ABSTRACT
Visitors to the Sutlej River Valley in the winter of 1795 would have stumbled upon a curious sight: a band of battered peasant-warriors marching towards a riverside palace, its banners at half-mast. Walking at a short distance from the rest of the crew, a stringed instrument thrown over his shoulder and his lips rhyming phrases to a set meter, the bard returning from the battlefield was composing a history of the war to be presented at court. Once approved by the king, his narrative would become the official account of the war used to inculcate future generations into the valiant ways of their ancestors. A century later, the descendants of that battle's participants wrote down their own versions of the events, adding a novel dimension to the established mode of oral transmission. No longer relying on the spoken word alone, these authors combined their childhood memories of oral recitations with their experience as the privileged vassals of a global empire, into which they had been integrated and to which they owed their positions of power. Informed by a century of extensive exchanges between royal elites and foreign administrators, these accounts evince the radical reorientation of kingship and polity in the modern era in their discarding of the locally grounded markers found in the oral tradition for a pan-Indian reading that associates the Rajput rulers of the hills with the Kshatriya monarchs of antiquity.
