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...
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...