The history of the Chib Rajputs, from their Katoch origins to Bhimber and beyond.
Long before Bhimber, the ancestors of the Chibs ruled Trigarta, the land of three rivers. Its king Susharma appears in the Mahabharata as an ally of the Kauravas, and the Katoch rajas of Kangra kept his memory alive in one of the longest royal genealogies in the world.
In 326 BC Alexander the Great met King Porus on the banks of the Jhelum, the river that flows past the Chib homeland. Katoch tradition and the Chibs’ shajra remember Porus as Raja Parmanand Chandra, an ancestor of the Chib Rajputs.
For centuries the fort of Kangra was the seat of the Chibs’ ancestors, the Katoch rajas. Mahmud of Ghazni plundered it, Firoz Shah Tughlaq besieged it and Jahangir finally took it: the story of the ancestral stronghold of the Katoch rajas.
Around 1400 the three sons of Raja Megh Chand of Kangra founded three royal houses: Kangra, Guler and Bhimber. How Hari Chand fell into a well and founded Guler, and why the Chibs count the Katoch houses of Kangra and Guler as their kin.
The hills between the Jhelum and the Chenab were known in ancient times as Darvabhisara, and their king Abisares dealt with Alexander the Great. Later they became Chibhal, the land of the Chibs. The long history of the Chib homeland.
Before the Mughals, Bhimber already guarded the southern road into Kashmir. In the age of the Kashmir Sultans a Chib raja turned back an invading army, fugitives sought refuge in his hills, and the armies of three empires passed beneath them.
Rupyal, Barwana, Ghaniyal, Ghaghial and ten more: the fourteen septs of the Chib clan, the ancestors they are named after, and the old order of mandis, garhs and dheris that once divided the kingdom of Bhimber.
After Raja Sultan Khan, the Chibs lost Bhimber to the rising Dogra power of Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu. How more than four centuries of Chib rule came to an end between the 1820s and the Treaty of Amritsar of 1846, and what became of the old ruling families.
A French doctor in the camp of Aurangzeb, an English veterinary surgeon on his way to Central Asia and an English artist bound for Kashmir: what three European travellers saw at Bhimber between 1665 and the 1830s.
In the 1960s the waters of Mangla Dam drowned old Mirpur and some 280 villages in the Chib homeland. Many of the displaced families set out for Britain, and today Chib families live across the world. How a dam shaped the modern Chib story.
