Garhwal · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
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.
Periodisation is regional, not national — the medieval period does not begin in the same century here as it does elsewhere in India.
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.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 3rd century BCE | An Ashokan rock edict is cut at Kalsi on the Yamuna, at the western edge of the Doon. |
| c. 2nd century BCE – 3rd century CE | Kuninda coinage circulates through the Doon and the lower hills, the earliest evidence of an organised hill polity here. |
| c. 7th–11th centuries | Katyuri authority from Kartikeyapura extends across the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi country; the surviving stone temple idiom dates from this period. |
| 8th–9th century (tradition) | Adi Shankara is associated in tradition with the establishment of Jyotirmath and the ordering of worship at Badrinath; the arrangement by which a Nambudiri Brahmin from Kerala serves as rawal there is of long standing, though its origin is not securely dated. |
| c. 823 CE (tradition) | The Panwar chronicle places Kanak Pal at Chandpur Garhi in this year, marrying into the family of a local raja and founding the line. The date comes from the dynasty's own genealogy and is traditional rather than independently attested. |
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.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1358 (traditional; some chronicles place him around 1500) | Ajay Pal is credited with uniting the fifty-two garhs into a single kingdom and moving the capital to Devalgarh and then to Srinagar on the Alaknanda. The date is not settled between sources. |
| 1575–1591 | Balbhadra Shah is the first of the line to use the title Shah. |
| 1622–1640 | Mahipat Shah rules from Srinagar and campaigns north towards Tibet and west towards Sirmaur; his generals include Madho Singh Bhandari, Rikhola Lodi and Banwari Dass. |
| c. 1635–1640 | Madho Singh Bhandari is killed at the engagement recorded as Chhota Chini, on the Tibetan campaign. |
| 1630s–1640s | Rani Karnavati governs as regent for her young son and repels a Mughal expedition into the Doon; she is remembered in the chronicles by the epithet Nakti Rani. |
| 1659–1660 | Prithvi Pat Shah shelters Sulaiman Shikoh, the fugitive son of Dara Shikoh, at Srinagar for about eighteen months. The prince was handed over in 1660 after a split within the Garhwal court. |
| 1684–1716 | The reign of Fateh Shah, the longest of the line, during which Garhwal was drawn into the politics of the Sutlej and Yamuna hill states. |
| 1791 and 1803 | Gorkha forces from Nepal, having taken Kumaon in 1790, press west into Garhwal; the first attempt is broken off and the second succeeds. |
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.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 14 May 1804 | Pradyumna Shah is killed at the battle of Khurbura, near Dehradun, after thirteen days; Gorkha rule over Garhwal follows. |
| 1815 | The settlement after the Anglo-Nepalese war partitions the region. Eastern Garhwal and the Doon are annexed by the British and administered from Pauri; the west is restored to Sudarshan Shah as the princely state of Tehri Garhwal, with a new capital founded at Tehri. |
| 1816–1835 | George William Traill, Commissioner of Kumaon, carries out the first revenue settlements of British Garhwal and Kumaon, fixing land records and assessments that lasted a century. |
| 1919 | Tehri state moves its administrative capital to the newly built Narendranagar, above Rishikesh. |
| 14 January 1921 | The coolie-begar refusal at Bageshwar, in neighbouring Kumaon, ends compulsory unpaid porterage across the hills; the campaign ran through Garhwal as well and was organised in part from here. |
| 23 April 1930 | Soldiers of the Garhwal Rifles at Peshawar refuse an order to fire on unarmed demonstrators. Sixty-seven men were court-martialled; Chandra Singh, the platoon commander, was sentenced to transportation for life after his death sentence was commuted. |
| 30 May 1930 | Firing on a mahapanchayat of forest-rights protesters at Tiladi, in the Rawain valley of Tehri state. The official count of the dead was eighteen; other contemporary estimates were far higher. |
| 23 January 1939 | The Tehri Rajya Praja Mandal is founded by Sri Dev Suman to press for representative government in the princely state. |
| 25 July 1944 | Sri Dev Suman dies in Tehri jail on the eighty-fourth day of a hunger strike over prison conditions. |
Rulers and commanders
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.
Dynasty: Panwar (Parmar) of Garhwal. Seat: Chandpur Garhi
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.
Dynasty: Panwar of Garhwal. Seat: Devalgarh, then Srinagar
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.
Dynasty: Panwar of Garhwal. Seat: Srinagar
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.
Dynasty: served the Panwars of Garhwal. Seat: Maletha, near Srinagar
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.
Dynasty: Panwar of Garhwal. Seat: Srinagar
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.
Dynasty: Panwar of Garhwal. Seat: Srinagar
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.
Dynasty: Panwar of Garhwal (Tehri branch). Seat: Tehri
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.
Dynasty: East India Company administration. Seat: Almora
The history of Garhwal from ancient through medieval to modern times, and the rulers, commanders and administrators who shaped it. (8)