A weak and shaky attempt was made to lend credibility to a highly baseless claim dragging an entirely unrelated community into the argument by a cardiologist masquerading as a historian.
In its article published on 15 June 2026, titled "Don't use Rajput women as proof of Mughal Indianness. It's communal simplification,"
@ThePrintIndia @ThePrintHindi, under the editorship of
@ShekharGupta and through an article authored by
@dryadusingh, asserted that Jat women too had matrimonial connections with the Mughal imperial household.
This was not a passing remark. It was a positive historical assertion placed before a national readership. As such, it carried an evidentiary burden.
On examination, however, that burden remains entirely unmet.
I. The Gratuitousness of the Defamation
The stated objective of the article was to challenge an over-simplified narrative centred upon Rajput matrimonial alliances with the Mughal imperial household. One may engage with that argument on its merits.
What is not defensible is the method by which the article pursued it: invoking alleged matrimonial connections between Jat women and the Mughal imperial household without primary documentary support and against the explicit correction recorded by the earliest source in which the tradition appears in written form.
The honour of one community's women is not defended by implicating the womenfolk of another community in a claim that the evidence does not sustain.
The Jat community did not require to be conscripted into this argument.
Its conscription was gratuitous.
And, in the ordinary meaning of the term, defamatory.
II. What Hari Ram Gupta Actually Recorded, and Whence He Derived It
The article cites Hari Ram Gupta's Sikh Lion of Lahore (1991) for the proposition that the Bains, Sahotas and Khungas were known as "Akbari Jats" by virtue of matrimonial alliances with the Mughal household, and that "one account mentions a Jat named Mehar Mitha offering his daughter in marriage to Emperor Akbar."
What the article failed to disclose is that this "account" is not a contemporary historical document.
It is a folk tradition recorded in written form for the first time by Denzil Ibbetson in A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province.
Ibbetson was sufficiently scrupulous to do what Hari Ram Gupta—and subsequently The Print—did not. Having recorded the tradition, he appended a footnote to the very passage in question, observing that "it is hardly necessary to say that neither Akbar nor Jahangir ever took a Jat bride."
Ibbetson thus recorded an urban legend and corrected it in the same breath. Hari Ram Gupta repeated the legend and suppressed the correction. The Print has now repeated Hari Ram Gupta whilst remaining ignorant of the source that both underlies and refutes him.
The chain of transmission upon which the article's claim rests is the following:
• A folk tradition;
• Corrected as historically false by the first scholar to commit it to print;
• Repeated at second hand;
• Stripped of its corrective footnote;
• And published as historical evidence in a reputed national daily.
This is not evidence.
It is the recirculation of an urban legend.
III. What "Akbari Jat" and Cognate Designations Actually Denote
The article further implies that the grades of "Akbari," "Darbari," "Aurangzebi," and "Khalsai" among Jat lineages testify to matrimonial connections with the Mughal imperial household.
This implication is unfounded.
Ibbetson's Glossary, the authoritative source for these designations, explains that they denote the period at which particular Jat lineages received recognition of chaudhriyat, that is, the status of local revenue superior or zamindar, under successive Mughal and Sikh administrations.1/.
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