History of Chotu Ram

Chhotu Ram was born as Ram Richpal in a Jat family in the village of Garhi Sampla, Rohtak district, Punjab Province. His parents were Chaudhary Sukhiram Singh Ohlian and Sarla Devi. He acquired the nickname Chhotu Ram as he was the youngest of his brothers.

History of Jat

The Jats are a paradigmatic example of community- and identity-formation in early modern Indian subcontinent."Jat" is an elastic label applied to a wide-ranging community from simple landowning peasants to wealthy and influential Zamindars The Jats seem to have had their origins in pastoralism in the lower Indus valley of Sindh. At the time of Muhammad bin Qasim's conquest of Sind in the 8th century, Arab writers described agglomerations of Jats in the arid, the wet, and the mountainous regions of the conquered land.The Arab rulers, though professing a theologically egalitarian religion, the position of Jats or the discriminatory practices against them that had been put in place in the long period of Hindu rule in Sind.Between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, Jat herders migrated up along the river valleys,into the Punjab,which had not been cultivated in the first millennium.Many took up tilling in regions such as Western Punjab, where the sakia (water wheel) had been recently introduced.By early Mughal times, in the Punjab, the term "Jat" had become loosely synonymous with "peasant", and some Jats had come to own land and exert local influence.
According to historians Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot,
The Jats also provide an important insight into how religious identities evolved during the precolonial era. Before they settled in the Punjab and other northern regions, the pastoralist Jats had little exposure to any of the mainstream religions. Only after they became more integrated into the agrarian world did the Jats adopt the dominant religion of the people in whose midst they dwelt.
Over time the Jats became primarily Muslim in the western Punjab, Sikh in the eastern Punjab, and Hindu in the areas between Delhi Territory and Agra, with the divisions by faith reflecting the geographical strengths of these religions.During the decline of Mughal rule in the early 18th century, the Indian subcontinent's hinterland dwellers, many of whom were armed and nomadic, increasingly interacted with settled townspeople and agriculturists. Many new rulers of the 18th century came from such martial and nomadic backgrounds. The effect of this interaction on India's social organization lasted well into the colonial period. During much of this time, non-elite tillers and pastoralists, such as the Jats or Ahirs, were part of a social spectrum that blended only indistinctly into the elite landowning classes at one end, and the menial or ritually polluting classes at the other. During the heyday of Mughal rule, Jats had recognized rights. According to Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf:
Upstart warriors, Marathas, Jats, and the like, as coherent social groups with military and governing ideals, were themselves a product of the Mughal context, which recognized them and provided them with military and governing experience. Their successes were a part of the Mughal success.

Jat Sikh of the "Sindhoo" clan, Lahore, 1872
As the Mughal empire now faltered, there were a series of rural rebellions in North India.Although these had sometimes been characterized as "peasant rebellions", others, such as Muzaffar Alam, have pointed out that small local landholders, or zemindars, often led these uprisings.The Sikh and Jat rebellions were led by such small local zemindars, who had close association and family connections with each other and with the peasants under them, and who were often armed.
These communities of rising peasant-warriors were not well-established Indian castes,but rather quite new, without fixed status categories, and with the ability to absorb older peasant castes, sundry warlords, and nomadic groups on the fringes of settled agriculture.The Mughal Empire, even at the zenith of its power, functioned by devolving authority and never had direct control over its rural grandees. It was these zemindars who gained most from these rebellions, increasing the land under their control.The triumphant even attained the ranks of minor princes, such as the Jat ruler Badan Singh of the princely state of Bharatpur.
The non-Sikh Jats came to predominate south and east of Delhi after 1710.According to historian Christopher Bayly
Men characterised by early eighteenth century Mughal records as plunderers and bandits preying on the imperial lines of communications had by the end of the century spawned a range of petty states linked by marriage alliance and religious practice.
The Jats had moved into the Gangetic Plain in two large migrations, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively.They were not a caste in the usual Hindu sense, for example, in which Bhumihars of the eastern Gangetic plain were; rather they were an umbrella group of peasant-warriors. According to Christopher Bayly:
This was a society where Brahmins were few and male Jats married into the whole range of lower agricultural and entrepreneurial castes. A kind of tribal nationalism animated them rather than a nice calculation of caste differences expressed within the context of Brahminical Hindu state.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the ruler of the recently established Jat kingdom of Bharatpur, Raja Surajmal, felt sanguine enough about durability to build a garden palace at nearby Dig (Deeg). Although, the palace, Gopal Bhavan, was named for Lord Krishna, its domes, arches, and garden were evocative of Mughal architecture, a reflection ultimately of how much these new rulers—aspiring dynasts all—were products of the Mughal epoch. In another nod to the Mughal legacy, in the 1750s, Surajmal removed his own Jat brethren from positions of power and replaced them with a contingent of Mughal revenue officials from Delhi who proceeded to implement the Mughal scheme of collecting land-rent.