The Documentary Record

The clan in state records, inscriptions and the earliest chronicles — what can be shown rather than argued

1 · Akbar’s revenue survey, c. 1595 — Grade A

Abū’l-Faḍl’s Āʾīn-i-Akbarī records, for every maḥal of the empire, its area, its assessed revenue, its military contingent — and the caste of its zamīndārs. In Ṣūbah Dehli, Sarkār Sirhind, the caste Barāh is entered against three maḥals.

Maḥal	Zamīndār castes as printed
Sirhind, with subordinate district (brick fort)	Rājpūt, BARĀH, Khauri, Dādah, Jat
Samāna	BARĀH, Jat
Karyāt Rāe Samū	Ranghar, Jat, BARĀH

This is the earliest hard attestation of the clan by nearly three centuries, and it is of a kind nothing else in the record matches: a Mughal revenue survey recording who actually held land. It is not a pedigree and makes no claim about descent.

Three cautions. Barāh occurs nowhere else in the whole of volume II — only in these three maḥals. The Āʾīn does not call the Barāh Rajputs, does not gloss the name, and neither Jarrett nor Sarkar annotates it; the identification with the Varāha is an inference and is marked here as Grade E. And it must not be confused with Brār, which does not occur as a landholding caste in Sarkār Sirhind at all, with the maḥal name Sultānpur Bārha, or with the separate Wāh entry at Māchhiwāra.

2 · The Bhatinda inscription of Rājā Śatrughnadeva — Grade A

Copied in 1918–19 from the tomb of Haji Ratan Baba at Bhatinda; Lahore Museum no. 8; published by D. R. Sahni, “Six Inscriptions in the Lahore Museum”, Epigraphia Indica XXI (1931–32), no. 44, at pp. 297–98. Nineteen lines of Nāgarī, much damaged. Verse 2 praises Rājā Śatrughnadeva; verse 3 names Tribhāṇḍanapura.

“I am unable to identify the Rājā Śatrughnadēva who was ruling over the region, where the inscription had been found… ‘Tribhāṇḍanapura’ mentioned in verse 3 is undoubtedly the original ancient name of Bhatinda where the inscription was discovered. The ruler Śatrughnadēva in whose time the inscription was recorded is, as far as I can make out, not known from another inscription. He must have belonged to a local family of Bhatinda. Raverty, quoted by Smith in his Early History of India, 3rd Edition, p. 382, was wrong in making Bhatinda the capital of Jayapāla of the Hindu Shāhi dynasty.”

Four things follow. Bhaṭiṇḍā had a Sanskrit name, and Tribhāṇḍanapura is almost certainly what the Persian chroniclers rendered as Tabarhindah. Bhaṭiṇḍā had a ruler in the late tenth century and his name was Śatrughnadeva. On the epigraphist’s own reading he belonged to a local family — which is what the clan tradition asserts of itself, and makes him a candidate worth raising, marked Grade E. And Sahni, publishing the only inscription ever found at the place, states in print that Bhaṭiṇḍā was not Jayapāla’s capital.

Three disciplines. The inscription is undated: the whole dating rests on one sentence, “the characters are Nāgarī of about the end of the 10th century A.D.”, with no palaeographic argument offered. Sahni gives no formal translation, only a running paraphrase. And the Northern Circle appendix had already proposed Tribhāṇḍanapura for Bhatinda in 1919, twelve years before the edition.

3 · The Barlū memorial stone, 1006–07 CE — Grade A

“102.—V. 1063.—Barlū (Jodhpur State, Rājpūtānā) devli. Inscription recording the death of the Rājā Dahita, son of Javikava, a Mahā-Varāha.¹”
footnote ¹: “Corresponds to Barāhī, an old Rajpūt clan.”

D. R. Bhandarkar, A List of the Inscriptions of Northern India, Appendix to Epigraphia Indica XIX–XXIII (1929), entry no. 102. The identification of Mahā-Varāha with the Barāhī Rajput clan is Bhandarkar’s own, in his own footnote, in the official list — which is what makes it usable. It fixes a man of rank bearing that style in Marwar in 1006–07 CE (V.S. 1063). It says nothing about where he came from.

4 · Nainsī’s chapter, and the country called Varihāho — Grade C

Muḥṇot Nainsī, dīwān of Jodhpur, compiled his Khyāt in the seventeenth century; it is the earliest substantial Rajasthani prose chronicle and the foundation of all later Rajput genealogy, Tod’s included. Its Part 2 carries a chapter headed वात (वरिहाहांरी) — “The account of the Varihāhās”. At printed pp. 25–26:

विकंपुर देरावर विचे आ धरती चित्रांगलस आ अजेस ‘वरिहाहो’ कहीजे ।

“This land between Vikampur and Derāwar — Chitrānglas — is to this day called Varihāho.”

The word अजेस carries the editors’ own footnote, “अभी तक”, up to now. They enter all three names in their gazetteer. A people who leave their name on the land were not a marginal presence in it, and a Jodhpur minister recording six centuries later that the tract still bore the name is as good as this kind of evidence gets.

A second, independent strand in the same work — Part 1, p. 253, in the Khīchī Chauhān chapter — has a kavitt naming वरिहाहा संके, the Varihāhā sāṅk or clan-branch, in a line with the Bhuṭās and Bhāṭīs, and naming Vikampur, Derāwar and Lodhruva.

What Nainsī does not give. He never names the Varihāhā chief — only his wife Ravāy and his daughter Huraṛ. And he gives no date at all: there is not one samvat form in pp. 17–28. The dates that circulate for these events are Tod’s, transmitted through Mishra, and must not be attributed to the khyāt.

5 · The twelve chhats — Grade B

Punjab States Gazetteers, vol. XVII A, Phulkian States, Patiala, Part A, p. 66:

“The Barāh or Varāh Rājpūts claim descent from Binepāl of Bhatinda and emigrated at a very distant period from Udaipur. They have a proverb — Behū mās na chakhde singh, bāj, Variāh, ‘the lion, the hawk and the Varāhs never taste stale meat.’ Rai Kālu of Kakra near Bhawānīgarh embraced Islam in Jahangir’s reign, so that their conversion is somewhat recent, and the Barāhs of Bakhtri in tahsil Sunam are still Hindus. They own nearly 30 villages in tahsils Sunām, Bhawānīgarh and Amargarh… The Barāhs have 12 chhats and 24 makans, the chhats in this State being Samana, Talwandī, Kakrā, Bhumsī, Jhal, Jhondan, in Nabha Baena, Badbar, Baragraon, in Jīnd Bazidpur, and in British territory Budlada and Moranda.”

Samāna appears in both the Āʾīn of 1595 and the chhat list of 1904 — the same clan in the same place three hundred and nine years apart, recorded by two different states. That single continuity is the strongest thing the administrative record gives.

Note also that Kakrā and Jhal are two separate chhats, not one village; that the conversion is dated to Jahangir’s reign (1605–27) and judged “somewhat recent” by the compiler himself, not to any medieval conquest; and that part of the clan never converted at all, surviving as Hindus at Bakhtri in tahsil Sunam into the twentieth century.

6 · The spine, in one view

Date	Grade	What is recorded
1006–07	A	A Mahā-Varāha on a memorial stone at Barlū in Marwar; read by Bhandarkar as of the Barāhī clan.
late 10th c.	A	Rājā Śatrughnadeva at Tribhāṇḍanapura (Bhatinda) — “a local family”, and not a Shāhi.
17th c.	C	Nainsī gives the Varihāhā a chapter, and names their country between Vikampur and Derāwar.
c. 1595	A	Barāh zamīndārs of Sirhind, Samāna and Karyāt Rāe Samū. Bhatinda’s zamīndārs are Bhatti.
1605–27	B	Rai Kālu of Kakra embraces Islam in Jahangir’s reign.
1883	B	Ibbetson names Pirthi Pāl, a Waria Rajput of Garh Mithila; Variah listed as a Rajput clan of Ferozepore.
1904	B	Twelve chhats, twenty-four makans, c. 30 villages in Sunam, Bhawanigarh and Amargarh; Barāhs of Bakhtri still Hindu; Varyáh living in the Rohī (Cholistan).
1908	B	Imperial Gazetteer XIV, p. 2: “the Barāhas (now Musalmāns)” among the Rajput clans of the desert.

Three hundred and nine years from the first revenue entry to the last gazetteer, in one country, in state records. Whatever is concluded about the clan’s remoter origins, this stands on its own.

A note on why this was hard to find

Two of the findings above were recovered only because a published finding aid was wrong. The Bahawalpur State Gazetteer of 1904 is an English book whose online text was produced by an Urdu OCR engine and contains no Latin characters at all, so every keyword search of it returns nothing. The Āʾīn’s revenue tables OCR so badly that Barāh reads as “Bariih”. And Nainsī’s own editors print an errata slip correcting वरहाहा to वरिहाहा; following that slip is what led to the second attestation. The clan has been hard to find partly because it is spelled fourteen different ways across four scripts, and partly because the finding aids are broken.