Kangra is the exception in this group of regions. It was not a princely state after 1846 but an ordinary district of British Punjab, with a collector, a land settlement and a cantonment, which means it had something to resist directly and the usual apparatus of the national movement to do it with — district Congress committees, conferences, civil disobedience, Quit India arrests. That is why its resistance record looks different from Chamba's or Mandi's, where politics had to be aimed at a raja first. Two of its episodes came before any of that: the rising of 1848 in the Nurpur country against the annexation itself, and the executions at Dharamshala in 1857 of the leaders of the attempted rising in neighbouring Kullu. The twentieth-century movement here is best remembered through Baba Kanshi Ram, who worked in the Pahari language rather than in Urdu or English and reached villages that no printed pamphlet did.
The Nurpur rising1848
In the disturbances following the annexation of the hills, Ram Singh Pathania proclaimed himself wazir of Nurpur and raised the surrounding country, taking and holding the fort at Shahpur Kandi and fighting a series of engagements in the Ravi country.
Outcome: He was taken in 1848 after being betrayed, tried by a military court at Lahore and transported to Rangoon, where he died in November 1849 at twenty-five. Accounts of the fighting itself vary a good deal between sources.
The Dharamshala executions of 18573 August 1857
The attempted rising in Kullu, led by Pratap Singh with support from the Seraj country, was put down and its leaders brought to Dharamshala, the district headquarters, for trial.
Outcome: Pratap Singh and Vir Singh were hanged at Dharamshala on 3 August 1857. The Kangra district itself did not rise.
Congress organisation in the Kangra district1920–1942
As part of British Punjab, Kangra had district Congress committees, political conferences and the full sequence of non-cooperation, civil disobedience and Quit India. A conference at Sujanpur Tira in 1927 was broken up with injuries to those attending.
Outcome: Repeated arrests through the 1930s and 1940s; the district is the only part of this region whose freedom-movement record is of the directly administered kind.