Neeraj Chopra, the golden boy of Tokyo Olympics where he won the gold medal in javelin, hails from Haryana, from Khandra village near Panipat. Apart from this, there is a lot more about the historical roots of Chopra, and the community he belongs, to that is not known too widely.
Going by popular folk history, Neeraj Chopra is a descendant of the surviving Maratha soldiers who lost against Ahmad Shah Abdali in the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761. Unhappy and ashamed of their defeat, these soldiers chose never to return to Maharashtra. Instead, they settled in the areas around Panipat, Karnal and Kurukshetra to become farmers.
Outside Haryana, it is not known that their descendants still inhabit that area and are called Ror-Maratha community. For them, the Battle of Panipat is something to remember forever. Accordingly, they mark the anniversary of that decisive battle on January 14 every year and raise slogans like ‘Hum aaj bhi hain Panipat mein, Tu kahan chhipa hai Abdali?’
The loss in that historical battle halted the expanding Maratha empire which spread from Poona (present day Pune) in the west to Panipat in the north. Mr Singh wrote: Scholars and historians have been visiting Panipat and its surrounding villages to pick up stories on their ancestors, a large number of whom died fighting at Panipat. But some survived and their stories continued reaching Poona from time to time. They found some Maratha customs in the Ror-Maratha community and some of their gotras too matched. The main gotras among the Ror-Maratha community living in Haryana today are Dahiya, Ghartan, Kadian, Lather, Malik, Mehla, Sagwal and Sangwan.
Vasantrao More, a historian attached to Kolhapur University and Virendra Singh Varma, a former Haryana bureaucrat and president of the Maratha Jagruti Manch, first found evidence to prove that the Ror-Marathas are found in at least 230 villages around Panipat. They have descended from the 500-odd Maratha soldiers who had participated in that battle. Incidentally, the Haryana government built a memorial which marks the field where the battle was fought.
For the past decade or so, some delegations from Maharashtra too join the anniversary celebrations in Panipat, Karnal and Kurukshetra. In 2011, the then President Pratibha Patil participated in the 250th anniversary celebrations of the battle.
The current descendants of Chhatrapati Shivaji, too, had joined these celebrations on different occasions. There is nostalgia on both sides and mutual bonds are being strengthened. Interestingly, it is fairly common among the community members to say “Chhatrapati ki Jai’’. That salutation remained one of the strong elements of memory that the community maintained with something that happened centuries ago.
It is said that at least 50,000 Maratha soldiers were butchered in that battle and Abdali took many more, plus 22,000 women, to be sold in the Central Asian slave markets. The Sikhs led by Jassa Singh Ahluwalia waylaid the tail end part of the caravan returning to Afghanistan near the town of Goindwal and set the women and others free. They also looted the booty being carried by the Abdali forces.
When this news reached Abdali in Lahore, he returned to Amritsar and destroyed the Sikh shrine of Harmandir Sahib by blasting it. He filled the holy sarovar next to it with bodies of people he killed and carcasses of cows to desecrate the shrine. About five decades after this incident, the Sikhs rose under Maharaja Ranjit Singh who set up his capital at Lahore and annexed Afghanistan.
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