Punjab.

Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Punjab. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and Guru Har Rai were also connected with the District. In 1710 the Sikh leader Banda plundered Batala and Kalanaur, and made the District the head-quarters of his raids on the neighbourhood. Driven into the hills by Bahadur Shah in 1711, he returned and built a fort at Lohgarh, identified with the modern Gurdaspur, and defeated Islam Jang, viceroy of Lahore. In 1713 Abdus Samad Khan drove him back to the hills, and, though he again returned and recaptured Kalanaur, finally took him prisoner at Lohgarh in 1716. The next period in the history of the District is closely connected with Adlna Beg. At first governor of Bahrampur and subsequently of the Jullundur Doab, he founded Dmanagar in 1730, which he seems generally to have made his head- quarters. This ruler is chiefly remarkable for the astuteness with which he played off Ahmad Shah, the Delhi emperors, and the Marathas, one against the other, until he was installed by the last-named power as governor of Lahore with head- quarters at Batala. His death in 1758 removed the main obstacle to the spread of the Sikh power, which was only temporarily checked by their defeat at Barnala in 1762. The Sikh Ramgarhia confederacy, under the famous Jassa Singh, then occupied Batala, Dmanagar, Kalanaur, Srigovind- pur, and other places, the rest of the Bari Doab south of Dinanagar falling into the hands of the Kanhayas, while west of the Ravi the Bhangi confederacy rose to power. The rival confederacies soon fell out, and a struggle for supremacy ensued between the Ramgarhias and Kanhayas; the Bhangi, who supported the former, lost their power in these parts in 1774, and Jassa Singh himself was expelled by the Kanhayas. He returned in 1783, but again lost Batala to the Kanhayas in 1786 ; and two years after his death, in 1806, all the remaining possessions of the Ramgarhia confederacy were confiscated by Ranjit Singh. The Kanhaya estates were confiscated in 1811, and later on Batala and its dependencies were assigned to Sher Singh, a putative son of Ranjit Singh by his Kanhaya wife, Mahtab Kaur. Dinanagar was a favourite resort of Ranjit Singh, and it was there that in 1838 he received the Macnaghten mission which negotiated the proposed alliance for placing Shah Shuja on the throne of Kabul. Pathankot and a few neighbouring villages in the plains, together with all the hilly portion of the District, formed part of the country ceded by the Sikhs to the British after the first Sikh War in 1846. Under the original distribution of the new territory they were attached to Kangra; but after the final
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