Questions about Butt/Khawaja clan and Kashmiri descendants in Pakistan

[Dervesh786]

Butt is a clan name much like Lone, Mir, Dar, Wain, Magray. These are ancient Kashmiri tribes and the origins are from the valley. Butt is similar to Bhat. Khawaja is an honorific title used by most of the tribes above, just like all Jatt tribes use the title 'Chaudhary'. Khwajah is not a clan/tribe but a title.

Butt were of brahmin origin allegedly, however in the varna system they were mainly traders and artisans.

All the above mentioned tribes have been mentioned in kalhanas rajataringiri in one way or another and going by that they trace their descent from the valley for at least 1000 years and most probably a lot lot longer. These tribes were instrumental in making and shaping the history of kashmir from king makers to king breakers.

My lineage trace descent from gurez and sopore, Baramullah , feudal landlords aka 'damaras', who occupied the lands from kargil down to gurez and who fought in the original battles kalhana describes in the 'kings of kashmir', there is no coincidence that the freedom struggle in Indian Occupied Kashmir has always and will always be from gurez, sopore and baramullah from the forefront. These tribes have been waging freedom struggle for millenia.

Also i am part butt from my mums side

 

[saaju]

Have you ever been mirpur?[/QUOTE]

No never been to mirpur so far .

 

[Pakistani E]

What @save_ghenda said true for the most part, Khawaja is at least partly an honorific title linked to Sufi Orders. My maternal side of the family are Butt's from Kashmir Valley and carry the Khawaja title or at least did until last two generations. For example, an ancestor going back a few generations is called Khawaja Qutb ud Din Butt. Now I am certain that they were give/took the title of Khawaja after accepting Islam at the hand of some Sufi saint.

 

[Jaanbaz]

I can't imagine who would name themselves the Butts. Hey @Fenrir you wouldn't know someone with that silly surname by any chance or would you?

The Butts, sounds like a great band name.

 

[Respect4Respect01]

Very similar to my family's story. We were forced out from rural outskirts of Srinagar and settled in Sialkot. But we are Gujjar.

I am also Gujjar and sub-caste is Gorsi.

 

[Pakistansdefender]

what do you want to prove with this silly post...
are you not satisfied as being a Muslim and a Pakistan..?
does being butt or Khawaja makes you special above others...?
let's take a test :
1. Are you and your family extremely fat to the busting point ....then you can be butt......? But then all other people who are fat , what about them....are they butt too......
2.are you fairer then usual people .... ?They say that Khawaja and butt have lighter skin tone .... But I have seen butts and Khawaja's who have very brown and black complexion too , now what would you say.....?

3. Do you eat everything in front of you , including bones of your chicken ? Then you definitely are a butt .... Not sure about Khawaja ....

nothing would make you superior ,
neither your cast , neither your house ,neither your colour ....
only best among you is who has best Taqwa....
we don't need this shit in Pakistan....this cast system we have adopted from hindu's making us believing some casts are higher and better then the other...

 

[Dervesh786]

what do you want to prove with this silly post...
are you not satisfied as being a Muslim and a Pakistan..?
does being butt or Khawaja makes you special above others...?
let's take a test :
1. Are you and your family extremely fat to the busting point ....then you can be butt......? But then all other people who are fat , what about them....are they butt too......
2.are you fairer then usual people .... ?They say that Khawaja and butt have lighter skin tone .... But I have seen butts and Khawaja's who have very brown and black complexion too , now what would you say.....?

3. Do you eat everything in front of you , including bones of your chicken ? Then you definitely are a butt .... Not sure about Khawaja ....

nothing would make you superior ,
neither your cast , neither your house ,neither your colour ....
only best among you is who has best Taqwa....
we don't need this shit in Pakistan....this cast system we have adopted from hindu's making us believing some casts are higher and better then the other...

what an arrogant post above. get off your religious high horse. which part of the OP indicated:

superiority?
rascism?
casteism?
colour?
excessive food eating?

stop this religious bullying and making people inferior, if someone wishes to find out their family history they are entitled to it. all this taqwa and piety is solely for people with beards.

'O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other'

 

[Orakzai]

Punjabis are a very loose group identified more by language than ancestry or blood. This is one of the reasons why groups from outside Punjab have generally settled down and merged within local structures very quickly. The most recent arrivals are Urdu speakers from UP/Delhi, but historically we have had Kashmiri migraiton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmiris_of_Punjab), and also Baloch and Pashtun migrations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baloch_of_Punjab), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathans_of_Punjab. I am from old Lahore and my paternal grandmothers family is from a Kashmiri background. One of my cousins is married to a Multani "pathan" (dont know which tribe, he told me but cant remember, ends with zai though of course haha). Further one of my aunts is married to an Urdu speaker. However growing up we never thought of these people as outsiders or different than us, primarily because language is the main identity marker, rather than tribe or blood.

Lol probably yousufzai.

Yeah it always has been very confusing for me like our most prominent parlimentarians are khawajas, sharifs, butts and shaikhs and they all are belived to have kashmiri background, so made me wonder who actually could be the real punjabis.

what do you want to prove with this silly post...
are you not satisfied as being a Muslim and a Pakistan..?
does being butt or Khawaja makes you special above others...?
let's take a test :
1. Are you and your family extremely fat to the busting point ....then you can be butt......? But then all other people who are fat , what about them....are they butt too......
2.are you fairer then usual people .... ?They say that Khawaja and butt have lighter skin tone .... But I have seen butts and Khawaja's who have very brown and black complexion too , now what would you say.....?

3. Do you eat everything in front of you , including bones of your chicken ? Then you definitely are a butt .... Not sure about Khawaja ....

nothing would make you superior ,
neither your cast , neither your house ,neither your colour ....
only best among you is who has best Taqwa....
we don't need this shit in Pakistan....this cast system we have adopted from hindu's making us believing some casts are higher and better then the other...

Tbh its a good and informative post, i dont see anyone discussing supperiority of one over the other.
I am a Pashtun i have very limited info about the people living in Punjab and their background, would be good to know more about them.

 

[_Khawaja]

What @save_ghenda said true for the most part, Khawaja is at least partly an honorific title linked to Sufi Orders. My maternal side of the family are Butt's from Kashmir Valley and carry the Khawaja title or at least did until last two generations. For example, an ancestor going back a few generations is called Khawaja Qutb ud Din Butt. Now I am certain that they were give/took the title of Khawaja after accepting Islam at the hand of some Sufi saint.

So my ancestors adopted the khawaja title after converting to Islam by Sufi saints? That makes sense, so are Kashmiri Khawajas and Butts from the trading community? cause my ancestors were businessmen and merchants in Kashmir and latter Punjab.

Do you know anything about the other Kashmiri clans like Dar, Mir, Lone etc They seem very similar to Butts.

Butt is a clan name much like Lone, Mir, Dar, Wain, Magray. These are ancient Kashmiri tribes and the origins are from the valley. Butt is similar to Bhat. Khawaja is an honorific title used by most of the tribes above, just like all Jatt tribes use the title 'Chaudhary'. Khwajah is not a clan/tribe but a title.

Butt were of brahmin origin allegedly, however in the varna system they were mainly traders and artisans.

All the above mentioned tribes have been mentioned in kalhanas rajataringiri in one way or another and going by that they trace their descent from the valley for at least 1000 years and most probably a lot lot longer. These tribes were instrumental in making and shaping the history of kashmir from king makers to king breakers.

My lineage trace descent from gurez and sopore, Baramullah , feudal landlords aka 'damaras', who occupied the lands from kargil down to gurez and who fought in the original battles kalhana describes in the 'kings of kashmir', there is no coincidence that the freedom struggle in Indian Occupied Kashmir has always and will always be from gurez, sopore and baramullah from the forefront. These tribes have been waging freedom struggle for millenia.

Also i am part butt from my mums side

Thanks, that was informative.

I know for a fact my ancestors are from Srinagar, however it was the capital so it's very likely they were transplants from other parts of Kashmir. I remember reading some where that the Butt clan originated in Baramula, North Kashmir. I dn't know for sure, there's harldly any good sources of information on Kashmiri clans and ancestry. It's like neither Kashmiri origin Pakistan nor Kashmiris in the valley ever bothered to document and do some research on Kashmiri history unlike Pakhtuns, native Punjabis and Baloch who have so much information available on the internet.

On the downside, a lot of books and articles online about Kashmiri genealogy are written by what's called the "Kashmiri Pandits" and from their perspective. It'd cool if somebody wrote a book or did a research paper on this subject. There are so many Kashmiri origin people in academia now but nobody's interested in doing this yet I know a Burusho lady at my college in America who did research on her people and there are only 80,000 of them!

Punjabis are a very loose group identified more by language than ancestry or blood. This is one of the reasons why groups from outside Punjab have generally settled down and merged within local structures very quickly. The most recent arrivals are Urdu speakers from UP/Delhi, but historically we have had Kashmiri migraiton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmiris_of_Punjab), and also Baloch and Pashtun migrations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baloch_of_Punjab), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathans_of_Punjab. I am from old Lahore and my paternal grandmothers family is from a Kashmiri background. One of my cousins is married to a Multani "pathan" (dont know which tribe, he told me but cant remember, ends with zai though of course haha). Further one of my aunts is married to an Urdu speaker. However growing up we never thought of these people as outsiders or different than us, primarily because language is the main identity marker, rather than tribe or blood.

Bruh are you from Mozang? I got some extended fam there.

 

[AZADPAKISTAN2009]

I or my family upbringing never teaches anything about clans or tribes , so I actually had no clue which clan belongs to where but interesting share..

Still don't see any difference other then the Pakistani designation or Muslim designation

Only time I ever noticed this was when I went to Indian craiglist type site to look for appartment in western city and found they had this clan distinguisher in the registration and I was generally scratching my head what the hell is this

Later as I grew older found out there were these political lines around which villagers voted the PPP clan and PML clan and that was enough of clansmanship for me.

Growing up we had 1 kid in our class who was Shia and frankly we heard rumors he was shia , not that as a 5 year old or 10 year old it matter whose team he was going to play on . he was quite fast runner so obviously he was going to be on our team, so even the shia sunni issue was was never experienced

 

[HAIDER]

Hey everybody, I got some questions about my heritage.

I'm of Pakistani descent and my family have Kashmiri ancestry, our forefathers migrated from Kashmir (around Sringar) to rural North Punjab near Sialkot & Gujranwala and later my grandparents branched out to other cities across Pakistan. We belong to the Butt clan but also use Khawaja as a our last name or title, now the thing is I'm confused about whether Khawajas and Butts are the same clan or we're 2 different clans.

From what I've read, most Kashmiris settled in Punjab adopted 'Butt' as their lastname as a collective identifier of their Kashmiri heritage even if they didn't actually belong to the Butt clan. Pretty much all people with the last name Butt also use Khawaja as a last name. All the men in my family get refered to as 'Butt saabs" in Pakistan however my father says we're actually Khawajas and Butt was just a collective name.

Is there a difference between the two clans? Did they descend from two different groups or castes in Kashmir? All I know is that my Great Great-Grandfathers and their fathers were rice sellers in Kashmir before settling across the near the Punjab-Jammu border and getting involved in business, so what clan or caste might we be? It is quite amazing how my family and ancestors manage to branch out across Pakistan and the world and get an education, now we have nothing to do with farming or agriculture though I do have some extended relatives left in Upper Punjab who haven't changed at all.

If there are any Butts/Khawajas on here, what do you know about the clan?

You never heard Allama Iqbal shairr.

Yu tu butt bhi ho khawaja bhi ho mian bhi hoo
ya tu bataoo kia tum muslman bhi hoo

 

[Kambojaric]

Lol probably yousufzai.

Yeah it always has been very confusing for me like our most prominent parlimentarians are khawajas, sharifs, butts and shaikhs and they all are belived to have kashmiri background, so made me wonder who actually could be the real punjabis.

Well some of the "older" Punjabi tribes would be the likes of Sial (tahir ul qadri), Arain (zia ul haq), Kamboh (Ejaz Chaudhary - PTI president Punjab), Janjua Rajputs (Boxer Amir Khan) et cetera. Ultimately the question who are the "real Punjabi" has no real answer since all Punjabis migrated to the land of the five rivers at some point. Residing in this geographic location and speaking the language automatically makes one a Punjabi, especially the second and third generations.

Tbh its a good and informative post, i dont see anyone discussing supperiority of one over the other.
I am a Pashtun i have very limited info about the people living in Punjab and their background, would be good to know more about them.

I agree. Far too often I have noticed some Pakistanis get really touchy on topics relating to history, culture, tribes so forth. If the discussion is civil and no implications of superiority are made then all we are doing is learning about each others backgrounds and better understanding our fellow countrymen. I have learnt a lot about Pashtuns, Balochis and other Pakistani groups on this forum and see no reason why such discussion should be discouraged.

 

[_Khawaja]

You never heard Allama Iqbal shairr.

Yu tu butt bhi ho khawaja bhi ho mian bhi hoo
ya tu bataoo kia tum muslman bhi hoo

How's that relevant? I'm not a racist or chauvinist, I got relatives married into various ethnicities and clans. I'm just curious about my heritage, even Iqbal was proud of his heritage. There's nothing wrong with that, Butts are probably among the least racist Pakistanis and take more pride in nationality than clan.

 

[Kambojaric]

Bruh are you from Mozang? I got some extended fam there.

Nah, from the walled city. Kashmiri Bazaar

 

[HAIDER]

How's that relevant? I'm not a racist or chauvinist, I got relatives married into various ethnicities and clans. I'm just curious about my heritage, even Iqbal was proud of his heritage. There's nothing wrong with that, Butts are probably among the least racist Pakistanis and take more pride in nationality than clan.

Bhai mazak kar raha thaa....My good friend from South Punjab and there are Khawajas , There forefather from Sariki land.