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Sikh rule was not qualitatively different than Afghan rule in terms of administration, revenue collection, and so on. Ranjit Singh left the administration of Kashmir to his governors, many of whom were Punjabi Khattris and took control of its administrative machinery with the help of Kashmiri karkun. Since Ranjit Singh was engaged in near-constant warfare like the Afghans, taxes continued to be oppressive, and in an attempt to increase revenues even further, the Sikh administration resumed jagirs (land grants) that had been held by Muslim families and shrines since the Mughal period, while at the same time endowing other land grants, some revenue-free, to non-Muslims.
Moreover, as a result of their previous experiences in Muslim territories, Sikh governors undertook several policies aimed specifically at Muslims with the objective of tamping down Muslim opposition; however, these policies —such as the ban on cow slaughter and azan (Muslim call to prayer); closing down of the Jama Masjid for public prayer; and the seizure of other mosques as property of the state—served to alienate the Muslim population. Begar (forced labour), imposed by the Sikh administration to facilitate the supply of materials to their armies; the poor working conditions of weavers as the shawl trade flourished, which at the same time enriched shawl merchants; and several famines in the 1830s added to the woes of the people (Bamzai 1962: 561-71).

The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir came into being in 1846. Its founder was Gulab Singh (1792–1857), a warrior chieftain from the Jammu region. Singh belonged to a traditionally martial Rajput sub-caste of the Dogras, an ethnolinguistic group found in significant numbers in the Jammu region. Hence the princely state is often recalled, especially in the Kashmir Valley which lies to the north of the Jammu region, as ‘Dogra rule’ or the ‘Dogra monarchy’. Gulab was a courtier and commander of Ranjit Singh, the great Sikh ruler who established a mini-empire across vast tracts of northern and north-western India in the early nineteenth century with its capital in the Punjab city of Lahore (in Pakistan post-August 1947). But after the Sikh monarch’s death in 1839, Gulab Singh colluded with British schemes to undermine and eliminate Sikh power, which proved successful within a decade. During the 1820s and 1830s, Gulab Singh’s forces — led by his most intrepid commander, Zorawar Singh — had gradually expanded his territories northward from the plains and sub-Himalayan foothills of the southern parts of the Jammu region to mountainous areas in the Jammu interiors, and then to the sparsely populated high Himalayan regions of Ladakh and Baltistan (Zorawar was killed in 1841 when he forayed further east from Ladakh into Tibet). In 1846, as Sikh power unravelled, the Kashmir Valley under Sikh rule since 1819 ~— was up for grabs and the British rewarded Gulab Singh for his collaboration by selling him the Kashmir Valley, along with the remote region of Gilgit to the north of Baltistan. The British were not interested in garrisoning and governing far-flung Himalayan territories and it suited them to sub-contract their authority to Gulab Singh.

Afghans, Sikhs, and finally the British-supported Dogra Raj all prioritized high taxation over efficient governance to maintain their domination. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century regional narratives and European travelogues alike document heart-wrenching stories of injustice and persecution which kept Kashmiris in constant terror. During his travels to Kashmir in the early nineteenth century, for example, the French naturalist Victor Jacquemont lamented the lack of value placed on human life in the poverty-stricken state. Jacquemont described the ruthlessness of the Afghan governors who employed collective punishments to create fear in people’s hearts; their favorite tools of oppression included hanging political dissenters in public, then leaving their tortured bodies on display.5 Other European travelers corroborated such stories of injustice, which continued after the Sikh conquest of 1819.6 British explorer William Moorcroft exposed the disproportionate revenue demand that impoverished Kashmiri villages under Sikh rule. He described in detail the “ghastly picture of poverty and starvation” in “half deserted villages” as “wretched Kashmiris” struggled to survive under a regime that “looked upon a little better than cattle.”7 As policies imposed by ruthless empires reduced ordinary Kashmiris to servitude, the ideas of “justice,” “equity,” and “truth” articulated by local saints and mystics under the banner of spiritual “freedom” provided hope that an oppressive society could be transformed.

During the Afghan rule (1753-1819), the system of revenue collection did not differ in practice. In this period, a portion of revenue was transferred to Afghan capital in Kabul.
During the Sikh rule (1819-1846) the miseries of the cultivators increased. The grant of land as Jagir and Maufi continued but without proprietary rights and large tracts of fertile land were reserved for royal households termed as ‘Khalis’, which later assumed the corrupted nomenclature of ‘Khalsa’, which gradually led to large scale revenue farming between the cultivator and the state. The land-holding systems prevalent between 12th and 19th centuries give rise to a long chain of intermediaries between the state and the actual tillers. There was a Malik Ala, Malik Adna, the occupancy tenant of grade A, the occupancy tenant of grade B, and the Sub-tenant. On the top were the Jagirdar, and Maufidar and the Illaqadar. This resulted in the development of landed aristocracy, absentee landlordism, concentration of land among few, and alienation of land from small and petty owners to bigger landlords and increasing expropriation of the share of peasantry. The peasants who depended on the agricultural economy were at the mercy of the rapacious officials, who enacted the ‘last bush of grain from their meagre produce’ (Land Committee Report, J&K Govt., 1951-52).
The conquest of Kashmir by the Sikhs in 1819 AD resulted more trouble for the masses as the triumphant army resorted to loot and marauding. Most of the governors gave utmost priority to raising revenues. However, Mehan Singh (Sikh governor, 1834-1841 AD) is known to have toned up the administration by imposing discipline and accountability and by making food grains available at subsidized rates.

The departing British also decreed that the hundreds of princes, who ruled one-third of the subcontinent and a quarter of its population, became legally independent, their status to be settled later. Geographical location, personal and popular sentiment, and substantial pressure and incentives from the new governments led almost all princes eventually to merge their domains into either Pakistan or India. In Pakistan, some princes retained considerable autonomy for decades (and some continue to hold substantial political influence). In India, many princes negotiated special privileges and incomes (until the 26th Amendment to the Constitution ended them in 1971). Uncooperative princes faced force. Pakistan pressured the ruler of Kalat in Balochistan (population 150,000) into acceding. The Muslim government of Hindu-majority Junagadh (population 500,000) tried to join distant Pakistan, but India annexed it (which Pakistan still officially protests). The Muslim Nizam of Hindu-majority Hyderabad (population 14 million) claimed independence, but Indian troops seized it in 1949. The Hindu ruler of Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir (population 3 million) initially claimed independence, but then suddenly opted for India, amid battles between the Pakistani and Indian armies, themselves recently partitioned out of the British Indian Army. Kashmir’s identity remains hotly disputed with a UN-supervised “Line of Control” still separating Pakistani-held Azad (“Free”) Kashmir from Indian-held Kashmir (where a half-million Indian troops are now trying to control ongoing popular resistance).
Adding to its other strategic importance to each nation, Kashmir is the source of major tributaries in the Indus system – vital to West Pakistan and northwest India. (India’s most recent annexation was Sikkim in May 1975.)
Each new government asserted its exclusive sovereignty within its borders, realigning all territories, animals, plants, minerals, and all other natural and human-made resources as either Pakistani or Indian property, to be used for its national development. For instance, the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra river systems now crossed international borders, with each rival claiming their vital waters. Wildlife walked, flew, or swam across these boundaries, but each new regime imposed its authority over all those on its side. Every human became a citizen, legally loyal to only India or Pakistan, on pain of treason. While statistics remain disputed even today, about 12 million people, finding themselves in the “wrong” country, either chose or were forced to emigrate – roughly half Hindus and Sikhs leaving Pakistan and half Muslims going there – with up to 2 million murdered and tens of thousands of women abducted and many more assaulted.
Long-standing cross-border seasonal migrations by merchants, laborers, and pastoralists with their domesticated animals would legally cease (but sometimes illegally persist). Simultaneously, the central civil and military services and judiciary split roughly along religious “communal” lines, even as they divided movable government assets according to a negotiated formula: 22.7 percent for Pakistan and 77.3 percent for India.

In native states, dynasties and their allies formed ethnic elites, some very small, such as the Muslim dynasty in Hyderabad and the Hindu regime in Kashmir. The ethnic-minority status of the Hyderabad and Kashmir dynasties led them to enact landlord policies that favoured small ruling cliques and caused widespread resentment among tenants whose struggles for land rights became opposition to the dynasty. Both states witnessed severe violence as their native-state dynasties ended in 1947. (44%, Kindle)
Ideas from European legal history thus underpinned laws and policies which gave old texts and textual expertise a new modern authority. These ideas acquired lasting imperial authority, applied far and wide. In Ceylon, native Christians required special attention. In Nepal, Hindu law became state law with the Mulk-i-Ain, in 1854, using elements of law codes from British India to enforce the House of Gurkha’s control over labour and taxes. In Kashmir, Raja Ranbir Singh enacted Brahmanical law codes called the Ain-i-Dharmath in a native state inhabited mostly by Muslims. ... Orientalist methods and the modern imperial definition of India as a majority Hindu culture gave British India a distinctly Brahmanical flavour and Sanskrit texts unprecedented authority. This trend had many antecedents and parallels. As we have seen, Brahman authority had prevailed in Maratha imperial territory under the Peshwas. Religious codes became popular among many eighteenth-century rulers, notably in Hyderabad and Mysore and in the Portuguese and French Catholic colonies. In Portuguese Goa, the Inquisition was extremely harsh. Brahmans became arbiters of law and political power in nineteenth-century Nepal, despite the large population of Buddhists, and in mostly Muslim Kashmir.(47%)
Almost all the pain of partition fell on three historic regions divided between India and Pakistan: Punjab, Bengal, and Kashmir. In each region, the new international borders were unprecedented; their local details were also quite arbitrary. All the regions involved saw expulsions, riots, killings, refugees, and new justifications for more ethnic solidarity and more hatred. But Punjab produced by far the most dislocation and violence. Battles for assets and for revenge became a civil war. Bengal’s partition was long, slow, and peaceful by comparison. Unregulated migration and everyday mobility continued for decades across the new borders. Kashmir was divided by a treaty that ended a war which India and Pakistan fought over the territory in 1947. Kashmir remains disputed national territory. The Raja of the native state of Jammu and Kashmir opted to join India. Opposition groups from his Muslim-majority population argued for joining Pakistan. Pakistan claimed Kashmir because of its Muslim majority. The polarization of the state along Hindu–Muslim lines originated in the Dogra dynasty’s nineteenth-century installation of a Brahman and Kashmiri Pandit ruling elite of landlords, bureaucrats, and businessmen, and its institution of state Hindu rituals and law codes. Public Muslim activity in the observance of prayers and festivals was officially imbued with an air of dissent and even outlawed. A Muslim political opposition arose that was banned in Kashmir and exiled to Lahore, where Kashmiris and their supporters entered the fray of Punjabi politics. Political antagonisms among Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh groups in Punjab were thus embroiled in struggles over the rights of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in Kashmir. These external dimensions of Kashmiri politics were well established in 1947, when India and Pakistan went to war. Their peace treaty divided Kashmir to bring the major portion, including the Vale and its capital, Srinagar, into India, and to bring a smaller portion, called Azad Kashmir, into Pakistan. (58%, Kindle position)

Although the domination of Kashmir by the Sikh state based in Lahore had lasted only for about a quarter of a century, it became an important gauge against which both the British and Gulab Singh were to measure their own performances as they fashioned the new state. Henry Lawrence enjoined Gulab Singh in 1846 to 'make liberal arrangements with the Rajahs, chiefs and subjects , . . . leaving no man worse off than he was under the Sikhs. As he urged further, 'If you do so, your rule will be hailed with joy and your name go down to posterity with blessings . . .'138 The British were not overly taxing their new ally, by and large extending the status quo with a minimum requirement that Gulab Singh ensure his rule simply be 'no worse' than that of the Sikhs.139 There is a marked degree of disingeniousness in these professions of concern on behalf of the population of Kashmir, since Sikh rule over Kashmir had already been denounced in the strongest of terms by the British.140 It is interesting that, at this time, the comparison made so often from the late nineteenth century onwards between the poor state of affairs in princely India and the benefits available to subjects in British Indian territory, is rarely, if at all, heard. therefore, in 1846, the British were not demanding the very highest of standards of governance from Gulab Singh.

Dogra rule came to J&K following the British defeat of the Sikhs in the first Anglo-Sikh War in 1846. (British forces also won the second Anglo-Sikh War in 1849.) The victorious East India Company then concluded two consecutive treaties. The first was the Treaty of Lahore on 9 March, which, amongst other matters, imposed reparations on the losers. The second, exactly a week later, was the Treaty of Amritsar with Raja Gulab Singh who, in 1846, assisted the British against the Sikhs.11 According to the Frenchman, Victor Jacquemont, who met Gulab Singh in 1831, he ‘was a soldier of fortune and a usurper’.12 Along with his younger brothers, Dhyan and Suchet, these three Singh brothers from Jammu had enjoyed considerable influence and notoriety at Emperor Ranjit Singh’s Lahore Court until his death in 1839. Dhyan, who became Ranjit Singh’s Prime Minister in 1828, and Suchet, were particular favourites of the Emperor.13 In the post-Ranjit political turmoil, their power and status diminished when Dhyan was assassinated in 1843 and Suchet was killed in 1844. Gulab remained alive, but possibly with some blood on his hands. Allegedly, Gulab was ‘inferior ... in talent’ to his younger brothers, particularly Dhyan.14 Nevertheless, most Britishers generally considered him to be very capable, although some disliked him, even though, or possibly because, he perfidiously assisted the British to defeat the discombobulated Sikhs. Herbert Edwardes, for example, who had been Gulab Singh’s political advisor in 1846,15 considered the Dogra ruler to be ‘a bad king, a miser, and a liar! If he is not all this, and a thousand times worse (for he is the worst native I ever came in contact with).’16 Edwardes’ boss, Henry Lawrence,17 a signatory with Gulab Singh on the Treaty of Amritsar, considered the Dogra to be ‘a bad man’ and ‘a man of indifferent character’, although, pragmatically, ‘there are few princes who were any better’.18 While the character of their ally, Gulab Singh, left a lot to be desired, the British at that stage had little choice but to be involved with this Jammuite as they then knew few, if any, Kashmiris. By 1846, less than ten Europeans had ever visited Kashmir.19

The Sikhs were replaced by the Dogras in 1846, and their rule lasted till 1947. Whereas Kashmir lost its sovereignty in 1586 itself to Mughals, the region and its dependencies got enslaved with the arrival of the Dogra rule which came into existence through the Treaty of Amritsar. This Treaty was signed between the English EIC and Maharaja Gulab Singh, the first Dogra ruler of Kashmir, on 16 March 1846 (Rai 2004). Under the Treaty, the EIC transferred the region of Kashmir to the Maharaja for 75 lakh Nanak Shahi rupees (Puri 1981). With the Dogras taking over Kashmir, they declared private ownership of property land as null and void, and brought all the land under State control (Aziz 2010). This resulted in peasantry losing the ownership of land, which they were owning from centuries. With the Maharaja taking control of the land, he transferred huge chunks of land called Jagirs (assigned tracts of land) to a neo-class of intermediaries to create a support base. These intermediaries, mostly Hindus, were different types of landlords with varied designations, called Jagirdars (assignees), Muafidars, Illaqadars and Chakdars (land holders exempt from payment of revenue), and Pattadars (rent receiver of a piece of land) and were actually collaborators of feudal Lord Maharaja (Beg 1995). Even though the Jagir was not a permanent transfer of ownership of land to the Jagirdar, yet they acted as masters and used cruelty against the tenants (Aziz 2010). Under those circumstances, peasants turned from owners of land to mere ‘serfs’, as they did not have even right to cultivation or right to occupancy of land, rather they were tied to it, not even allowed to move out, instead were forced to cultivate the land (Beg 1995: 36; Lawrence 2002: 2-3). However, despite restrictions imposed on migration, many of the peasants managed to ‘flee’ to Punjab and other regions to escape the rant of landlords and the Raj. In short, peasantry in this period not only lost the ownership but also had to face immense miseries at the hands of intermediaries and the State which appropriated major portion of their produce, leaving just a meagre amount for their survival. Moreover, the State also levied huge taxes, which put further burden on the already beleaguered peasantry. The realm of British India’s Non-Interventionist Policy in the region, which was due to the fact that they had sold the region to the Dogras, changed with the appointment of British Resident in 1885 in Kashmir to work for the reforms in the Dogra state. This appointment was made after the grievances were made to the British crown against the Dogra rule which had crossed the limits of cruelty (Aziz 2010). The exploitation of Indian resources and the very imposition of inhuman laws on peasantry by British in India are well established, however in Kashmir the very intervention of British crown in the state was seen as a blessing, as the Dogra rule in Kashmir was more exploitive and cruel than the British rule in the rest of India (Aziz 2010).