1 J AT, RAJPUT, AND ALLIED CASTES. 103
2 " grass fibre, and silk, these six are best beaten ; and the seventh is the Jat."
3 " A Jat, a Bhat, a caterpillar, and a widow woman ; these four are Ijest
4 " hungry. If they e;it their fill they do harm ." " The Jat, like a wound, is better
5 " when bound." In agriculture the Jat is jjre-eminent. The market -gardening
6 castes, the Arain, the JMali, the Saini, are perhaps more skilful cultivators on
7 a small scale ; but they cannot rival the Jat as landowners and yeoman cul-
8 tivators. The Jat calls himself zaminddr or " husbandman " as often as Jat,
9 and his women and children alike work with him in the fields : " The Jat's
10 "baby has a plough handle for a plaything." "The Jat stood on his com
11 " heap and said to the king's elephant-drivers—' Will you sell those little
12 " ' donkeys V " Socially, the Jat occupies a position which is shared by the Ror,
13 the Gujar, and the Ahir, all four eating and smoking together. He is of
14 eom-se far below the Rajput, from the simple fact that he practises widow-
15 marriage. The Jat father is made to say, in the rhyming proverbs of the
16 country side — " Come my daughter and be married ; if this husband dies there
17 " are plenty more." But among the widow-marrying castes he stands first.
18 The Banya with his sacred thread, his strict Hinduism, and his twice-born
19 standing, looks down on the Jat as a Siidra. But the Jat looks down upon
20 the Banya as a cowardly spiritless money-grabber, and society in genei-al
21 agrees with the Jat. The Khatri, who is far superior to the Banya in
22 manliness and vigour, probably takes preceilence of the Jat. But among the
23 races or tribes of purely Hindu origin, I think that the Jat stands next after
24 the Brahman, the Rajput, and the Khatri.
25 There are, however, Jats and Jats. I shall briefly describe each class in
26 the remarks prefixed to the various sections under which I discuss the Jat
27 tribes ; and I shall here do nothing more than briefly indicate the broad
28 distinctions. The Jat of the Sikh tracts is of course the typical Jat of the
29 Panjab, and he it is whom I have described above. The Jat of the south-
30 eastern districts differs little from him save in religion ; though on the Bikaner
31 border the puny Bagri Jat, immigrant from his rainless prairies where he has
32 been held in bondage for eentiuies, and ignorant of cultivation save in its
33 rudest form, contrasts strongly with the stalwart and independent husbandman
34 of the Malwa. On the Lower Indus the word Jat is applied generic-ally to a
35 congeries of tribes, Jats proper, Rajputs, lower castes, and mongrels, who have
36 no points in common save their Mahomedan religion, then- agricultural occu-
37 pation, and their subordinate position. In the great western grazing grounds
38 it is, as I have said, impossible to draw any sure line between Jat and Rajput,
39 the latter term being commonly applied to those tribes who have attaineil
40 political supremacy, while the people whom they have subdued or driven by
41 dispossession of their territory to live a semi-nomad life in the central steppes
42 are more often classed as Jats ; and the state of things in the Salt-range
43 Tract is very similar. Indeed the word Jat is the Panjabi term for a
44 grazier or herdsman ; though ilr. O'Brien says that in Jatki, Jat the cultiva-
45 tor is spelt with a hard, and Jat the herdsman or camel grazier with a soft t.
46 Thus the word Jat in Rohtak or Amritsar means a great deal ; in Muzaffar-
47 garh or Bannu it means nothing at all, or rather perhaps it means a great deal
48 more than anv single word can afford to mean if it is to be of any practical
49 use ; and the two classes respectively indicated by the term in these two parts
50 of the Province must not be too readily confounded.
51 425. The nature and meaning of the figures. — Sucb being the state of things, it may be
52 iini^ined that our iigures do not always convoy any very definite meaning. The 160,000 Jats of
53 Derah Ghazi Khan include 5,000 JIalis, 2,000 Julahas, 3,000 Tarkhaus, -1,500 Kutanas, 4,K>0