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...
Commemorative Stamp of Zorawar Singh History is a nebulous creature, or perhaps more like a Medusa, which when one stares directly in the face, results in petrification. To that extent, it is interesting to note how the Communist Chinese narrative of one and a half wars that were won against India that was first thrown up by the murderous demagogue Mao Tse Tung to justify a sense of superiority over India. The problem with all shades of Marxists and Maoists is that the cherry picking of history is a habit that fails even basic scrutiny. The power of narrative holds only so long as gatekeepers to information are able to secure it. Once the horses bolt the stables, it is beyond redemption, however hard they try. If there was one and a half war for China, there were two and a half wars won by India that could be invoked to provide a cure for selective amnesia and cherry picking of history that would petrify a large section of the China apologia. History offers lessons to those w...