Page:Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India 1904-05.pdf/195



ÜRPUR lies in latitude 32° 18' 10" north, and longitude 75° 55' 30" east, on the a small tributary of the into the Bias. It is picturesquely situated on a spur, 2,000 feet above the sea-level, and some twenty-two miles north-west of Kangra. It was formerly the capital of a petty hill state ruled by the Fathaniya clan of the Rajputs. For long it has enjoyed a considerable commercial importance dependent on the manufacture of shawls, and the fact of its being a great rendezvous on the way to Kashmir, Chamba and Ladakh. But now it presents a somewhat depopulated appearance, which has resulted from the collapse of the shawl trade, With the addition of the talukas of Shahpur and Kandi Bachertu, now attached to the district of Gurdaspur, and of a small tract across the Ravi, that was given in exchange to the Raja of Jammu, the boundaries of the old principality are retained. almost entire in the present taksil of Nurpur.

The old name of the place, as we learn from the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, was Dhameri, the Dal mal of Alberüni. According to the Ain-i-Akbari, Dhameri was a parganah of the Bāri Duab, which yielded 1,600,000 dāms and furnished 60 horse and 1,300 foot. It is not clear what the meaning or the etymology of the word is. Cunningham derived it from Audumbara, but none of the forms that he has given, or which are met with in the works of Alberüni, Abu-l-Fazl and others, nor the current form Dhameri or Dhamer, support his view.

The name of Nurpur, we learn from the Tuzuk and the Shash Fath-i-Kangrä, was given to this town in honour of Nuru-d-din Muhammad Jahangir, the Mughal Emperor of India, when he visited it on his return from Kängra. A parallel instance is supplied by the fort at Delhi, the oldest portion of which, i.e., Salim-garh, was termed Nür-garh by the Timurean dynasty. Thus the general assumption that this town was so called in honour of Nurjahan, the celebrated consort of Jahangir, should be regarded as erroneous.

The place rose to prominence at the time of the Mughal ascendancy in India. The earlier historians hardly make any mention of it, nor do we find any building of

From the Punjab Gazetteer, Kängra District, 1883-4, p. 253, it would appear that this collapse was related to the Franco-Prussian War. Punjab Gasetter, Kängra District, p. 36. Ci. Shash Fathi Kangra in Sir H. Elliot's History of India, Vol. VI. p. 522.
 * Cf. Atharu-p-ganadid Ch. II. p. 22. (Lucknow Edition.)