Qais Muhammad Qasim is 84 years old. He lives in the Meo neighborhood located behind Lahore General Hospital. As the name suggests, the majority of its residents belong to the Meo community, who migrated from Mewat to that part of Punjab which was included in Pakistan in 1947.

At the time of migration, Qais was six years old. He recalls his father, Sohrab Khan, who was a schoolteacher in the village of Gurgaon (now in Delhi district) in the Mewat region.

“My father was very distressed about migrating from his homeland. He often advised me to become a great man but never leave my language and culture.”

Qais mentions that during his student years, an organization, named ‘Anjuman Ittehad-o-Taraqqi Mewat Pakistan’ was formed. He not only joined it but also launched a monthly magazine, called Aftab Mewat in the 1970s, which represented the Meo community in the Urdu language.

Qais has written several books on the Mewati language, including its elementary grammar and rules, some of which have not been published yet. He also writes a column in Mewati for the Urdu monthly ‘Sada-e-Meo’ which is published in Lahore.

His brother, Sikandar Sohrab Meo, is also the author of several books of prose and poetry in Urdu and Mewati. He is also the editor of two monthly magazines.

Identity crisis in both India and Pakistan

The Partition of India brought not only the hardships of migration for the Meo community but also an identity crisis. In India, the Mewati language is officially considered a dialect of Hindi rather than a separate language.

Prof Dr Attaur Rehman, who has been a teacher for three decades, is currently teaching Urdu at Lahore Garrison University. He say the Meos have faced identity issues not just in India but also in Pakistan.

“The Meo families that migrated wanted to settle in one region where they could live according to their culture and traditions but this was not possible. The scattered population not only made language preservation difficult but also limited social interaction.”

Historically, Mewat was never an administrative unit during the Mughal era, yet it managed to maintain its linguistic and cultural identity.

According to the current administrative division of India, the Mewat region is divided across three states—Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh—spanning eight districts. Among these, Haryana’s Gurugram is adjacent to Delhi and is practically considered a part of it.

At the time of Partition, this region was divided into three administrative entities: two princely states, Alwar and Bharatpur, and the British Indian province of Haryana’s Gurugram district.

Actual population three times higher than official figures

The Meo community is considered Rajput. According to a paper by Suraj Bhan Bhardwaj, a former professor of history at Motilal Nehru College, University of Delhi, the Meos began converting to Islam through the preaching of Sufis. He states that while the religious identity of Meos was ambiguous until the 19th century, all Meos in Pakistan and India are now Muslims.

Researcher Rakesh Ankit, who works with a British university, says that in 1947, the total number of Mewati speakers in India was 401,596, out of which 193,000 (about half) migrated to Pakistan.

India’s 2011 census reported the number of Mewati speakers as 856,643, while the latest Pakistani census (2023) puts their population at 1,094,219. This indicates that the Meo community is still equally divided between the two countries.

According to the census, more than 470,000 Mewati speakers live in the district of Kasur, which has the largest population of the Meos in Pakistan, making up 12pc of the total population of Kasur. There are 250,000 Meos in Lahore, and around 50,000 Meo speakers live in the districts of Sialkot, Multan, Narowal and Lodhran. Outside Punjab, around 30,000 Meos live in Karachi, and about 10,000 in Mirpurkhas.

Leaders of the Meo community claim that their actual population in Pakistan is three times higher than the census figures. Prof Dr Attaur Rehman agrees with this and says, “Many people, due to a sense of inferiority, prefer to identify themselves as Rao, Khan, or Chaudhry rather than Meo, but now the situation is improving.”

Only language survives in dying Mewati culture 

Asid Khan Meo expresses regret that their culture and traditions are fading away. He lives in the village of Haveli Ramayana in the Kasur district where he runs a school and college under the name of Meo International.
“Only the Mewati language has survived. I am afraid that if we don’t protect our mother tongue, we will completely lose our identity.”

He says that the people of Mewat used to consider themselves custodians of Urdu and regarded it as their language. However, in the early 1970s (after the Bengali, Sindhi, and Urdu conflict), the Meo community started realizing the loss of their identity.

This led to the formation of several organisations that made efforts to get Mewati recognized as a separate language but none was successful. However, in the past 15-20 years, some efforts met some success.

Abid Hamid Khan Meo, a social and political activist from the Narowal district, played an important role in getting Mewati recognised as a separate mother tongue. He explains that in 2010, he established an organization called ‘Pakistan Meo Ittehad’.

“Under this organization, in 2014, we submitted a request to the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) to include Mewati in the identity forms, and now it is officially recognized as a language.”

He told Lok Sujag that in 2017, he approached the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics and also filed a petition before the Lahore High Court. The bureau of statistics assured the court that Mewati would be included in the next census. As a result, Mewati was included in the 2023 census.

“The honorable judge also issued instructions to other institutions to register the Mewati language, which has given our community its identity.”

Mewati produced hundreds of writers

Asid Khan made his first attempt to promote the Mewati language in 1995. He submitted an application with the Punjab University, Lahore, to start classes to teach Mewati.

“The university replied that there was no literature available in Mewati but if it were found, the language programme could be launched. After that, we started working on literature.”

Asid Khan says that now almost a dozen organisations in Punjab are working on the education and promotion of the Mewati language while books on Mewati grammar, rules and proverbs are being distributed for free, and more than 100 books have been published.

“When I collected data in 2005, only 12 people were writing in Mewati, but now the number has reached hundreds. Research and thesis writing in Mewati is also taking place.”

He adds that two monthly magazines, named Sada-e-Meo and Meo Express, and a quarterly magazine Aravli, which are published in Urdu, also regularly feature Mewati writings.

There is also a website called Mewati Dunya, which offers content related to Mewati language and culture. Several young people are running Mewati YouTube channels as well.

Rise in research on Mewati language and culture 

Imran Meo, a PhD scholar at the Imperial University Lahore, has done work on ‘Mewati Literature’ in his MPhil and is now writing a research paper, titled ‘The Role of Mewati in the Linguistic Formation of Urdu’.

He explains that the major issue with the Mewati language is that it never had its own script. All available material is in Sanskrit, Urdu or Arabic. Mewati literature and culture were passed down orally, in the form of proverbs and stories, from generation to generation.

Imran Meo confirms Asid Khan’s claims, stating that when he was working on his MPhil thesis in 2018, there was no material available on Mewati history and literature on the Internet, but now, as he is doing his PhD, the situation has improved.

“I know at least 10 young people who are now writing their MPhil or PhD theses on Mewati language and culture.”

Prof Sarfraz Ahmed Meo, general secretary of the Sada-e-Meo Forum, says that work on Mewati language and literature is progressing rapidly but for the community’s identity to survive, it is necessary to include Mewati as an optional subject at the primary school level.

Note: This report is a joint effort of Asif Riaz from Lahore and Afzal Ansari from Kasur.