Sial (tribe)

The Sial tribe (also written as Siyal, Syal, Sayal, Seyal) is a tribe of the Punjab region of British India. It is believed that Jhang city was built in 1288 by Rai Sial. The Sial tribe ruled Jhang city for 360 years. The last ruler of the Sial tribe ruled from 1812 to 1822, and then Sikh took over followed by British rule.

Denzil Ibbetson, an administrator of the British Raj, classified the Sials as a tribe rather than as a caste. He believed, like John Nesfield, that the society of the Northwest Frontier Provinces and Punjab in British India did not permit the rigid imposition of an administratively-defined caste construct as his colleague, H. H. Risley preferred. According to Ibbetson, society in Punjab was less governed by Brahmanical ideas of caste, based on varna, and instead was more open and fluid. Tribes, which he considered to be kin-based groups that dominated small areas, were the dominant feature of rural life. Caste designators, such as Jat and Rajput, were status-based titles to which any tribe that rose to social prominence could lay a claim, and which could be dismissed by their peers if they declined. Susan Bayly, a modern anthropologist, considers him to have had "a high degree of accuracy in his observations of Punjab society ... [I]n his writings we really do see the beginnings of modern, regionally based Indian anthroplogy."

Following the introduction of the Punjab Land Alienation Act in 1900, the authorities of the Raj classified the Sials who inhabited the Punjab as an "agricultural tribe", a term that was administratively synonymous with the "martial race" classification that was used for the purposes of determining the suitability of a person as a recruit to the British Indian Army.

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