Every Rajput belongs first to his clan — Jhala (Zala), Jadeja, Gohil — and within it to a shakh, a branch descended from a common ancestor. The rule of exogamy was absolute: no one married within their own clan, so every wedding bound together two houses of different names and often of different regions.

Around each ruling gadi stood the bhayat — cadet kinsmen holding villages by right of blood. A younger son received a maintenance share of land rather than the throne, and his descendants formed the squirearchy of the countryside, owing loyalty and service to the senior line.

The joint household was the norm: three generations under the roof of a darbargadh, the fortified residence at the heart of every chief’s village.

The Rajput household was small and patrilocal. Married sons set up separate hearths soon after children came, so the four-generation joint family was rare; what bound the houses instead was the ghar — the circle of brothers' families sharing a gate, a guest room and thirteen days of mourning.

The father held the purse and the grain store; the mother ruled the inner house and trained each incoming daughter-in-law to head a hearth of her own one day. A wife kept her father's clan name for life — addressed in her new village as Vaghelima or Jhaliba, after the house she came from.

From about the age of ten a boy's life moved outdoors, to the Uttara — the men's dormitory where he slept, listened and learned. The house itself belonged to the women; even its master entered his rooms, by custom, only at night.

Marriages were arranged with careful regard to rank. A family sought for its daughter a house equal or superior to its own — the practice of hypergamy — so daughters tended to marry “upwards”, and the great houses received brides from lesser ones. Rulers of salute states looked to Rajputana as often as to Saurashtra for their matches.

Betrothal customs, the dayjo (dowry) and enormous wedding expenditure weighed heavily on families of modest means, and were among the pressures that reformers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to curb.

Polygyny remained common in ruling families well into the modern era — a matter of alliance and prestige more than of household life — until the covenants and laws that followed 1948 brought it to an end.

Alongside formal marriage, Rajput courts long maintained rakhat — a recognised pattern of concubinage in which a woman lived under a chief’s protection without the status of a wife. It is remembered as a social institution with its own rules, obligations and provision for children.

From the personal attendants of the ruling families grew the Khavas, a community of their own standing. Serving within the darbargadh across generations, Khavas families were often trusted with confidential duties and rose to considerable influence in several states.

Women of the ruling houses observed purdah — seclusion from public view — travelling in curtained carriages and receiving visitors in the zenana quarters. The custom marked rank: the stricter the seclusion, the higher the family’s pretension.

Yet the tradition also remembers women of great force: Shaktidevi, worshipped by the Jhalas (Zalas) as a dynastic goddess; Ranakdevi, whose defiance of the Solanki conqueror is still sung at Wadhwan; and the many queens who administered states as regents. Schooling for girls came late, but by the last generation of the princely order the daughters of the great houses were attending schools and colleges.

Purdah among the Rajputs was not one custom but a grammar. A daughter never veiled in her own village; a wife always did when she stepped out. The young bride kept full laj — sari-end to the neck — before her mother-in-law and every man senior to her husband, and half-laj, to the lips, before the elder women of the house.

The veil reached beyond the living: women drew full laj before the memorial stones of consecrated ancestors and before the kuldevi at whose shrine the wedding knot was untied. Men answered in kind — kinsmen caught in a narrow lane would hold up a cloth screen of their own so the women could pass at ease.

Seclusion was costly, and that was partly the point: it announced a family whose women need not go to the well. Reformers pressed against it from the early 1900s — the Maharani of Gondal among the first — and through the twentieth century the practice steadily fell away.

Among the hardest chapters of the peninsula’s history is female infanticide, practised for centuries in some Rajput communities — particularly among the Jadejas — where hypergamy made a daughter’s marriage ruinously expensive and pride made an unequal match unthinkable.

Colonel Alexander Walker, after settling the tributes of Kathiawar in 1807, turned to the suppression of the practice. The engagements he obtained from the Jadeja chiefs, renewed and enforced through the nineteenth century, gradually extinguished it — a turning point counted among the region’s most important social reforms.

Every clan honours a kuldevi, a tutelary goddess of the line: Shaktidevi of the Jhalas (Zalas), Ashapura of the Jadejas (shared with the Raos of Kutch), Khodiyar honoured by the Gohils and many houses besides, and Mandavraiji — the Sun himself — carried by the Parmars from Thar-Parkar to Muli.

Beyond the clan goddesses, religious life ran the whole breadth of the peninsula’s traditions: Shiva at Somnath, Krishna at Dwarka, the Jain tirthas of Girnar and Shatrunjaya, Navratri as the great festival of the martial houses, and the village shrines of local satis and heroes marked by paliya stones.

The Rajput heritage of Gujarat is deeply entwined with the Sant-Bhakti and spiritual traditions. Celebrated mystic saints born into or married into the royal clans include: Gangasati (by long tradition a Sarvaiya Rajput of Samadhiyala, Saurashtra, revered for her profound philosophical bhajans), her husband Kahalsang Bapu (Gohil Rajput, steadfast devotee of the Bhakti marg), Jesal Jadeja of Kutch (the famed martial chieftain who attained spiritual transformation under Sati Toral at Anjar), and the saint-poet Nirant Saheb (Gohil Rajput of Dethan in Karjan, who composed profound nirguna spiritual poetry).

The Charans were the bards of the Rajput world — poets, genealogists and moral arbiters whose praise made reputations and whose satire could shame a chief before his peers. Their persons were held inviolable; to harm a Charan was among the gravest of sins.

The Barots kept the vahis — the great registers of descent, marriage and land in which every family’s line was entered generation by generation. Between the bard’s verse, the Barot’s ledger and the paliya stones of the countryside, the clans preserved their history for a thousand years without an archive of paper.

The wealth of the old order rested on land. A chief held his state; his kinsmen held giras villages; and a complex web of tributes — to Junagadh, to the Marathas, later fixed by the British settlement of 1807 — moved revenue upwards. The distinction between girasya (landholder) and non-girasya ran through every community of the peninsula.

The reform era brought schooling designed for the ruling class: Rajkumar College at Rajkot (1870) educated the princes, while institutions such as the Girasiya school at Wadhwan (1880) reached the squirearchy. From these classrooms came the generation of rulers who built railways, hospitals and representative assemblies in the leading states.

Most villages of the peninsula were founded, not grown — granted to cadets, or raised from waste land by a chief who fixed the site and called in the essential castes: potter, carpenter, barber, Brahmin. Houses clustered at the core with the fields all round; over five hundred villages were once walled, and their ruins still mark the old fear of raid and plunder.

The Rajputs of a village were one lineage in one quarter, and speech named the village after them — a ‘Dhrol bhayat’ or ‘Lathi bhayat’ village. At its heart stood the Chora, common hall and watch-tower, where the elders' word carried weight and where, as the saying went, all were equal.

The Kathis, a martial pastoral people who entered the peninsula in the medieval centuries, carved out estates across its centre and fought and intermixed with the Rajput houses for generations. So vigorous was their presence that the whole country came to be called Kathiawar — “the land of the Kathis” — though the Rajput clans ruled most of it.

Sun-worshippers and famed horse-breeders, the Kathis stamped their own character on the region; they are remembered as the Rajputs’ closest neighbours and rivals.

Among themselves the clans admitted no ladder — every ranking was disputed, and each told its own glory. It was the British settlement that fixed a hierarchy: in 1863 the states were graded into classes with defined powers, styled Maharaja, Raja Saheb or Thakor Saheb, and saluted by a scaled count of guns.

Schooling followed the same current. The old village school offered nothing a Rajput wanted; boys trained with sword and horse, and a prince learned his line's genealogy from the Charan before he was eight. The Rajkumar College at Rajkot (1870) and the Girasia school at Wadhwan (1880) turned the tide — and within two generations the community counted its graduates, its barristers, and by the 1930s its first woman graduate.

With the covenant of 1948 the states dissolved into the Union, and the ruling families became private citizens with privy purses — themselves abolished in 1971. Land reforms ended the giras tenures that had supported the bhayat for centuries.

The modern era shows a community in transformation: darbargadhs turned into schools and hotels, princes turned to public life, industry and the army, and old distinctions softening into the common citizenship of the Republic — while clan memory, the kuldevis and the marriage networks continue to bind the community together.