Proposition: Among the major scholars of South Asian society and history, the Jats are described as ------ (to be filled in after some sources have been added below).
I'm keeping in mind two categories for the Jats' description, not now, but what they traditionally were, a caste-based and sociology and economic-history-based.
Among tertiary sources, i.e. widely used text-books, not research monographs (such as Chris Bayly's Empire and Information, or Bina Agarwal's A Field of One's Own, or even Susan Bayly's Caste and Society) there are found:
"Non-elite" or some notion of not being high-caste, or being outside the caste system (per Peter Robb, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf, Romila Thapar,) below.
"Peasant" (which can mean tenant farmer (or tiller) or a farmer with small holdings) per Tirthankar Roy, Asher and Talbot, Burton Stein and David Arnold, David Ludden, Michael Fisher ("Peasant," by the way, means, (OED, 3rd edition, 2005) " A person who lives in the country and works on the land, esp. as a smallholder or a labourer; (chiefly Sociology) a member of an agricultural class dependent on subsistence farming. Now used esp. with reference to foreign countries (or to Britain and Ireland in earlier times), and often to denote members of the lowest and poorest rank of society (sometimes contrasted with prince or noble). In specific contexts the term may be variously defined. Although modern sociologists agree that a peasant works the land, the more wealthy peasants may also be landowners, rentiers, hirers of labour, etc., and in these capacities share interests with completely different social groups. Hence, in the analysis of many rural societies, divisions within the class frequently have to be made."), so the Jats might be middle-peasants per Bina Agarwal's second example, or simply peasants in her first.
Among Secondary Sources
Non-elite: Susan Bayly
"Peasant" there as: Bina Agarwal
The Jats were also misogynists par excellence, the spur for the Female Infanticide Prevention Act, 1870, see Dyson's magnum opus below. Their gender ratios are abysmally low even today, and they are thought to engage widely in sex-selective abortion.
Robb, P. (2011), A History of India, Palgrave Essential History Series (2 ed.), Palgrave, p. 245, ISBN978-0-230-34549-2, Standardizations and accommodations in Indian society, in this period, often took the form of status controversies between notional or kin groups rather than individuals, as already noted. Caste began to be reassessed. The outcome was both a development of harder and broader communities, and the persistence of pre-colonial norms. Influences had also' included regional political mobilizations, Mughal and Company policies, and the specialized production and urban growth sponsored by long-distance trade. The changes were social as well as intellectual, affecting the upper levels of society first. Remarkable caste-based subdivisions (of labour, marriage and custom) were already noticed, by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European observers, among low-status servants and workers. Even so, most Shudras were still only vaguely identified by 1800. Among the agriculturist Jats, Kunbis and Vellalas, for example, caste and jati divisions often seem to have been localized and obscure to outsiders. By contrast, Brahmans, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas were commonly differentiated outside as well as within the localities, and hence some groups were widely accepted as belonging to a 'high' varna. Many achieved this, however, only after deliberate effort and changes in behaviour.
Metcalf, Barbara D.; Metcalf, Thomas R. (2012), A Concise History of Modern India (3rd ed.), Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-1-107-02649-0, Marathas, Sikhs, Jats, and even Rajputs represented social groups with old names but new cohesion and status. These were not age-old Indian 'castes'. One of the surprising arguments of fresh scholarship, based on inscriptional and other contemporaneous evidence, is that until relatively recent centuries, social organization in much of the subcontinent was little touched by the four normative hierarchic categories (varnas) known from Sanskrit Vedic texts: Brahman priests as ritual guardians of social purity; Kshatriya warriors; Vaisya merchants; and Shudra peasants.
Stein, B. (2010), Arnold, D. (ed.), A History of India (2nd ed.), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN978-1-4051-9509-6, (p. 190)Elsewhere in the north, Mughal authority was openly contested. A revolt among the chieftains of the Jat pastoralists and peasants south of the imperial capital of Agra posed a dangerous challenge. The Jats were strategically placed to intercept and plunder the bullock trains of treasure and trade passing into the Gangetic basin from the Deccan, and harried them until that route was abandoned. ... (p. 192) The Sikhs rose under the leadership of a charismatic pretender, who had assumed political if not spiritual leadership after the assassination of the tenth and last Guru. He succeeded in winning the allegiance and religious affiliation of the Jats, who were then in the process of transforming themselves from pastoralists into sedentary farmers. (p. 197) Similarly, the new rulers of Hindu states were less often scions of the medieval ruling Rajput clans of kshatriya lineage, and more often of dominant regional peasant stock, such as the Maratha Kunbis or the Sikh Jats. Where such locally recruited, 'sons-of-the-soil' (nativist) elites comprised an important part of the dominant landlord and ruling strata, the direct agrarian exploitation of the earlier Mughal age could no longer be practised.
Roy, Tirthankar (2020), The Economic History of India: 1857–2010 (4th ed.), Oxford University Press, pp. 106–107, ISBN978-0-19-099203-3, Local administrations usually supported the peasant community in matters of dispute. The big tenants owned or controlled land, credit, water, implements, and animals. Real work in the village, therefore, was impossible without the consent and cooperation of the big tenants. Such groups reaped the gains from commercialization when market conditions turned in their favour. The Jat peasants in Punjab and Upper Doab, the Vellalas in Tamil Nadu, the jotedars or large tenants with superior rights in western and northern Bengal, the Kanbi Patidars of south Gujarat, the rich Reddy farmers in Madras—Deccan, the Maratha peasants and Saswad Malis in the Maharashtra sugarcane belt, and counterparts of these groups from various other regions illustrate that process. The process was not a smooth one. Famines and the Great Depression caused reversals. But these were temporary reversals and did not upset the trend. After Independence, this class of relatively wealthy peasant communities made successful attempts to control and shape local and national politics. In studies on the political economy of independent India, they have been variously called 'commercial peasants' (Donald Attwood), 'rich farmers' (Pranab Bardhan), and 'bullock capitalists' (Lloyd and Susan Rudolph). At the lower end of the scale, opportunities for improvement were limited. Those with small holdings suffered a lot during famines and slumps. The famines impoverished them and reduced the supply of working males. They had to live with the insecurity of tenancy, high risks of cultivation, limited capital resources, and the collapse of the world market.
Thapar, Romila (2002), Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 464, ISBN978-0-520-24225-8, Some castes claimed origin from socially elevated ancestors but maintained that their status had been reduced through economic necessity or through a fault in the performing of a ritual. The khatris, an established caste of traders in northern India, claimed kshatriya origin in recent times, maintaining that their lowered status was purely a result of having had to work in commerce. Gurjaras, Jats and Ahirs also claimed kshatriya origin and conceded that they had lost this status. The emergence of new jatis had been a feature of caste society since its inception, but in the early agrarian communities it was probably slower since there had not been a pressure to convert non-caste groups to caste status. The restructuring of the agrarian economy in this period, the intensified mercantile activity and the dispersal of certain higher castes accelerated the process of conversion. Flexibility associated with upper-caste society did not exist for those at the lowest levels or those branded as beyond the pale of caste society. Despite some contestation of orthodox views on caste, these generally remained established among the upper castes.
Ludden, David (2014), India and South Asia: A Short History, Short History Series, London: One World Publications, ISBN978-1-85168-936-1, Great kings built great temples and supported many learned Brahmans. The distribution and content of temples and inscriptions thus maps medieval social geography. Lands rich with inscriptions are concentrated in eastern and central Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Gujarat, western Maharashtra, and along the coastal plains. Where we do not find many medieval temple inscriptions – in Punjab, in Jat territories in the western Ganga plains, and in most mountainous regions – we can surmise that Brahman influence was small and cultures less Hinduized in medieval times. ... Rajput cultural influence spread widely among allies, competitors, and imitators. The genealogies that constituted the valorous record of a Rajput ancestry became coveted assets among aspiring rulers who multiplied east of Rajasthan until, in the eighteenth century, a cultural Rajputization of tribal kingdoms occurred across the mountains of central and eastern India. Rajput supremacy also stimulated the rise of warrior Jat peasant clans in the western frontiers of old Bharat – in Rajasthan, the western Ganga basin, and Punjab – where Rajputs and Jats built fortified villages and hilltop forts, sometimes allied with one another, but most often at odds. ... In Punjab, activists among the Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu populations also won Assembly seats in the 1920s. Their separate interests combined both religious and secular elements. Old Muslim elites were prominent Zamindars. Muslim Jats were the most numerous farmers, particularly in the west. Muslim Pashto clans controlled the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province ... Charan Singh was a leader of Nehru's opposition. His strategy of land reform in Uttar Pradesh did end Zamindari tenure, but it also established a two-tier system of land rights favouring locally dominant Jat landed elites in the villages. A Jat himself, from a poor rural background, Charan Singh symbolized and propelled the rise of 'rich peasant' political power in India.
Catherine Asher, University of Minnesota and Cynthia Talbot, University of Texas-Austin
Asher, C. B.; Talbot, C. (2008), India Before Europe (1st ed.), Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-0-521-51750-8, (p. 290) While Aurangzeb's personal attentions were focused on the Deccan and south India, he had left his sons and grandsons to deal with the territories to the north. Problems with Jats, a peasant group involved in agricultural cultivation, arose in the area around Agra, as they engaged in wide-scale marauding and plundering, including the murder of important Mughal nobles. (p. 322) The Jat community of the Agra–Delhi countryside started to rebel as early as 1669, during Aurangzeb's reign, when villagers near the town of Mathura overcame local Mughal forces and began looting the wealthy. The rebellion spread among other Jats, peasants largely engaged in agriculture, ... (p. 323) While there is a tendency to consider the Jats as unsophisticated peasants or marauders, clearly they were capable of producing sophisticated architectural creations using cutting-edge technologies. (p. 327) First were the Jats, who became Sikhs in large numbers during the seventeenth century; later on, Arora merchants, various untouchable groups, and artisan-craftspeople also joined the religion in smaller numbers. The Jats are a striking example of how new communities and new identities were arising throughout the centuries covered in this book. Jat is a broad label applied to diverse peoples who were originally pastoralists in the lower Indus region of Sind. Over time they migrated northward into the Punjab, bringing their herding lifestyle with them. Those Jats who moved into the more fertile localities of the Punjab, in its central and eastern portions, slowly took up agriculture. Facilitating the spread of agriculture in this semi-arid region was the introduction of the Persian wheel, a device powered by draught animals that drew up water from wells. By the sixteenth century, Punjabi Jats were known as peasant villagers, and some were among the land-controlling local notables of the area. In the western Punjab and other localities where settled agriculture was not productive, many Jats continued to herd animals. (p. 328) Before they settled in the Punjab and other northern regions, the pastoralist Jats had had little exposure to any of the mainstream religions. Only after they became more integrated into the agrarian world did the Jats slowly adopt the dominant religion of the people in whose midst they dwelt. The affiliation of the Jats varied depending on their location: Jats living between Delhi and Agra were primarily Hindu, those in the eastern Punjab were mainly Sikh, and those of the western Punjab were Muslim. This division among Jats reflects the relative strengths of the three religions in the different regions where they settled.
Dyson, Tim (2018), A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day, Oxford University Press, ISBN978-0-19-882905-8, The government's efforts to eradicate female infanticide may also have had a slight upward effect on life expectation.136 The extent of the practice is very hard to assess—for example, because of the under-reporting of young girls in the censuses. Nevertheless, infanticide was practised in Rajput and Jat households in the north and north-west. For most of the nineteenth century efforts to eliminate it met with little success. But in 1870 the government introduced legislation which formed the basis of what Lalita Panigrahi calls a 'mature and assertive social policy'. Essentially, census, survey, and vital registration data were used on a large scale to identify social groups who killed female infants at birth. These groups were then designated as 'Proclaimed Clans' and placed under surveillance. For instance, household surveys were conducted to identify women who were pregnant so that their outcomes could be monitored. When suspicions arose that a baby had been killed, post-mortems were sometimes undertaken. Household heads, midwives, and others found guilty of being involved in infanticide were punished with stiff fines, and even short prison sentences. Extra police were recruited to manage the surveillance procedures, and the associated costs were met through taxation of the Proclaimed Clans. If the proportion of girl children in a clan approached a more normal level then the surveillance arrangements were revoked. Panigrahi states that '[s]eldom in the history of British rule in India had there been undertaken a measure of such gigantic proportions, which touched directly the private lives of individuals'.
Fisher, Michael H. (2018), An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/9781316276044, ISBN978-1-107-11162-2, LCCN2018021693, S2CID134229667, Peasant communities in the Mughal heartland also persistently rebelled. Through the late 1660s, Hindu Jats around Mathura rallied under their popular leader, Gokula. Eventually in 1670, Mughal troops subdued this insurrection (albeit temporarily) and captured Gokula's children. ʿAlamgir renamed Mathura "Islamabad" and ordered the demolition of the major temple there (recycling its stonework into a mosque in nearby Agra). Yet, Jat uprisings reemerged in the late 1680s. In Punjab, Sikhs under their Gurus, revolted repeatedly against Mughal rule and repulsed several Mughal suppression campaigns.
Talbot, Ian (2016), A History of Modern South Asia: Politics, States, Diasporas, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 86–87, ISBN978-0-300-19694-8, Military might, especially naval supremacy over the French, was a key factor in the struggle against an expanding Mysore state, which at one moment threatened the established East Indian base at Madras. Seventy years later, the British were able to bring in vital military reinforcements by sea at the time of the 1857 revolt. The rich land revenues—extracted far more uniformly and rigorously from Bengal than under the Mughals—enabled the East India Company to pay for increasingly large standing armies. These numbered more than 150,000 men at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They came from social groups that had a tradition of augmenting income and status by military service. The Madras and Bombay Presidency Armies were mainly middle caste in composition—for example, Jats and Reddis—unlike the Bengal Army, which comprised Bhumihar Brahmin and Rajput sepoys from Awadh and Bihar. The Bengal Army's "distinctive pattern" of recruitment has been seen as explaining its leading role in the 1857 revolt.
Agarwal, Bina (1994), A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 229, 431, ISBN0521418682, As noted earlier, similar political considerations probably underlay British support for forced leviratic unions for peasant (especially Jat) widows in the Punjab.(p. 229) ... In relation to women's own perceptions, studies based on interviews with peasant women in many parts of India and Bangladesh suggest that women do in fact recognize the importance of their work contribution to welfare, while lamenting the little recognition their contribution receives from other family members. A Jat woman in a middle peasant household in rural Punjab comments: We are the slaves of slaves. Agricultural labourer men help Jat men in the fields, but for Jat women it only means more work We have to cook more food and fee the labourers as well. ... (p. 431)
Bayly, Christopher A., "Indigenous and colonial origins of comparative economic developments: the case of colonial India and Africa", in Bayly, C. A.; Rao, Vijayendra; Szreter, Simon; Woolcock, Michael (eds.), History, Historians and Development Policy: A necessary dialogue, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 39–64, Now it is true that colonial policy — the desire to extract revenue for fiscal-military purposes — determined the nature of tenurial patterns across India to a considerable degree. Yet colonial policy itself was working within a much wider field of social forces. Immediate pre-colonial tenurial systems determined to an equal extent as colonial policy the actual form of proprietorship under British rule. It was the triumph of the pre-colonial Sikh movement amongst the predominantly Jat peasant farmers of northern India which gave rise to the particular type of intensive and balanced cultivation that allowed Punjab to grow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while much of Bengal and Bihar remained economically stagnant. Again, in the case of the Punjab or Gujarat, the broad status group called Pattidars formed an equally buoyant peasant society that later diversified into commerce and the professions in both India and East Africa (Hardiman 1981, Charlesworth 1985). Here again it was Indian actors who made use of these tenurial advantages. Peasant farmers in the Punjab sent their sons into the British Indian army, where they learnt transports skills and brought home development money and land grants. Religious and social movements such as the Arya Samaj in the Punjab or the 'monotheistic' Satya Narayani movement in Gujarat enhanced local capabilities through education, political mobilization and social provision during crises. In the post-colonial period, the central Punjab has been the model for the more prosperous parts of the agrarian economy in both India and Pakistan.
Jeffrey, Craig (2010), Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 43, The activitics of the Arya Samaj religious reform movement acted as a further stimulus to Jat diversification out of agriculture. Dayananda Saraswati, a religious scholar, established the Arya Samaj in 1877 to reform Hindu religious practice by reducing its dependence on Brahmin priests and promoting self-improvement through physical exercise, education and social work. These ideologies resonated with Jats' practical approach to religion and their long-running antagonism towards Brahmins (Datta 1999). Between 1900 and 1930, the Arya Samaj established a host of schools and associations in North-Western UP that catered mainly for Jats and other middle castes and included a Jat newspaper and a Jat Mahasabha (Jat caste society) (Nevill 1922: 82). By the early 1960s, there was a small elite of Jats located in urban areas of North-Western UP which resembled upper-caste urbanites: they were educated, attended urban social functions and often belonged to clubs and associations in the city (cf. Vatuk 1972). Between the mid-1960s and late 1980s, the introduction of private tube-well irrigation, HYVs of wheat and sugar cane and new chemical fertilizers increased the predictability and profitability of cash crop agriculture in North-Western UP and bolstered the position of the Jats (Singh 1992). Many rich Jat farmers took advantage of this growing wealth by removing themselves and their family members from the physical act of cultivatng the soil (Jeffery and Jeffery 1997).
