The British obsession with the purported “Russian romanticization” of Kashmir, was probably a projection of their own “romantic” colonial representation of the region, as they called it the “Happy Valley” and the “Home away from home”.

I have scurried in part 1 of this series, through the historical journey of Kashmir, being conquered and reconquered, as its mantle of rule was being tossed from the hand of one empire to another, since the Vedic Era, till we touched down at the partition of India in 1947.

Now, let’s close up on the timeline, during the period that led to the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846, until end of the Dogra Dynasty Maharajas. This will unavoidably compel us to concentrate on the role / rule of the British Empire, namely, the British East India Company, focusing on rarely visited angles of the story.

We are hopping on an overwhelmingly extensive historical timeline for the bounds of one article indeed, but let’s pick a starting point anyway, and zoom in.

Maharaja Gulab Singh Jamwal

Gulab Singh, a Hindu descendant of the Dogra Rajput clan, who were known for their toponym family name Jamwal, a name derived from the founder of Jammu, Jambu Lochan according to their narrative.

Gulab was a Commander in the Sikh Empire, which ruled Jammu and Kashmir, from 1799 until its defeat at the hands of the British East India Company, at the outset of the Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1849. Singh decided to change his allegiance and sided with the Britons during the First Anglo-Sikh War which started on 11 December 1845.

On a side note, American and European mercenaries were hired earlier, by the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Ranjit Singh, as he was building up his military forces, for a potential face-off against the British or the Afghans, who were both threats to the rule of Kashmir.

An additional complexity added to the Kashmir pot, which was forced to take part in the Great Game of Empires over this conflicted area in that period. Not to mention that both Hindu and Muslim soldiers were incorporated into the Sikh army to face such imminent threats. It is almost impossible to summarily describe the confusion of such a mix-up. We’ll see later how the British chose to deal with that.

Gulab Singh’s services were rendered to Ranjit Singh’s forces, during the Annexation of Kashmir from the hands of the Afghan Durrani Empire in 1820. Services that Ranjit appreciated so much, and which gave rise to Gulab himself, and his family as well, before Gulab switched sides, and lent his services to the British, 25 years later.

The Lahore Crisis

But earlier, as Raja (Governor-General) of Jammu, Gulab Singh was already the most formidable leader in the Sikh Empire’s military and feudal systems. Famous for his official assignments to crush rebellions against Sikh rule, especially in Lahore. Which turned him into the richest Raja in the north, due to his looting of Lahore’s treasures during his rebellion-crushing missions.

After the death of Ranjit Singh, Lahore, the capital of the Sikh Empire, turned during the 1840s into a stage for conspiracies, revolts, assassinations, and scrambling for the throne. That opened the space for Gulab and his two Jamwal brothers, Suchet and Dhian, to join the quest for the mantle of rule.

The British East India Company, already the most dangerous player on the game board, found an opportunity in Gulab, to indirectly rule the area with him acting as a Maharaja, because they were still not ready to rule Jammu and Kashmir directly, due to the pressure on their military amenities and resources caused by their occupation of the entire Punjab region.

Gulab who decided to switch to their side, was put on the British tributary list, with the condition of paying a war indemnity of 75,000 Rupees. Gulab also crushed another rebellion during this period, by the Muslim Governor of Kashmir, Shaikh Imam-ud-Din, with the help of the British Major-General, Herbert Benjamin Edwardes, historically famous for his title of “Hero of Multan”, after he played a paramount role in securing the British victory in their second war against the Sikhs.

When the British East India Company decided to establish the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, based on the Amritsar Treaty of 1846, Gulab Singh became the First Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, and the founder of the Dogra Dynasty, which continued to rule the region under the suzerainty of the British India Empire.

The Great Game

Kashmir’s position, at the time, was increasingly strategic for all the competing powers, not just internally, but in its wider geographical surroundings as well. It was considered a buffer state between the Afghans and the British-controlled lands of the Indian subcontinent.

While Russia, then under the rule of Emperor Nicholas I, during whose reign Russia was continuously expanding to the south Caucasus, after their victories over the Persian Empire in the late 1820s. As well as establishing control over the pastoral lands of Kazakhstan in the 1840s. Which for the British meant that the Russian threat was looming from the north, further confirming Kashmir’s importance as a buffer zone to the northwest of British-ruled lands, whether against the Russians or the Afghans who might invade their precious “Koh-i-Noor”.

So, it wasn’t Kashmir’s natural beauty and nice weather, or merely the profitable Pashmini shawl trade around Central Asia, that got the British interested. The real reasons behind the British purported goal of “introducing modernity” to Kashmir were geopolitical reasons, that pushed the British East India Company to indirectly take control over Jammu and Kashmir from the Sikhs, and then blaming themselves for not ruling it directly, so they gradually do.

The Double-Edged Autonomy

As fears from the Russian expansion elevated, and the worry that the Muslim sufferings under a Hindu Maharaja, might invite a move to aid from their Afghani co-religionists across the border, the British found themselves increasingly more involved in the direct rule of Jammu and Kashmir, through appointing a British “Resident”, and an approach which kept eating the powers of the Local Maharaja.

The British turned the “autonomy” of Kashmir, into another point of suffering for the area, which seemed torn apart between establishing that supposed autonomy because of this geopolitical significance in the Great Game, and losing its autonomy due to the same exact reason.

Even after the instalment of a pro-British Mir on the throne of Hunza, and the British extending their rule further into Afghani land to the northeast in 1893 to expand the buffer zone, and even the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The British still were imposing the will of their Resident over the Maharaja, perpetually imprisoning Kashmir in a “colonial frontier” position, and a “buffer zone” status on their north-western colonial boundaries.

The Harmful British Delusions

The British obsession with the purported “Russian Romanticization” of Kashmir, was probably a projection of their own “romantic” colonial representation of the region, as they called it the “Happy Valley” and the “Home away from home”. Turning the place, into a “touristic destination” to escape from the southern summer heat, while portraying it as a place that lives in harmony, away from the religious antagonism that afflicted other regions of the Indian subcontinent to the south.

This colonial delusion is nothing surprising, it’s a characteristic of any colonialist power. But the harm caused by this complete denial of the historical background of the place, forcing it to call itself harmonious, as an explosive undercurrent continues to stream out of its complex history, we have briefly visited in the first part of this series, is simply beyond the word “delusion”.

Linguists need to come up with way more powerful words than “delusion” or “denial” to describe what the British and their East India Company have done to Kashmir, just by forcibly sticking Kashmir’s entire complex history filled with misery, conflicts, pilgrimage, slavery, pogroms, and bigotry, at the hands of sects, tribes, religions and competing empires who even brought in mercenaries into the fabric of Kashmir, into an imagined tight bottleneck of a so-called harmonious “Happy Valley”, or a strategic “Colonial Frontier”, with a figurehead Maharaja controlled by a British “Resident”.

And we haven’t even visited but one narrow angle of the British East India Company’s horrors inflicted upon an entire subcontinent, and on its north-western “frontier” in Jammu and Kashmir.

What word do you think a linguist can come up with to describe the British rule over Kashmir? I’m sure I don’t know. But what I am sure of, is that the word “Happy” doesn’t even register in the Kashmiri dictionary, no matter what the British claim in their historical records.

Concluded

Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.su/2025/06/18/kashmir-an-autonomous-happy-valley-or-a-british-great-game-frontier/