Kinship and State Formation: The Gills of Nabha

Based on an in-depth study of a unique historical document, this study throws light on the complexities of state formation and paramount control in north India from the late Mughal to the late colonial period. It provides valuable insights into how political power was acquired and how kinship relations were used for conquest, expansion, consolidation and political relations. Diversities of feudal relations in a period of over two centuries are illumined through the critical evaluation and analysis of this document whose text and translation have been provided with detailed annotation and glossary, supported by chronology and tables and illustrated by maps and plates. The document in question was acquired from Sardar Gurpreet Singh Gill whose great grandfather got it prepared for submission to Maharaja Ripudaman Singh of Nabha (1912-23). His short but eventful reign bridges the pre-modern and modern tendencies, and also registers a change in the fortunes of the Gill family in a political context affected variously by the working of British paramountcy. The document is supplemented by the memoirs of Dr Baldev Singh Gill (1890-1975), who used the oral tradition of the family and his own experience and observation to provide a candid account of the activities of different branches of the Gill family over several generations. He also brings out the process of how the feudal class was trying to reorient itself in the circumstances of the late colonial and post-Independence times. There are useful insights also into the processes of emergence of the professional middle class and the changing position of its women in the twentieth century. This short but insightful book would be of interest as much to the general reader and the people of Nabha as to the scholars in the disciplines of History, Sociology, Anthropology and Punjabi Literature.