Note 30 — G

Gâra (gârna, “to bury”).—A tribe of industrious cultivators practically confined to the Sahâranpur and Muzaffarnagar Districts. Of them Sir H. M. Elliot writes:30—“They are Musalmâns, and are frequently considered to be, like the Jhojhas, converted slaves. They themselves assert that they were formerly Sombansi Râjputs; that they came from Nagara Bambera, to the west of Delhi, and that Akbar located them in desert tracts, which have now been cleared by their industry. There seems reason to believe that they are the progeny of Râjput clans, because among themselves they have the sub-divisions of Bargûjar, Chauhân, etc., but there are also perhaps among them descendants of several inferior castes. All those on being converted to Muhammadanism, were called (perhaps contemptuously) Gâra, from the new practice they had adopted of burying, instead of burning, their dead. They now apply the term to themselves, but endeavour to disguise its origin by pretending to high birth. The Gâras generally intermarry in their own clan; but there is a set of villages in Sahâranpur, called Sayyid Gâra, from the fact of the daughters of Gâras marrying into Sayyid families.” The complete Census Returns name 51 sections. Some of them are local, such as Chaurasiya, Multâni; others are those of well-known castes and septs, such as Bargûjar, Bhâl, Bhatti, Chandela, Chauhân, Julâha, Pundîr, Râjput, Râthaur; others are purely Muhammadan, as Ansâri, Azîz, Bahlîm, Ghori, Mughal, Mughal-Bharsawa, Muhammadi, Shaikh, Shaikh Haidar, and Yâr Muhammad.