Balchand

According to Ganga Singh (1967: 20-30), Balcnand, , a descendent of Madan Pal in his fifth generation in the Sinsini village, forcibly married the Saurot gotri wife of a Dagar gotri Jat. He was excommunicated by the Rajput biradari and was declared as gotraless. Consequently, he adopted Sinsini, the name of the village, as his gotra. He joined the Jat biradari of the village of his own sweet will after

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throwing a pritibhoj to the villagers. He was accepted as leader in the tumultuous period and became the founder of the Bharatpur Sinsinwar Dynasty. Ganga Singh also says that Balchand and four of his ancestors up to Suai Thakur remained hidden in Sinsini village where a faithful Chobdar (unnamed) of Vijaypal took his son Madanpal and latter's four sons to hide them from the wrath of the Muslims after the defeat and suicide of Vijaypal, the last alleged Chauhan ruler of Delhi, by the enemies. This is, in short, Balchand's story, as given by Ganga Singh.

Upendra Nath Sharma differs a bit from him. He describes Balchand as a Jadon Rajput hero who turned out all other Rajputs from the area and founded Sinsini, his citadel, at a safer place in the jungles, after the name of their god, Shin, whom the Jats worshipped. There-after Balchand, the Jadon Rajput and the Jat inhabitants of this village, with whom he helplessly had to mix after his excommunication by the Rajputs for marrying a Jat lady, began to be known as Sinsinwar Jat (1977: 63f).

So far as the foundation and name of the village are concerned, we find from Deshraj (1934: 553-628; and "Jat Jagat", no. 14, 1942, p. 11) that its old name was Surseni, which Sharma rejects as doubtful without giving any proof or reason. For his version of this fable, Sharma depends, as he himself says, on the jagas he does not name, and on much later sources, which also followed the jagas we do not rely on very much.

The two innocent scholars seem to have fallen victim to the divergent "lies" of the jagas and their statements contradict each other. If the anonymous Chobdar, according to Ganga Singh, hid Madanpal and his sons, the direct ancestors of Balchand, in Sinsini village five generations before Balchand (son of Suai Thakur), then Upendra Nath Sharma's contention (that Balchand was the founder of Sinsini) falls to ground. His further assertion that its founder, Balchand, the Jadon Rajput, (the gotraless of Ganga Singh), adopted Sinsini, the name of the newly founded village, as his gotra and subsequently all the Jats of that village came to be known Sinsinwar, is also preposterous. We also reject U.N. Sharma's fortified claim that the Jats were worshippers of Shin at that time. They have gone down in history as iconoclasts rather than as worshippers of gods and goddesses. They have ever been worshippers, but of the forces of nature. Shin, we must remember, was

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the most hated and undesirable god in ancient Indus Valley, worshipped by the priestly c1ass,which was strongly opposed by the ancestors of the Jats, who worshipped Sun, as Source of all life. That the Jats of Sinsini were worshippers of Shin must be another concoction of the jagas relied upon as such by subsequent writers uncritically to defame the Jats. There is no greater improbability that Surseni, the old name of the Jat village must have been changed by some unscrupulous jagas to Shinseni (Sinsini) just as Parniprath was changed into Panipat, Swarnaprasth into Sonepat and Dilli or Dhilli into Delhi.

The legend of Balchand bristles with further absurdities. According to tradition, a particular community has always the right to ostracise a member of their own community only, and not that of another. An excommunicated person, as experience shows, continues to bear the gotra of the community (biradari), which punishes him for a serious fault of his. He never becomes gotraless as Balchand, the Jadon Rajput, is maligned to have become by some unprincipled bhats and jagas. Howsoever, severe the punishment may be, it does not forfeit the legitimate gotra of a person. An ostracised person, as the tradition is green even now, can be re-admitted after expiation, only to his own biradari alone, and is always unacceptable to other communities in our caste-ridden society. Even a foundling, bereaved of his parents, has his owngotra, though we may not know it simply because of its suppression by his unfortunate parents who abandon the infant under the compulsion of some unavoidable circumstances. Balchand is never stated to be an infant in any text. On the other hand, he is described as fully grow-up hero and as a descendent of Suai, son of Madanpal (in the fifth generation of the former), who, as we shall have the occasion to prove in the next chapter, were Tomar Jats, and not even Jadon Rajputs, as they were made to be.

Balchand's excommunication by the Rajputs and throwing a feast by him, a device usually resorted to by a defaulter to please and pacify his own biradari in order to seek re-admission into it and to probably redeem his lost position and status, clearly reveal that he was a Rajput, and not a Jat. What is even more absurd, he was deemed to have been gotraless only after forcibly marrying a Jat wife of a Jat. Obviously, as a Rajput, he must have been of the gotra of a section of the Rajput biradari which ostracised him. If this incident. as reported,

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is true, as Ganga Singh himself believes and would have us also to believe, but without any solid proof and reliable evidence, Balchand as well as his annalists render him equally condemned in the eyes of the Jats also for robbing a Jat of his wife, and consequently unacceptable to them as well. His admission to the Jat biradari is unimaginable and impossible in the caste-ridden medieval society in which social taboos of the like were religiously followed. But even then Balchand was projected as a Sinsinwar Jat leader on the oasis of merely some hearsay, as Upendra Nath Sharma(1977: 66) himself believes uncritically, and was interpolated as such in the spurious royal genealogy of the Jat rulers of the Bharatpur dynasty, even when there was no love lost between the Jats and Rajputs at that time. In the given circumstances, we cannot escape the irresistible conclusion that the Balchand anecdote, relied upon by later historians, is, an unintelligent fabrication and ,its interpolation is nothing but a puerile connivance of some bhats and jagas at the instance of some interested party, which may for ever remain unknown, to vitiate the origin of the Bharatpur dynasty and to curry favour with the adversaries.

This irrational and ridiculous fable is indiscriminately given a prominent narration by all scholars who have written a book on the Bharatpur House. Ganga Singh and Upendra Nath Sharma who are, by and large, considered impartial and objective in their approach, are also no exceptions in this respect. The most surprising fact about such writers is that to guard themselves against possible castigation for being indiscreet, they take shelter behind the Jagas, who are notorious fabricators. Indeed, a lie repeated hundred times becomes a truth for ever. Subsequent Gazetteers and historians quote these modern "Sutas", to support themselves. They shot their arrows from behind these "Shikandis"! We have further exposed the hollowness of this theory in the next chapter.

Nowadays, almost all prominent Sikh Jat leaders²⁸ are using the name of their respective villages as their third name or as their gotra, but it does not mean that they are gotraless. If Balchand, the alleged-Jadon Rajput (Thakur, who was rejected as such as a bona fide Jat by annalists), having deviated from the popular tradition of following the gotra of one of the original seven Brahmanical Rishis, which the Rajputs are as yet adhering to, adopted the name of his cowstall or cowshed²⁹

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(gotwara} in the Village (Sinsini, where his ancestors sought asylum) in observance of the Indo-Aryan Kshatriya practice; he has not committed any sin for- which he was censured. Even if we concede the fable of Balchand as true, we may pertinently pose a question.If the Bharatpur House was; to all intents and purposes; related with Krishna, the alleged scion of the Vrishnis; where-was then the necessity of devising and introducing so emphatically as well as so frequently the Balchand fable? This over-doing, however, leaves no room whatsoever but to suspect the genuineness of the intention of the later writers to popularise the erroneous concoctions of the jagas and bhats to further obscure their, origin. This is really an "old wives tale" as fantastic and frivolous as the one coined by Vasu brothers³⁰. Balchand might not even be a Jadon Rajput. He might have to escape the enemies, concealed his real identity as was earlier done by Suai Thakur and his brothers (infra).

This is not the only example. Medieval Indian history is replete with such concocted stories. So far as the later sources, tapped by Dr. Chandavat, are concerned, it may be remarked that they seem to be blinded by "the bardic fantasies" and did not guard themselves against them. Even if we tentatively accept the genealogy, alluded to by Dr. Chandavat and others, to connect the Bharatpur House With Lord Krishna, we come across further some glaring discrepancies and difficulties which vitiated it (at steps no. 11,13, 21,29,30,31,36-39) and rendered the genealogy hopelessly unreliable. This genealogy is conspicuous by its absence in the Puranas or the Mahaaharata, which are said³¹ to have been redacted time and again even up to the middle of the 19th century. The names suffixed with "pal" are represented as Jadon Rajput in the genealogy, but latest researches prove that they were Tomar, who are an important (gotra) tribe of the Jats (Ch. VI).

Further, declaring Yadu or Yadava origin of the Bharatpur House does not, as Dr. Rajpal Singh rightly holds, automatically make all other Jats of India belong to the Yadava stock. As the popular belief has it,the Mahabharata War in which Krishna played the decisive role, took pace in 3102 B.C.³², but what about the genealogy of Krishna's descendents after that date? Hence, in view of the above, it may be said that Sudan-Somnath-Udey Ram contention, upheld by subsequent native and foreign writers, is unacceptable to us.

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सिनसिनवार:ठाकुर देशराज

ठाकुर देशराज^[2] ने लिखा है.... भरतपुर के संबंध में जागा लोगों का कहना है कि बालचंद्र ने एक डागुर गोती जाट की स्त्री का डोला ले लिया था, अतः बालचंद राजपूत से जाट हो गया। बृजेंद्रवंश भास्कर के लेखक ने भी इसी गलती को दोहराया है। हालांकि महाराजा श्री कृष्णसिंह जी इस बेहूदा

[पृ.129]: बात पर बड़े हंसे थे। वे तो कहते थे हम राजपूतों से बहुत पुराने हैं। उनका गोत सिनसिनवार क्यों हुआ? इसके लिए जगा कहते हैं क्योंकि ये सिनसिनी में जाकर आबाद हुए थे किंतु उन बेचारों को यह तो पता ही नहीं कि गांवों के नाम सदा किसी महान पुरुष के नाम पर होते हैं। और उसी के नाम पर गोत्र का नाम होता है। जैसे मथुरा नाम मधु के नाम से प्रसिद्ध हुआ और उसके साथी मधुरिया अथवा मथुरिया कहलाए। पुरानों के अनुसार भी देश और नगरों के नाम किन्हीं महान पुरुषों के नाम से प्रसिद्ध हुए हैं। हाँ 2-4 घटनाएं अपवाद भी होती हैं।

वास्तव में बात यह है कि इन लोगों ने वहां पर शिन देवता की स्थापना की थी। उसी शिन के नाम पर जिसे कि ये लोग सिनसिना कहते थे सिनसिनी प्रसिद्ध हुआ। ये शिन अथवा सिनसिना कौन है यह भी बता देना चाहते हैं। शिन वैदिक ऋचा का दृष्ट्वा एक ऋषि हुआ है जिसका वैदिक ऋचा में नाम है और चंद्रवंशी क्षत्रियों में ही हुआ है। चंद्रवंश की वंशावली में भगवान श्रीकृष्ण से 6 पीढ़ी पहले शिनि हुये हैं। एक शिनी कृष्ण से 10 पीढ़ी पहले वृषणी के जेठे भाई थे। संभव है इन दोनों शिनियों को वे सिनसिना के नाम से उसी भांति याद करते हैं जैसे लोग नलनील अथवा रामकृष्ण को याद करते हैं। सिंध में तो इन लोगों की कुछ मोहरें भी मिलीं जिनपर शिनशिन और शिन ईसर लिखे शब्द मिले हैं। यह याद रखने की बात है कि ब्रज की

[पृ.130]: संतान के कुछ लोग पंजाब के जदू का डांग और सिंध के मोहनजोदारो में जाकर आबाद हुए थे। वहां से लौट कर इनके एक पुरुष ने बयाना पर कब्जा किया। यहां पर बहुत प्राचीन समय में बाना लोग राज करते थे। उनकी पुत्री उषा का वहां अब तक भी मंदिर है। आगे चलकर इनकी दो शाखाएँ हो गई। एक दल नए क्षत्रियों में दीक्षित हो गया जो कि राजपूत कहलाते थे। उसने उन सब रस्मों रिवाजों को छोड़ दिया जो कि उसके बाप दादा हजारों वर्ष से मानते चले आ रहे थे। इस तरह जाट संघ से निकलकर वे लोग अपने लिए यादव राजपूत कहलाने लगे। करौली में उन्होंने अपना राज्य कायम किया।

References

External links

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[1] Hukum Singh Panwar:The Jats:Their Origin, Antiquity and Migrations/Appendices/Appendix No.1

[2] Thakur Deshraj: Jat Itihas (Utpatti Aur Gaurav Khand)/Shashtham Parichhed, p.128-130

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