Kangri

The Kangri are the people of the Kangra hills in the Himalayan foothills, who speak a Western Pahari language once written in the Takri script. Their country was split among Rajput principalities, including Kangra, ruled by the Katoch dynasty and counted the oldest and largest state of the Punjab Hills.

The fort of Kangra drew plundering armies from the plains: Mahmud of Ghazni sacked its temple treasures in 1009, and in 1333 Raja Prithvi Chand II defeated an army of Muhammad bin Tughluq. Mughal forces serving Jahangir took the fort in 1620 after a fourteen-month siege, reducing the Katoch rajas to vassals.

As Mughal power faded, Raja Sansar Chand recovered his ancestral fort in 1789 and built a short-lived hill dominion, but a Gorkha invasion in 1806 and the treaty of Jawalamukhi in 1809 delivered Kangra to Ranjit Singh's Sikh Empire.