Punjabi Jatt Sikhs are ex- Buddhists

 

                                Punjabi Jatt Sikhs are ex- Buddhists

                                History of Punjabi Speaking Jatts

                                     
Irfan Habib. New Delhi. 2000.
Pic Ram Rahman

https://apnaorg.com/prose-content/english-articles/page-100/article-5/index.html

“No description of the Jatts is available before the seventh century, though scholarly ingenuity may find solitary reference 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” (S. Beal, Buddhist Records of the Western World’; T. Watters, On Yuan Chwang’s Travels in India). 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. 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. They were especially concentrated in central Sind, in the territory of Brahamanabad. Their settlements extended in the south to the port of Debal, and in the north to Siwistan (Sehwan) and the region of Bodhiya immediately to the north. There were no small of great among them. They were supposed to lack marital laws. The only tribute they could 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 upon them, which the Arab conquerors confirmed. Besides pastoralism, the only occupations they pursued were those of soldiers and boatmen.

The Jatts are also noticed in Sind proper during the next century. In A.D. 836 an Arab governor summoned them to appear and pay jiziya , each to be accompanied by a dog, a mark of humiliation, prescribed also under the previous Brahmana regime.

Till then the Jatts were not mentioned in connection with the Punjab anywhere at all. When Mohammed 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. The Jatts presence in the Punjab is also attested by the statement of another Ghaznavid historian that these “seditious Hindus” had supported Sultan Masud’s officers against the rebel Yanaltigin. Alberuni (c. 1030), whose direct experience in India was confined to the Lahore area, took the Jatts to be “cattle owners, low shudra people.”

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. Once can see now how this fits in with the philosophical 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.”