Arain

Arain Raeen, Rain or Arai
Raeens or Arains, Lahore
Ethnicity	Punjabi
Location	Punjab, Sindh and Western Uttar Pradesh
Language	Punjabi
Religion	Islam with minority being Hindu and Sikh

Arain (also known as Raeen) are a large Punjabi agricultural community with a strong political identity and level of organisation. Arain are predominantly Muslims, 99.91% at the time of the 1931 census in Punjab, but a small population of Arain in India also follows Sikhism, Hinduism and Jainism.

At the beginning of the last century, they numbered around 1 million and were mainly rural cultivators and landowners concentrated in four districts: Lahore, Jalandhar, Amritsar and Ambala, all in the British Punjab province. Following the 1947 partition of India, they are now mainly present in the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sindh with a small population in parts of Indian Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

A self-conscious community, several meetings were held to establish an organisation to represent the Arain community in the 1890s. Eventually, in 1915, Anjuman Ra’iyan-i-Hind emerged as such a body in Lahore and a national community newspaper, titled Al-Rai, was established.