Kumaon kingdom

Almora

The Chands established themselves at Champawat as Katyūrī power fragmented and by the sixteenth century held the whole of Kumaon, moving the capital to Almora in 1563. The kingdom controlled the trade routes to Tibet through the Johar and Darma valleys, along which Bhotiya traders carried borax, salt and wool.

Kumaon's temple architecture — the Jageshwar group, Baijnath, the Katarmal sun temple — spans the Katyūrī and Chand periods, and the Nanda Devi Rāj Jāt, a pilgrimage held every twelve years to the mountain goddess, is among the longest and most demanding religious processions in India.

Gorkha and British

The Gorkhas took Kumaon in 1790 and held it for twenty-five years, a period Kumaoni tradition remembers harshly. The British expelled them in the Anglo-Nepalese War and annexed Kumaon outright in 1816 rather than restoring the Chands.

The province was administered under the non-regulation system by a succession of commissioners, and its hill peasantry avoided the zamindari tenures of the plains. Almora and Nainital became important hill stations, and Kumaon later produced a disproportionate share of India's soldiers and, in the twentieth century, of its environmental movement.