Jat People

The Jat people are a community of traditionally non-elite tillers and herders 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 Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu faiths, they are now found mostly in the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Punjab and the Indian states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Traditionally involved in peasantry, the Jats took up arms against the Mughal Empire during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The community played an important role in the development of the martial Khalsa panthan of Sikhism. The Hindu Jat kingdom reached its zenith under Suraj Mal of Bharatpur (1707–1763). 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.