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...
1533 Painting of the Likeness of Muhammad Bin Tughlaq (source: Agha Mehdi Husain) History has so many lessons and anecdotes hidden in its womb, and sometimes it becomes rather difficult to even search them. It is like trying to discover the innermost layers in an onion, where you fail to realize where the original bud lies underneath the layers that you keep peeling away. This is unfortunately the case of the history of the larger Punjab Hill states region, where historical research seems to be stuck in a rut and there is a lack of effort to revisit history and see the nuances once again. Be that as it may, it is rather interesting at times when you stumble across instances that make you wonder how it slipped your eye all this while. As is still claimed, the history of the Pathania rulers of Nurpur tends to become clearer only in the middle ages, as more 'reliable' sources start referring to the region and its rulers. One such source was the history of the Muslim conquests w...