Reassessing the Creation of Jammu and Kashmir: A Re-reading of Dogra and British Archival Sources, 1820–1858

Ranjodh Singh Jamwal; Puneet Sharma

doi:10.62127/aijmr.2026.v04i04.1439

Reassessing the Creation of Jammu and Kashmir: A Re-reading of Dogra and British Archival Sources, 1820–1858

Author(s)	Mr. Ranjodh Singh Jamwal, Mr. Puneet Sharma
Country	India
Abstract	The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir came into formal existence in March 1846 through the Treaty of Amritsar, an event that has been narrated almost exclusively as a "sale" of the Kashmir Valley by the British East India Company to Maharaja Gulab Singh. That characterisation, although it captures something real about the colonial calculations at work, obscures more than it reveals. This paper draws on Dogra court records — the Rajdarshini chronicles, Persian firmans, revenue settlements preserved at the Mubarak Mandi Archives in Jammu — alongside British colonial records held at the National Archives of India and the India Office Records in the British Library, and argues that what emerged in 1846 was not created overnight. The Dogra state had been taking shape for at least two decades before the treaty was signed: through military campaigns into Ladakh, Baltistan, and Gilgit between 1834 and 1842; through the internal disintegration of the Sikh Empire; and through British frontier calculations that had as much to do with fiscal exhaustion as with the "Great Game." The treaty, in other words, did not conjure a state out of nothing — it gave legal dress to a territorial reality that already existed on the ground. When the Dogra and British archives are read together, and where necessary against each other, a more complicated picture of state formation in the western Himalayas comes into view — one in which the populations governed by these arrangements, whose perspectives neither archive took the trouble to record, also begin to appear.
Keywords	Princely states, Maharaja, Jammu and Kashmir, British
Discipline	Arts
Published In	Volume 4, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-10
DOI	https://doi.org/10.62127/aijmr.2026.v04i04.1439

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Reassessing the Creation of Jammu and Kashmir: A Re-reading of Dogra and British Archival Sources, 1820–1858

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