Ever Heard of Cheeta-Merats ???

By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net

65 year-old Naseeb Khan recently arranged for his son Prakash Singh to marry Sita, daughter of Ram Singh and his wife Reshma. Three months ago, Hemant Singh's daughter Devi married Lakshman Singh in a nikah ceremony solemnized by a Muslim maulvi. Naseeb Singh's elder son Roshan had a Muslim-style nikah, and his younger son Iqbal got married in the Hindu fashion.

Salim Khan keeps pictures of Hindu deities and local Rajasthani folk heroes in an altar in his hut, and regularly visits a neighbouring dargah of a Muslim saint. He says he is a Muslim, but, like many people in his village, he does not know the kalima shahada, the Muslim creed of the faith. His neighbour and first cousin, Madho Singh, has been offering the Eid prayers in the village Eidgah for as long as he can remember. Yet, like everyone else in his village, he also celebrates Holi and Diwali with equal gusto.

These intriguing people who defy conventional notions of 'Hindus' and 'Muslims', belong to a little-known community known as the Cheeta-Merat. Some 400,000 strong, the community inhabits some 160 villages in the vicinity of Ajmer and Beawar towns in Rajasthan's Ajmer district. The Cheeta and the Merat (also kown as Kathat) are two separate clans who intermarry with each other. Most of them are small peasants and landless labourers. They call themselves Chauhan Rajputs, and identify their religion variously as 'Hindu-Muslim', or either 'Hindu' or 'Muslim' or simply 'Cheeta-Merat'. In terms of dress, language and food habits there is little to distinguish the Cheeta-Merat from the other castes whom they live with. Their distinguishing feature, however, is their unique syncretic religious identity.

Different stories are told about the origins of the Cheeta-Merat. Most of these stories are based on the claim of the community being supposedly descended from the clan of Prithviraj Chauhan, the last Chauhan Hindu ruler of Ajmer, who was killed while fighting the forces of Muhammad Ghori. This claim is not, however, widely accepted by the Hindu Rajputs and might well be a contrived means to claim a higher social status for the community, which, for centuries, roamed the Aravalli mountains, attacking and plundering trade caravans.

According to one story, a conquering 'Muslim Sultan'gave one of the ancestors of the Cheeta-Merat, Har Raj, the choice of converting to Islam, death or having his womenfolk raped. Har Raj is said to have selected the first option, but, instead of fully converting to Islam, is said to have only accepted three things of Islam for himself and his descendants: male circumcision, eating meat slaughtered in the Muslim halal fashion and burial of the dead. This is why, according to this story, most Cheeta-Merat still follow only these three Islamic practices, while being almost indistinguishable from the other local Hindu castes in other respects.

This theory appears to be a newly invented one, and does not find mention in reliable historical chronicles. It is, however, forcefully articulated today by Hindu groups active in the region, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the RSS, who are trying to bring the Cheeta-Merat into the Hindu fold. The identity of the 'Muslim Sultan' in the story is confused: some name him as Aurangzeb, others as Mohammad Ghori, yet others as Mohammad Ghazni or Alauddin, Sultan of Malwa.

A different, though related, version of the story is that the 'Muslim Sultan' provided Har Raj with a sizeable estate as a reward for giving up his community's practice of raiding trading caravans. This made Har Raj's six brothers jealous of him, because of which Har Raj chose to become a Muslim, feeling that a Muslim Sultan had treated him better than his own brothers. However, despite his conversion to Islam,his descendents, the Cheeta-Merats, retained only a very nominal link with Islam, owing to the remote terrain in which they lived. They thus practised only three customs, mentioned above, that drew from Islam. Although the Sultans of Delhi, who controlled the Ajmer region, made efforts to promote Islamisation among them (as through building mosques in their villages, the ruins of many of which still remain, and by settling faqirs of the Madari caste, also known as Sain or Shah, in the villages to instruct the Cheeta-Merats in the basics of Islam and to slaughter animals in the Islamic fashion), these attempts did not make much dent.

Another theory about the Cheeta-Merat is that their ancestor Har Raj voluntarily converted to Islam at the hands of the renowned Sufi, Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer. This is why, it is argued, he is also known as Pir Har Raj, having received the honorific title of Pir, which is used for a Muslim saint. No surprisingly, this theory finds favour with Muslim groups active today among the Cheeta-Merats, who are seeking to provide them with a more distinctly Muslim identity.

The Cheeta-Merats' identity as neither 'Hindu' nor 'Muslim', but perhaps a bit of both, came under increasing challenge from the early decades of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, the Arya Samaj launched efforts to bring into the Hindu fold various communities like the Cheeta-Merats who could not be easily classified as either 'Hindu' or 'Muslim', as the terms were conventionally understood. The powerful Rajput Sabha, allied to the Aryas, appealed to the Cheeta-Merats to abandon their Islamic practices and turn Hindu. Some Cheeta-Merats are said to have formally declared themselves as Hindus at this time.

'We say Ram-Ram to Hindus and salam to Muslims. We hold a laddu in each of our hands', says Salim Khan smilingly when I ask him how his community responds to the contradictory appeals of Hindu and Muslim revivalist groups competing with each other. 'Most of us do not know how to do intricate Brahminical pujas or say the Muslim namaz. We just bow our heads before temples, mosques and dargahs', he explains. He talks of how, over the years, his community is now being increasingly divided into two factions—one Hindu and the other Muslim. 'Inter-marriages still occur, but this is reducing', he laments. 'However', he stresses,'whether Hindu or Muslim, we all think of ourselves as brothers, descended from the same ancestors'.

'We are a unique community', says Rohan Singh, 'I don't think there is any other community like us in the whole of India'. His mother's brother, Buland Khan, nods in agreement. 'Our philosophy of life is to live and let live. People must be free to worship God in whatever way they like', he tells me. 'Some Cheeta-Merats', he confesses, 'feel ashamed about their identity'. 'Others mock them and say that they are confused and muddled-up and are trying to ride two boats of the same time'. 'But', he stresses, 'I think we are right. Some of us are Muslims and others are Hindus, like me and my nephew here. But still we live together in harmony. We interdine and we intermarry. Religion is a personal issue and does not affect our relations'.