Page 21 - Lohgarh

Introduction w 21

the present districts of Yamuna Nagar, Ambala and Panchkula, is not
more than 250 years old. In 1852, the Bristish Government appointed
the first consolidation officer Kale Rai (Rangar) for reinhabitation of
population in the said area.
Some historians have wrongly stated that the Lohgarh Fort was a
new name given to the already existing Muklishgarh Fort (which was, in
fact, not a Fortress, but was ‘Rang Mahal’ i.e. palace of joy of the Mughal
Emperors and generals). The mighty Lohgarh Fort was falsely and
fictitiously projected as Mukhlispur simply to dilute the glorified history
of the Lohgarh Fort, which was constructed by the natives to uproot
the alien and oppressive rule of the Mughals. Muklishgarh is situated
near Hathni Kund Barrage and is approximately 35 km away from
Lohgarh Fort. The contemporary Mughal historians like Khafi Khan,
Mohammed Qasim Aurangabadi and others deliberately projected a
wrong picture of Lohgarh as Muklishgarh. Later on, Alexander
Cunningham, who was a British army engineer with the Bengal Engineer
Group, held an interest in the history and archaeology of India. In 1861,
he was appointed to the newly created position of the Archaeological
Surveyor to the Government of India, and, he founded and recorded
(what later became Archaeological Survey of India). He also surveyed
this area, but he, too, deliberately, never submitted any report on
Lohgarh. He even wrote a note on the Sikh history, but never made any
true reference to Lohgarh Fort. All the later historians picked references in
its context from the above cited authors, thus got a faulty interpretation
of the history of Banda Singh Bahadur, the battles of Lohgarh, the
Vanjaras and the Sikligars.
The British Gazetteer of the territorial dominion of old Ambala,
published in 1893, makes no reference of the Fort of Lohgarh, though
the British Gazetteer of district Saharanpur, makes a reference to
Muklishgarh (the pleasure palace of the Mughals). After the Britishers
occupied this area in the middle of the 19th century, the British surveyors
like Cunningham, Irvine and W. Crooke were appointed to do research
on the Vanjaras. It appears that these surveyors presented adverse
reports against the Vanjaras (who uprooted the Mughals Empire). To