The treaty of Amritsar
Gulab Singh, a Dogra Rajput of Jammu, rose in the service of Ranjit Singh, who made him raja of Jammu in 1822. He and his commander Zorawar Singh conquered Ladakh in the 1830s and invaded western Tibet. In the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845–46 he kept aloof and helped negotiate the peace. By the treaty of Lahore the defeated Sikh state ceded Kashmir to the British, and by the treaty of Amritsar, a week later, the British transferred Kashmir and the hill country east of the Indus to Gulab Singh in exchange for seventy-five lakh rupees, under British paramountcy. Critics have called the arrangement the sale of Kashmir.
The Dogra state
The state combined very different regions: Hindu-majority Jammu, the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir, Buddhist Ladakh, and the northern areas of Gilgit and Baltistan. The Dogra rulers were Hindus ruling a Muslim-majority population. Ranbir Singh and Pratap Singh consolidated the administration, and the British, concerned with the Russian frontier, established a political agency at Gilgit and in 1935 leased the Gilgit area from the maharaja. Heavy taxation, forced labour and the poverty of the Kashmiri peasantry were reported by visitors and officials.
The political movement
In 1931 protests in Srinagar against the maharaja's government were fired upon, and the movement that followed led to the formation of the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference in 1932 under Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. In 1939 Abdullah renamed it the National Conference and opened it to all communities, allying it with the Indian National Congress, while a revived Muslim Conference aligned with the Muslim League. In 1946 Abdullah launched a Quit Kashmir campaign against the maharaja and was imprisoned.
1947
At independence Maharaja Hari Singh did not accede to either India or Pakistan. In the months that followed, a rebellion broke out in Poonch, and communal violence occurred in Jammu. In late October 1947 armed tribesmen from Pakistan's North-West Frontier entered the state and advanced towards Srinagar. On 26 October the maharaja signed the instrument of accession to India, and Indian troops were flown to Srinagar the next day. The war that followed ended with a ceasefire on 1 January 1949, which left the state divided along a line that later became the Line of Control. The status of the state has remained disputed between India and Pakistan since then.
Further reading
- Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi. Macmillan, 2007
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
- Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Yale University Press, 2007
See also
- Kashmir — Kashmir is a Himalayan valley in the northwestern subcontinent whose early history encompasses successive Buddhist and Hindu dynasties, the distinct philosophical tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, and a 14th-century transition to Muslim rule under the Shah Mir dynasty.
- Islamic rule in Kashmir — Islamic rule in Kashmir denotes the political and religious transformation of the Kashmir Valley that began with the Shah Mir dynasty's founding in 1339 and continued through the Sultanate, Mughal, Afghan, Sikh, and Dogra periods, along with the region's twentieth-century history of partition, insurgency, and the displacement of its Hindu minority.
- Sikh Empire — The Sikh Empire ruled the Punjab and the northwest from Lahore between 1799 and 1849, the last major Indian state to fall to the British and the only one to take Peshawar from the Afghans.
- Anglo-Sikh Wars — The Anglo-Sikh Wars were two conflicts between the East India Company and the Sikh Empire, fought in 1845-46 and 1848-49, which ended in the annexation of the Punjab.
- Jawaharlal Nehru — Jawaharlal Nehru was an Indian nationalist leader and the first Prime Minister of independent India, serving from 1947 until his death in 1964.
- Partition of India — The Partition of India in 1947 divided British India into the independent dominions of India and Pakistan, ending British colonial rule and triggering mass migration and communal violence on a scale unmatched in modern history.
- Namgyal dynasty of Ladakh — The Namgyals ruled Ladakh from Leh from the fifteenth century until the Dogra conquest of 1842, and under Sengge Namgyal built the Leh palace and the great monasteries.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.