Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland

Abstract

KingsHiP and Polit y on tHe Himalayan Borderland grant number 334489) enabled this project's completion -my warm thanks to them all.The responsive assistance of staff members at depositaries and libraries across the globe was indispensable for research. My deep thanks to the staff at the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the National Archives of India in New Delhi, and the Himachal Pradesh Department of Arts, Languages & Cultures Library at Shimla -a great many of the sources that are mentioned in this book would have been inaccessible without them. A shorter version of the third chapter was published in Modern Asian Studies, my thanks to Cambridge University Press for allowing its reproduction in an expanded format here, and to Lucy Rhymer of the same for insightful remarks on this project as a whole. Further credits are due to Alexander Cherniak for help with Kahluri diacritics, to Offek Orr for maps that are both readable and reflective of the mythic qualities attributed to Pahari Rajputs in modern historiography, and to Isabelle Ratié for photographs of the region.Parts of this book had developed through scholarly exchanges in various academic platforms. In Germanophone circles, my thanks to William Sax for Heidelbergian hospitality and engrossing discussions around the globe, and to Martin Gaenszle and Michael Mann for facilitating an exposition of key topics from the book in Vienna and Berlin, respectively. I am grateful to Elena de Rossi Filibeck and John Bray for fruitful collaborations during early phases of research in Rome. In Paris, I am thankful to the faculty and staff of the Centre d'Études Himalayannes (CNRS, UPR 299) for many warm welcomes and engaging scholarly enquiries; to Marie Lecomte-Tilouine and Anne de Sales for immaculately planned workshops that persistently managed to break new grounds in Himalayan Studies; and to Daniela Berti and Véronique Bouillier for delightful exchanges over the years. Further thanks to Emmanuel Francis for discussions at the Centre d'Études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud and elsewhere.Across the Channel, I am grateful to Roy Fischel, Michael Hutt, and James Mallinson of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London for comments on an earlier version of Chapter 2. Farther still beyond the Atlantic, my thanks to Mark Turin for prompting a rethinking of Himalayan history, to Sara Shneiderman for pointed comments on the same, and to Catherine Warner for collegial collaboration on the topic. For academic exchanges in conferences and research institutes in India, I am grateful to