Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland Himalayan the on Polity and Kingship
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8 ASIAN BORDERLANDS Moran Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland Arik Moran Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland Rajput Identity during the Early Colonial Encounter Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland Asian Borderlands Asian Borderlands presents the latest research on borderlands in Asia as well as on the borderlands of Asia – the regions linking Asia with Africa, Europe and Oceania. Its approach is broad: it covers the entire range of the social sciences and humanities. The series explores the social, cultural, geographic, economic and historical dimensions of border-making by states, local communities and flows of goods, people and ideas. It considers territorial borderlands at various scales (national as well as supra- and sub-national) and in various forms (land borders, maritime borders), but also presents research on social borderlands resulting from border-making that may not be territorially fixed, for example linguistic or diasporic communities. Series Editors Tina Harris, University of Amsterdam Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam Editorial Board Members Franck Billé, University of California, Berkeley Duncan McDuie-Ra, University of New South Wales Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University Yuk Wah Chan, City University Hong Kong Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland Rajput Identity during the Early Colonial Encounter Arik Moran Amsterdam University Press Cover illustration: Sketch of raja Sansar Chand Katoch II, Kangra c. 1800 Courtesy: The Director, Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 560 5 e-isbn 978 90 4853 675 7 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462985605 nur 740 Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0) The author / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Table of Contents Acknowledgements 7 A Note on Translation and Transliteration 11 Introduction 13 1 Memories of a Feud: Chinjhiar, 1795 29 1.1 The Bilaspur-Kangra Rivalry, c. 1750-1795 30 1.2 The Bard’s Tale 37 1.3 Enter Sirmaur 45 1.4 The Rajputization of Pahari Kingship: Narratives of Chinjhiar, c. 1900 54 2 Alterity and Myth in Himalayan Historiography : Kangra, Sirmaur, and Gorkha Rule in the West 61 2.1 The Rise of the Katoch Legend 63 2.2 Beyond the Bilaspur-Kangra Rivalry: Sirmaur, 1795-1815 70 2.3 Explaining the Silence about Gorkha Rule in West Himalayan Histories 80 3 Sati and Sovereignty in Theory and Practise 85 3.1 The Multiple Roles of Royal Women, c. 1775-1825 87 3.2 The Guleri Rani of Sirmaur 95 3.3 Rethinking Sati and Women’s Agency in British India 105 3.4 European and Pahari Rajput Appropriations of Sati 115 4 Statecraft at the Edge of Empire: Bilaspur, 1795-1835 125 4.1 Beyond the Rajput Fold: Brahmins, ascetics, and monastic advisors 129 4.2 The Ends of ‘Empire from Below’: Kot Dhar, 1819 134 4.3 Kingship Recalibrated: Kharak Chand’s Bilaspur, 1824-35 147 5 Widowed Ranis, Scheming Rajas, and the Making of ‘Rajput Tradition’ 161 5.1 A Marriage of Interests: the Sirmauri ranis in Bilaspur 163 5.2 Kingship and its Practise: Bilaspur, Sirmaur, and the ‘Rajput State’ 171 5.3 The Ranis’ Revolution: Bilaspur, 1839-40 180 Epilogue 197 Appendix: The Jhera of Chinjhiar 205 Bibliography 229 Index 243 List of Images, Maps and Charts Image 1 The Kangra Valley, the view towards the west from the northeast (Mata Maheshwari temple and fort, Chota Bhangal) 31 Image 2 Kangra Fort (Kangra Kot) 33 Image 3 Bilaspur, the view towards the south from Garh Chinjhiar 42 Image 4 The highlands of inner Sirmaur 46 Image 5 Raja Kirat Prakash of Sirmaur (b. 1747, r. 1757-73/4) 47 Image 6 A Nath yogi visiting a Rajputni harem in Chamba 52 Image 7 Raja Sansar Chand Katoch II alias Pahari Padhsah (b. 1765, r. 1775-1823); Kangra c. 1840 67 Image 8 Pahari Rajputnis; Guler c. 1830 103 Image 9 The Sutlej River Valley near Rampur-Bashahr 126 Image 10 A Sikh sardar, possibly Desa Singh Majitha, receiving a deputation of Hill Chiefs; Guler c. 1775 136 Image 11 Portrait of a Prince, possibly an Ajmeriya Mian; Bilaspur c. 1700 145 Image 12 Pahari warrior-peasants; Punjab Hills (Kangra?), late nineteenth century 153 Map 1 Rajput Kingdoms of the Western Himalaya 34 Map 2 Sirmaur 72 Map 3 Bilaspur 128 Genealogical chart 165 Acknowledgements It gives me great pleasure to thank the very dear people who helped bring this book to completion. My warm thanks to David Shulman for introducing me to the study of South Asia’s oral traditions and for ongoing support since I had first stumbled into his office at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a Masters’ student. Further thanks to Yohanan Grinshpon for inspiring lectures during those formative years. I am deeply grateful to David Washbrook for supervising my doctoral studies at the University Oxford with unfail- ing good humour, and for sharing his oceanic knowledge of South Asian history with characteristic modesty. Also at Oxford, my thanks to David Gellner, Charles Ramble, and Alexis Sanderson for stirring conversations and pointed observations on various occasions. A very special thanks to Rosalind O’Hanlon and Norbert Peabody for carefully reading through the DPhil thesis that is at the kernel of this book and for thoughtful suggestions on its content. In India, Jotinder Pal and his family were the perfect hosts on several research visits for which I am deeply grateful. My warmest thanks to Ajay Bahadur Singh for spinning delightful tales in and around Sirmaur, facilitat- ing crucial contacts in the hills, and timely assistance on more occasions than I’d care to remember. Further thanks still to Mahesh Sharma for knowledgeable discussions and generous hospitality in Chandigarh. Lastly, a most profound thank you to my mentor and friend, Amar Nath Walia, for hours of fantastic conversations, exegeses, and anecdotes about Himachali history at the Press Club in Shimla and in the lower hills of Kangra – this would have been a very different book without him. I was most fortunate to have the team at Amsterdam University Press see this project through to fruition. My thanks to the series’ editors, Saskia Gieling, Jaap Wagenaar, Chelsea McGill, Mike Sanders, Moshe Mitchell, and the many others who helped bring this book to completion with rigorous attention. My sincere thanks to the reviewers of the manuscript for dedicated readings that had substantially honed its arguments. This book would have been impossible without the generous financial assistance of the Clarendon Bursary Fund, the Beit Fund, and the Frere Exhibition for Indian Studies that sustained my postgraduate years at Oxford; Wolfson College (Oxford), the Sasakawa Fund (Oriental Institute, Oxford), and the William Frederickson Memorial Fund (Cambridge) supplied research and travel grants for further research; and a four year fellowship (2013-17) from the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (EU-FP7, 8 KINGSHIP AND POLITY ON THE HIMALAYAn BORDERLAND grant number 334489) enabled this project’s completion – my warm thanks to them all. The responsive assistance of staff members at depositaries and libraries across the globe was indispensable for research. My deep thanks to the staff at the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the National Archives of India in New Delhi, and the Himachal Pradesh Department of Arts, Languages & Cultures Library at Shimla – a great many of the sources that are mentioned in this book would have been inaccessible without them. A shorter version of the third chapter was published in Modern Asian Studies, my thanks to Cambridge University Press for allowing its reproduction in an expanded format here, and to Lucy Rhymer of the same for insightful remarks on this project as a whole. Further credits are due to Alexander Cherniak for help with Kahluri diacritics, to Offek Orr for maps that are both readable and reflective of the mythic qualities attributed to Pahari Rajputs in modern historiography, and to Isabelle Ratié for photographs of the region. Parts of this book had developed through scholarly exchanges in various academic platforms. In Germanophone circles, my thanks to William Sax for Heidelbergian hospitality and engrossing discussions around the globe, and to Martin Gaenszle and Michael Mann for facilitating an exposition of key topics from the book in Vienna and Berlin, respectively. I am grateful to Elena de Rossi Filibeck and John Bray for fruitful collaborations during early phases of research in Rome. In Paris, I am thankful to the faculty and staff of the Centre d’Études Himalayannes (CNRS, UPR 299) for many warm welcomes and engaging scholarly enquiries; to Marie Lecomte-Tilouine and Anne de Sales for immaculately planned workshops that persistently managed to break new grounds in Himalayan Studies; and to Daniela Berti and Véronique Bouillier for delightful exchanges over the years. Further thanks to Emmanuel Francis for discussions at the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud and elsewhere. Across the Channel, I am grateful to Roy Fischel, Michael Hutt, and James Mallinson of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London for comments on an earlier version of Chapter 2. Farther still beyond the Atlantic, my thanks to Mark Turin for prompting a rethinking of Himalayan history, to Sara Shneiderman for pointed comments on the same, and to Catherine Warner for collegial collaboration on the topic. For academic exchanges in conferences and research institutes in India, I am grateful to Maheshwar Joshi, B.K.