ABSTRACT
In 1809, representatives from the British East India Company and the Sikh Empire of Lahore convened in Amritsar to sign a treaty that would fundamentally transform the political landscape of northern South Asia. Assiduously protected by the parties until the fall of Lahore in the Anglo-Sikh War of 1845-6, the Treaty of Amritsar divided the Punjab between the superpowers along the course of the Sutlej River, creating a singularly reliable constant that secured their expansionist drive on the river's two sides for decades (Kiernan 1971[1943]). The boundary's benefits to empire notwithstanding, its application to the upriver hill tracts (Image 9) generated a novel set of problems that irrevocably changed the political culture of the Pahari Rajput kingdoms. Thus, subservience to Lahore reduced the once illustrious ‘mountain emperor’ of Kangra to a zamindar of modest proportions, while the incorporation of Sirmaur within EIC territory facilitated its rise as an exemplary ‘model state’ in British circles. It was, however, in Bilaspur, whose territories encompassed extensive tracts on both sides of the Sutlej, that the effects of the treaty were most strongly felt. Officially subservient to both Calcutta and Lahore but in practise almost entirely independent, the kingdom on the Sutlej emerged as the most consequential mountain state in the early decades of British rule. While the dominant discourse of regional historiography has come to dismiss this era as ‘the darkest page in Bilaspur's history’ (Hutchison and Vogel 1999[1933], vol. 2, p. 508), a careful examination of its trajectory between the Battle of Chinjhiar (1795) and the troubled reign of Kharak Chand (b. ~1813, r. 1824-39) reveals a vibrant kingdom that utilized its anomalous position to its benefit, developing a distinct courtly culture that defies the classificatory schemes customarily applied to ‘Rajput states’.
