New Delhi: Last month, former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda performed an elaborate havan at his Rohtak residence before filing his nomination for the assembly elections.
These days, a Jat patriarch performing a Hindu ritual may seem commonplace. But a little more than a hundred years ago, it could have drawn the wrath of the larger community, as it did during the time of Hooda’s paternal grandfather and granduncle.
How Jats, who in precolonial India, had a fragile and ill-formed sense of identity with few religious links to Hinduism, came to embrace Hindu or Arya Samaji rituals, is a story linked to their collective feeling of inferiority, caste-based and colonial humiliation, as well as their attempt to forge a wholly new identity in order to respond to a perceived existential crisis in the early 20th century.
Incidentally, Hooda’s grandfather, Matu Ram Hooda, and granduncle, Ramji Lal Hooda, were key players in forging this new identity.
Jats constitute 26-28 percent of Haryana’s population. Ahead of elections for the 90 assembly seats in the state, the question of the Jat vote, has become ubiquitous again.
ThePrint explains how the modern Jat identity came to be; its sociocultural contours; how the differences between Jats and non-Jats became the key faultline in Haryanvi politics; and why modern-day Jat politics is centred around the community’s collective anxieties.
Also Read: After sitting out LS polls, RSS campaigning hard for BJP in Haryana. ‘Not the time for anger’
Origins in ‘humiliations’
In 1916, a new Rohtak-based weekly called the Jat Gazette appeared on the horizon and began to appeal to Jats to remain united.
“Our Jat brothers in the army should keep bhaichara (brotherhood) among themselves,” said one of the articles published at the time. “No Jat should speak ill of his fellow Jat. It would be a sin if the Jat brothers turned against each other.”
This was an entirely new phenomenon. Until a few years before it, Jats were hardly considered a united caste group. In fact, the word “Jat” was used to mean “a low and servile creature”, according to historian Nonica Datta’s book Forming an Identity—A Social History of the Jats.
Experts argue that, in a sense, the formation of the Jat identity, especially as we know it today, is based on decades, if not centuries, of what they regarded as humiliation.
Datta, in her book, says that, until two centuries ago, the Jats possessed “a rather fragile and inchoate sense of identity”.
They first appeared in Sind possibly during the 17th century, gradually moving into Punjab and the Yamuna Valley, eventually settling in the Indo-Gangetic plains. However disparate and disunited as they may have appeared, the Jats were collectively looked down upon as an inferior group in society from the beginning.
Their social customs, such as mandatory cohabitation and karewa, that is, marrying a brother’s widow, made them the subject of Brahminical disdain and resulted in their categorisation, according to their own accounts, as Shudras—the lowest of the Hindu social classes. This discrimination would go a long way in fuelling their attempts to forge a hitherto non-existent sense of identity.
By the time of British India, two things had occurred: the Jats had become prosperous and even economically influential cultivators of land, and their sense of collective humiliation and inferiority had reached its peak.
The British, who were incorrigibly preoccupied with identifying the “origins” of their colonial subjects, began to categorise the Jats as “tribes”, “nomads”, etc., and claimed that they were “lowly Indo-Scythians and not Aryans”, according to Datta.
Compounded by restrictions such as men not being allowed to wear the janeu (a sacred thread), women not being allowed to wear nose rings, and children not being allowed to use the same taps in schools as the twice-borns or the upper castes, the Jats felt that their humiliation had to be overcome through a new Jat unity.
“The word ‘Jat’ did not have the same meaning or unity that it implies now. But the sense of inferiority and the colonial project of enumerating every group created this sense that power lay in numbers, thereby creating a hitherto non-existent Jat identity,” explains sociologist Surinder Jodka.
“They realised at the time if they don’t regroup themselves in a way that they constitute one numerically significant group of people, they will lose their power.”
The coming of the ‘Arya Jat’
But simply creating a new identity was not enough. They also had to invent traditions that they could call their own. For the Jats, who historically had few religious customs, the emergent Arya Samaj movement—a Hindu reform movement—came in handy.
“With its rejection of caste orthodoxies, Arya Samaj allowed Jats the means for upward social mobility which could ameliorate their social status,” Datta told ThePrint. “Arya Samaj was anti-caste, anti-Brahminical and could give the Jats a new identity that would give them social respect.”
Moreover, in the Satyarth Prakash, the Bible-equivalent of the Arya Samaj, its founder Swami Dayanand Saraswati, had written a chapter titled ‘Jat ki Kahani’ (story of Jats), which valourised a Jat man for challenging Brahminical authority. For the Jats, who had always faced the disdain of the Brahmins, this was a huge boost. Their defiance of Brahminism suddenly had institutional and religious backing.
Armed with its teachings, and much to the chagrin of Brahmins and even other Jats, these new “Arya Jats” began to wear the janeu, perform havans and claim a higher caste status as Kshatriyas—the warrior and ruling classes. They even reinterpreted their own customs like the karewa through the lens of Arya Samaj, which propagated widow remarriage.
In fact, one of the first Jat leaders to adopt widow remarriage was Ramji Lal Hooda, the paternal granduncle of Bhupinder Singh Hooda. By the 1880s, Rohtak, the pocket borough of the Hooda family, became the nerve-centre of Jat-Arya Samaj politics. Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s grandfather, Matu Ram, as well as Ramji Lal, had much to do with it.
It eventually led to their excommunication in 1883, when a large panchayat of Hooda Jats decided to stop hookah-paani with the brothers for their “radical” Jat politics.
Yet, as Datta argues in the essay Arya Samaj and the Making of Jat Identity, the acceptability of the Arya Jats kept rising.
Therefore, Hooda performing a havan before filing his nomination papers is a symbol of this long political history of his family and the community.
The origins of the ‘Jat-non-Jat’ divide
By the early 20th century, Jat associations, schools, and newspapers, among other institutions, became ubiquitous. The group was no longer just economically prosperous, they had also become politically and socially influential.
The Jat Gazette, started by one of the most prominent Jat leaders, Ch. Chhotu Ram, in 1916, was not just a magazine. It came to represent one of the two poles in Haryanvi politics of the time, Rohtak MLA and Kurukshetra University vice-Chancellor, Bhim S. Dahiya says in his book Power Politics in Haryana—A View from the Bridge.
The other pole, according to Dahiya, was represented by Haryana Tilak—a weekly started by Pandit Shri Ram Sharma in 1923 in response to the increasingly powerful Jat politics represented by the Jat Gazette.
“Using their political mouthpieces (their weeklies) for furthering their respective interests of regional and national politics, these two leaders set up two broad polarities of political consciousness among the people of Haryana,” says Dahiya. “The other castes gathered around these two poles, with the landed peasantry siding with Ch. Chhotu Ram and the business and trading castes siding with Pandit Sri Ram Sharma.”
Even as it underwent several changes over the decades, the foundational divide between Jats and non-Jats—initially represented by the Brahmins, but later by other castes, including the Punjabi business and trading castes to which Haryana’s first BJP chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar belongs—has continued to define Haryanvi politics.
“Khattar is politically an important phenomenon in Haryanvi politics because of a long history that few know,” says Jodka.
From Kshatriya to Kisan to OBC
Khattar’s importance also comes from the political and economic developments of the last two decades of the 20th century, says Jodka.
The Jats, as prominent cultivators and owners of land in Haryana for decades, benefitted enormously from the Green Revolution—India’s adoption of technology into its agricultural practices starting from the 1960s. According to Jodka, it led to the formation of “an aspirational agrarian elite”.
In the essay ‘The Haryana State Assembly Elections 2019, Puzzles and Patterns’, Jodka argues, “The success of the Green Revolution benefited the rich among the cultivators the most. It also set in motion a kind of agrarian politics where the rural elite mobilised their caste and rural constituencies and successfully captured the political space at the local and regional levels that was made available by the introduction of democratic politics.”
From Ch. Chhotu Ram to former Prime Minister Charan Singh, the Jats increasingly sought to represent all farmers, which Jodka says, was Jat politics in the garb of farmer politics.
Yet, the success of the Green Revolution, followed by years of economic liberalisation, brought on a new set of anxieties. The prosperous and powerful Jats did not want their children to be just farmers anymore.
“In the 1980s, land started to become somewhat less viable, and simultaneously, this aspirational agrarian elite started to move to urban pockets,” Jodka says.
“They (Jats) had by now educated their children on a big scale, who now wanted to compete in the job market and urban businesses, which were controlled by Banias and Punjabi refugees…For Jats, who had formal education, but did not know the tricks of the trade and the ways of this urban elite, it was difficult to make inroads into the urban space.”
But with the diminishing returns from agriculture and the impenetrability of urban spaces, Jat anxiety about their position in society was only heightened. And by the 1990s, after proudly claiming to be Kshatriya just a few decades ago, they were now demanding their classification under Other Backward Castes (OBCs).
According to political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, over the last few decades, Jat politics has been determined by the twin processes of “mandal” and “market”.
And it is in response to this that they have “changed the discourse from one of domination—a claim to a glorious past and Kshatriya status—to one of deprivation, and have attempted to lay claim to OBC status in order to get access to education and jobs”, he writes in Religion, Caste and Politics in India.
However, even as all this continues to dominate political discourse and electoral realities in Haryana, Jat politics is now facing an existential threat, says Jodka.
“Jat politics is not able to expand because the rural sphere is disintegrating. That is why the BJP can even experiment in Haryana. Jat politics as we have known it can no longer exist. It needs rearticulation.”
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
Also Read: Populist promises in Congress & BJP manifestos for Haryana polls threaten to strain state’s budget