Chetram Jatav was a freedom fighter who participated in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. He joined the mutiny on 26 May 1857 in the Soro region of Eta district, North-Western Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). He was tied to a tree and shot.
The circumstances of Jatav's death have been highlighted by Badri Narayan Tiwari, a Subaltern historian from the G. B. Pant Institute of Social Sciences in Allahabad, but his life appears to be lost to history. Other sources have repeated Tiwari's research, which was taken from Swatantrata Sangram Mein Achhuton Ka Yogdan, a 1990 work written by D. C. Dinkar.
The Bahujan Samaj Party has adopted Jatav and some others who died as a result of the 1857 rebellion as icons of Dalit heroism. Tiwari says that:
Dalit intellectuals supported by BSP, which is trying to mobilise grassroot Dalits using local heroes, histories, myths and legends found a wealth of resources in the oral history of the regions of [Uttar Pradesh] centering around the 1857 rebellion. The political strategy of the party is to tell and retell the stories of these heroes, build memorials and organize celebrations around their stories repeatedly to build a collective memory in the psyche of the people. The stories are narrated in such a manner that the Dalits imagine the story of the making of this nation in which they played a significant role.