Painting picture courtesy Christie's Auction House Sometimes, a painting begins to ask more questions than it answers. A late eighteenth-century painting, attributed to the Mandi school and catalogued as showing Raja Sansar Chand of Kangra with a courtier, has intrigued me for some time. At first glance, the identification appears straightforward enough. Two men sit opposite each other, smoking hookahs, while attendants stand behind them holding fly-whisks. One figure is dressed in red, the other in white. The scene is informal, almost intimate, and yet unmistakably courtly. But the more I looked at the painting, the less convinced I became that the red-clad figure was Sansar Chand. The reason came from looking at other portraits. Among the surviving paintings associated with the Mandi court are several portraits of Raja Surma Sen, who ruled Mandi from 1781 until his death in 1788. One such portrait shows him seated smoking a hookah, attended by a fly-whisk bearer. Another depicts ...
Chitral Montage (Source: Wikipedia) Recently, some right wing people started raising questions on the status of Chitral, Hunza and Nagar with respect to Jammu and Kashmir. Several people, especially Pakistani propagandists, have made a lot of noise about these places having been governed directly by the British government. However, the answer, as is everything, not so straight - an element of disinformation has been made out that needs to be cleared. I will just point out to the fact that some people have over time gone through the archives of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and have provided some interesting points about the Chitral region in particular, the locus of this post. I will firstly point out an analysis by Colonel Dr Narendar Singh of the archives of the Jammu and Kashmir princely state. I will just reproduce his words verbatim: The earliest records available show that since the year 1864, The Mehtar of Chitral, Aman ul-Mulk used to send his Nazrana through his re...