Khanzada - Etymology

Etymology

William Crooke records two etymologies for the name of Khanzada. He favours that of "descendants of the Khan" but notes the "probably less correct explanation ... 'descendants of a slave'". Although there had been censuses prior to 1881, they were not recorded until the exercise of that year. Denzil Ibbetson notes that the Khanzadas self-identified as being of the Jadubansi gotra in the 1881 Punjab census and he speculated that their communal name could be translated as "the son of a Khan " and is the Muslim equivalent to the Hindu word Rajput ("son of a Raja"). From this he concluded that "there can be little doubt that the Khanzadas are to the Meos what the Rajputs are to the Jats".

Percy Powlett, who compiled the Gazetteer of Ulwur in 1878, favours the "slave" origin, believing that the etymology derives from khanazad and that Bahadur Khan, their leader around the time that Firoz Shah had enslaved the population, "being a pervert, would contemptuously receive the name of Khanazad (slave) from his brethren". He does, however, acknowledge that the Khanzadas "indignantly repudiate this derivation, and say the word is Khan Jadu (or Lord Jadu), and was intended to render still nobler the name of the princely Rajput race from which they came."

Alexander Cunningham, who wrote a few years after Powlett, describes in some detail why those who favour Powlett's preference are most likely incorrect. He argues that the slave theory probably owes a lot to changes in religious dominance in the Mewat region, which had once again become a Hindu area around two centuries before he was writing. As with Crooke, he notes that khanzada and khanazada are different words, and that descendants of people who took the name of Khan upon conversion to Islam would indeed be referred to as khanzada. He uses the historic writings in Babur's autobiography, Ahmad Yadgar's Tarikh-i-Salatin Afaghana and Abu Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari to demonstrate that the corruption of meaning was a relatively recent occurrence.