The Belkhariya clan

Historical record

One clan, several spellings

Belkhariya and Bilkhariya are the working spellings in this archive. The Oudh gazetteer uses Bilkharia, and Lethbridge’s entry for the Raja of Umri uses Bilkhari as well as Bilkharia. The family compilation includes बेलखरिया, बिलखरिया and बेलखारिया. Rajput and Rajpoot are alternate English spellings.

The gazetteer places Kot Bilkhar in the former village of Bilkhar, then within Ayyapur on the left bank of the Sai. It offers two possible sources for the clan name: the place Bilkhar and the Mahadeva shrine called Bilkharnath. Local retellings sometimes derive the shrine name from the clan. The order in which the names arose remains open.

Recorded tradition

Dikhit ancestry and Samoni

The settlement account places Ghaibar Sah in a Dikhit lineage. It calls him the fourth son of Jaswant and a great-grandson of Balbhaddar Dikhit, and associates the family with the dispersed Dikhit settlement of Samoni. The family material links Samoni with the Banda area of Bundelkhand.

Thakur Uday Narayan Singh’s Kshatriyavamshavali groups the Dikhit with the solar lineage and records Kashyap gotra, Samaveda and Durga as part of its Dikhit entry. The compilation describes Kinwar separately as a Dikhit branch. It links the name to initiation at the court of Kumarapala in Gujarat. Chhotelal Sharma instead links the title to Kalyan and Vikramaditya of Ujjain, while the family history preserves a Kannauj version. These are attributed genealogical traditions.

The wider compilation names Durga Bahu or Durg Bhav, Kalyan Shah and Balbhadra as early figures. Stories linking Ayodhya, Gujarat and Kannauj represent proposed ancestry. The very early dates and individual successions require dated records to verify.

Comparing accounts

Who built Kot Bilkhar?

The 1878 Oudh gazetteer, p. 152, connects the move to the fall of Kannauj and describes Ghaibar Sah taking possession of Kot Bilkhar. Its Patti account on pp. 158–159 instead records a local qanungo’s account crediting him with building the fort. The separate Yahiapur entry names Gular Sah of Bisauli, Banda, in its settlement story. Nevill later names Ghaibar Sah of Bisauli, and Lethbridge credits Ghaibar with the construction. The family compilation also uses the forms Gevar Shah and Gavar Shah.

Chhotelal Sharma and William Crooke name Jaswant’s fourth son Khairaj and credit him with taking Bilkhar. The 1878 gazetteer records C. A. Elliott’s Khairaj reading and favours Ghaibar Sah. These accounts are much later than the events they describe. Nevill p. 144 estimates Ghaibar’s arrival around the middle of the thirteenth century. That is an estimate of settlement. A contemporary building inscription, dated foundation record or excavated construction phase was not located.

Historical record

Earliest record found for the fort

The earliest fort reference located in this search is in Abu’l-Fazl’s late sixteenth-century Ain-i-Akbari. In the Manikpur revenue table, Jalalpur Balkhar is listed with a brick fort (H. S. Jarrett’s 1891 translation, volume II, p. 164). The table’s area figure covers the revenue mahal. The 1878 Oudh gazetteer identifies Jalalpur Bilkhar with the old Patti pargana. H. R. Nevill’s 1904 gazetteer, p. 212, explicitly links Bilkhar in that compound name to the old fort at Yahiapur on the Sai. The Mughal entry gives no precise location or construction date.

Sherring’s 1872 work (vol. I, p. 167) explicitly mentions a captured fort called Belkar-kot, citing Patrick Carnegy (1868, p. 39). The available short Carnegy scan omits that page, so the 1868 passage is known here through Sherring. The 1855 Wilson and 1869 Elliot glossaries attest the clan name and the Bilkhar place-name, while describing a Bachgoti Chauhan affiliation that differs from the Pratapgarh Dikhit accounts.

Historical record

The fort site and its recorded extent

The 1878 description places the ruined fort on a raised plateau on the left bank of the Sai, with ravines and broken ground on three sides, the river on the fourth, and a ditch traceable around it. Nevill’s 1904 Yahiapur entry places the site at the junction of the Paraya stream and the Sai. The nineteenth-century survey list repeats the plateau description and interprets the mound as a possible earlier Buddhist site. The latter is a historical interpretation without a dated excavation in the record consulted.

The Patti account dates the fort’s demolition to 1180 Fasli, which it prints as 1773 CE. The Yahiapur entry gives the same Fasli year for the conflict involving Rae Meherban Singh but prints 1772 CE. Nevill’s Yahiapur entry repeats 1773 for the demolition, although his p. 102 account places the preceding arrears around 1780. The 1981 and 2011 census handbooks place the Bilkhar Nath temple among the ruins at Yahiapur or Yahiyapur. The 2011 village directory gives Yahiyapur village code 159519 in Baba Belkharnath block and records a village area of 321.5 hectares. Its block map shows the village on the Sai. A surveyed fort perimeter, dimensions and a plot-level boundary remain unverified. The old pargana and modern village boundaries are different geographic units.

Historical record

Ramdeo and the Patti succession

The Oudh gazetteer remembers Raja Ramdeo or Ram Deo as the Bilkharia lord of Patti. In its settlement narrative, Bariar Singh Bachgoti entered Ramdeo’s service, rose to military command and married his daughter. One account has Bariar killing Ramdeo’s son Dalpat Sah and taking the estate. Another has Bariar succeeding peacefully through marriage to Ramdeo’s heiress.

Lethbridge’s account repeats the violent succession. The competing stories in the gazetteer make the circumstances and exact date uncertain. A separate gazetteer footnote attributes a Dirgbansi branch to Durgadas, described there as Ramdeo’s second son. The family compilation connects Durgadas to Ghaibar Sah, so the parentage differs across sources.

Historical record

Umri, Antu and northern Patti

The nineteenth-century settlement account names the Raja of Umri and the Babu of Antu as holders of two Bilkharia taluqs in the Partabgarh pargana. It also reports eight villages held around the former Aurangabad estate in northern Patti at the time of the account.

The Golden Book records Jagat Bahadur of Umri’s birth on 17 November 1850, his accession on 23 October 1872, and his heir Lal Krishna Pal Singh. It describes him as a representative of the old Bilkhari chiefs. The book’s biographical entry supports the Umri connection. The intervening generations from Ghaibar Sah still need a continuous set of records.