Ahluwalia (caste)

Ahluwalia (also transliterated as Ahluvalia) is an Indian caste native to the Punjab region.[1][2]

The Ahluwalias originally belonged to the Kalal caste, whose traditional occupation was brewing country liquor.[1][2] The Kalals held a low status in the traditional caste hierarchy, close to the outcastes.[1][3] In the 18th century, the Sikh chief Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, who belonged to the Kalal caste, adopted the surname "Ahluwalia" after the name of his ancestral village. His descendants became the ruling dynasty of the Kapurthala State. In the late 19th century, other Kalals also adopted the Ahluwalia identity, as part of a Sanskritisation process to improve their social status, resulting in the formation of the Ahluwalia caste.[1] They gave up their traditional occupations, as they gained political power and as the colonial British administration started regulating distribution and sale of liquor.[4] This attempt was successful, and the Ahluwalias came to be considered equal to the high-ranked Khatris in the caste hierarchy.[1] The Kalals took up new occupations, and in particular, a large number of Ahluwalias served in the army.[4]

Some of the Ahluwalias further tried to enhance their social status by claiming Khatri or Rajput descent.[4] For example, a legendary account traces the ancestry of the Kapurthala royal family to the Bhatti Rajput royal family of Jaisalmer (and ultimately to Krishna through Salibahan). According to this narrative, a group of Bhattis migrated to Punjab, where they came to be known as Jats, and became Sikhs. The account states that Sadho Singh and his four sons married into Kalal families, because of which the family came to be known as Ahluwalia.[5] Lepel Griffin (1873), a British administrator who wrote on the history of Punjab's rulers, dismissed this account connecting the Ahluwalias to the Jaisalmer royal family as spurious.[5] The Sikh author Gian Singh, in his Twarikh Raj Khalsa (1894), noted that the Ahluwalia family had adopted the Kalal caste identity much before Sadho Singh.[6]

Most of the Ahluwalias follow either Sikhism or Hinduism.[1][7]

References
  1. W. H. McLeod (2009). The A to Z of Sikhism. Scarecrow Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-8108-6344-6.
  2. Paramjit S. Judge (2015). "Caste Hierarchy, Dominance, and Change in Punjab". Sociological Bulletin. Sage. 64 (1): 62. JSTOR 26290720. Ahluwalias, formerly known by the name of Kalal, are a caste of liquor distillers. At present, they are upper caste without any traditional stigma.
  3. Dev Raj Chanana (1961-03-04). "Sanskritisation, Westernisation and India's North-West" (PDF). The Economic Weekly. VIII (9): 410. The Ahluwalias had a very low social status as they engaged in the distillation and sale of liquor. Their professional name was Kalal. [...] They got the chance to improve their social status, when one of their castes was able to carve out the state of Kapurthala for himself. The entire community then laid claim to the title of Kshatriyas...".
  4. Donald Anthony Low (1968). Soundings in Modern South Asian History. University of California Press. pp. 70–71. OCLC 612533097.
  5. Ganda Singh (1990). Sardar Jassa Singh Ahluwalia. Punjabi University. pp. 1–4.
  6. M. L. Ahluwalia (1996). Land marks in Sikh history. Ashoka International. p. 37.
  7. Jogindra Singh Gandhi (1982). Lawyers and Touts: A Study in the Sociology of Legal Profession. Hindustan. p. 64. Ahluwalia are bi-religious, having both Hindu and Sikh members
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