Sandhu Got

What “Got” means for the Sikh Jat

In Jat Sikh families the got is the patrilineal clan name. A got is exogamous: a person does not marry into their own got, and many families also avoid the mother's and the grandmothers' got.

Name and Origin

Rose (1919) writes the tribe's name as Sindhu and records its own accounts. The tribe claims descent from the Raghubansi Solar Rajputs through Ram Chandar of Ayodhya. One story says its ancestors went with Mahmud of Ghazni to Ghazni and returned in the 13th century or under Firoz Shah. Another, told by the Sindhus of Jullundur, says they came from the south two or three centuries before Rose's time, when Pathans displaced the Manj Rajputs. Rose adds that Sir Lepel Griffin thought the real origin was in north-western Rajputana. The Rajput descent is clan tradition. Historians (Grewal, as summarised on Wikipedia's Jat Sikh article) describe the Jats in general as moving up the rivers from Rajasthan and Sindh, and Wikipedia's Sandhu article gives no origin account of its own. Rose also lists a smaller clan, Sandho, in Amritsar, Montgomery and Multan, and says the name seems to be a variant of Sindhu.

Historical Journey

Rose, compiling from the Punjab census reports of 1883 and 1892, calls the Sindhu the second largest Jat tribe, after the Sidhu, with its headquarters in the Amritsar and Lahore districts. It is also found along the upper Sutlej and under the hills from Ambala in the east to Sialkot and Gujranwala in the west. He says its political history was of capital importance under the Sikhs and sends the reader to Griffin's Punjab Chiefs. Two of the Sikh misls were founded by Sandhu Jats. Jai Singh of Kanha in Lahore district, a son of Khushal Singh, founded the Kanhaiya misl, which held Sohian and later Batala and Mukerian and was led by Jai Singh from 1748 to 1789. Heera Singh Sandhu led the Nakai misl from 1748 to 1767 and held lands around Baherwal. Wikipedia cites Dhavan, When Sparrows Became Hawks (2011), and Griffin, The Panjab Chiefs, for these. Rose records that the Sindhus of Jullundur moved there from Amritsar at the invitation of the Gils.

Migration and Diaspora

Rose says the Jullundur Sindhus came from Amritsar at the invitation of the Gill, and that a group of 22 villages around Sirhali traces its migration from a village of the same name near Moga. The Sindhu septs he lists are spread across the Majha and Doaba. Wikipedia names Kala Mehar as a jathera worshipped in Faridkot; that detail comes only from Wikipedia, which cites Kamalpreet Singh Gill (2021) on jathera worship.

How the Got Is Kept

Rose names the ancestor Kala Mihr (also Kala Mahar or Kala Pir), whom the Sindhus of Karnal worship, and gives his chief shrine as Thana Satra in Sialkot. In the tribe's account Kala Mihr was a grandson of Wagar and was killed in a feud with the Bhattis. Sindhus told Rose they avoid blue clothes and, until recently, burnt bricks. A variant he cites from Crowther has Kala dying at Sirhali, where a mound marks the jathera; at weddings the groom goes round it seven times and gives alms. Rose says the Sindhus keep wedding customs like those of the Sahi Jats, and that in Ludhiana the bride, on visiting the jathera, strikes her husband seven times on the shoulders with a light switch, and he returns the blows. These are early twentieth century records, and practice differs by family and village. Rose gives 84 muhins (septs) in the usual account, descended from the sons and grandsons of Wagar, and 34 in a variant.

Presence Across Regions

Notable Personalities

Stories and Legends