Uttarakhand
Formerly Uttaranchal, state of India, located in the northwestern part of the country. It is bordered to the northwest by the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, to the northeast by the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, to the southeast by Nepal, and to the south and southwest by the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Its capital is the northwestern city of Dehra Dun.
On November 9, 2000, the state of Uttaranchal-the 27th state of India-was carved out of Uttar Pradesh, and in January 2007 the new state changed its name to Uttarakhand, meaning “northern region,” which was the traditional name for the area.
Uttarakhand is a land steeped in many layers of history, culture, ethnicity, and religion. Ancient rock paintings, rock shelters, Paleolithic stone tools (hundreds of thousands of years old), and megaliths indicate that the mountains of the region have been inhabited by humans since prehistoric times. Archaeological remains also support the existence of early Vedic (c. 1500 BCE) practices in the area.
Aside from what has been learned from such archaeological evidence, very little is known about the early history of Uttarakhand. Early scriptures mention a number of tribes that inhabited the Garhwal and Kumaun regions of what is now Uttarakhand. Among these early residents were the Akas, Kol-Munds, Nagas, Paharis (Khasas), Hephthalites (Hunas), Kiratas, Gujjars, and Aryans. The Paharis were the dominant group in both the Garhwal and the Kumaun areas until the coming of the Rajputs and high-caste Brahmans from the plains around the 13th century.
It was only in postindependence India that the Uttarakhand region began to receive significant attention in the regional literature, when the autonomous princely state of Tehri-Garhwal was incorporated into the United Provinces of India in 1949. With the adoption of a new Indian constitution in 1950, the United Provinces was renamed Uttar Pradesh and became a constituent state of India. Grappling with a large population and a vast land area, the government of the new state-seated at the southeastern city of Lucknow-found it difficult to address the interests of the people in the far-northern region. Unemployment, poverty, lack of adequate infrastructure, and general underdevelopment ultimately led the people of Uttarakhand to call for a separate state shortly after the creation of Uttar Pradesh. Initially, protests were weak, but they gathered strength and momentum in the 1990s. The tension reached a climax on Oct. 2, 1994, when police fired on a crowd of demonstrators in the northwestern town of Muzaffarnagar, killing a number of people.
Himachal Pradesh
State of India, in the extreme northern part of the Asian subcontinent. It is bounded by Jammu and Kashmir union territory to the northwest and Ladakh union territory to the northeast, by the Tibet Autonomous Region of China to the east, and by the states of Uttarakhand to the southeast, Haryana to the south, and Punjab to the west. Himachal Pradesh occupies a region of scenic splendour in the western Himalayas, offering a multitextured display of lofty snow-clad mountains, deep gorges, thickly forested valleys, large lakes, terraced fields, and cascading streams. Indeed, the name of the state is a reference to its setting: Himachal means “snowy slopes” (Sanskrit: hima, “snow”; acal, “slopes”), and Pradesh means “state.”
The history of this mountainous state is complex and fragmented. It is known that a number of so-called Aryan groups filtered into the more productive valleys during the Vedic period (c. 1500 to 500 BCE) and assimilated the pre-Aryan population. Later, successive Indian empires-such as the Mauryan (c. 321-185 BCE), the Gupta (c. 320-540 CE), and the Mughal (1526-1761), all emerging in the Indo-Gangetic Plain-sought to exercise varying degrees of control over trade and pilgrimage routes into the area and between India and Tibet across the Himalayas.
The remote, predominantly Buddhist area that is now the district of Lahaul and Spiti was controlled by Ladakh from the decline of the Mughal Empire (about the mid-18th century) until the early 1840s, when it briefly came under Sikh rule. Also during this period, warring semiautonomous petty rulers controlled the trade routes, as well as desirable segments of agricultural and pastoral land, in the other areas of present-day Himachal Pradesh. British domination of this region followed the Sikh Wars of the 1840s and continued, directly or indirectly, for the next 100 years.
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