The Kethwals are a hill tribe of Rajput origin, and by their own account and that of every British record, the oldest settlers of the Murree Hills. This page brings together what our traditions remember and what historians wrote down.
Origins
Two traditions are told about where the Kethwals came from. The first holds that the tribe originated in Kerman, in Iran. An ancestor travelled east, settled in the hills above the Jhelum, and established self-government over the region. The second, and the one most Kethwals hold today, is that the tribe is of Rajput origin, one of the old hill clans of the Murree range.
Some British writers recorded that the Kethwals claimed descent from Alexander the Great. That claim does not appear in the tribe’s own traditions or genealogies, and it is best read as one of many such stories colonial officers attached to hill tribes.
The name “Kethwal”
The name is derived from a tribal chief, Mian Katho Khan. He was born in 1560 and is said to have ruled the area for about half a century. The name is written in several ways: Kethwal, Kathwal and Kaithwal in English, and کیٹھوال in Urdu. The plural form Kethwalan appears in place names such as Dheer Kot Kethwalan.
Embracing Islam
According to tradition, the Kethwals embraced Islam in 1402, when the teachings of the great Kashmiri Sufi Syed Ali Hamdani reached the Murree Hills. The first Kethwal Muslim was Mian Qadir Bakhsh, son of Raja Chandu of the Murree Hills, who accepted Islam at Patan on the Kohala crossing of the Jhelum, the old ferry that linked Kashmir with the Pothohar plateau.
A note on the date. Mir Syed Ali Hamdani is usually recorded as having died in 1384. The 1402 date in our tradition most likely refers to the work of his followers, who carried his mission through Kashmir and the surrounding hills in the decades after his death.
The oldest settlers of the Murree Hills
Four tribes have long dominated the hills north-east of Rawalpindi: the Dhund Abbasi, the Satti, the Dhanyal and the Kethwal. Both the Satti and the Dhund say that when they arrived, they found the Kethwals already living in the hills. Local tradition in Circle Bakote names Manwan ni Hell as the first town of the Kethwal and Satti, who settled much of the area before the Karlal and Dhund arrived.
The Rawalpindi District Gazetteer of 1907 places the Kethwals “wedged in” between the Dhund to the west and the Satti to the east. It records that they owned Charihan, the largest village in Murree Tehsil, together with two small hamlets separated from it at the last land settlement, and that they took no part in the Mutiny of 1857.
They regard themselves, with reason, as the oldest settlers of the four chief hill tribes.
Rawalpindi District Gazetteer, 1907
H. A. Rose, in his Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, describes the Kethwal as a Rajput tribe of Rawalpindi holding the hills south of the Satti country, of the same group as the Dhund and Satti and older than either. He also records a tradition that the Dhund once nearly destroyed the tribe, at a date no one could fix.
In British-era records
J. M. Wikely’s recruiting handbook Punjabi Musalmans locates the tribe on the Charihan spur of the Murree range. It names the Zaildar of Charihan and one or two pensioned Indian officers as the leading men of the tribe, and notes that the Kethwals intermarry with the Dhund, Satti and Dhanyal.
Family and society
Until about 1950, Kethwal families customarily married their children between the ages of 15 and 18. The tribe has several sub-clans, including the Badwal, Jogeal and Janjual. Families are also organised into patti, lineages traced through a common ancestor, which are recorded in genealogies such as Khayaban e Kethwalan.
The Kethwals today
From a population of under two thousand in 1881, the Kethwals have spread across Pakistan. The heartland remains the villages of Murree and Kotli Sattian: Charhan, Sanj, Ghel, Ban and Dheer Kot Kethwalan among them. Large communities also live in Kahuta, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and families are settled from Abbottabad to Dera Ghazi Khan.
On 14 October 2022, Murree and Kotli Sattian tehsils were separated from Rawalpindi to form the new Murree District, so the ancestral Kethwal homeland now has a district of its own.