Final Settlement — Bhatinda, Sirhind, Ambota

11th – 17th centuries CE · Bhatinda → Sirhind → the Shivalik foothills

After the fall of Trilocanapala and his son Bhimapala in 1026 CE, the surviving Varaha-Shahi clan retreated from the Punjab to the desert margin and the lower hills. Three way-stations punctuate the migration — Bhatinda on the desert edge, Sirhind on the Sutlej, and finally Ambota in the Shivalik foothills of district Una, Himachal Pradesh.

Bhatinda — the desert frontier

The first refuge in the tradition is Bhatinda (Vatinda; Tabarhindah in the Persian sources). Col. James Tod’s Annals of Rajasthan records the Jhalrapatan inscription of S. 748 (692 CE) of Raja Doorgangul / Durgagana; Tod does not say that this king’s territory reached Bhatinda, and that extension is a later addition which this page formerly presented as his.

Two further corrections are owed to readers of the first edition. The clan tradition has Raja Vinaypal holding Bhatinda Fort against the Ghurids; this page gave the campaign as 1130 CE, which cannot be right — the Ghurid capture of Tabarhindah belongs to 1191, on the eve of the first battle of Tarain, and Muhammad of Ghor was not campaigning in the Punjab sixty years earlier. And the name Vinaipāl reaches us through Sant Visakha Singh (1953), a twentieth-century compilation, not through a record of the period. The only ruler of Bhatinda named in an inscription actually recovered there is Rājā Śatrughnadeva, of what the epigraphist calls a local family.

The Bhatinda chapter of the migration is also the chapter of the Bhatti–Varaha rivalry. Hari Singh Bhatti’s Pugal ka Itihaads (1989) records the long feud — including the wedding-massacre tradition and the death of Vijay Rai Bhatti c. 800 CE — that fixed the two clans on opposite sides of the desert. The Pugal ki Khyat describes the Varahas as the senior power on the Bhatinda–Bhatner axis until the late twelfth century. Both are bardic compilations and should be read as what the Bhatti side remembered, not as chronicle. See the dedicated Bhatti post.

Sirhind — the Sutlej crossing

Sirhind was the natural way-station for any clan moving from the Bhatinda desert toward the Punjab hills. The Varaha presence at Sirhind is preserved in revenue records and in the genealogical tradition that runs through the Vanshavali recovered from state revenue records and reproduced in the book’s appendix. The Vanshavali names Rai Hameer (settler of the Bhatinda area) and Rai Jagat Singh (after whom the title Rana begins to be used) as the early hinges of the line; later, Chaudhary Jahjar Chand moves from Arniala into Ambota in the Mughal period. The full Vanshavali is reproduced on the dedicated Vanshavali page.

The Āʾīn-i-Akbarī, 1595 — the clan in an imperial revenue register

Abūʾl-Fazl’s Āʾīn-i-Akbarī, completed in 1595, lists for each maḥal the caste of its zamīndārs. Barāh appears in eight of them, across two sūbas:

• Sūba Delhi, Sarkār Sarhind — Sarhind, Sumāna (Samāna), Karyāt Rāe Samū, Machhiwara
• Sūba Lahore, Sarkār Bet Jalandhar Doab — Bajwara, Dardak, Rahimabad, Sankarbanot

This list is Prof. G. S. L. Devra’s, from his 2003 Indian History Congress paper, and it is five maḥals longer than the three recovered independently for this site. The addition matters more than the arithmetic. Bajwara lies in Hoshiarpur district — the same district whose U’nah parganah administered Ambota, and the district in whose Shiwalik valley the Dholbaha sculptures were found. The 1595 register therefore places the clan not only in the Puadh but in the Bet Jalandhar Doab and at the foot of the hills the family would later settle in. That is the closest any dated document comes to Ambota.

Three things make the entry the most important single document on this page. It is an administrative record of the year it describes, not a tradition recalled later. It was not written by or for the clan. And it puts the clan under its own name, as a landholding body, two and a half centuries before the earliest colonial gazetteer that mentions it. Devra draws the same inference about status that the record itself forces: by 1595 “it is confirmed that they in these parts had not been respected as rulers” — they are zamīndārs, not kings.

Samāna remains the strongest case in the whole dossier. The Āʾīn gives Barāh zamīndārs there in 1595; the Phulkian States Gazetteer gives Samāna as a Varyāh chhat in 1904. Two unrelated administrations, three centuries apart, record the same clan holding the same town.

Two cautions, one of them confirmed by Devra

On the reading. The scanned revenue tables are poorly recognised and render Barāh variously as “Bariih” and “Sarah”; a word-search of the digitised text misses the entries altogether. The readings were taken from the page images, not from the searchable text.

On Bhatinda. The Āʾīn does not attest the clan at Bhatinda, and Devra says so independently and in as many words: “Incidentally Abul Fazl has not referred to them in the Parganas of Bhatner or Bhatinda.” In the Sirhind tables Bhatinda is a Bhatti holding. The register attests this clan across the Puadh and the Bet Jalandhar Doab. It cannot be cited for Bhatinda, and that has now been checked twice from opposite directions.

The full entry, with the twelve chhats and the grading of every source on this site, is set out on The Documentary Record; the Devra passages are quoted on The Turk Shahi.

Ambota — the Shivalik settlement

Ambota (district Una, Himachal Pradesh) is the modern home of the Varaha Rajput community. The Settlement Records of the U’nah parganah of Hoshiarpur district (Esquire, R. C. A., 1876) and the British Punjab State Gazetteers preserve the foundation tradition: a maternal grandfather granted the founding family five villages in the Shivalik foothills, and the lineage settled there permanently. The Ambota Vanshavali — DARAD AMBOTA, gotra SHANDILYA, BRYAH (Varaha) caste — was formally recorded in revenue documents on 26 May 1967. Three Vanshavali notes preserved in the same dossier explain the displacement and resettlement: “Kingdom of Raja Andarpal was located on some distance of Badri Narain’s Teerarth. Luka, Shamla and complete area of Daira Doon was in his occupation. His capital was in Bhatinda. But due to cruelty and brutality of Muslim rulers, Rai Kalo Ram inhabited in Jhal Kakra. Generation of other sire Goya Rai Devi Chand took shelter in the north east 16 to 17 miles away from Bhatinda.” That note is a 1967 record of family memory, and what it can and cannot be asked to carry is set out on the Vanshavali page — including the point that Jhal and Kakrā are two separate chhats, run together here into one name.

The conversions and the diaspora

The conversions split the surviving Varahas, and the date matters more than the name of the emperor. This page formerly put them under Aurangzeb; the community’s own material dates the conversion of the Varyāh line to the reign of Jahangir (1605–27), with Rai Kālu at that point, and the earlier date is given here because that is what the sources say. Aurangzeb is the later and more familiar villain, and the attribution looks like a reflex rather than a reading. The branch that resisted retreated up into the Shivaliks and consolidated at Ambota and the surrounding villages. The branch that accepted Islam — under names such as Birāhān, Birah and Barāhā — disappears from north-Indian Hindu records. Dashrath Sharma, in his Poona Orientalist paper “Identification of the Birāhān” (1943), and S. H. Hodivala’s Studies in Indo-Muslim History (1939) reconstruct that conversion. Other Varaha cadet lines join the Wadan Gils, the Man and the Bhuller Jat clans — H. A. Rose, A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab (1914) — and the Gil Jat of Sirsa, who trace descent to Raja Bhainipal / Vinay Pal Birah. The southerly branch, displaced westward toward Saurashtra and Sindh, is claimed as ancestral to the Jhalas and the Makwanas.

One claim is withdrawn here. The first edition and earlier versions of this page counted the Sayyid Barha of Awadh and Rohilkhand among the converted Varahas, on the strength of the name. That identification does not survive testing: the Sayyid Barha are a J1-L859 Arab-descended group, and the shared syllable is coincidence. The name is dropped from the list above.

The Masrur question

The monument most often associated with the Hindu Shahi-Varaha line is the rock-cut Masrur temple complex in the Kangra hills. Prof. Narinder Kumar Singh, in Coronation of Shiva — Rediscovering Masrur Temple (Har-Anand, 2009), argues that the complex was patronised by the Hindu Shahi court and looted by Mahmud of Ghazna in the same campaign that brought him to Kangra Fort in 1009 CE. The book takes that argument up, and states its status plainly: the attribution is Singh’s reading, not an inscription at the site, and no epigraph at Masrur names a Shāhi patron. If the attribution holds, Masrur would be the missing visual record of the line’s last patronage in north India. That is a conditional, and the first edition printed it as a fact.

In this era

• Āʾīn-i-Akbarī, 1595 — Barāh zamīndārs at Sirhind, Samāna and Karyāt Rāe Samū (Grade B, and the hard anchor of this page)
• Epigraphia Indica XXI, no. 44 — Rājā Śatrughnadeva and Tribhāṁdanapura at Bhatinda (Grade A)
• The Ambota Vanshavali — state revenue records, 26 May 1967 (Grade D)
• Bhatti rivalry · Jhala · Makwana · Gil Jat
• Jhalrapatan Inscription of Raja Doorgangul, S. 748 / 692 CE
• The Documentary Record — the dated documents, graded, with the Shāhi question tested
• Primary sources — Tod’s Annals, Bhatti’s Pugal ka Itihaads, Sharma (1943), Hodivala (1939), Rose (1914), Singh (2009)

Cholistan: Uchchha & Derawar — the western survival

The collapse of the Hindu Shahi political line after 1026 was not the end of the Varaha name in the west. Two parallel survivals are claimed: an eastern retreat through Bhatinda — Sirhind — the Shivalik hills, ending in the family settlement at Ambota in district Una, Himachal Pradesh, and a western survival in the Cholistan tract of southern Punjab (modern Pakistan), about the desert forts of Uchchha (near Multan) and Derawar (in the upper Sind / Cholistan).

The western presence is well attested. Six strands of evidence bear on it, and they are of unequal weight — the strongest is Nainsī, the weakest are the encyclopaedia entries, and the page now says which is which rather than counting them all as one.

1. The construction of Derawar — 9th century, by a Bhati Rajput

Derawar Fort is said to have been built in the 9th century CE by Rai Jajja Bhati, a Hindu Rajput ruler of the Bhati clan, as a tribute to Rawal Deoraj Bhati of Jaisalmer.¹ The fort was originally called Dera Rawal, then Dera Rawar, and finally Derawar. This is a Bhati foundation, not a Varaha one, and the source for it is an encyclopaedia article — it sets the scene and proves nothing about this clan.

2. Muhṇot Nainsī’s Khyāt, 17th century — and a country called Varihāho

This is the best source on the page, and the first edition quoted it at second hand. Muhṇot Nainsī, dīwān of Jodhpur, gives the clan a chapter of its own in his Khyāt — the editors head it vāt (varihāhā’s) — and in it he records something no paraphrase conveys: the tract between Vikampur and Derāwar still bore the clan’s name in his own day.

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

Muhṇot Nainsī rī Khyāt, part 2, pp. 25–26. The editors gloss ajes in their own footnote as abhī tak, “up to now,” and enter Varihāho, Chitrānglas and Ūch Derāwar in their gazetteer.

A people who leave their name on a tract were not marginal in it, and a Jodhpur minister recording six centuries later that the country still carried the name is as good as this class of evidence gets. The English sentence formerly quoted on this page — “Varha were the lords of the forts…” — came from a web portal, not from the Khyāt; it is a fair gloss, but the passage above is the text. Nainsī, incidentally, affiliates the clan to the Paramāras, not to the Shāhis.

3. The Bahawalpur succession — Sadiq Mohammad I takes Derawar from Rawal Akhi Singh

The official Bahawalpur government history records that Sadiq Mohammad I, founder-ancestor of the Bahawalpur state (1748), wrested Derawar Fort from a Rajput prince Rawal Akhi Singh only a few years before establishing his rule.⁴ That holds the Rajput grip on Derawar into the early eighteenth century. It does not say the prince was a Varaha — Rawal is the Bhāṭī style — and the page should not imply that it does.

4. UNESCO — the desert forts of Cholistan as a Hindu Rajput network

The UNESCO Tentative List entry “Derawar and the Desert Forts of Cholistan” describes a dense network of forts (Meergarh, Jaangarh, Marotgarh, Maujgarh, Dingarh, Khangarh, Khairgarh, Bijnotgarh, Islamgarh) running parallel to the Indus and Sutlej, all originally Hindu Rajput strongholds in the medieval period before being absorbed by Muslim rulers.⁵ This is context for the frontier, not evidence about one clan in it.

5. Uch Sharif as a regional Rajput-period centre, 12th — 17th c.

Before the eighteenth-century establishment of Bahawalpur, the regional centre of the tract was Uch Sharif, between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.⁶ Uch is the same Uchchha that Nainsī names, and the dating window matches his testimony — which is the point worth making here.

6. The Cholistan enumeration of 1904

Better than any portal synthesis: the Bahawalpur State Gazetteer of 1904 enumerates Varyáh among the tribes of the Cholistan tract. That is an administrative record, in the right place, giving the clan’s name in the same spelling the Punjab gazetteers use — and it independently closes the gap between Nainsī’s seventeenth-century country and the modern map. It is worth noting how nearly it was missed: the digitised text of that gazetteer is an English book recognised with an Urdu engine, and contains not one Latin letter, so no word-search can find anything in it. The entry was read from the page images.

The kitabkhana.org essay “The Hindu Shahi Dynasty, the forgotten clan of Varaha Rajput”⁷ gathers much of this material and is useful as a finding aid. It is a modern synthesis, it draws on this site among others, and it is not independent evidence — the first edition treated it as though it were.

The eastern retreat: Bhatinda → Sirhind → Ambota

While the Cholistan branch held the desert forts in the west, the tradition has the surviving clansmen of the Punjab plain retreating east. The route is the one preserved in the Vanshavali at Ambota: from Bhatinda, where the tradition places Raja Banni Pal’s descendants in the fort through the early Sultanate period; to Sirhind, after the loss of Bhatinda; and finally to the Shivalik foothills, where Chaudhary Jahjar Chand settled the family at Ambota (district Una, Himachal Pradesh) in the Mughal period, under the pressure of the conversions that the community’s own material dates to Jahangir’s reign.⁸

For the original record see The Ambota Vanshavali; for the documents that date any of it, The Documentary Record.

Sources for this page