इतिहास
Garhwal's periodisation turns on two dates that are entirely its own. Its medieval period begins in the ninth century, when the Panwar line is traditionally founded at Chandpur Garhi and begins the long work of absorbing the fifty-two garhs that give the region its name - a process that took some six hundred years and was not complete until a single kingdom was seated at Srinagar on the Alaknanda. Its modern period begins not in 1857 but in 1804, when the Gorkha conquest ended that kingdom and killed its raja at Khurbura. The other date that matters is 1815, because the British settlement after the Anglo-Nepalese war cut the region in two - the eastern half annexed as British Garhwal and administered from Pauri, the western half restored as the princely state of Tehri Garhwal - and from that point the two halves had different laws, different forest regimes and, when politics arrived, different movements. Almost everything that happened here after 1815 happened twice, differently.
कालक्रम यहाँ क्षेत्रीय है, राष्ट्रीय नहीं — मध्यकाल हर क्षेत्र में एक ही सदी से शुरू नहीं होता।
प्राचीनc. 3rd century BCE – c. 823 CE
The oldest firmly dated object in the region sits at its lowest point: an Ashokan rock edict at Kalsi, on the Yamuna at the western end of the Doon, which places the Mauryan writ at the foot of these hills in the third century BCE. Above the Doon the evidence is thinner and mostly numismatic - Kuninda coinage, struck by a hill people of the Sutlej-Yamuna-Ganga foothills, circulates from about the second century BCE. From roughly the seventh century the Katyuris, seated at Kartikeyapura in the Kumaon hills, held authority across much of the Uttarakhand hills including Garhwal, and the stone temple idiom that survives at Jageshwar, Baijnath and the Alaknanda shrines is theirs. The association of Adi Shankara with Jyotirmath and Badrinath belongs to the eighth or ninth century in tradition rather than in dated record, but the institutional arrangement it produced - a Kerala-born rawal serving at Badrinath - is old, continuous and unusual.
मध्यकालीनc. 823 – 1804
The name Garhwal is a description of the political problem: garh means fort, and the country was held by fifty-two of them, each with its own chief. The Panwars at Chandpur spent centuries reducing them. Ajay Pal completed the work and moved the seat first to Devalgarh and then to Srinagar on the Alaknanda, a river-bank town rather than a hill fort, which is the physical sign that the kingdom had stopped being defensive. From the late sixteenth century the rulers took the title Shah, campaigned north across the passes and south into the Doon, and were drawn into the affairs of the plains at the edges - a Mughal expedition repulsed under a regent, and, in 1659, the sheltering of the fugitive Mughal prince Sulaiman Shikoh, which ended badly for everyone involved. Garhwal court painting, the school associated with Mola Ram, belongs to the last century of this period and is one of the few distinct miniature traditions produced in the hills.
आधुनिक1804 – 1947
Pradyumna Shah met the Gorkha advance near Dehradun and was killed on 14 May 1804 after a thirteen-day engagement at Khurbura; the kingdom he lost had lasted, by its own count, nearly a thousand years. Eleven years of Gorkha administration followed, remembered chiefly for its revenue demands. The Anglo-Nepalese war ended that, but the settlement of 1815 partitioned Garhwal rather than restoring it: the British kept the eastern districts and the Doon, and returned the western half to Sudarshan Shah, who founded a new capital at Tehri because Srinagar was on the wrong side of the line. From then on the region's politics were forest politics. Both administrations reclassified hill forest as reserved state property and restricted the grazing, lopping and fuel-collection that hill agriculture depends on, and every significant movement here between 1921 and 1947 - the coolie-begar refusal, the forest satyagrahas, the mahapanchayat at Tiladi - began with that. The other Garhwali contribution to the period was made a thousand kilometres away, when soldiers of the Garhwal Rifles refused to fire at Peshawar in 1930.
शासक और सेनापति
Kanak Pal Raja संस्थापक from c. 823 CE (traditional)
The founder of the Panwar line in the dynasty's own chronicle, said to have come from Malwa and married into the family of the raja of Chandpur. The date and the Malwa origin are traditional; what is not in doubt is that his successors spent the next six centuries absorbing the surrounding garhs.
राजवंश: Panwar (Parmar) of Garhwal. राजधानी: Chandpur Garhi
Ajay Pal Raja शासक traditionally 1358; some accounts place him c. 1500
Credited with completing the unification of the fifty-two garhs into one kingdom and moving the seat down to the Alaknanda at Srinagar - the move from hill fort to river town that turned a confederation of chiefships into a state.
राजवंश: Panwar of Garhwal. राजधानी: Devalgarh, then Srinagar
Mahipat Shah Raja शासक 1622–1640
Campaigned north towards Tibet and west towards Sirmaur, and consolidated Srinagar as the working capital. The three generals associated with his reign are the only Garhwali commanders whose names the ballads kept.
राजवंश: Panwar of Garhwal. राजधानी: Srinagar
Madho Singh Bhandari Senapati सेनापति c. 1585 – c. 1640
Commander under Mahipat Shah, killed on the Tibetan campaign. He is also credited with cutting the Maletha irrigation channel - a tunnel of some six hundred metres driven through a spur to bring water to a dry terrace. The channel exists; the story of the sacrifice said to have accompanied its cutting belongs to the Pawara ballads, not to record.
राजवंश: served the Panwars of Garhwal. राजधानी: Maletha, near Srinagar
Rani Karnavati Rani, regent संरक्षक 1630s–1640s
Governed as regent for her infant son and turned back a Mughal expedition that had pushed into the Doon. The epithet the chronicles give her, Nakti Rani, refers to the treatment of the defeated force and is the form in which the episode is remembered rather than a description of policy.
राजवंश: Panwar of Garhwal. राजधानी: Srinagar
Pradyumna Shah Raja सेनापति 1785–1804
The last raja of undivided Garhwal. He met the Gorkha advance near Dehradun with a force reported at around ten thousand and was killed on 14 May 1804 after a thirteen-day engagement at Khurbura.
राजवंश: Panwar of Garhwal. राजधानी: Srinagar
Sudarshan Shah Raja संस्थापक 1815–1859
Restored to the western half of Garhwal by the settlement of 1815 and founded Tehri as its capital, the old seat at Srinagar having fallen on the British side of the new line. The princely state he founded lasted until 1949.
राजवंश: Panwar of Garhwal (Tehri branch). राजधानी: Tehri
George William Traill Commissioner of Kumaon प्रशासक 1816–1835
Carried out the first British revenue settlements of Garhwal and Kumaon and compiled the earliest systematic statistical accounts of the hills. The land records he fixed shaped hill tenure for a century, and the pass he crossed above the Pindari glacier still carries his name.
राजवंश: East India Company administration. राजधानी: Almora