Ahirwal is a region spanning parts of southern

Haryana Haryana (; ) is an Indian state located in the northern part of the country. It was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on 1 Nov 1966 on a linguistic basis. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with less than 1.4% () of India's land ...

, north-eastern

Rajasthan Rajasthan (; lit. 'Land of Kings') is a state in northern India. It covers or 10.4 per cent of India's total geographical area. It is the largest Indian state by area and the seventh largest by population. It is on India's northwestern s ...

, and South-Western

Delhi Delhi, officially the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi, is a city and a union territory of India containing New Delhi, the capital of India. Straddling the Yamuna river, primarily its western or right bank, Delhi shares borders wi ...

The region was once a small principality based from the town of Rewari and controlled by members of the

Yaduvanshi Ahir The Yaduvanshi Aheer or Yaduvanshi Ahir claim descent from god Krishna of the ancient Yadava clan. The Ahirs have three major classifications - Yaduvanshi, Nandavanshi and Goallavanshi. Yaduvanshi claim descent from Yadu, Nandavansh claim descent ...

community from around the time when the

Mughal empire The Mughal Empire was an early-modern empire that controlled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries. Quote: "Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the ...

was in decline. The name translates as "Land of the Ahirs". J. E. Schwartzberg has described it as a "folk region" and Lucia Michelutti as a "cultural-geographic region ... which includes parts of the districts of Alwar, Bharatpur in Rajasthan and Mahendragarh, Rewari, Gurgaon in the state of Haryana." The Ahirwal region in southern Haryana has 11 assembly segments spread over three Lok Sabha seats – Bhiwani-Mahendergarh, Gurgaon and

Rohtak Rohtak () is a city and the administrative headquarters of the Rohtak district in the Indian state of Haryana. It lies north-west of New Delhi and south of the state capital Chandigarh on National Highway 9 (India), NH 9(old NH 10). Rohtak fo ...

(one segment only) – having a sizeable presence of Ahir voters. The main language of the area is Ahirwati. It is commonly taken to be a dialect of Mewati and classified within the Rajasthani group of languages, but it also has characteristics in common with the neighbouring

Western Hindi The Central Indo-Aryan languages or Hindi languages are a group of related language varieties Spoken across North India and Central India. These language varieties form the central part of the Indo-Aryan language family, itself a part of th ...

varieties. The closely related Bangru (also known as Haryanvi) and

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of North India, northern, Central India, centr ...

are also spoken in the region. The events at the battle of Rezang La on 18 November 1962 involved many soldiers from the Ahirwal region, who were greatly outnumbered by their Chinese opponents.

See also

References

Further reading