Sansar Chand Katoch portrait The Gorkha invasion of Kangra in 1805–06 is a fairly well-known episode in the history of the western Himalayan states. The campaign, that eventually brought Raja Sansar Chand's ambitions to a halt and led to his decline, has been discussed in multiple historical accounts. Yet, while going through some older writings on the history of Nepal, I came across an account that seems to suggest that the confrontation between the Katochs and the Gorkhas was not a one-off; it was one of the multiple confrontations that had occurred, arising from a variety of reasons. The account appears in Ludwig F. Stiller's The Rise of the House of Gorkha: A Study in the Unification of Nepal, 1768–1816 (1973) , which draws upon Francis Buchanan-Hamilton's earlier An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal (1819) . The story begins not with the Gorkhas, but with Sansar Chand's growing influence in the region. Hamilton wrote that after the demise of Dharma Prakash, who had d...
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...