Battle of Mangal

01The road through Hazara

Kashmir had fallen to Ranjit Singh in 1819, and Hari Singh Nalwa served as its governor. Hazara, the hill country between Kashmir and the Indus, was held by tribes who acknowledged nobody for long. Nalwa came down by Muzaffarabad and Pakhli with his infantry. At Mangal the Jadun and Tarin tribesmen under Muhammad Khan Tarin gathered to stop him. The account in the Sikh sources has the tribesmen far outnumbering the Sikh force.

02Governor of Hazara

The tribesmen attacked and were beaten after hard fighting, with heavy losses on the Sikh side too. To save their town the Jaduns paid a fine assessed on every house. Nalwa built a fort at Nawanshahr to hold the valley, and Ranjit Singh, pleased with the result, gave him charge of all Hazara. Over the next years he founded the fort town of Haripur, which still carries his name.

Person · 1780–1839 CE; Maharaja 1801–1839Maharaja Ranjit SinghA misl chief’s son who lost an eye to smallpox as a child, Ranjit Singh took Lahore in 1799 and made one kingdom out of the Punjab, Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar. He covered the Harmandir Sahib in gilded copper and held the Khyber against the Afghans for forty years.Read →