The Rakhi system
Read the Rakhi system through Browne’s protection agreement and Forster’s hill tribute, keeping their different assessment bases and reported reach clear.
Punjab and hills
History · A guide to the archive
Protection, associations and Lahore power
Compare protection payments, Sikh associations, Lahore’s acquisition and Nowshera through selected early accounts and later memory.
How to approach this subject
Start with the terms used in a selected account. Compare the stated base of a payment before comparing percentages, and distinguish a named chief from the association to which a later passage connects him. Trace who supplies a reported grant or a disputed date. Two books may share an earlier account and therefore cannot automatically corroborate each other. Read the sequence from fighting to settlement with care, then ask how a later discussion of poetic memory changes the question being answered.
An intentional selection
Begin with these entries
The Bhangi misl
The Bhangi misl was an eighteenth-century Sikh chiefship. Historical accounts trace its leadership, territorial power and changing alliances.
Lahore, Gujrat and Amritsar
The Ramgarhia misl
Follow Ramgarhia recovery, Jodh Singh’s political standing and later confiscation, distinguishing an association’s changing position from one chief’s life.
Batala and the Jalandhar Doab
The Sukerchakia misl
Trace Sukerchakia power through the Gujranwala stronghold, Maha Singh’s reported alliances and the regency that followed his death, using early accounts.
Gujranwala, Jammu and Gujrat
Ranjit Singh’s capture of Lahore
Read the 1799 acquisition of Lahore through the reported grant, named collaborators and subsequent opposition, with the two related narratives identified.
Lahore
The Battle of Nowshera
Follow Nowshera’s fighting and tributary settlement through an early compilation, then a later study of local poetic memory, retaining chronology limits.
Nowshera and Peshawar