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.

Nomadic Narrative, Dr.Tanuja Kothiyal, CUP (2016)

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," ThePrint ThePrint Hindi under the editorship of Shekhar Gupta and through an article authored by Dr Yadu Singh, 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.

A glossary of the tribes and castes of the Punjab and North-West frontier province Vol 2

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What the article failed to disclose is that this "account" is not a contemporary historical document.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.

Those whose recognition dated to the reign of Akbar were designated Akbari.

Those recognised under Aurangzeb, Aurangzebi.

Those elevated in Sikh times, Khalsai.

Those confirmed under British administration, Angrezi.

These are grades of administrative recognition and local landed status, not testimonies to matrimonial alliance with the imperial household.

To represent them otherwise, in a published article of historical commentary intended for a national readership, is a material misstatement of fact.

IV. What the Scholarship Actually Records

Contemporary peer-reviewed scholarship confirms and deepens this correction.

Dr Tanuja Kothiyal, in Nomadic Narratives: A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert (Cambridge University Press, 2016), states expressly that Mughals did not contract matrimonial alliances with Jat or Maratha warrior lineages, the matrimonial diplomacy of the imperial household having been confined to elite Rajput households across twenty-seven recorded marriages from Akbar's to Farrukhsiyar's reigns.

The pattern of mutual social assimilation that resulted from those Rajput alliances was specific to that relationship and was not extended to other warrior communities.

The claim published in The Print is accordingly contradicted not merely by a corrective footnote in a colonial-era glossary, but by Cambridge-published contemporary scholarship.

This is not how history is conducted. It is not how evidence is evaluated. It is not how a publication of The Print's standing ought to represent historical questions to its readership.

IV-A. What the Contemporary Mughal Record Actually Shows

The silence of the contemporary Mughal record is equally revealing.

Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari, both authored by Abu'l Fazl, provide extensive detail regarding Akbar's reign, imperial policies, matrimonial alliances, administrative arrangements, and the status of regional zamindars. Jats appear within these texts as peasant and zamindar groups inhabiting regions such as Mathura and Agra. Yet nowhere do these works mention imperial marriages involving Jat women, nor do they associate any supposed "Akbari" designation with matrimonial alliances.

Similarly, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, Jahangir's own memoirs, contains no reference to Jat wives or to any comparable alliance between the Mughal imperial household and Jat lineages.

Other contemporary accounts—including those of chroniclers such as Badauni and various European travellers—are likewise silent on the matter.

By contrast, Mughal chroniclers repeatedly emphasised the imperial household's matrimonial alliances with elite Rajput families. Akbar's marriage to a Kachwaha princess, the mother of Jahangir, was recorded and acknowledged precisely because such alliances formed an important component of Mughal political strategy.

The absence of any comparable reference concerning Jat women across this body of contemporary evidence is striking.

While absence of evidence is not, by itself, evidence of absence, historians ordinarily expect events of such political and dynastic significance to leave some trace within the contemporary documentary record.

No such trace has been produced.

V. The Question That Must Be Answered

The question is remarkably simple.

Can Yadu Singh, Shekhar Gupta, and The Print produce any primary documentary evidence generated during the Mughal period itself—and predating Ibbetson's Glossary—establishing that any Jat woman was received into the Mughal imperial household in a matrimonial capacity?

Can they produce:

• A court chronicle?

• A farman?

• Royal correspondence?

• A contemporary Persian history?

• A genealogical register?

• Any documentary evidence whatsoever produced during the Mughal period itself?

No secondary source composed after the tradition entered the written record through Ibbetson will suffice.

The sole question is whether any evidence antecedent to Ibbetson exists.

The scholarly record suggests none does.

VI. A Pattern That Invites Scrutiny

It is also worth noting that Yadu Singh has, for some time, displayed a striking hostility towards Jat historical identity.

On one occasion, he even argued that "Jatt" and "Jat" had no relationship whatsoever"—a claim difficult to reconcile with the overwhelming body of historical, linguistic and genetic scholarship on the subject.

Readers may judge for themselves the depth of expertise behind such assertions.

In the end, however, this debate is not about the caste background of the author.

It is about evidence.

Historical claims stand or fall not on sentiment, identity, or ideological preference, but on the quality of the sources from which they derive.

VII. Apologise or Substantiate

Therefore, @yadusingh, @ShekharGupta, and @ThePrintHindi @ThePrintIndia owe the public—and the Jat community in particular—one of two things.

Either produce primary Mughal-period evidence establishing that Jat women entered the Mughal imperial household in a matrimonial capacity.

Or issue an unequivocal public apology for publishing an unsupported allegation as established historical fact.

The choice is theirs.

The burden of proof is also theirs.

Until such evidence is produced, this claim remains precisely what the historical record suggests it to be:

Not established history, but the repetition of an unsupported urban legend masquerading as fact.