Garhwal kingdom

The fifty-two forts

Garhwal takes its name from the garhs, the hill forts that divided the country among petty chiefs until Ajay Pal unified them in the fifteenth century and moved the capital to Srinagar on the Alaknanda. The Panwar rulers claimed descent from the Paramāras of Malwa, a claim of the usual kind.

The kingdom's importance was religious as much as political: Badrinath and Kedarnath, and the sources of the Ganga and Yamuna at Gangotri and Yamunotri, all lie within it, and the char dham pilgrimage circuit that links them passed under its protection and administration.

Gorkha invasion and partition

The Gorkhas overran Garhwal in 1803, and the raja was killed at the battle of Khurbura. British intervention in the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814–16 expelled them, but the price was partition: the British annexed the eastern half as British Garhwal and restored the western half to Sudarshan Shah, who founded Tehri as his capital in 1815.

Tehri Garhwal acceded to India in 1949. The town of Tehri itself was submerged in 2005 by the reservoir of the Tehri dam, and its inhabitants resettled — the kingdom's capital of a century and a half is now under water.

Garhwal's other modern association is the Chipko movement, which began in the district in the 1970s when villagers, mostly women, prevented commercial felling by embracing the trees.