The Chib History Book (1997), Chapter by Chapter

The Chib history book behind this website is a 1997 Urdu compilation of about 450 pages by Raja Muhammad Iftikhar Ali Khan, an advocate of Karachi from Barhang near Bhimber. Named after Raja Shadab Khan, known as Hazrat Baba Shadi Shaheed, it covers the Chib Rajputs from their Katoch origins to their rajas, clans, jagirs and shrine. This guide follows the whole book in its own order, from page 8 to page 451, and links every part to the articles that retell it. Its main written source, Thakur Major Singh’s Tarikh-e-Chibhal of about 1926, now has its own guide: Tarikh-e-Chibhal, chapter by chapter.

About the book and its compiler

The copy used here begins at page 8; its title page survives as a torn leaf at the back. The subject is the raja of Bhimber, in today’s Azad Jammu and Kashmir near the Pakistani Punjab border, whom the book places in the time of Sultan Ibrahim Lodhi and the early Mughals and from whom it traces most Chib families. The compiler, who calls himself a descendant of the Baba, says the idea had been with him for a quarter of a century, and he formed the Hazrat Baba Shadi Shaheed Academy to carry it out.

He calls the work a taleef, a compilation. Long extracts from Thakur Major Singh’s Tarikh-e-Chibhal and Maulvi Zain-ul-Abidin Kohi Samahnavi’s unpublished manuscript stand beside British records, family trees, inscriptions and living witnesses, and where they disagree the book often prints both. Some chapters mention “the current year 1998” and a death in early 1999, so the copy used appears to be a revised or later printing.

How the Chib history book is organised

The book has no numbered chapters. Its contents list (pp. 9–10) has 58 entries, but it is a guide rather than an index. It omits whole sections, among them Chibhal and Bhimber (pp. 33–47), the Pothi Jang Khan family (pp. 73–80) and the shrine’s description and photographs, and between Raja Dom Khan and Khari Kariali its page numbers often differ from the text. This guide follows the headings where they are actually printed.