Poonch Qila: The Memory of a Forgotten Principality

Dr Harmeet Singh Soodan

harmeetjnu@gmail.com

In the heart of Poonch town, rising from a commanding knoll above the silver thread of the Poonch River, stands a fortress that has outlived every empire that ever claimed it. Known locally as Qila Poonch, this sprawling complex of red-brick walls, arched corridors, and crumbling royal chambers stretches across approximately 7,535 square metres of a hillside that has witnessed more than three centuries of conquest, courtly intrigue, rebellion, and ruin. It is not merely a fort. It is a layered testament to the political history of the northwestern highlands, a building whose very walls change architectural language from one wing to the next, recording in stone the succession of rulers who each left their mark and then, sooner or later, vanished into history.

Today, its chambers are mostly silent, home to pigeons and the slow decay that comes from decades of governmental neglect. Yet for anyone willing to read its stones, Poonch Qila remains one of the most eloquent historical monuments in the entire Jammu and Kashmir region, and its story begins, as all great stories do, with a single act of ambition.

The Foundation: Raja Abdul Razak Khan and the Birth of the Qila

The origins of Poonch Qila are rooted in the early eighteenth century, during a period when the Mughal Empire's authority over its distant highland territories was fracturing and local Muslim chieftains were reasserting control over their ancestral domains. It was in this window of shifting power that Raja Abdul Razak Khan also recorded in some historical accounts

as Abdur Razzaq Rathore laid the foundation of the fort in 1713 A.D. Abdul Razak Khan was no ordinary chieftain. A resourceful and ambitious ruler, he controlled the Poonch state and steadily expanded his territory during nearly half a century of rule. The fort he commissioned was conceived from the outset as more than a defensive rampart. As historian K.D. Maini, one of the foremost scholars of the Pir Panjal region, has observed, Poonch Qila holds a unique distinction among the forts of the region: it was specifically built with the objective of managing the jagir, the administrative and revenue affairs of the principality, rather than purely as a Kashmir Valley outpost for external defence. This made it simultaneously a seat of government, a royal residence, a treasury, and a garrison. Abdul Razak Khan completed the lower and foundational portion of the fort but died before seeing the full vision realized. The work of completion fell to his son.

Raja Rustam Khan: The Builder Who Named a Town

It was Raja Rustam Khan, son and successor of Abdul Razak Khan, who oversaw the major phase of construction between 1700 and 1787, a building campaign that gave the fort its essential form and scale. So significant was his contribution to the physical landscape of the region that the town of Poonch was for a time named Rustam Nagar in his honour, a testament to the esteem in which the local population held this builder-king.

Rustam Khan's construction reflected the Muslim court aesthetic of the era, drawing heavily from the Mughal tradition that had shaped architecture across the subcontinent for two centuries. The fort features large open courtyards arranged around interconnected buildings, arched openings of graceful proportions, thick walls of red brick laid in decorative herringbone patterns within recessed arches, and a sloping stone plinth of uncoursed rubble that follows the natural contour of the hill. The overall composition is one of mass and permanence, an architecture that speaks of a dynasty intending to endure.

Within the fort's precincts, multiple structures served distinct functions: residential chambers for the royal family and their residential and administrative halls for the conduct of revenue and judicial business; storage facilities; and remarkably, religious structures serving the diverse community, including a mosque, a temple, and, later, a gurdwara, reflecting the plural social fabric of Poonch and its rulers' pragmatic accommodation of multiple faiths. Rustam Khan's fort was, in essence, a self-contained world: the capital of a highland principality that, though small in the larger imperial geography, governed a territory of considerable strategic importance along the routes connecting the Punjab plains to the Kashmir Valley.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Reach into the Mountains

The early nineteenth century brought the most transformative political force the northwestern subcontinent had seen in generations. Maharaja Ranjit Singh, founding emperor of the Sikh Empire and master of the glittering Lahore Darbar, was systematically extending his dominion over every territory between the Sutlej and the Himalayas. In 1819, marching on his way to the conquest of the Kashmir Valley, Ranjit Singh captured the Poonch region, defeating the local ruler Gujjar Raja Ruh Allah Khan of Poonch and Raja Sultan Khan of Bhimber.

Poonch Qila, the administrative nerve centre of the region, thus fell under the authority of the Lahore Darbar. For the fort, this marked the beginning of its second great architectural phase. Sikh administrators and military commanders who arrived to secure the region contributed a northern block to the fort complex, constructed in the characteristically robust, martial style favoured by Sikh builders, its solid geometry a visible contrast to the gentler Mughal curves of the original Muslim-era structures below.

In 1827, Maharaja Ranjit Singh gifted the Poonch-Chabbal territory as a jagir to his most powerful minister, Raja Dhyan Singh, a Dogra nobleman who served as the prime minister (Wazir) of the Sikh Empire for an extraordinary twenty-five years. Dhyan Singh was one of three influential Dogra brothers at the Lahore court, the others being Gulab Singh and Suchet Singh, and his receipt of the Poonch jagir reflected both his standing at court and Ranjit Singh's characteristic policy of rewarding loyalty with territorial grants.

Dhyan Singh, however, never personally visited Poonch. Consumed by the demands of the Lahore Darbar, he entrusted the management of the jagir to his brother Gulab Singh in Jammu, while his own administrators ran the day-to-day affairs from Poonch Qila. The fort thus functioned as the operational hub of an absentee lord's domain, a situation that gave local administrators considerable practical authority, even as ultimate power remained tethered to Lahore.

The Lahore Darbar's period of control over Poonch was not uniformly peaceful. In 1832, a tribal coalition in the Poonch region submitted only after Ranjit Singh personally marched with an army of sixty thousand troops. In 1837, hill tribes led by the Sudhans launched a full-scale rebellion, capturing Sikh garrisons and defeating an expeditionary force under Gulab Singh's own son Uttam Singh before Gulab Singh himself intervened to suppress the uprising. These repeated rebellions underlined both the fierce independence of the mountain peoples of Poonch and the strategic necessity of maintaining Poonch Qila as a strong garrison point.

The Unravelling: Intrigue, Murder, and the End of Sikh Rule

The death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1839 shattered the political order he had built. The Lahore Darbar descended into a decade of assassination, coup, and factional war that consumed its most powerful figures. Raja Dhyan Singh himself was murdered in 1843 in a palace conspiracy, his body cut to pieces alongside Emperor Sher Singh. His brother Suchet Singh was killed the following year in a failed coup. His son Hira Singh briefly seized power as prime minister before he too was killed in the court's incessant bloodletting.

In the chaos, Poonch was confiscated by the Lahore Darbar on the grounds that the Dogra family had become entangled in the empire's rebellions, and the region was handed to Faiz Talib Khan of Rajouri. Poonch Qila exchanged hands amid the general disorder of a dying empire.

The First Anglo-Sikh War (1845-4C) ended the Sikh Empire's independence. The resulting Treaty of Amritsar on 13 March 1846 AD, negotiated between the British East India Company and Maharaja Gulab Singh, saw the British sell the entire territory of Jammu, Kashmir, and its dependent highland regions, including Poonch, to Gulab Singh for seventy-five lakh Nanak Shahi rupees. An entire people and their ancient landscape changed hands in a commercial transaction. The Sikh age at Poonch Qila was over. The Dogra century was about to begin.

The Dogra Era

Under the new dispensation, Gulab Singh, now Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, restored the Poonch jagir to Jawahir Singh, the eldest surviving son of the murdered Dhyan Singh. But it was Jawahir Singh's brother, Raja Moti Singh, who would leave the deepest personal imprint on the fort itself. After a dispute between the two brothers was settled by the Punjab Board of Revenue in 1852, with Moti Singh receiving the Poonch district and Jawahir Singh the Mirpur district, Moti Singh became the effective ruler of Poonch and governed the principality for approximately forty years until his death in 1892. He was, by most accounts, a popular ruler who built mosques and temples alike, conducted three public durbars a year, and was described by a British visitor in 1867 as presiding over a growing town with a functioning educational and commercial life. Moti Singh's most enduring legacy at Poonch Qila was architectural. He undertook sweeping renovations of the fort, adding an entirely new front block that introduced a jarring but fascinating stylistic departure: he engaged a European architect to design this section, producing a wing whose colonial-era aesthetic sits in striking contrast to the Mughal foundations and Sikh military additions beneath it.

This European-influenced block, constructed between approximately 1850 and 1882, completed the fort's extraordinary architectural journey, making Poonch Qila perhaps the only monument in Jammu and Kashmir that carries within a single complex the distinct architectural fingerprints of Muslim, Sikh, Dogra, and European hands.

The fort under the Dogras served as the secretariat of the Poonch Jagir, the formal seat of administration from which the region was governed. Under Raja Baldev Singh, Moti Singh's successor, this administrative function was formally institutionalized, even as the royal residence shifted to the newer Moti Mahal nearby. The Dogra dynasty continued to hold Poonch as a subsidiary principality under Jammu and Kashmir until 1928, when Maharaja Hari Singh began encroaching on the jagir's internal autonomy. By 1947, Poonch had been reduced to the status of an ordinary district of Jammu and Kashmir, and the fort that had once been the proud seat of an independent principality was merely a relic of administrative history.

Why This Fort Matters

Poonch Qila is not merely a local monument. It is a compressed archive of the subcontinent's political history, told in brick, arch, and courtyard. Within its 7,535 square metres, the story of Mughal decline, Sikh expansion, Lahore Darbar politics, British imperial calculation, and Dogra dynastic ambition are all physically present, layered one upon another in a way that no document alone can convey. It is the fort of Abdul Razak Khan's founding vision and Rustam Khan's patient construction. It is the fort that received the administrators of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's sprawling empire and housed the agents of Raja Dhyan Singh, the most powerful minister the Sikh court ever produced. It is the fort that Raja Moti Singh adorned with European columns while governing his mountain principality with a pragmatic pluralism rare in his era. Today, its rooms are mostly sealed, its corridors darkened, its walls scarred by the 2005 earthquake and decades of indifference. A heritage library has been opened within it a hopeful gesture but far from the comprehensive conservation this monument demands. Poonch Qila deserves to be read, not merely visited. Because carved into its stones, for those who care to look, is nothing less than the full and turbulent history of a highland world that empires came to conquer and could never quite contain.

(The author is HoD Political Science, GDC Katra, Jammu)