Sansar Chand Katoch portrait The Gorkha invasion of Kangra in 1805–06 is a fairly well-known episode in the history of the western Himalayan states. The campaign, that eventually brought Raja Sansar Chand's ambitions to a halt and led to his decline, has been discussed in multiple historical accounts. Yet, while going through some older writings on the history of Nepal, I came across an account that seems to suggest that the confrontation between the Katochs and the Gorkhas was not a one-off; it was one of the multiple confrontations that had occurred, arising from a variety of reasons. The account appears in Ludwig F. Stiller's The Rise of the House of Gorkha: A Study in the Unification of Nepal, 1768–1816 (1973) , which draws upon Francis Buchanan-Hamilton's earlier An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal (1819) . The story begins not with the Gorkhas, but with Sansar Chand's growing influence in the region. Hamilton wrote that after the demise of Dharma Prakash, who had d...
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...