Published ahead of the state’s 26th Statehood Day, 9 November 2026 — the companion history to our Uttarakhand travel guides.
Uttarakhand is a young state with one of the oldest identities in India. The name itself is Puranic; the hills were called Kedarkhand (roughly today’s Garhwal) and Manaskhand (roughly today’s Kumaon) in the Skanda Purana, and the land has been Devbhumi — the Land of the Gods — for as long as the Char Dham has been walked. But the political story most people assume is ancient is actually a recent settlement: one dynasty first unified these hills around 700 CE; two rival kingdoms — the Chands of Kumaon and the Panwars of Garhwal — ruled them for five centuries; the Gorkhas of Nepal seized both by 1804; the British took them at the Treaty of Sugauli (1815–16) and split Garhwal in two; and after forty years of neglect inside Uttar Pradesh, a movement that turned on the Rampur Tiraha firing of 1994 finally won statehood on 9 November 2000.
That is the whole arc — ancient sacred geography, medieval twin kingdoms, colonial surgery, and a twenty-six-year-old state still negotiating its relationship with the plains — and this guide walks it in order, with a master timeline, the dynasties, the movements, and a map of where you can stand in each layer of history today. It is the companion piece to our guides to Uttarakhand’s seasons, snow, hill stations and treks: the why behind everywhere they send you.
Why Uttarakhand’s History Confuses Everyone: Two Kingdoms Under One Name
Three traps catch almost everyone who reads about — or writes about — Uttarakhand’s past:
- The state is young; the name is old. “Uttarakhand” appears as a geographic term in ancient Hindu texts, and the movement that demanded a separate hill state used it from the 1970s. But the political entity — India’s 27th state — exists only since 9 November 2000, and for its first seven years it was officially called Uttaranchal. When a state’s name is older than the state by two millennia, people conflate the two and assume a political continuity that never existed.
- For most of history, there was no single Uttarakhand. There was Kumaon and there was Garhwal — two rival kingdoms with separate dynasties, capitals (Almora and Srinagar), cuisines, dialects and origin legends. Today’s Garhwali–Kumaoni distinction, which surfaces in everything from folk songs to state politics, is the living memory of that rivalry. Any history that treats “the hills” as one place is skipping the most important fact about them.
- The modern borders are colonial artefacts. The 1816 Sugauli settlement didn’t just transfer the hills to the British — it split Garhwal itself in two: the eastern half became British territory, the western half was handed back as the princely state of Tehri Garhwal, which remained a separate political world until 1949. People wonder why Tehri has its own identity; the answer is that for 132 years it was literally a different country.
Add the era trap — guidebooks freeze the state in its sacred geography (Pandavas, Shankaracharya, Char Dham) and skip the political story, while exam books do exactly the reverse — and you get a public understanding that is half mythology, half date-list, and no narrative. This guide runs the full arc instead.
What This Guide Covers (and How to Read It)
The sections run in chronological order: ancient Uttarakhand (the Puranic geography, the Katyuris, Adi Shankaracharya), the medieval two-kingdom era, the Gorkha conquest, British rule, the hills in the freedom struggle, the road to statehood, and the modern state from 2000 to the 26th Statehood Day of 2026. Two reference tools sit inside: a one-table master timeline, and a traveller’s map of where each historical layer can be seen today.
Keep one frame in mind throughout: Kumaon and Garhwal, two rooms in one house. Nearly every event in this history happens twice — once in each kingdom — until 1790, when the Gorkhas made them one story, and 2000, when India finally did.
Uttarakhand at a Glance: A One-Table Timeline
| Period | What happened |
|---|---|
| Vedic–Puranic era | The hills appear in early texts as sacred geography; the Skanda Purana names Kedarkhand (Garhwal) and Manaskhand (Kumaon); Devbhumi tradition takes root; Pandava legends attach to Kedarnath and Swargarohini |
| 7th century | Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang describes hill principalities; the Katyuri dynasty rises around this period |
| 8th century | Adi Shankaracharya revives Badrinath, is linked to Kedarnath’s stone temple, and founds Jyotirmath (Joshimath) — one of his four cardinal mathas |
| 11th century | Katyuri power fragments into petty chiefdoms; the field is cleared for two new kingdoms |
| c. 11th–16th century | Chand dynasty rises in Kumaon (first capital Champawat); Panwar dynasty consolidates Garhwal — Ajay Pal unites the “64 garhs”, capital to Srinagar (by ~1519) |
| 1560s–1597 | Chand capital moves to Almora (1560s); Rudra Chand (r. 1568–97) builds the Malla Mahal, meets Akbar at Lahore |
| 1790–91 | Gorkhas of Nepal conquer Kumaon |
| 14 May 1804 | Battle of Khurbura — Garhwal falls; Pradyuman Shah is killed |
| 1814–16 | Anglo-Nepalese War; Treaty of Sugauli signed 2 December 1815, ratified 4 March 1816 |
| 1816–1947 | British rule: Kumaon division (with eastern Garhwal) under the Empire; Tehri Garhwal princely state in the west; Mussoorie (mid-1820s), Nainital (1839), the railway to Dehradun (1900), FRI (1906) |
| 1921–1942 | Coolie Begar satyagraha, Non-Cooperation, Quit India; Veer Chandra Singh Garhwali’s Peshawar stand (1930); G.B. Pant rises from Almora to the United Provinces premiership |
| 1947–1979 | Hills inside Uttar Pradesh; neglect, forest disputes, out-migration build; Uttarakhand Kranti Dal founded (1979) |
| 1973–74 | Chipko movement — first actions at Mandal (1973), the defining stand at Reni led by Gaura Devi (March 1974) |
| 1994 | Statehood movement peaks; Rampur Tiraha firing, night of 1–2 October |
| 9 November 2000 | India’s 27th state — initially Uttaranchal; Nityanand Swami first Chief Minister |
| January 2007 | Renamed Uttarakhand |
| 16–17 June 2013 | Kedarnath disaster — 5,700+ later presumed dead; the temple survives, the town is destroyed |
| March 2020 | Gairsain declared the state’s summer capital |
| 9 November 2026 | The state marks 26 years |
Ancient Uttarakhand: Kedarkhand, Manaskhand and the Land of the Gods
The hills enter recorded imagination not as a kingdom but as a sacred map. The Skanda Purana’s two khandas — Kedarkhand and Manaskhand — are the first written articulation of the two-region frame that still organises the state: Kedarkhand covering the Garhwal temples and the Ganga’s upper watershed, Manaskhand covering Kumaon’s lakes and shrines. Layered onto it came the great epics’ geography: the Pandavas’ final journey through the hills, the ascent toward Swargarohini — the “stairway to heaven” peak above the Har Ki Dun valley — and the founding legend of Kedarnath itself, where the Pandavas are said to have sought Shiva to atone for the war. Near Badrinath, a cave tradition names Ved Vyasa, the compiler of the Mahabharata, in the rock above the Alaknanda. The 7th-century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang left one of the first outside descriptions of the region’s hill principalities — proof that this world was known far beyond the hills long before it was a state.
The Katyuri Dynasty: The First Unified Kingdom
Around 700 CE, the Katyuri dynasty rose in the Kumaon hills and did something no power had done before or would do again for a thousand years: it held most of present-day Uttarakhand as one kingdom. Their capital, Kartikeyapura, sits in ruins at modern Baijnath in the Bageshwar valley, where the temple complex they raised to Shiva still stands beside the Gomti. The Katyuris were prolific temple builders — the Baijnath group, and the extraordinary Katarmal Sun temple on its ridge above the Kosi near Almora, belong to their cultural world — and their memory survives in copper-plate inscriptions and local legend. By the 11th century the dynasty had fragmented into the petty chiefdoms — the thakurais and raikas — that its successors would spend centuries absorbing.
Adi Shankaracharya and the Sacred Geography
In the 8th century, Adi Shankaracharya walked into these hills and, in effect, redrew their map. Badrinath’s worship was revived; the stone temple of Kedarnath is attributed to his era; and at Joshimath he established Jyotirmath, one of the four cardinal mathas of Hinduism — a statement that this remote valley was a centre of the faith, not its periphery. The institutions he left behind organise the region’s economy and calendar to this day: the Char Dham Yatra — Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, Badrinath — opens around Akshaya Tritiya each spring and closes around Diwali each autumn, a rhythm our seasons guide covers in practical detail. When a state’s biggest industry runs on an 8th-century pilgrimage circuit, the 8th century is not ancient history — it is current affairs.
The Medieval Two-Kingdom Era: Chands of Kumaon and the Panwar Kingdom of Garhwal
After the Katyuri fragmentation, the hills settled into their classic two-kingdom shape — and stayed there for five hundred years.
The Chand Dynasty of Kumaon
The Chands built Kumaon. Their founder, Som Chand, is traced by tradition to a plains origin — accounts variously place him at Jhusi near Prayag or at Kannauj — and the dynasty’s early chronology is genuinely contested, with sources placing its rise anywhere between the 7th and the 11th–12th centuries; what is certain is the world they made. Their first capital was Champawat, still one of Kumaon’s most atmospheric temple towns. In the 1560s the capital moved to a new ridge-top fortress town the Chads called Alamnagar — today’s Almora — and under Rudra Chand (r. 1568–1597) the kingdom flowered: he built the Malla Mahal palace, and he travelled to Lahore to meet Akbar as a peer. Later Chands pushed into the Terai, fought the Rohilla powers of the plains, and presided over a court culture whose art — the Aipan floor-paintings, the ballads, the hill architecture of carved wooden doors and stone temples — remains Kumaoni identity to this day. The dynasty’s run ended not in decline but in conquest: the Gorkhas took Kumaon in 1790–91, and the last Chand raja fled into the hills.
The Rise of the Garhwal Kingdom
Garhwal’s name tells its origin: the land of forts. Dozens of small strongholds — the garhs — were ruled by local chiefs until Ajay Pal of the Panwar (Parmar) line — a dynasty tradition traces back to Kanak Pal of Malwa — did in the west what the Chands did in the east: he united the quarrelling “64 garhs” (by tradition’s count) into one kingdom in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. His administrative genius was as much logistical as military: he moved the capital from exposed Chandpur to Devalgarh, and by 1506–1519 had settled it at Srinagar, on the Alaknanda — which remained Garhwal’s political heart for three centuries. The Panwar kings styled themselves Badshah — emperor — and their kingdom’s inaccessibility made the title semi-plausible: Mughal armies probed the hills in the 17th century and found the terrain a better defender than any army. Garhwal’s wealth ran on more than defence: the trans-Himalayan trade through the Mana and Niti passes and up the Johar valley — the same valley that cradles Munsiyari in our hill-stations guide — was carried for centuries by the Bhotiya trading communities, moving grain, wool, borax and salt between Tibet and the plains.
The symmetry is the point: two kingdoms, two capitals, two cultures — and, within fifteen years of each other, the same fate.
The Gorkha Interregnum (1790–1815): Conquest, Resistance and Cruelty
At the end of the 18th century, the expanding Gorkha empire of Nepal — the machine built by Prithvi Narayan Shah — swung west along the Himalaya. Kumaon fell in 1790–91 after brutal fighting. Garhwal held out longer, and its end came in one of the saddest battles in hill memory: Khurbura, 14 May 1804, near modern Dehradun, where Pradyuman Shah’s soldiers — fighting largely with swords and hill weapons — were cut down by the Gorkha army’s guns. The king was killed; the kingdom fell; and commanders like Amar Singh Thapa extended Gorkha administration across both regions.
The eleven years of Gorkha rule — the Gorkhyani — sit in Garhwali and Kumaoni memory as a byword for harshness: punishing taxation, forced recruitment and labour, repression severe enough to empty villages and push whole communities down into the plains. The memory matters because it explains what happened next. When the East India Company went to war with Nepal in 1814–16, hill people did not defend their conquerors — they guided the British, supplied them, and fought alongside them. The hills changed hands for a second time in a generation, this time with local help — an ambivalence (liberation and colonisation in one transaction) that shaped the whole colonial century that followed.
British Rule and the Treaty of Sugauli (1816–1947): Two Garhwals, One Kumaon
The Anglo-Nepalese War ended with the Treaty of Sugauli — signed 2 December 1815 and ratified 4 March 1816 — by which Nepal ceded its western conquests. The settlement’s line-drawing still shapes the map: Kumaon and eastern Garhwal passed to the East India Company, administered as the Kumaon division, while western Garhwal was restored to the deposed Shah dynasty as the princely state of Tehri Garhwal under Sudarshan Shah. Garhwal — one kingdom since Ajay Pal — was split in two, and would remain so until 1949.
Kumaon and British Garhwal
The early British administrators — figures like E. Gardner, the first political agent, who made a point of winning hill trust rather than breaking it — governed a territory the size of a small country from Almora and, later, Nainital. Two of their legacies grew into the modern state’s deepest grievances: the forest settlements, which nationalised the hill commons and put the forests villagers had used for centuries under a new, distant bureaucracy; and the revenue system, whose extractive logic pushed hill households toward migration and army service. The same administration, though, built the schools, roads and institutions that later made the hills unusually literate and politically organised — the seedbed of everything from the freedom movement to the statehood campaign.
Tehri Garhwal: The Princely Exception
The Shah kings ruled their reduced kingdom from Tehri town, and the state’s most visible moderniser, Narendra Shah, built a new capital — Narendra Nagar, its palace still one of the most striking buildings in the hills — in 1919. Tehri Garhwal stayed a separate political world — its own laws, its own court, its own catastrophes — until 1949, when it acceded to the Indian Union. Its last great act of resistance was its land: the Tehri dam, India’s tallest, would eventually drown old Tehri town itself — a 20th-century echo of the state’s oldest theme, the mountains paying for the plains’ progress.
Hill Stations, Railways and Institutions
The British summer came to the hills early. Mussoorie grew from Captain Frederick Young’s house and the Landour cantonment in the mid-1820s; Nainital was “discovered” in 1839 by the sugar merchant P. Barron and rose so fast it became the Kumaon seat; Dehradun filled with schools, survey offices and, in 1906, the Forest Research Institute — the colonnaded cathedral of the very forest bureaucracy the hills would learn to resent. The railway reached Dehradun in 1900, turning a week’s journey into an overnight one. Every Mall Road, gothic church and colonnaded institute you walk past in our hill-stations guide is this century’s sediment.
The Hills in the Freedom Struggle: Coolie Begar, Garhwali and Pant
The national movement reached the hills in three forms.
The hill-specific struggle came first. The Coolie Begar system — compulsory unpaid porterage that forced hill villagers to carry loads for any travelling official — was the rawest face of the colonial state, and it was attacked in agitations through the 1910s that culminated in the Coolie Begar satyagraha of 1921, associated with Badri Datt Pandey and the Non-Cooperation wave. Forest satyagrahas followed — villagers reclaiming their nationalised woods — and in 1942 the Quit India movement flared across Kumaon and Garhwal districts.
The heroes made the hills’ contribution famous. Veer Chandra Singh Garhwali, a rifleman of the Garhwal Regiment, was ordered at Peshawar in 1930 to fire on unarmed Khudai Khidmatgar protesters — Pathans standing silently in the rain — and refused. He was court-martialled, imprisoned and tortured, and came home a legend: the soldier who would not shoot his own conscience. And Govind Ballabh Pant, born in Almora district, became Premier of the United Provinces and its first Chief Minister after independence, then India’s Union Home Minister and a Bharat Ratna — the hill’s argument that it could govern, not merely be governed.
The quieter transformation mattered as much: the Garhwal and Kumaon regiments’ soldiers came home from two world wars with wages, widows’ pensions and an unanswerable question — if the hills could die for an empire, why could they not be heard by a province?
The Road to Statehood: Neglect, Chipko and 1994
The Grievances (1947–1979)
Independence changed the flag, not the frame: the hills became the northern districts of Uttar Pradesh, governed from Lucknow — farther away, in hill terms, than London had ever felt from Mussoorie. The grievance list wrote itself: forests the villages had protected were controlled by a plains bureaucracy; big dams and limestone mines took the hills’ rivers and stone while the hill districts stayed among India’s poorest; jobs meant migration; and every plan for the mountains seemed written by people who had never climbed one. In 1979, the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal gave the accumulated anger a political vehicle and a name for its answer: Uttarakhand.
Chipko (1973–74): The Movement That Hugged the World
Before the statehood demand went political, it went ecological. In 1973 at Mandal in Chamoli district, villagers — led by figures like Chandi Prasad Bhatt — physically blocked contractor axe-men from their forest. The defining image came in March 1974 at Reni, when Gaura Devi and the village women stood in front of the trees and refused to move: chipko — to hug. Sunderlal Bahuguna carried the story to the world, and the world adopted it as the emblem of grassroots environmentalism. But Chipko was always more than trees. It was a political claim — that the hills understood their forests better than the plains did, and might govern themselves better too.
1994: The Year of Rampur Tiraha
By 1994 the statehood demand was a mass movement, and the year became its crucible. A huge Delhi rally in August was met with lathi charges; a planned mass agitation followed. On the night of 1–2 October 1994, busloads of activists travelling from Rishikesh toward Delhi were stopped by police at Rampur Tiraha, on the Muzaffarnagar bypass. What happened there — the firing on unarmed marchers, the deaths of at least six activists, the assault of women travellers — became the movement’s martyrology, the event that made statehood unstoppable. The wheel of justice turned with characteristic slowness: it was June 2026 — thirty-two years later — before three of the policemen involved were finally sentenced, a verdict the state’s papers covered as the closing of an open wound.
Parliament did in six years what Lucknow had delayed for fifty: the Uttar Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2000 passed, and on 9 November 2000 the new state was born.
2000 and After: Birth, Disaster and the Modern State
Statehood and Renaming
The state arrived as Uttaranchal — a compromise name — on 9 November 2000, as India’s 27th state, with Nityanand Swami as its first Chief Minister and Dehradun as its capital. The name never fit: the movement had demanded Uttarakhand, the ancient word, and in January 2007 the state officially took it back. The youngest state in the hills now carries the oldest name in the hills.
The 2013 Disaster
On 16–17 June 2013, cloudbursts over the Kedarnath region triggered catastrophic flooding and landslides through the Char Dham corridor. Kedarnath town was destroyed; the temple survived. More than 5,700 people were later presumed dead — official tallies eventually ran toward six thousand — in one of the worst disasters in independent India’s history. The catastrophe (which our snow and monsoon guides treat as a planning lesson) forced the state to confront its core dilemma: a pilgrimage economy built on exactly the rivers, slopes and weather that a warming climate is making more violent. The rebuilt Kedarnath — new town, new retaining walls, pilgrimage management — is the state’s most visible act of self-reinvention.
The Modern State
Gairsain — deep in the hills, roughly midway between Garhwal and Kumaon — was declared the state’s summer capital in March 2020, honouring the movement’s promise that the state would belong to the mountains, not just to Dehradun’s plains edge. The permanent problems remain the movement’s problems in modern dress: out-migration emptying villages into “ghost hamlets”, disaster risk on a fragile range, and the balance between development and the mountains’ limits. On 9 November 2026, the state turns 26 — old enough that its residents have never known another map, young enough that its founders’ generation still remembers the buses stopped at Rampur Tiraha.
Where to See This History Today: A Traveller’s Map of the Layers
Every era in this article has an address. Walk the state as a sequence of layers:
| Layer | Where to stand in it |
|---|---|
| Puranic and epic | Kedarnath and the Swargarohini views from the Chandrashila trail; Ved Vyas’s cave above Badrinath; the Panch Prayag sequence |
| Katyuri (c. 700–11th c.) | The Baijnath temple complex (their capital, Kartikeyapura) in Bageshwar; the Katarmal Sun temple ridge above Almora |
| Shankaracharya (8th c.) | Jyotirmath at Joshimath; the stone temple of Kedarnath; Badrinath’s shrine and its matha tradition |
| Chand Kumaon | Champawat (first capital); Almora’s cobbled bazaar and Malla Mahal site; the Aipan-painted thresholds of Kumaoni homes |
| Panwar Garhwal | Srinagar (Garhwal) on the Alaknanda — the old capital most travellers drive straight past; Devalgarh above it |
| Gorkha era (1804) | The Khurbura ground in Dehradun, where Pradyuman Shah fell |
| British century | Landour’s churches and cemeteries above Mussoorie; Nainital’s colonial core; Dehradun’s FRI colonnades and the railway station the 1900 line built |
| Tehri state | Narendra Nagar’s palace capital (1919); the drowned old Tehri town’s shoreline at the dam |
| Freedom struggle | Almora’s Pant heritage; the Garhwal Rifles memorials at Lansdowne (our hill-stations guide covers the cantonment) |
| Chipko | Reni and Mandal villages in Chamoli — the modern pilgrimage sites of Indian environmentalism |
| Statehood | Gairsain, the summer capital; Rampur Tiraha’s memorial at Muzaffarnagar |
| 2013 and after | The rebuilt Kedarnath — the most concentrated lesson in the state’s fragility and resilience |
Common Myths and Misconceptions About Uttarakhand’s History
- “Uttarakhand is a new name.” It is the ancient one — Uttaranchal was the new, compromise name, retired in 2007.
- “Uttarakhand has always been one place.” For most of its history it was two kingdoms — Kumaon and Garhwal. The Garhwali–Kumaoni distinction is not social-media trivia; it is five centuries of separate statehood.
- “Nothing happened before the Chands and Panwars.” The Katyuris unified most of the region around 700 CE — centuries earlier — and their temples still stand at Baijnath and Katarmal.
- “The British took everything in 1816.” They took Kumaon and eastern Garhwal; western Garhwal remained the princely state of Tehri until 1949. The colonial border ran through Garhwal.
- “Chipko was a tree-hugging campaign about trees.” It was that — and a political assertion of hill self-rule that fed directly into the statehood movement.
- “The state was born from administrative planning.” It was born of a mass movement whose bloodiest night, Rampur Tiraha (1994), took until 2026 to see even partial legal closure.
- “The 2013 floods were purely a natural event.” The cloudburst was natural; the disaster’s scale reflected decades of riverbed construction, hydropower debate and a changing climate — a distinction the state’s own reconstruction policy now accepts.
- “Devbhumi is tourism branding.” The sacred geography is Puranic in age and organised the hills’ economy for well over a millennium before the first trek operator opened.
What This History Explains About the Uttarakhand You Visit
Read the state through this timeline and its present stops being a puzzle:
- The Char Dham’s six-month calendar is 8th-century sacred geography meeting Himalayan snow — the practical version is in our seasons guide.
- Almora and Srinagar matter out of proportion to their size because they were the twin capitals of the two kingdoms.
- Garhwali and Kumaoni pride — the songs, the food, the friendly rivalry — is the memory of five hundred years of separate statehood.
- Forest and dam politics dominate the state’s news because control of the hills’ resources was the statehood movement’s original grievance.
- The hills empty into Delhi and Dehradun along a migration arc that began with colonial forest settlements and continues through the state’s own success stories.
- Kedarnath’s rebuilding carries such emotional weight because the temple is both the 8th century and 2013 — the state’s continuity and its fragility in one image.
- And 9 November is not just a holiday: it is the answer to a question the hills asked for fifty years.
Two ancient kingdoms, one colonial border, one young state trying to govern both — that is Uttarakhand, and now you know the order in which it happened.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Uttarakhand formed as a state?
9 November 2000, under the Uttar Pradesh Reorganisation Act, as India’s 27th state — carved out of Uttar Pradesh after a decades-long statehood movement. Nityanand Swami became the first Chief Minister, and the state marks its Statehood Day on 9 November each year (the 26th in 2026).
What was Uttarakhand called in ancient times?
The Skanda Purana divides the region into Kedarkhand (roughly Garhwal) and Manaskhand (roughly Kumaon), and the land carries the epithet Devbhumi — Land of the Gods. The name “Uttarakhand” itself is an ancient geographic term. When the state was created in 2000 it was officially named Uttaranchal; in January 2007 it was renamed Uttarakhand, restoring the ancient and movement-era name.
Why is Uttarakhand called Devbhumi?
Because its sacred geography is unusually dense: the Char Dham (Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, Badrinath), the Panch Kedar and Panch Badri circuits, the Panch Prayag river confluences, and the Pandava legends of the Mahabharata all sit in these hills — a network consolidated in the 8th century by Adi Shankaracharya, who revived Badrinath and founded Jyotirmath at Joshimath. The gods’ economy here predates the trekking economy by well over a thousand years.
Who were the Katyuris?
The Katyuri dynasty (rising around 700 CE) was the first — and for a millennium the only — power to hold most of present-day Uttarakhand as one kingdom, ruling from Kartikeyapura (modern Baijnath, Bageshwar). Great temple builders (Baijnath’s Shiva complex; the Katyuri-era Sun temple at Katarmal), they fragmented into petty chiefdoms by the 11th century, clearing the way for the Chand and Panwar kingdoms.
Who founded Almora?
The Chand dynasty of Kumaon. Their first capital was Champawat; in the 1560s the capital moved to the new fortress town of Alamnagar — Almora. Rudra Chand (r. 1568–1597) built its Malla Mahal palace and met Akbar at Lahore. Almora remained the Chand seat — and Kumaon’s cultural heart — until the Gorkha conquest of 1790–91.
When did the Gorkhas rule Uttarakhand?
The Gorkha empire of Nepal took Kumaon in 1790–91 and Garhwal in 1804, after the Battle of Khurbura (14 May 1804), in which King Pradyuman Shah was killed. Gorkha rule — remembered as harsh and extractive — lasted until the Anglo-Nepalese War (1814–16), when hill communities themselves helped the British evict the Gorkha administration.
When did the British take over, and what did the Treaty of Sugauli do?
The Treaty of Sugauli — signed 2 December 1815 and ratified 4 March 1816 — ended the Anglo-Nepalese War and transferred Kumaon and eastern Garhwal to the East India Company, while restoring western Garhwal to the Shah dynasty as the princely state of Tehri Garhwal. That split — British Kumaon and Garhwal on one side, Tehri on the other — lasted until Tehri’s accession to India in 1949.
What was the Chipko movement?
A forest-conservation movement of the early 1970s in which Himalayan villagers — most famously the women of Reni, led by Gaura Devi, in March 1974 — physically hugged trees to stop contractors from felling them, after the first actions at Mandal (Chamoli) in 1973. Associated with Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Chipko became a global environmental landmark — and a political argument that the hills could steward their own forests, feeding the statehood demand.
What happened at Rampur Tiraha?
On the night of 1–2 October 1994, police stopped busloads of Uttarakhand statehood activists at Rampur Tiraha (Muzaffarnagar) and opened fire on unarmed marchers — at least six were killed, and women activists were assaulted. The incident galvanised the movement and made statehood inevitable; in June 2026, three policemen involved were finally sentenced, thirty-two years after the event.
What happened in the 2013 Kedarnath disaster?
On 16–17 June 2013, extreme cloudbursts triggered flash floods and landslips across the Char Dham corridor. Kedarnath town was destroyed but the temple survived; more than 5,700 people were later presumed dead (tallies ran toward 6,000), making it one of independent India’s worst disasters. It reshaped the state’s debates on hydropower, construction and pilgrimage management — and gave the country the image of a surviving temple above a destroyed town.
Uttarakhand’s history is a house with two ancient rooms — Kumaon and Garhwal — under a roof built in 2000. Walk it in that order and every place the travel guides send you starts telling its story: the capital towns, the temple calendars, the emptying villages, the rebuilt shrine. The Land of the Gods has been many things on paper — two khandas, two kingdoms, a colony, a province, a demand, a state — but on the ground it has been one thing all along: the mountains, keeping their own ledger.
Related guides on Uttrayani
- Era pages: Katyuri Dynasty | Chand Dynasty | Panwar Garhwal | Gorkha Invasion | Chipko Movement | Statehood Movement
- Where to see it: Almora | Colonial hill stations | Joshimath (Jyotirmath)
- Culture: Garhwali vs Kumaoni | Char Dham Yatra
