Remaking a Hindu King: Authority and Legitimacy in the Early Tehri State

Abstract

When invading Gurkha armies forced the Raja of Garhwal, Pradyumna Shah, to flee his capitol, Srinagar, in 1803/4, they inaugurated a 12-year occupation recalled in British and Garhwali sources as brutal and rapacious. Pradyumna Shah was shortly killed on the battlefield, but his son, Sudarshan Shah, remained in hiding in a merchant’s haveli near present-day Haridwar for over a decade. When British armies helped Sudarshan Shah drive the Gurkhas from Garhwal in 1815, the impoverished young king, unable to pay the costs of the war, was forced to cede half of Garhwal, including his ancestral capitol. Over the course of his long reign, Sudarshan Shah (d. 1859) faced significant challenges in rebuilding Garhwal and its institutions while battling a range of rivals who challenged his authority and asserted territorial claims at the outskirts of his influence. One of his principal internal adversaries were the muafidars (feudal rulers) of Saklana, who rose to local power in the vacuum created by the Gurkha occupation. In the unsettled period immediately following the Gurkha expulsion, British agent William Fraser had granted them semi-independence from the raja in gratitude for their military support. This presentation will examine the bitter rivalry between Sudarshan Shah and the Saklana muafi that marked much of Sudarshan’s rule, highlighting how these rivalries shaped the early Tehri state and continue to resonate in the collective memory of their descendants.