I was just walking through some documents I had saved over the years, when it struck me that there has been very little new research work or relook into the history of the hill states. One particular format has been the examination of oral ballads, very few of which seem to be available in popular culture today. However, that was certainly not the case in the British era, when much field work seems to have been done by scholars of Europe on the subject, as they panned across the state of the Lahore kingdom and their adjunct territories. Sirmour was a Small Princely state along the Yamuna river's course While their purpose may have been malevolent in nature, many interesting insights got captured over the course of their work, and replication or improvement on the same seems to be rather scarce, especially in the context of what the European scholars used to call the "Punjab Hill States". One such case was on Sirmour, where very little information can be found in the publi...
Barselas of Mandi (Picture Credit: The Off.Info) We are told innumerable stories about what the custom of Sati or widows burning themselves on the funeral pyre was. A horrible practice interestingly, and one that needed to be abolished from the face of this earth given its sheer cruelty and misogyny. However, of late, a lot of revisits have happened that certainly question the prevalence of the custom itself. Professor Meenakshi Jain has written a tome on the subject, and other books exist too. It is interesting however to revisit some of the so called narratives to understand just how frequent or how extensive it really was. Banning something that was neither widespread in geography or in demography seemed a great case being built up to promote India as a backward, barbaric civilization - that is a near certainty that needs not much evidence to prove. Let me in that case also quote an interesting anecdote recorded by a British traveller G T Vigne, while travelling ac...