Ramgarhia is a community name taken from Jassa Singh Ramgarhia in the eighteenth century, adopted by Tarkhan carpenter and Lohar blacksmith families, and it functions now as both a caste name and a surname.
Common Ramgarhia surnames include Kalsi, Matharu, Bhogal, Chana, Digpal, Landa, Sagoo, Rai and Panesar.
Ramgarhia families were the artisan class of the Punjab village, working under the sepidari arrangement for a share of the harvest, and they carried skills that transferred directly to industrial work.
That is why Ramgarhias were recruited for the East African railways, why they dominated the artisan trades in colonial Punjab, and why Ramgarhia gurdwaras exist as separate institutions in Britain, Kenya and Canada.
A Ramgarhia gurdwara is not doctrinally distinct. It follows the same maryada and reads the same volume, and what makes it Ramgarhia is who sits on the committee and who was in the room when it was founded. That is caste as an institutional fact rather than a religious one.
A misl name from 1748 became a caste identity, then a migration network, then a set of buildings in Leicester and Southall.
The name is also a claim. Taking a misl sardar's title as a community name in the nineteenth century was a way of saying that these families had held a fort and fought, and not only worked wood, at exactly the moment when the census was fixing everybody into occupational boxes.
They went to East Africa as fitters, carpenters, masons and clerks on the Uganda railway from the 1890s, stayed on for the public works and the building trades, and left or were expelled in the 1960s and 1970s. Leicester, Southall, Birmingham and Slough hold the institutions that came out of that second move.
In Punjab it is a caste. In Britain it is a caste, a set of gurdwaras, a marriage market and a network of businesses, and it is stronger there than it is here. Distance did not dissolve it. Nobody in the tradition intended it to be carried out of the country at all.
Colonial ethnographic surveys of Punjab.