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 ...
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Suket and Mandi were two states that were relatively recent in their formation like Kullu. Interestingly, the Sen rulers of Suket and subsequently Mandi is traced back to a Chandrabansi lineage, linking them to the Pandava clans that ruled around Indraprastha.
While it may be difficult to postulate accurately that bit of ancestry, it is interesting to note how the ancestry moves subsequently into Bengal. It is here that our attention is drawn, captured in the history of the region and the connections with Bengal.
Khemraj, who was the last ruler of Delhi, had been replaced by his Wazir. He retires towards Vanga desha, or present day Bengal and set up the Gaudiya Sena dynasty of eastern Bengal. The capital of these Sena rulers was in Lakshmanpuri, along the river Ganga. An important ruler was the last one, Lakshman Sena, which was brought to an end by the invading Muhammad Khilji in 1206 AD, despite having expanded it into present day Assam and Odisha. What happens next, as per the bansaabali is quite a read.
Lakshman Sena's son, Rup Sena, moves towards Northwest India. He settled in Rupar near Ambala (present day Ropar), but got attacked by the Khiljis again. In the process, three sons to Rup Sena - Bir Sen, Giri Sen and Hamir Sen - escape into the hills.
Bir Sen later brought the feuding Ranas and Thakurs of Suket under his rule to create the Sen dynasty of Suket. Giri Sen did the same in Keonthal in Shimla district of today to set up the Keonthal Sen dynasty. Hamir Sen entered Kishtwar in the Chenab valley, and set up the Kishtwar Sen dynasty near Jammu.
While this legend, as B R Beotra in his 'Gazetteer of the Suket State' may have felt exaggerated to an extent, it certainly is in the realm of possibility. Alexander Cunningham ascribed an earlier date of the 8th century AD. His assessment, with which Beotra too agreed to an extent, noted the entry of a cadet of the Sena dynasty of Bengal named Vir Sen, which he believed happened earlier. However it is interesting that the link exists, and may be possible because there is evidence to suggest the same with other dynasties too. A Kannauj offshoot of The Palas of Bengal has been linked with the establishment of the rolling dynasty of Kullu. What it certainly demonstrates is that the route and the certainly known by that time, and they too were contemporaries of the Sena dynasty. Therefore, the claim is certainly meritorious to an extent. Of course, it requires greater postulation on part of historians.
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