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The '''Jat people''' ({{IPA-hi|dʒaːʈ}}, spelling variants include '''Jatt''', '''Jaat''' and '''Jutt''') are a traditionally [[agricultural]] community native to the [[Indian subcontinent]], comprising what is today [[Northern India]] and [[Pakistan]]. OriginallyPreviously [[pastoralism|pastoralists]] in the lower [[Indus river]]-valley of [[Sindh]],<ref name="KhazanovWink2012">{{citation|last1=Khazanov|first1=Anatoly M.| authorlink = Anatoly Khazanov|last2=Wink|first2=Andre|title=Nomads in the Sedentary World|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-v_RORENFbMC&pg=PT177|accessdate=15 August 2013|year=2012|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-136-12194-4|page=177}} Quote: "Hiuen Tsang gave the following account of a numerous pastoral-nomadic population in seventh-century Sin-ti (Sind): 'By the side of the river..[of Sind], along the flat marshy lowlands for some thousand li, there are several hundreds of thousands [a very great many] families ..[which] give themselves exclusively to tending cattle and from this derive their livelihood. They have no masters, and whether men or women, have neither rich nor poor.' While they were left unnamed by the Chinese pilgrim, these same people of lower Sind were called Jats' or 'Jats of the wastes' by the Arab geographers. The Jats, as 'dromedary men.' were one of the chief pastoral-nomadic divisions at that time, with numerous subdivisions, ....</ref><ref name="Wink2004">{{citation|last=Wink|first=André|title=Indo-Islamic society: 14th – 15th centuries|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nyYslywJUE8C&pg=PA92|accessdate=15 August 2013|year=2004|publisher=BRILL|isbn=978-90-04-13561-1|pages=92–93}} Quote: "In Sind, the breeding and grazing of sheep and buffaloes was the regular occupations of pastoral nomads in the lower country of the south, while the breeding of goats and camels was the dominant activity in the regions immediately to the east of the Kirthar range and between Multan and Mansura. The jats were one of the chief pastoral-nomadic divisions here in early-medieval times, and although some of these migrated as far as Iraq, they generally did not move over very long distances on a regular basis. Many jats migrated to the north, into the Panjab, and here, between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, the once largely pastoral-nomadic Jat population was transformed into sedentary peasants. Some Jats continued to live in the thinly populated ''barr'' country between the five rivers of the Panjab, adopting a kind of [[transhumance]], based on the herding of goats and camels. It seems that what happened to the jats is paradigmatic of most other pastoral and pastoral-nomadic populations in India in the sense that they became ever more closed in by an expanding sedentary-agricultural realm."</ref>
Jats migrated north into the [[Punjab region]], [[Delhi]], [[Rajputana]], and the western [[Gangetic Plain]] in [[late medieval]] times.<ref name="Wink2004" /><ref name="js">[https://www.google.co.in/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=isbn:0521637643 The Sikhs of the Punjab p. 5] by [[J.S. Grewal]] Quote: "However, the most numerous of the agricultural tribes were the Jats. They had come from Sindh and Rajasthan along the river valleys, moving up, displacing the Gujjars and Rajputs to occupy culturable lands. Before the end of the sixteenth century they were more numerous than any other agricultural tribe between the rivers Jhelum and Jamuna."</ref> Primarily of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh faiths, they now live mostly in the [[Indian state]]s of [[Haryana]], [[Punjab, India|Punjab]], [[Delhi]], [[Rajasthan]] and [[Uttar Pradesh]] and the Pakistani provinces of [[Punjab, Pakistan|Punjab]] and [[Sindh]].
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