Ahluwalia

Ahluwalia is a Sikh clan from Punjab, India. It originates from a misl (the name for the sovereign states of the Sikh confederacy) of the same name, derived from Ahlu, the ancestral village of the misl leaders. The Ahluwalia misl was one of the 12 major Sikh misls, and held land to the north of Sutlej river. Different scholars variously name the misl's founder as Sadho Singh, his descendant Bagh Singh, or Bagh Singh's nephew Jassa Singh. The misl rose to prominence under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, who was the first person to use the name 'Ahluwalia'. Originally known as Jassa Singh Kalal, he styled himself as Ahluwalia after his ancestral village of Ahlu, and established the ruling dynasty of Kapurthala State. Since the other hindu Kalals from rest of India held a low status in the traditional caste hierarchy, the other Kalals also adopted the Ahluwalia identity. They gave up their traditional occupations, as they gained political power and as the colonial British administration started regulating distribution and sale of liquor. The Hindu Ahluwalias further tried to enhance their social status by claiming Khatri or Rajput descent. A legendary account traces the ancestry of the Kapurthala royal family to the Bhatti Rajput royal family of Jaisalmer (and ultimately to Krishna through Salibahan). According to this narrative, a group of Bhattis migrated to Punjab, where they came to be known as Jats, and became Sikhs. The account states that Sadho Singh and his four sons married into Kalal families, because of which the family came to be known as Ahluwalia Kalal. Lepel Griffin (1873), a British administrator who wrote on the history of Punjab's rulers, dismissed this account connecting the Ahluwalias to the Jaisalmer royal family as spurious. The Sikh author Gian Singh, in his Twarikh Raj Khalsa (1894), noted that the Ahluwalia family had adopted the Kalal caste identity much before Sadho Singh. W. H. McLeod (2009), a scholar of Sikh history, notes that using the process of Sanskritisation, the formerly low-caste Kalals (Hindu) adopted the Ahluwalia identity with high-caste customs, and successfully achieved a high social rank, on par with the higher castes such as the Khatris. The Kalals took up new occupations, and in particular, a large number of Ahluwalias served in the army. Rajkumari Bibiji Amrit Kaur (1889-1964), the first health minister of India, was a member of the Ahluwalia royal family of Kapurthala State.