ravichaudhary
August 12th, 2004, 09:30 AM
part 1 of 3
JATTS OF PUNJAB AND SIND by IRFAN HABIB
[* From the Presidential Address given at the Medieval Section of the Punjab History Conference (1971), Punjabi University, Patiala.]
This essay proposes to present a certain amount of speculation about the history of a large section of the Punjabi-speaking population during the millennium ending with the seventeenth century. The speculation raises certain other historical questions, besides, of course the question of its own validity. Some of these questions are spelt out here. The further task of answering them definitively—a task requiring knowledge I do not possess—I shall leave to scholars better equipped than I am.
The argument that is to follow would be simplified if I were first to clarify certain geographical matters. Since I am at the moment mainly interested in the Punjabi-speaking population, the 'Punjab' that I have in mind approximates to the British province of the Punjab, as it existed before 1947, together with the princely states lying within it. but excluding the territory of the present states of Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.
It is easy to follow Spate in dividing this region into two unequal parts The first and larger portion, comprising, indeed, the bulk of the region consists of the alluvial plains with rivers draining into, or (in the case of Saraswati and Ghaggar) towards, the Indus. The second is the Potwar plateau containing the historic site of Taxila and the fort of Rohtas. This is fringed in the south and south-east by the Salt Range and in the west by the Indus, and in the north by the Himalayan foothills. While it is of course true that there is no correspondingly clear physiographic features to enable one to make a further division of the first and larger alluvial portion,[1] there do exist certain reasons for believing that it might not always have been geographically a homogeneous unit.
When the Punjab rivers leave the Himalayas and enter the plains, they tend to flow in deep channels, with very marked high banks. These high banks raise the larger parts of the doaba into a quasi-plateau, where the water-table reaches more than 100 feet below ground-surface. As a result, before the modern canal system was laid out, irrigation, whether directly from the river or from wells, remained largely confined to the sub-montane plains, served by a number of tributary streams of the major rivers, and to the banks of the main, and seasonally active, abandoned channels of these rivers. This means that there should have been two distinct blocks of cultivated territory in the alluvium : the first lying roughly above the 200 metre contour, from Jhelum to Ludhiana, including the towns of Sialkot and Lahore; the other, created in the south-east by the numerous channels thrown out by the major rivers as they draw towards one another, and containing the towns of Multan, Uch and Pakpattan. These two blocks, joined to each other at two or three points by the narrow margins of cultivation along the main rivers, were elsewhere separated by the desert of the Sind-Sagar Doab, the steppes or bars of the Rechna Doab, and the Lakh! Jungle created by the maze of the Beas-Sutlej river channels around Dipalpur.[2]
This geographical division has been reflected quite distinctly in medieval political boundaries. In the seventh century Hiuen Tsang founded a kingdom called Tsek-kia—the Takia of the Arabs, and, probably, Takka in its original form—which contained both Shakala (Sialkot) and Mulasthanapura ( Multan ), and which extended from the Beas to the Indus.[3]This kingdom was subsequently wholly absorbed by Sind, and, when the Arabs conquered the latter kingdom early in the next century, their commander not only occupied Multan, but marched to beyond Shakalha ( Shakala )[4] But as the Arab power declined and Multan alone remained under Arab control, Lahaawur, or Lahore, developed into a separate centre. Henceforth, up to the decline of Mughal empire a state or provincial boundary nearly always intervened between the two cities. The Mughal province of the Punjab or Lahore included the Potwar plateau, but the whole of the southern Punjab lay within the Multan province, which also included northern Sind and the Shibi territory.
The remarkable fact is that philology also authorized the division of the plains that we have suggested on geographical grounds, for Grierson took 74" Long. E. to be an approximate line dividing the area where Lahnda dialects are prominent, from the area where Punjabi proper is spoken 5 In the former the traces of Sindhi and Dardic are very noticeable, whereas Punjabi is more closely linked with Midland Hindi. Grierson believes that this phenomenon is to be explained by an incursion into the Punjab of "the inhabitants of the Midland [who], through pressure of population or for some other reason, gradually took possession of the Punjab and partly imposed their own language on the inhabitants.[6] Grierson's authority must always carry weight; but surely the "linguistic condition" he describes can plausibly be explained by an emigration of population from the south-west, which then imposed its vocabulary upon an existent language based on Dardic and Midland Hindi. Given this assumption, the intruders would have imposed their 'outer' language more heavily in the Multan area, while outside of it, beyond Long. 74°, in the Salt Range in the north the influences of their language would weaken.[7]
I should like to suggest that this possible interpretation of the linguistic condition may also be considered. I say this especially because of the peculiar nature of the evidence that I am going to present about the history of the Jatts, which appears to me to suggest a migration in the direction opposite to the one postulated by Grierson.
I have elsewhere[8] referred to this evidence. But I should now like to offer fuller references. No description of the Jatts is available before the seventh century, though scholarly ingenuity may find solitary references in Sanskrit texts to tribes bearing similar names. In the seventh century, Hiuen Tsang found in Sin-tu or Sind a people whom he described as follows : "...By the side of the river Sindh,. along the flat marshy lowlands for some thousand Li, there are several hundreds of thousands (a very great many) families settled...They give themselves to tending cattle and from this derive their livelihood... They have no - masters, and whether men or women, have neither rich nor poor," They claimed to be Buddhists, but they were "of an unfeeling temper" and "hasty disposition."[9] This large pastoral population, left unnamed by Hiuen Tsang, is described in practically identical terms by the Chachnama, the celebrated account of the Arab conquest of Sind. A. D. 710-14.[10]. The important addition is that their people are given the name of Jatt. They are' said to have lived on both banks of the Indus, which divided them into western and eastern Jatts[11] They were especially concentrated in central Sind, in the territory of Brahmanabad.[12] Their settlements extended in the south to the port of Debal,[13] and in the north to Siwistan (Sehwan) and the region of Bodhiya immediately to its north.[14] They are designated ‘dashti’, i.e. belonging to the steppes or wastes. [15] There were no small or great among them. They were supposed to lack marital laws. The only tribute they could pay was in the form of firewood. They owed allegiance to the Buddhist shramanas; and under the Brahmana dynasty of Chach there had been harsh constraints imposed on them, which the Arab conquerors confirmed. [16] Besides pastoralism, the only other occupations they pursued were those of soldiers[17] and boatmen.[18].
The Jatts are also noticed in Sind proper during rhe next century. In A. D. 836 an Arab governor summoned them to appear and pay Jisya, each to be accompanied by a dog [19] a mark of humiliation, prescribed also under the previous Brahmana regime.[20]
Till then the Jatts were not mentioned in connection with the Punjab anywhere at all. When Muhammad-bin-Qasim occupied Bhatiya on the Beas and then Multan and marched further northward, the Jatts were no longer encountered. But early in the eleventh century, we suddenly have the appearance in strength of "the Jatts of Multan and Bhatiya [by] the banks of the Sihun [ Indus ]," who with their 4,000 or 8,000 boats engaged the forces of Mahmud of Ghaznin[21]. The Jatts' presence in the Punjab is also attested by the statement of another Ghaznavid historian that these "sedious Hindus" had supported Sultan Masud's officers against the rebel Yanaltigin.[22] Alberuni (c. 1030), whose direct experience of India was confined to the Lahore area, took the Jatts to be "'cattle-owners, low Shudra people."[23]
The trend of this evidence appears to me to be unmistakable. A northward migration of the Jatts into the southern Punjab from Sind must have taken place by the eleventh century. One can see now how this fits in with the philological evidence, which attests to the considerable influence of a language akin to Sindhi in the Multan area, a situation one would naturally expect to have followed the migration of the Jatts into the region. It is not without significance that one of the recognized names of Lahnda is Jatki, the language of the Jatts who, as Grierson says, are "numerous in the central part of the Lahnda tract."[24]
The postulation of a connection between the Jatts of the Punjab and
the Jatts of Sind of the seventh and eighth centuries would be a mere exercise in anthropological speculation, were it not that this might offer us some insight into the kind of economic and social changes that were taking place in the Punjab in medieval times. We have seen that in Sind the Jatts had been a large primitive community, based on a pastoral economy and with an egalitarian
JATTS OF PUNJAB AND SIND by IRFAN HABIB
[* From the Presidential Address given at the Medieval Section of the Punjab History Conference (1971), Punjabi University, Patiala.]
This essay proposes to present a certain amount of speculation about the history of a large section of the Punjabi-speaking population during the millennium ending with the seventeenth century. The speculation raises certain other historical questions, besides, of course the question of its own validity. Some of these questions are spelt out here. The further task of answering them definitively—a task requiring knowledge I do not possess—I shall leave to scholars better equipped than I am.
The argument that is to follow would be simplified if I were first to clarify certain geographical matters. Since I am at the moment mainly interested in the Punjabi-speaking population, the 'Punjab' that I have in mind approximates to the British province of the Punjab, as it existed before 1947, together with the princely states lying within it. but excluding the territory of the present states of Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.
It is easy to follow Spate in dividing this region into two unequal parts The first and larger portion, comprising, indeed, the bulk of the region consists of the alluvial plains with rivers draining into, or (in the case of Saraswati and Ghaggar) towards, the Indus. The second is the Potwar plateau containing the historic site of Taxila and the fort of Rohtas. This is fringed in the south and south-east by the Salt Range and in the west by the Indus, and in the north by the Himalayan foothills. While it is of course true that there is no correspondingly clear physiographic features to enable one to make a further division of the first and larger alluvial portion,[1] there do exist certain reasons for believing that it might not always have been geographically a homogeneous unit.
When the Punjab rivers leave the Himalayas and enter the plains, they tend to flow in deep channels, with very marked high banks. These high banks raise the larger parts of the doaba into a quasi-plateau, where the water-table reaches more than 100 feet below ground-surface. As a result, before the modern canal system was laid out, irrigation, whether directly from the river or from wells, remained largely confined to the sub-montane plains, served by a number of tributary streams of the major rivers, and to the banks of the main, and seasonally active, abandoned channels of these rivers. This means that there should have been two distinct blocks of cultivated territory in the alluvium : the first lying roughly above the 200 metre contour, from Jhelum to Ludhiana, including the towns of Sialkot and Lahore; the other, created in the south-east by the numerous channels thrown out by the major rivers as they draw towards one another, and containing the towns of Multan, Uch and Pakpattan. These two blocks, joined to each other at two or three points by the narrow margins of cultivation along the main rivers, were elsewhere separated by the desert of the Sind-Sagar Doab, the steppes or bars of the Rechna Doab, and the Lakh! Jungle created by the maze of the Beas-Sutlej river channels around Dipalpur.[2]
This geographical division has been reflected quite distinctly in medieval political boundaries. In the seventh century Hiuen Tsang founded a kingdom called Tsek-kia—the Takia of the Arabs, and, probably, Takka in its original form—which contained both Shakala (Sialkot) and Mulasthanapura ( Multan ), and which extended from the Beas to the Indus.[3]This kingdom was subsequently wholly absorbed by Sind, and, when the Arabs conquered the latter kingdom early in the next century, their commander not only occupied Multan, but marched to beyond Shakalha ( Shakala )[4] But as the Arab power declined and Multan alone remained under Arab control, Lahaawur, or Lahore, developed into a separate centre. Henceforth, up to the decline of Mughal empire a state or provincial boundary nearly always intervened between the two cities. The Mughal province of the Punjab or Lahore included the Potwar plateau, but the whole of the southern Punjab lay within the Multan province, which also included northern Sind and the Shibi territory.
The remarkable fact is that philology also authorized the division of the plains that we have suggested on geographical grounds, for Grierson took 74" Long. E. to be an approximate line dividing the area where Lahnda dialects are prominent, from the area where Punjabi proper is spoken 5 In the former the traces of Sindhi and Dardic are very noticeable, whereas Punjabi is more closely linked with Midland Hindi. Grierson believes that this phenomenon is to be explained by an incursion into the Punjab of "the inhabitants of the Midland [who], through pressure of population or for some other reason, gradually took possession of the Punjab and partly imposed their own language on the inhabitants.[6] Grierson's authority must always carry weight; but surely the "linguistic condition" he describes can plausibly be explained by an emigration of population from the south-west, which then imposed its vocabulary upon an existent language based on Dardic and Midland Hindi. Given this assumption, the intruders would have imposed their 'outer' language more heavily in the Multan area, while outside of it, beyond Long. 74°, in the Salt Range in the north the influences of their language would weaken.[7]
I should like to suggest that this possible interpretation of the linguistic condition may also be considered. I say this especially because of the peculiar nature of the evidence that I am going to present about the history of the Jatts, which appears to me to suggest a migration in the direction opposite to the one postulated by Grierson.
I have elsewhere[8] referred to this evidence. But I should now like to offer fuller references. No description of the Jatts is available before the seventh century, though scholarly ingenuity may find solitary references in Sanskrit texts to tribes bearing similar names. In the seventh century, Hiuen Tsang found in Sin-tu or Sind a people whom he described as follows : "...By the side of the river Sindh,. along the flat marshy lowlands for some thousand Li, there are several hundreds of thousands (a very great many) families settled...They give themselves to tending cattle and from this derive their livelihood... They have no - masters, and whether men or women, have neither rich nor poor," They claimed to be Buddhists, but they were "of an unfeeling temper" and "hasty disposition."[9] This large pastoral population, left unnamed by Hiuen Tsang, is described in practically identical terms by the Chachnama, the celebrated account of the Arab conquest of Sind. A. D. 710-14.[10]. The important addition is that their people are given the name of Jatt. They are' said to have lived on both banks of the Indus, which divided them into western and eastern Jatts[11] They were especially concentrated in central Sind, in the territory of Brahmanabad.[12] Their settlements extended in the south to the port of Debal,[13] and in the north to Siwistan (Sehwan) and the region of Bodhiya immediately to its north.[14] They are designated ‘dashti’, i.e. belonging to the steppes or wastes. [15] There were no small or great among them. They were supposed to lack marital laws. The only tribute they could pay was in the form of firewood. They owed allegiance to the Buddhist shramanas; and under the Brahmana dynasty of Chach there had been harsh constraints imposed on them, which the Arab conquerors confirmed. [16] Besides pastoralism, the only other occupations they pursued were those of soldiers[17] and boatmen.[18].
The Jatts are also noticed in Sind proper during rhe next century. In A. D. 836 an Arab governor summoned them to appear and pay Jisya, each to be accompanied by a dog [19] a mark of humiliation, prescribed also under the previous Brahmana regime.[20]
Till then the Jatts were not mentioned in connection with the Punjab anywhere at all. When Muhammad-bin-Qasim occupied Bhatiya on the Beas and then Multan and marched further northward, the Jatts were no longer encountered. But early in the eleventh century, we suddenly have the appearance in strength of "the Jatts of Multan and Bhatiya [by] the banks of the Sihun [ Indus ]," who with their 4,000 or 8,000 boats engaged the forces of Mahmud of Ghaznin[21]. The Jatts' presence in the Punjab is also attested by the statement of another Ghaznavid historian that these "sedious Hindus" had supported Sultan Masud's officers against the rebel Yanaltigin.[22] Alberuni (c. 1030), whose direct experience of India was confined to the Lahore area, took the Jatts to be "'cattle-owners, low Shudra people."[23]
The trend of this evidence appears to me to be unmistakable. A northward migration of the Jatts into the southern Punjab from Sind must have taken place by the eleventh century. One can see now how this fits in with the philological evidence, which attests to the considerable influence of a language akin to Sindhi in the Multan area, a situation one would naturally expect to have followed the migration of the Jatts into the region. It is not without significance that one of the recognized names of Lahnda is Jatki, the language of the Jatts who, as Grierson says, are "numerous in the central part of the Lahnda tract."[24]
The postulation of a connection between the Jatts of the Punjab and
the Jatts of Sind of the seventh and eighth centuries would be a mere exercise in anthropological speculation, were it not that this might offer us some insight into the kind of economic and social changes that were taking place in the Punjab in medieval times. We have seen that in Sind the Jatts had been a large primitive community, based on a pastoral economy and with an egalitarian