Cheema, Virk, Chatha

Cheema, Virk and Chatha are gots concentrated historically in the Rechna Doab, around Gujranwala, Sialkot and Wazirabad, which is now Pakistani Punjab.

Their Indian Punjab populations are largely descended from families that came across in 1947, and their villages of origin are in the other country.

Kulwant Singh Virk, the short story writer, was from Phullarwan in Sheikhupura district. Sant Attar Singh of Mastuana was born at Cheema in Sangrur district, which is a village of the same name on this side.

In Pakistani Punjab the same gots are Muslim, and Cheema, Virk and Chatha are common Muslim surnames there.

The got is one of the few things that survived the religious division intact. A Cheema in Sangrur and a Cheema in Gujranwala share a clan name across a border and a religion, and neither is likely to know it.

Chatha villages around Gujranwala gave their name to the Chatha chiefs who held that country before the Sukerchakia rise, and Ranjit Singh Ji's grandfather fought them.

The movement of 1947 moved these gots wholesale. A village of Cheemas in Sangrur district today is likely descended from a village of Cheemas near Gujranwala, resettled together on allotted land.

That pattern, whole villages moved and rebuilt under the same name, is one reason the got map of Indian Punjab is not a map of ancient settlement in its western half.

What we don't know

  • The extent of shared got names across the religious divide, which nobody has mapped.

Where to check this

  1. Colonial ethnographic surveys of Punjab. Punjab district gazetteers and settlement reports (Internet Archive) ↗

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

  • Distribution of got names in both Punjabs.

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.