The Satth Project

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Dhillon

Dhillon is a large Jat got found across Punjab and in what is now Pakistan, with concentrations in the Majha and around Ludhiana and Moga.

Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, one of the three INA officers tried together at the Red Fort in 1945, was a Dhillon, and the choice of a Hindu, a Sikh and a Muslim to be tried together was the prosecution's decision and the defence's opportunity.

Jarnail Singh Dhillon, the Indian football captain of the 1960s, came from the Mahilpur belt.

The got's origin tradition follows the standard Rajput-descent pattern.

Dhillon villages are scattered and the name is among the most common Punjabi surnames in North America.

The Dhillon villages of the Majha and the Malwa include several that carry the name directly, and the got is one of the larger ones in the Sialkot and Gujranwala country that is now in Pakistan, where the same name is carried by Muslim families.

Ajit Singh Dhillon and others of the name appear through the Ghadar and Babbar Akali records, which is unremarkable given the size of the got and is the sort of thing family histories make more of than it will bear.

The got exogamy rule means no Dhillon may marry a Dhillon anywhere, regardless of any traceable relation, which for a clan this large excludes a very substantial number of possible matches. That is the practical effect of the rule and it is why the marriage search runs so far from home.

What we don't know

  • The origin tradition, which is not verifiable.
  • The origin tradition, which is not verifiable, and the distribution, 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.

  • Red Fort trial records, 1945.

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.

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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.

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