Bikaner holds a secondary rank amongst the principalities of Rajputana. It is an offset of Marwar, its princes being scions of the house of Jodha, who established themselves by conquest on the northern frontier of the parent State; and its position, in the heart of the desert, has contributed to the maintenance of their independence.

Rāo Bīka, A.D. 1465-1504.

Such expeditions as that of Bika, undertaken expressly for conquest, were almost [179] uniformly successful. The invaders set out with a determination to slay or be slain; and these forays had the additional stimulus of being on “fated days,” when the warlike creed of the Rajputs made the abstraction of territory from foe or friend a matter of religious duty.

Bika, with his band of three hundred, fell upon the Sankhlas[[2]] of Janglu, whom they massacred. This exploit brought them in contact with the Bhattis of Pugal,[[3]] the chief of which gave his daughter in marriage to Bika, who fixed his headquarters at Kuramdesar, where he erected a castle, and gradually augmented his conquests from the neighbourhood.

The Conquest of the Jats.

Of this celebrated and widely spread race we have already given a succinct account.[[4]] It appears to have been the most numerous as well as the most conspicuous of the tribes of ancient Asia, from the days of Tomyris and Cyrus to those of the present Jat prince of Lahore, whose successor, if he be endued with similar energy, may, on the reflux of population, find himself seated in their original haunts of Central Asia, to which they have already considerably advanced.[[5]] In the fourth century we find a Yuti or Jat kingdom established in the Panjab;[[6]] but how much earlier this people colonized those regions we are ignorant. At every step made by Muhammadan power in India it encountered the Jats. On their memorable defence of the passage of the Indus against Mahmud, and on the war of extirpation waged against them by Timur, both in their primeval seats in Mawaru-l-nahr,[[7]] as well as east of the Sutlej, we have already enlarged; while Babur, in his Commentaries, informs us that, in all his irruptions into India, he was assailed by multitudes of Jats[[8]] during his progress through the Panjab, the peasantry of which region, now proselytes to Islam, are chiefly of this tribe; as well as the [180] military retainers, who, as sectarian followers of Nanak, merge the name of Jat, or Jāt, into that of Sikh or ‘disciple.’[[9]]

In short, whether as Yuti, Getae, Jats, Juts, or Jāts, this race far surpassed in numbers, three centuries ago, any other tribe or race in India; and it is a fact that they now constitute a vast majority of the peasantry of western Rajwara, and perhaps of northern India.

At what period these Jats established themselves in the Indian desert, we are, as has been already observed, entirely ignorant; but even at the time of the Rathor invasion of these communities their habits confirmed the tradition of their Scythic origin. They led chiefly a pastoral life, were guided, but not governed by the elders, and with the exception of adoration to the ‘universal mother’ (Bhavani), incarnate in the person of a youthful Jatni, they were utter aliens to the Hindu theocracy. In fact, the doctrines of the great Islamite saint, Shaikh Farid,[[10]] appear to have overturned the pagan rites brought from the Jaxartes; and without any settled ideas on religion, the Jats of the desert jumbled all their tenets together. They considered themselves, in short, as a distinct class, and, as a Punia Jat informed me, “their watan was far beyond the Five Rivers.” Even in the name of one of the six communities (the Asaich), on whose submission Bika founded his new State, we have nearly the Asi, the chief of the four tribes from the Oxus and Jaxartes, who overturned the Greek kingdom of Bactria.[[11]]

The period of Rathor domination over these patriarchal communities was intermediate between Timur’s and Babur’s invasion of India. The former, who was the founder of the Chagatai dynasty, boasts of the myriads of Jat souls he “consigned to perdition” on the desert plains of India, as well as in Transoxiana; so we may conclude that successive migrations of this people from the great “storehouse of nations” went to the lands east of the Indus, and that the communities who elected Bika as their sovereign had been established therein for ages. The extent of their possessions justifies this conclusion; for nearly the whole of the territory forming the boundaries of Bikaner was possessed by the six Jat cantons, namely—