Bakhtaur Singh

This is the story of Bakhtaur Singh, more popularly known as Bakhtaura Jatt.

Bakhtaur belonged to the village Ganga (district Sirsa ,Haryana). His father was a farmer and they had a large amount of land that they used for agriculture. when Bakhtaur was young. Because his family was very well off and successful zimindars, everybody from the nearby villages with a daughter hoped to arrange to engage her to Bakhtaur. When Bakhtaur was about six or seven years old, he was engaged to a girl named Bhag Kaur (Bhagi), from the village of Sravaan. Such arrangements were usual then with parents of each side thinking they had made the best match for their child.

As the years went by Bakhtaur’s family was badly effected by a famine in the area. To survive, his father had to sell off some of his land. Bakhtaur had to go to work as well and was always busy working hard to improve the condition of his family. Each day he worked harder. He also began to worry over finding a good husband for his sister, that made him work harder and harder. One day when he was coming back from the fields he was called over by a panditani (female Hindu pandit/priest) on the way.

She informed him that she had been sent by his fiancée Bhag Kaur with a message. The message was that his fiancée's parents were about to force her to marry another man from a nearby village. She said that Bhagi would be waiting for him at a particular place on a given date. The girl's parents had learned that Bakhtaura’s family had fallen on hard times and were no longer the best match they could make for their daughter. Bhagi had always dreamt of Bakhtaura as her husband and so she had sent the woman with the message to come and take her away before her parents had their way.

Bakhtaura talked to his family and decided to go and rescue Bhagi as planned. In those days girl infants were often killed after their birth (girls were seen as an expense - a wedding had to be paid for and many parents of the more afluent families would even demand a dowry to wed their son) so naturally with everyone wanting a son and thinking of a daughter as a burden, rather than as a blessing, young girls were short in number.

Even worse for the young man, fortunate enough to have been engaged, being unable to complete the wedding as arranged would assure that the young man would become an object of derision in the village, with some even considering him a coward. And with the male population far exceeding the female, no one even dreamt of getting a second chance. So if you had a fiancée (a mang) it was best if you did everything you could to marry her.

Finally the date that Bhagi had arranged to meet him came and Bakhtaur got his camel ready. His sister gave a good amount of liquor to the camel so that it wouln't care about being pushed to run as fast as it could. There is a famous saying for this that mentions Baktaura's name, "Bhain Bakhtaure jatt di lande uth nu sharaab piave."

Bakhtaura rode into Bhagi's village along with a few of his friends, just in case any of Bhagi's family or their friends objected and started a fight. Bhagi was waiting for him at the place she had said and no clash took place. They safely returned home. Bakhtaura’s generation still lives in the village Ganga, Distt.Sirsa ,Haryana.