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...
Temple at Babor (Courtesy: Jammu Daily ) The history of the Himalayan states of North-west India remains a subject of much obscurity, with thinly packed materials available, as historians like Karuna Goswamy have remarked. In the midst of all this, documents like the Rajdarshani or the Vanshavalis in other regions has served to be a much valuable work. While so called credible historians criticize them as sources of history given fanciful claims, it is interesting that the same cabal also does not hesitate to refer to similar fanciful accounts elsewhere, as for example is the case for Mahavamsa of Sri Lanka. Absence of archaeological evidence is a call for more such work, and not the case of 'unreliability' as some would claim. Be that as it may, the Rajdarshani as was written by Ganesh Das Badehra is an interesting account for it did have instances of the 8th-13th century AD period that can be verified in historical sources that we know of, especially for instance the Chamb...