, 1964, p.48; Denzil Ibbetson,Punjab Castes, Lahore, 1916, pp. 97-131. 34. Pagri Sambhal, O Jatta’ [Take care of your turban (hold your prestige), o Jatta]—The popular Panjabi song of the colonial times. Cited by H.S. Pawar,Jats: Origin, Antiquities and Migrations, Rohtak, 1993, p. 339. 35. Translated from original Sanskrit text into Arabic as Mujmalu-t Tawarikh, (Tr.) Elliot and Dowson,op. cit., p. 104. 36. Ibbetson, op cit., p. 103. Cited by S. Jabir Raza,op. cit. P. 2. 37. Zulfaqar Mubed,Dabistan-i Mazahib, (Tr.) David Shea and Anthony Troyer as Hinduism. During the Mughal India of the seventeenth century, Patna, 1993, p. 252. 38. Mahomed Kasim Ferishta,Tarikh-i Ferishta,(Tr.) John Briggs as History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India till the year AD 1612, vol. 1, Calcutta, pp. 49-50. 39. Abul Fazl,Āin –i-Akbarī, (Ed.) H. Blochmann, Bib. Ind., vol. 2, Delhi, 2006, p. 193