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 ...
Raja Ranjit Dev of Jammu (courtesy Christie's) Reading through the Rajdarshani, the annals of Jammu's history as written by Ganesh Das Badehra, has been a rather engaging exercise. The deeper one goes into the text, the more layers on the missing links to the history of the Panjab Hill States open up. One particular aspect of the history that gets less highlighted (rather ignored) is the rivalry of Jammu and Kangra. It is rather intriguing that the popular memory gap has been so poorly discussed and deliberated upon anywhere. One such instance, thanks to Dr. S S Charak’s work on a critical edition of the Rajdarshani, has been rather useful. It is not surprising that there is rivalry -through the history of the region, these were the two biggest princely states, and so it was but natural that competition for influence would take place. Curiously, the two have also seen continuity of dynasties for more than a millennium at the least. While the rivalries of Nagarkot or Kangra and...