Aftermath of Treaty of Amritsar (1846): Revisiting Accounts of Robert Thorp and Arthur Brinckman on Kashmir

The Treaty of Amritsar (1846) is an important subject for social scientists for it not only created Jammu and Kashmir (including Ladakh) as an integrated state, but gave birth to strange system that made the populace of Kashmir ‘subjects’ (and a property) of a ruler. The administration that emerged subsequent to the deal between the British and Gulab Singh had legal standing to treat the people of Kashmir as a jagir of the ruler. It had no uniformity for there were few distinguished classes which stood exception to general subject-hood of the masses of Kashmir. The firsthand documents are important historical sources to understand the polity, economy and society that come up in the backdrop of radical legal transformations. The two documentary accounts Cashmere Misgovernment [1868] and Wrongs of Cashmere [1870] by Robert Thorp and Arthur Brinckman, respectively, hold similar importance for their value in realizing the gross injustice that people of Kashmir faced and resisted. These two ‘small’ works, being complementary to one another, give us some glimpse of the pattern of miseries, tortures, misrule and cruelty the people of the Vale faced and lived through. This paper stands close to these two works to explore the life-lived in Kashmir, and as such are taken as one of the sources to imagine and understand ordinary life in the immediate background of Treaty of Amritsar (1846).