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 Chibs descend from the Katoch rajas of Kangra, one of the oldest royal houses of the Himalayas. Around 1400 Raja Partab Chand, son of Raja Megh Chand, founded the Chib state of Bhimber, and his son Chib Chand gave the clan and the land of Chibhal their name.
