Chauhan

Chauhan, Chouhan or Chohan is a caste. In the medieval period some those associated with it ruled parts of Northern India and one, Prithviraj Chauhan, was the king of Delhi.

Myth of origin

Rajput bardic accounts, which are based on mythology, describe the Chauhans as one of the four Agnikula Rajput clans who claim to have originated from a sacrificial fire-pit (agnikunda) at Mount Abu. These claims of supernatural origin are clearly improbable and unacceptable to the modern mind. However, these have numerous variants and give rise to the Chauhans claiming to be a clan of the Agnivanshi dynasty.

Ethnographic status

Denzil Ibbetson, an administrator of the British Raj, classified the Chauhans as a tribe rather than as a caste. He believed, like Nesfield, that the society of the Northwest Frontier Provinces and Punjab in British India did not permit the rigid imposition of an administratively-defined caste construct as his colleague, H. H. Risley preferred. According to Ibbetson, society in Punjab was less governed by Brahmanical ideas of caste, based on varna, and instead was more open and fluid. Tribes, which he considered to be kin-based groups that dominated small areas, were the dominant feature of rural life. Caste designators, such as Jat and Rajput, were status-based titles to which any tribe that rose to social prominence could lay a claim, and which could be dismissed by their peers if they declined. Susan Bayly, a modern anthropologist, considers him to have had "a high degree of accuracy in his observations of Punjab society ... [I]n his writings we really do see the beginnings of modern, regionally based Indian anthropology."