The Hindu Chibs of Dewa Vatala: The Line of Raja Ghaggi Khan

The Hindu Chibs are the branch of the Chib Rajputs that kept the old faith when their kinsmen became Muslims. According to the 1997 Chib chronicle of Raja Muhammad Iftikhar Ali Khan, they descend from Raja Ghaggi Khan, a grandson of Raja Shadab Khan (Baba Shadi Shaheed), and for centuries held the villages of Dewa and Vatala in the foothills east of Bhimber, until Partition in 1947 and the war of 1971 scattered them.

Who are the Hindu Chibs?

The Chibs (also written Chibh or Chhib) are a Rajput clan whose chiefs ruled Bhimber, a small hill state in today’s Azad Jammu and Kashmir, close to the border with Pakistan’s Punjab, for roughly four centuries until the 1820s. Their history is told in our overview of the Chib Rajputs. Most Chibs today are Muslims, and the chronicle traces their conversion to Raja Shadab Khan, the ruler remembered as Baba Shadi Shaheed, who embraced Islam in the early Mughal period.

Not every branch followed him. One of his grandsons, the book records, held firmly to his ancestral Hindu religion until his last breath, and that grandson’s descendants, the Hindu Chibs of Dewa Vatala, kept the faith for centuries (p. 114). The author uses them as evidence in a long-running argument: if Baba Shadi Shaheed had been converted by force, why did his descendants later become Muslims when no one compelled them, while a grandson stayed Hindu without anyone compelling him either? The full debate is set out in how Raja Shadab Khan embraced Islam.

The garh-holders of Chibhal

Under the Chib rajas, land and authority were shared out within the ruling family in a distinctive way. H. A. Rose’s Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab (1911), translated in the book, describes four great fiefs called mandis, each held by a prince of the blood, and some eighty-four small holdings called dheris (see the mandis of Chibhal). Alongside the mandis stood four garhs, or strongholds: Deva, Batala and two more read as Ambriala and Kadhala (readings uncertain). Rose says the garhs had a status entirely separate from the mandis and belonged to the descendants of Raja Ghaggi Khan, the Ghaggial Chibhal (pp. 26–27).

Garhs and mandis alike, Rose adds, were loyal to the raj of Bhimber but managed their own lands and collected their own revenue, and the clan was graded accordingly as Mandial, Garhial and Dheral. Deva and Batala are evidently Dewa and Vatala, and Ambriala is probably the Anbaryala of the Chib genealogies. The book’s own tables place the Ghaggial under the heading Chibhal, Rajana, Watala, Kandi, that is, within Raja Bhom Khan’s eastern half of the Chib country (p. 399).

Raja Ghaggi Khan and his sons

When the Chib state was divided after Baba Shadi Shaheed’s death, his eldest son, Raja Bhom Khan, kept Bhimber, and the western half went to his brother Raja Mal Khan as Khari Kariali. Bhom Khan’s elder son, Raja Ghanni Khan (also called Daulat Khan), succeeded him and founded the line of the rajas of Bhimber. The younger son was Raja Ghaggi Khan (p. 120).

The chronicle preserves one telling glimpse of him. When a dispute broke out in the brotherhood after Ghanni Khan’s coronation, Ghaggi Khan took his own sons and his four nephews, Ghanni Khan’s sons by a Hindu rani, to live in the houses at Bandala that the rajas used as a summer retreat. The nephews later returned to their father and received lands stretching from the Bhimber Nala to Lala Musa (p. 120).

How many sons Ghaggi Khan had is disputed. Thakur Major Singh’s Tarikh-e-Chibhal names only two, Kandu and Bharoya Piru (Pheru). The old manuscripts and family genealogies, the book says, agree that he had more; they speak of four but name five, and the hand-drawn charts also show five (pp. 137, 391, 393):

Takhti and the posthumous heir

The senior line very nearly ended in blood. Salabat Singh (Kandu) had a son, Takhti, also called Takhti Chand. According to Tarikh-e-Chibhal, Kandu and Takhti were both killed in a fight with their Muslim kinsmen (p. 137). The manuscript history of Maulvi Zain-ul-Abidin Kohi Samahnavi, quoted in the book, is more specific: Raja Jamshed Khan of Bhimber, Ghanni Khan’s son, fought Takhti, who was killed together with his children (p. 121).

Only one of Takhti’s wives survived. She was pregnant, escaped to her parents’ home and there gave birth to a boy named Dasu Khan. The book calls him the progenitor of the Hindu Chib Rajgan: every family of Dewa and Vatala traces itself to this posthumous son (pp. 121, 137).

Branches and villages of the Dewa Vatala Chibs

From Dasu Khan the family branched quickly. The book gives the line in prose (pp. 137–138), in a hand-drawn chart printed sideways across two pages (pp. 393–394) and in a table of villages (pp. 399–400). The charts are hard to read in places, so the outline below follows the prose and notes the main variants.

• Dasu Khan — progenitor of the Hindu Chibs
  • Sikandar — seven sons: Sihali (Sanbhali), Hira, Abal, Jitu, Ladam, Lakha and Bahara
    • Hira — the Dewa families
      • Puro — descendants at Nurpur, Kangra district
      • Ratan — Dewa; five sons: Sahdev (Purana Dewa), Masrur, Man, Basu (the Baswana family) and Jattu (no issue)
        • Masrur — six sons: Sujan, Khar (the family of Bije Singh), Nahotu, Bhika, Jagta and Rupa (no issue)
          • Sujan — sons Tara, Bakhta and Taja (descendants at Khokhra)
            • Bakhta — sons Mahi, Ghana and Kirat; Ghana’s grandson Mahan Singh was the father of Thakur Partap Singh, Zaildar
      • Mahir — line ended
    • Jitu — the Jatwana family
    • Ladam — descendants in Gurdaspur district
    • Sihali — four sons: Kahan Chand, Ogan Chand, Tabali and Bawa Abdali
      • Kahan Chand — the Pare Vatala families; his five sons founded the bands of Vatala
      • Ogan Chand — the Vatala Khas families
      • Bawa Abdali — never married; the chart says he became a sadhu
  • Manak Dev — the Pandoriyan family
  • Data — descendants at Nah
  • Marwan (Mardan) — descendants at Kotli

The five bands of Vatala

Kahan Chand’s five sons gave their names to the bands, or sub-branches, of Vatala (p. 138; the chart on p. 394 calls them banr):

Dewa Vatala: the land of the garh-holders

It is impossible that the Chib nation be mentioned and Dewa Vatala be ignored.

— Iftikhar Ali Khan (1997), p. 138

With these words the author opens his portrait of Dewa Vatala, a historic village and tract in the Kandi, the dry foothill belt east of Bhimber. By his own day it counted as only a small part of the Kandi, but its past was large: a history of revolts and bloodshed, of invaders who forced it to bow and of a proud people who rose again each time with their dignity intact (p. 138).

Before the Chibs, the book says, the tract was ruled for long periods by the Budhan, Sudhan and Thakyal tribes; the Budhans and Thakyals had also ruled Bhimber itself before Raja Chib Chand (pp. 138, 145). Ghaggi Khan’s descendants came down from the hills of Naushera, settled here and held fast to Hinduism, resisting invaders for centuries for the sake of their religion and their independence. Their Muslim cousins, the house of Raja Mal Khan and the forebears of Raja Sultan Khan of Bhimber, tried hard to subdue them, but Vatala, like the Afghans of the frontier, submitted to no one (p. 138).

The book even cites Sir Lepel Griffin’s colonial verdict that the Dewa Vatala tract was notorious for plunder and bloodshed; the author, himself a Muslim Chib, plainly reads it as a tribute to Vatala’s fierce independence. In the Sikh period the whole Kandi from Khari Kariali to Manawar, Vatala included, was long held in jagir by Prince Kharak Singh, son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (p. 138). The hill fort of Bagh Sar, near Samahni, stood on the routes linking Bhimber, Naushera, Deva Vatala and Beri Pattan (p. 40).

Thakur Major Singh, historian of Chibhal

The best-known son of the Hindu Chibs is their historian. Thakur Major Singh (printed Mehjar or Majhar Singh) wrote Tarikh-e-Chibhal, published in 1983 Bikrami (about 1926), which the book credits as the first attempt to gather the scattered history of the Chibs into a book (p. 24); it is also cited under the fuller title Tarikh-e-Rajgan-e-Bhimber wa Qaum-e-Chibhal (p. 316). The genealogical chart of the Vatala Chibs places him in the eighth generation from Somesh Chand of the Thakari band and records his death on 3 Asauj 1995 Bikrami, about September 1938 (p. 394).

Iftikhar Ali Khan relies on him throughout and argues with him often: over whether Baba Shadi Shaheed’s conversion was forced, over the number of Ghaggi Khan’s sons, and over many dates. Yet his verdict is generous. Without the Thakur’s book, he writes, the history of the Chibs might still be no more than oral memory, and every Chib should honour him for it (p. 24). The chronicle also cites a second Tarikh-e-Chibhal, by Thakur (Mian) Onkar Singh Chib, published in Delhi (p. 32). Both are discussed in the historians of Chibhal.

One saint, two faiths

For all their feuds, Hindu and Muslim Chibs shared more than a pedigree. The chronicle insists that the healing gift attributed to Baba Shadi Shaheed passed to his descendants whatever their religion, so that Hindu and Muslim Chibs benefit from it alike (pp. 113–114). Both brought their children to his tomb on Aadhi Dhak above Bhimber for the mu-tarashi, the ceremonial first haircut (p. 118). Griffin, writing for the colonial government, likewise noted that the saint’s grave was a place of pilgrimage for Hindu and Muslim members of the tribe, and that a Chib child kept a tuft of hair until the rite was performed there (p. 157).

The boundary between the faiths ran through families rather than between them. Within the Hindu house of Vatala, Malik Singh’s descendants became Muslims; Hindu names and branches, in turn, run through the Muslim lines. Raja Ghanni Khan had both a Muslim and a Hindu rani (p. 120). A later raja of Bhimber, Rehmatullah Khan, was also known as Roop Singh, and his sons included Jagat Singh, Karam Singh and Fateh Singh (pp. 122, 392). In Mandi Ghawaliyan one branch stayed Hindu into modern times (see Mandi Ghawaliyan), and the book notes that Mian Sawan Singh, private secretary to the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, came from the Ghanial family of Ghanni Khan’s descendants (p. 398).

Partition, 1971 and a scattered family

The book closes its account of Dewa Vatala on a note of loss. The Partition of 1947, the author writes, ended for ever the centuries-long history of Vatala, and the India–Pakistan war of 1971 completed what remained. The Hindu Chibs of Vatala were forced to leave the land and traditions of their forefathers, and he could not say where they had gone (p. 138). Their uprooting was part of the vast displacement of those years, when families of every community in Jammu and the Punjab lost their homes; see the Chib Rajputs in 1947.

Some branches had moved long before. The genealogy already places descendants of Puro at Nurpur in Kangra district and of Ladam in Gurdaspur district, both in today’s India (pp. 137, 400), echoing the clan’s old ties with Kangra, the land from which, by tradition, Raja Chib Chand came.

What the oldest Chib history says

Frequently asked questions

Continue reading

• Chib Rajputs: History, Origins and ClansThe pillar guide to the Chibs of Bhimber
• The Rajas of BhimberEvery Chib ruler from Chib Chand to Sultan Khan
• Forced or Free?How Raja Shadab Khan embraced Islam
• The Historians of ChibhalThakur Major Singh and those who followed
• Mandi GhawaliyanOne Chib family, Hindu and Muslim branches
• The Fourteen Septs of the Chib ClanRose’s list, from Rupyal to Ghaghial