Jat people

The Jat people (Hindi pronunciation: [dʒaːʈ]) (also spelled Jatt and Jaat) are a traditionally agricultural community in Northern India and Pakistan. Originally pastoralists in the lower Indus river-valley of Sindh, Jats migrated north into the Punjab region, Delhi, Rajputana, and the western Gangetic Plain in late medieval times. Primarily of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh faiths, they now live mostly in the Indian States of Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh and the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sindh.

The Jat community saw radical social changes in the 17th century, the Hindu Jats took up arms against the Mughal Empire during the late 17th and early 18th century. The Hindu Jat kingdom reached its zenith under Maharaja Suraj Mal of Bharatpur (1707–1763). The Jat community of the Punjab region played an important role in the development of the martial Khalsa Panth of Sikhism; they are more commonly known as the Jat Sikhs. By the 20th century, the landowning Jats became an influential group in several parts of North India, including Haryana, Punjab,Western Uttar Pradesh,Rajasthan, 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.

Jat of Afghanistan

The Jats or sometimes pronounced Jots are members of an ethnic group of itinerant travelers found in Afghanistan. They are a marginalized and stigmatised group, and considered "as blots on the ethnic landscape." The term "Jat" is an exonym, never used by what are disparate and distinct ethnic groups.

Origin

In Afghanistan, the term Jat does not refer to a single ethnic community, but rather to a number of disparate groups who practice a peripatetic lifestyle. Groups who are generally referred to as Jat have their own self-designation, and often resent being called Jat, and being called a Jat is an insult in Afghanistan. In Dari dialect of Kabul, shrewish women were often admonished not to be quarrelsome like a Jat. A comparison would the use of the word Gypsy to refer to the Romany and the word Zott to refer to similar groups in the Middle East. What is unclear is how these distinct groups acquired the name Jat. In neighbouring South Asia, the term Jat refers to a large cluster of agriculture castes, some especially in the Balochistan are connected with camel breeding and herding, and it is possible that the Afghan Jat are descended from peripatetic communities that entered Afghanistan in the company of these nomadic Jats, and acquired the name by association.