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...
Former Royal Priest of Nepal Keshari Raj Pandey performing Katto (credit: Outlook India) When the monarch of Nepal Sri Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev had passed away intragic circumstances back in 2001, a wave of shock went across the world for the goriness and the strangeness of the incident. Subsequently the funeral rites were conducted. What followed thereafter had sent murmurs across several groups, wondering what was going on. An interesting ritual post funeral that took place over time was taken up by the Brahmin Head Priest of the royal family. To quote the Independent story from the United Kingdom of the time. "A Brahmin priest put on the robes of Nepal's murdered King Birendra, mounted an elephant and went into symbolic exile to rid the country of the curse of his death as the official period of mourning ended yesterday." Further explaining the 'bizarre' ritual, the Independent wrote: "The Hindu ceremony, known as katto , ...