About the Hatti community:
- The Hattis are a close-knit community who take their name from their traditional occupation of selling home-grown crops, vegetables, meat, and wool at small-town markets known as ‘haats’.
- Hatti men traditionally don a distinctive white headgear on ceremonial occasions.
- The Hatti homeland straddles the Himachal-Uttarakhand border in the basin of the Giri and Tons rivers, both tributaries of the Yamuna.
- The Tons marks the border between the two states, and the Hattis living in the Trans-Giri area in today’s Himachal Pradesh and Jaunsar Bawar in Uttarakhand were once part of the royal estate of Sirmaur. Jaunsar Bawar was conquered by the British in 1814.
- The two Hatti clans, in Trans-Giri and Jaunsar Bawar, have similar traditions, and inter-marriages are common.
- They are governed by a traditional council called ‘khumbli’ which decides community matters.
- According to the 2011 census, members of the community numbered 2.5 lakh but at present population of the Hattis are estimated at around 3 lakhs.
