Bains, Sekhon, Grewal

Bains is a Jat got concentrated in the Doaba, particularly around Jalandhar and Hoshiarpur, and heavily represented in the British and Canadian diaspora.

Sekhon is found in the Malwa and produced Sant Singh Sekhon, the Marxist critic, and Flying Officer Nirmaljit Singh Sekhon, the only Indian Air Force officer awarded the Param Vir Chakra, from Isewal in Ludhiana district.

Grewal is concentrated around Ludhiana, and the Grewal villages of that district are among the best documented in Punjab because Kila Raipur, where the rural games are held, is a Grewal village and the games were founded by Inder Singh Grewal in 1933.

Each of these gots has villages that carry its name and a distribution that maps onto a specific belt of a specific district.

A map of Punjab's gots by village would show a pattern of medieval settlement that nobody has drawn, and the data to draw it is in the village directories of the census.

Bains villages are concentrated in the Doaba, Sekhon in the Malwa around Ludhiana and Moga, and Grewal across the central Malwa and into Ludhiana city.

Grewal is one of the largest gots of the Ludhiana country and the name is carried by a long list of writers, soldiers and politicians, which is what a large got in a dense district produces.

Each of the three names is also a village name in several districts. The got and the settlement are the same word, which is the general rule in Punjab.

What we don't know

  • Nobody has mapped got distribution by village from the census data, though it could be done.

Where to check this

  1. Colonial ethnographic surveys and census village directories. Census of India 2011 - Punjab district census handbooks ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Kila Raipur rural games records.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 120 accounts in The Village Itself, the chapter of this site covering how a Punjabi village works and what it holds.