Ahmadiyyat - The Renaissance of Islam — Page 258
258 AHMADIYY. AT service to the British cause. He was asked what would he wish to have and he suggested that the hill country between the rivers Ravi and Indus might be made subject to his rule. The British were not at that time aware of the full extent of the territory, its resources and the character and composition of its people. They did not consider it necessary to look into any of these details and agreed readily enough to the sugges- tion of Raja Gulab Singh in return for a cash payment of two and a half million rupees by Gulab Singh. Thus by the Treaty of Amritsar of I 846 between His Excellency Lord Lawrence, Governor General of India, and Raja Gulab Singh, the rule of the latter over the territory just described was recognized and Raja Gulab Singh became a faithful feudatory of the British. In this manner Dogra rule was established over Kashmir which comprised the famous valley of that name and the mountainous territories of Ladakh, Poonch, Gilgit and Hunza. This was the beginning of a century of the most savage tyranny of which history furnishes a record anywhere. Raja Gulab Singh assumed the title of Maharaja of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. The valley had a population of roughly four million, more than 90 per cent of whom were Muslims. In the total population of the State the proportion of the Muslims was over 80 per cent. The people of Kashmir, as is well known by now, are part of the lost tribes of Israel. They are a handsome people and are given to artistic pursuits like wood-carving, silver-chasing, and woollen and silk manufactures of the finest type. Under Mughal and Pathan rule they had led happy and comparatively prosperous lives. The Mughal emperors, beginning with Akbar the Great, spent a portion of the summer in the valley as a relief from the blazing heat of the plains. The valley had been celebrated as paradise on earth. From the very beginning of his rule, Maharaja Gulab Singh imposed a body of the harshest regulations upon the people of Kashmir and reduced them in effect to a state of humiliating bondage. He taxed severely everything needed for the support of human life, with the exception only of