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...
Pangna Palace Suket was a small princely state, part of the now Mandi district, with its capital at Sundar Nagar. It is one of the oldest surviving lineages of India, going all the way back to 765 AD. Interestingly, Suket, Mandi, Keonthal and Kashtwar (in Chenab valley region of Jammu) all had lineages related to each other. They all descend from a common ancestor of the Sena dynasty of Bengal, of the Chandrabanshi line of Rajputs. Hutchison and Vogel point out that The descendarnts of the common ancestors were three brothers, named Vira or Bir-Sen, who became the Ruler of Suket, Giri-Sen of Keonthal and Hamir Sen of Kashtwar. In 765, it is believed that along with his followers, probably Rajput adventurers like himself, Bir Sen crossed the Sutlej river and advanced into the interior, and defeated the then warring factions of Ranas and Thakurs, thus lording over them. Eventually, Bir Sen selected a site in the Surhi ilaqa, at 5,000 ft. above sea level, called Pangna, where he bu...