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...
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...