Chetram Jatav was a freedom fighter who participated in the

Indian Rebellion of 1857 The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the fo ...

. He joined the mutiny on 26 May 1857 in the Soro region of Eta district,

North-Western Provinces The North-Western Provinces was an administrative region in British India. The North-Western Provinces were established in 1836, through merging the administrative divisions of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces. In 1858, the nawab-ruled kingdom ...

(now

Uttar Pradesh Uttar Pradesh (; , 'Northern Province') is a state in northern India. With over 200 million inhabitants, it is the most populated state in India as well as the most populous country subdivision in the world. It was established in 1950 ...

). Them were tied to a tree and shot.

Life

According to legends, Maharaja Patiala saw a man who was carrying a lion on his back. On being asked, it was found that the man had killed the lion without a weapon. The king asked him to join his army. At the instance of the king, he joined the army. The person's name was Cheta Ram Jatav. Cheta Ram fought the British. Seeing the British harassing the people, he fought them, after which the British arrested him and tied him with a tree.The circumstances of Jatav's death have been highlighted by Badri Narayan Tiwari, a Subaltern historian from the G. B. Pant Institute of Social Sciences in

Allahabad Allahabad (), officially known as Prayagraj, also known as Ilahabad, is a metropolis in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.The other five cities were: Agra, Kanpur (Cawnpore), Lucknow, Meerut, and Varanasi (Benares). It is the administrat ...

, but his life appears to be lost to history. Other sources have repeated Tiwari's research, which was taken from ''Swatantrata Sangram Mein Achhuton Ka Yogdan'', a 1990 work written by D. C. Dinkar.

In popular culture

The

Bahujan Samaj Party The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is a national level political party in India that was formed to represent Bahujans (literally means "community in majority"), referring to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes (OBC), alon ...

has adopted Jatav and some others who died as a result of the 1857 rebellion as icons of

Dalit Dalit (from sa, दलित, dalita meaning "broken/scattered"), also previously known as untouchable, is the lowest stratum of the Caste system in India, castes in India. Dalits were excluded from the four-fold Varna (Hinduism), varna syste ...

heroism. According to Tiwari, Dalit intellectuals supported by BSP, which is trying to mobilise grassroot Dalits using local heroes, histories, myths and legends found a wealth of resources in the oral history of the regions of

centering around the 1857 rebellion. The political strategy of the party is to tell and retell the stories of these heroes, build memorials and organize celebrations around their stories repeatedly to build a collective memory in the psyche of the people. The stories are narrated in such a manner that the Dalits imagine the story of the making of this nation in which they played a significant role.

Life

In popular culture

References

Further reading