Chaudhary

26 August 2010 02:49:01 AM

Big Sat Sri Akal and Namaskar to Sardar Manjit Singh and all the Shoorsainis here!

We should be grateful to Manjit Singh Ji for all the effort he put into creating this website which Sainis of Punjab could finally identify with whole-heartedly and proudly, without having the image of Jyoti Rao Phule, who was not a Saini, thurst on them.

Regarding the message below about including people calling themselves Saini from outside Punjab on this website, a great caution needs to be exercised.

After 1930 many Mali and other non-Saini groups started calling themselves “Saini” to get access to army jobs. The reason for this was that British army recruitment was based strictly on caste. Sainis were designated as a “martial class” since 1880 while many of these caste groups were not. Many caste groups changed their identities around 1920-1930 period to get preferential treatment in recruitment.

As the number of Sainis was not very large, some self-seeking politicians from Punjab who wanted to increase their vote bank and project themselves as bigger leaders to English rulers formed political alliance with these non-Saini groups around 1930.

Under this arrangement, these Mali and other non-Saini groups were to change their name to “Saini” so that they could also be considered for army jobs . The way they went about doing this was by distorting the meaning of the word “Saini”.

Saini the way it is applied to Saini community of Punjab is a short form of “Shoorsaini”. It has a distinct meaning and historical context because Sainis of sub mountainous Punjab (includes Ambala district of modern Haryana) had moved there from Mathura and Bharatpur as part of the Rajput armies that came to Punjab to fight Ghazni, Ghauri, etc.

Since Mathura had fallen to Muslims, these Shoorsainis (a section of Jadaun Rajputs) could not go back to Mathura and settled in Punjab for good as agriculturists like many other Hindu tribes of Rajput origin.

So Punjabi Sainis are actually Shoorsainis, a Rajput tribe (not simply a Kshatriya), which became agricultural around 12-13 AD, descending from Sri Krishna’s clan which ruled Mathura till 12 century AD before it fell finally to Muhammad Ghauri after long-drawn warfare. This is exactly what our Saini elders of Doaba had told the English census official in 1880 and there is no reason to believe that they were not correct. Chaudhary Shiv Lal Saini, the great historian of our community, had also established this in “Taarikh Quam Shoorsaini” , a work he published from Lahore in the same era. More proofs of this can be easily given.

The way these new groups outside Punjab manipulated Saini identity to gain access to army jobs was by calling it a short form of “Sainik” which is totally different from the meaning of the term the way it applies to Punjabi (and some Haryana) Sainis.

We are not simply “Sainik” but Shoorsainis, the descendants of Maharaja Shoorsen, Krishna, Balaram, Satyaki, and the other illustrious Jadaun (Yadu) Rajput and Kshatriya rulers who held Mathura , Bharatpur and Bayana till 12 AD etc.

We are not Malis and gardening has never been the profession of our forefathers at any point during our history. We are a leading landowning tribe of Punjab and second to none in the caste heirarchy of Punjab. We had our own Zaildars even in British era and have never played second fiddle to any other caste.

We are totally distinct from these new post-1930 neo-Saini , i.e Mali, groups outside Punjab, socially, ethnically and culturally.

While we should respect all castes in the spirit of “Ik Manas Ke Zaat” , there is no harm or anything immoral in emphasizing our distinctness from these post-1930 claimants to Saini identity.

Per the 1881 census, there were no Sainis outside Punjab (which included HP and Haryana). Even in Haryana, Saini presence did not go beyond Ambala. Some Saini families from Phulkiyan , where Sardar Nanu Singh Saini had a vast Jagir, did sporadically settle in districts bordering Phulkiyan riyasat in present Haryana but this presence was not very large.

Adding other historically non-Saini people to our fold just to add numbers does not serve any real purpose of the community except expanding the vote banks of selfish polilticians. Further, our next generations will forget about their glorious ancestry and will needlessly get confused about their identity. We have no more similarities with these non-Shoorsaini groups than we have with many other groups within and outside Punjab.

We are a small but very proud and successful community. Today Sainis are sitting in NASA, serving as CEOs of MNCs like MasterCard, designing computer chips (Did you know that Pentium chip was co-designed by Saini?) ….there is hardly a field, from military to art, in which Sainis have not acheived world-wide leadership and not left an indelible mark. We have risen to this level by our hard work , courage and good values implanted in us by our forefathers, not through any special support from outside.

We already had Mr. Kanshi Ram running his mouth in 2001 in a public rally because Sainis of Punjab failed to tell him that they are historically distinct from the community he was confusing us with. The closer you move to these new Mali-turned-Saini groups outside Punjab, more incidents of that nature will repeat and your children will get confused about their identity and start harboring an inferiority complex.

Let us show respect to all other communities but lets maintain our unique and special identity. We can be friends with other communities without requiring either them or us to misrepresent our identities. This does not make us superior or anybody else inferior. It is just that our next generations need to learn historical facts not the media spin created to satisfy the need of the politicians.

NS Chaudhary