u/Curious_Map6367

I am Punjabi Jatt Sikh and 23&me shows an historical IBD match with Tagar DA9 sample.

https://www.yfull.com/live/tree/R-FTF40903/

Source: The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama | The 14th Dalai Lama

Source: The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama | The 14th Dalai Lama

Source: Iranian guest's Emotional Visit to Golden Temple | Spiritual Connect at Sri Harmandir Sahib

Source: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/spectrum/uchha-pind-of-buddhism-in-punjab-861196/

anghol, locally Uchcha Pind, sits in Fatehgarh Sahib district about 40 km from Chandigarh. Excavation between 1968 and 1990 found occupation running from Late Harappan around 2000 BCE through Painted Grey Ware, the Kushana period, the Gupta era and into medieval times.

In 1985 the site yielded 117 carved slabs, 69 upright pillars, 35 crossbars and 13 coping stones, all in the Mathura style of the 1st to 2nd century CE.  They were found dumped together in one corner of the stupa, which suggests they were hidden or thrown down during an attack.  The stone itself came from Mathura, several hundred kilometres away, which tells you what kind of money and reach the place had.

A relic casket was recovered from the stupa with an inscription in Kharosthi script.  Sanghol lay on the Uttarapatha, the northern trunk route linked to the Silk Road.

Punjab’s Buddhist centuries are not well known outside archaeology. This was one of the larger monastic sites in the region and most of it is still in the ground.

A lithograph by Emily Eden showing one of the favourite horses of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and his collection of jewels, including the Koh-i-Noor marked as number 1.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/

source: >!<

Source: https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/g-s1-135032/in-a-first-chinese-woman-wins-the-prestigious-fields-medal

Hong Wang is a mathematician from Guilin, China, and the first Chinese woman to win the Fields Medal. She studied at Peking University, completed her PhD at MIT, and now works between NYU and IHÉS in France.

ਜੰਗ ਹਿੰਦ ਪੰਜਾਬ ਦਾ ਹੋਣ ਲੱਗਾ,

ਦੋਵੇਂ ਬਾਦਸ਼ਾਹੀ ਫੌਜਾਂ ਭਾਰੀਆਂ ਨੀ।

ਅੱਜ ਹੋਵੇ ਸਰਕਾਰ ਤਾਂ ਮੁੱਲ ਪਾਵੇ,

ਜੇਹੜੀਆਂ ਖ਼ਾਲਸੇ ਨੇ ਤੇਗਾਂ ਮਾਰੀਆਂ ਨੀ।

ਸਣੇ ਆਦਮੀ ਗੋਲੀਆਂ ਨਾਲ ਉੱਡਣ,

ਹਾਥੀ ਡਿੱਗਦੇ ਸਣੇ ਅੰਬਾਰੀਆਂ ਨੀ।

ਸ਼ਾਹ ਮੁਹੰਮਦਾ, ਇਕ ਸਰਕਾਰ ਬਾਝੋਂ,

ਫੌਜਾਂ ਜਿੱਤ ਕੇ ਅੰਤ ਨੂੰ ਹਾਰੀਆਂ ਨੀ।

English:

The war between Hind and Punjab has begun;

both imperial armies stand in great strength.

Only a true sovereign government could appreciate

the worth of the sword-strokes dealt by the Khalsa.

Men are blown away by gunfire,

and elephants fall together with their howdahs.

Says Shah Muhammad: without a united sovereign authority,

armies may win battles, yet lose the war in the end.

Author:

Shah Muhammad (1780–1862)

Jangnama (Jang Hind Punjab da), composed c. 1846 after the First Anglo-Sikh War.

https://archive.org/details/TheFirstPunjabWar-ShahMohammedsJagnamah

Source: https://aish.com/when-jews-found-refuge-in-the-sikh-empire/

In March 1839, a mob descended on the Jewish quarter of Mashhad, in northeastern Persia. The violence that followed came to be known as the Allahdad, a name meaning “God’s justice,” and it left the community a choice between conversion and annihilation. Some three hundred Jews accepted Islam under duress and continued their observance in secret, crypto-Jews in the manner of Inquisition-era Spain. Hundreds of others gathered what they could and fled.

A number of them turned east. Along the old trade routes binding Khorasan to the subcontinent travelled word of a kingdom in the Punjab where faith was not a liability. The Sikh Empire of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, then at its height, was governed on principles of religious pluralism rare for the age. Muslims and Hindus held senior positions in its court and army, and its reputation for tolerance had reached far beyond its frontiers. The refugees settled in Rawalpindi, in the neighborhood of Babu Mohallah, a location suited to the international commerce many of them practiced. There they raised a synagogue and a communal hall.

The chronology carries its own quiet weight. Ranjit Singh died in June 1839, within months of the refugees’ arrival, and the empire he built was annexed by the British a decade later. Yet the sanctuary outlasted both the sovereign and the state. The Mashhadi community endured in Rawalpindi for over a century, a Persian Jewish enclave sustained in the heart of Punjab because a Sikh kingdom kept its doors open at the precise moment there was nowhere else to go.

Source: Mass Cremations & Jaswant Singh Khalra | Punjab Disappeared | Disappeared, Denied, But Not Forgotten

Most visitors to Amritsar notice that Durgiana Temple looks almost identical to Darbar Sahib (the Golden Temple), golden domes, a sarovar, a causeway bridge. What they’re rarely told is who built it, when, and why.

Guru Ram Das Ji, the fourth Sikh Guru, appointed his youngest son Arjan Dev as his successor. Prithi Chand, the eldest son, rejected the appointment. He established a parallel seat and his followers began circulating forged compositions attributed to earlier Gurus to create a false scriptural basis for his position. According to Sikh tradition, he also attempted to poison the young Hargobind, Guru Arjan’s son and the future sixth Guru. His followers became known as the Minas (ਮੀਣੇ), meaning “the deceitful.”

This rejection had a major consequence for Sikh scripture. One of the primary reasons Guru Arjan Dev Ji compiled the Adi Granth in 1604 was to create a single authenticated canon that could not be corrupted by forged compositions. By collecting manuscripts directly from the families of previous Gurus, cross-referencing them, and appointing Bhai Gurdas (nephew of Guru Amar Das and a major Sikh theologian) as scribe, Guru Arjan institutionally closed the door on scriptural fraud. The Minas, along with the later Dhirmalias and Ram Raiyas (two other factions that rejected sitting Gurus), are named in the Sikh Rehit as groups Sikhs should not associate with.

Without authenticated scripture or the Gaddi, the Mina sect had no theological foundation and dissolved within a few generations. But the biological lineage persisted. Prithi Chand’s descendants remained as Sodhi Khatris in the Amritsar area.

**Durgiana Temple in its current form was built by Harsai Mal Kapoor, a descendant of Prithi Chand.**Construction began around 1921, and the foundation stone was laid by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, founder of Banaras Hindu University, on Dussehra in 1924. The Amritsar Municipality Gazette of 1893 records a “Durgiana Sarovar” and a “Devi Dwara” at the site. A pond and a small shrine.

1921 is when the Akali Gurdwara Reform Movement was at its peak. Sikhs were reclaiming Gurdwaras from Hindu Mahants who had been managing, and in many cases mismanaging, them. Hindu festivals were being stopped at Darbar Sahib as Sikhs reasserted institutional control over their own sacred spaces. It was in this exact political moment that a descendant of the Minas built a temple architecturally mirroring the Golden Temple, in the same city, inaugurated by one of the leading figures of the Hindu consolidation movement.

Sources:

Gurinder Singh Mann, The Making of Sikh Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Amritsar Municipality Gazette, 1893

Mohinder Singh, The Akali Movement (Macmillan, 1978)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihang

R-Z93

└─ R-Z94

└─ R-Y3 / F2597

└─ R-Y2 / AM00479

└─ R-M634

├─ Roopkund 57 / I6946 ← upstream of L657, or unresolved above L657

├─ Sarmatian 9 ← also shown near M634 in your image

└─ R-L657

└─ I6942 / RoopkundA ← downstream L657, R-Y928

Sikhs seized it during one of their many raids on Delhi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikh_attacks_on_Delhi

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/08/23/sidebar-demographic-profiles/

Around 440 BCE, Herodotus described the Scythian gods in Histories IV.59, matching each one to a Greek equivalent: Papaeus to Zeus, Tabiti to Hestia, Argimpasa to Aphrodite. Four centuries later, three Saka kings ruled the Panjab from Taxila, namely Maues (c. 90–60 BCE), Azes I (c. 58–35 BCE), and Azilises (c. 57–35 BCE). They struck coins carrying Greek, Scythian, and Indian gods all on the same pieces, which gives a useful window into how a ruling group drew on several religious vocabularies at once.

Take the goddess on a lotus that coin scholars call Lakshmi. In the first century BCE the image is closely tied to royal fortune and sovereignty (śrī), a sense that runs alongside her later role in Hindu tradition as the consort of Vishnu. On a coin, she reads naturally as a symbol of the good fortune that backs a ruler.

Balarama tells a similar story. Here he appears as a figure in his own right, with club and plough, in a period when he was widely venerated as a standalone hero, the same Balarama who in later Vaishnava tradition is Krishna’s elder brother and in Jain tradition becomes a Baladeva. The coins catch these figures at an early, fluid stage, before the fuller sectarian frameworks settled around them.

A few days ago, I posted in another subreddit about the structural gap in Chinese-language Asian knowledge of Sikh identity, prompted by a Taiwanese election billboard that used Sikh imagery to oppose Indian migrant workers and a 2023 Chinese ministry road-safety video that put Chinese men in brownface and turbans lip-syncing a Punjabi song.

The thread surfaced something useful. Several readers confirmed that the gap is structural rather than personal prejudice. Chinese education does not teach Indian history with much depth. When pressed to describe an Indian, most Chinese-language readers reach for a Sikh, largely inherited from British-army colonial imagery.

This post is my attempt to fill that gap. I believe this informational gallery will be useful for this subreddit as well.

Please ask questions and I'll do my best to answer.