Kathiawar

• 1. A Peninsula of Lions

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  Kathiawar, also called Saurashtra, is a peninsula in south-western Gujarat that shelters the last remaining population of Asiatic lions. It covers about 23,500 square miles of western India. Today it is a quiet part of a modern state, but it was once a state of its own. Before that, it was a crowded map of princely rulers. How did a peninsula so cut off from the mainland end up divided among so many princes? How did those princes become one government, and then vanish into Gujarat? And how did a land with so many wells come to depend on water carried in by tanker? The answers begin with the shape of the land itself.

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• 2. Between Two Gulfs

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  The Kutch district lies along the northern edge of Kathiawar, and the Gulf of Kutch cuts into its north-west. The Arabian Sea wraps the south and south-west, and the Gulf of Khambhat marks the east. From the head of each gulf, a waste tract stretches inland toward the other. Each is half salt morass and half sandy desert. Together they isolate the peninsula, leaving only one narrow neck in the north-east that joins it to mainland Gujarat. Beyond that neck lies the low, fertile hinterland of Ahmedabad.

  Two belts of hill country cross the peninsula, and nine rivers drain it outward from the centre. Those rivers carry little natural flow outside the monsoon months, so dams have been built on some of them. Even so, its ports have flourished as centres of trade and commerce since at least the 16th century.

  Eleven districts of modern Gujarat make up the region: Amreli, Bhavnagar, Botad, Junagadh, Gir Somnath, Devbhumi Dwarka, Jamnagar, Rajkot, Porbandar, Morbi and Surendranagar. The Dhandhuka taluka, part of Ahmedabad district, also belongs to it. Diu, now part of the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, was historically included as well.

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• 3. A Name With Roots

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  Sindh is where the Kathis, also called Kathikas, came from before they entered Gujarat in the early centuries of the Common Era. They belonged to the Kshatriya caste. Their early settlements seem to have given the name Kathiawad to the land they occupied.

  The name Saurashtra has a different origin. It comes from the Sanskrit word सौराष्ट्र, which is the vṛddhi form of सुराष्ट्र, itself joining सु and राष्ट्र. Taken literally, it means good nation. A third name, Sorath, was used for the region too.

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• 4. Voices From Antiquity

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  The Mahabharata and the Vedic period already mention this region, under Saurashtra and some other names. By the first century CE, a text called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea knew it as Surastrene, or Saraostus. The Periplus places the coast at the beginning of the Kingdom of Nambanus and of all India. It calls the land "a fertile country, yielding wheat and rice and sesame oil and clarified butter," and adds "cotton and the Indian cloths made therefrom, of the coarser sorts." Its metropolis, the text says, was Minnagara, from which much cotton cloth was brought down to Barygaza.

  The Junagadh Rock inscription, dated to 150 CE and attributed to Rudradaman I, also names the region. Earlier rulers left traces too. Under Chandragupta Maurya, who ruled from 322-298 BCE, the governor was Pushyagupta. During the reign of Ashoka, from 268-232 BCE, the region was under Yavana Tushaspa.

  Dwarika and Somnath open a list of old places across the peninsula, gathered under history, archaeology, nature and religion. The list continues with Vallabhi, Junagadh, Sihor, Palitana and the Shatrunjay Hills at Palitana, then Virpur and Gondal. It also names the historic cities of Gondal, Wadhvan, Morbi and Wankaner, and it includes Diu. Sasan Gir and the Kathi territories in the Amreli and Bhavnagar districts close the list and tie it back to the people who gave the peninsula its name.

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• 5. Gathering the Princes

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  Early in the nineteenth century, Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote a poetical illustration called "Scene in Kattiawar." It accompanied an engraving of a painting by Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, and it shows the region as it stood in that period.

  On the 15th of February 1948, after India's independence in 1947, 217 princely states of Kathiawar merged to form a single state. They included the former Junagadh State. The new state was first named the United State of Kathiawar. In November 1948 it was renamed Saurashtra State.

  Shri Vallabhbhai Patel spent a great deal of time persuading the local princes and the petty subas, who totalled 222 in Saurashtra alone. Maharaja Krishnakumar Sinhji of Bhavnagar State readily offered his large and royal empire of Bhavnagar, also called Gohilwar, to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Bhavnagar became the first in the country to merge into the union of India.

  Rajkot served as the capital of the new state. Uchharangray Navalshankar Dhebar became its first Chief Minister and later served as President of the Indian National Congress from 1955-1959. Rasiklal Umedchand Parikh succeeded him on the 19th of December 1954.

  On the 1st of November 1956, Saurashtra merged into Bombay state. In 1960, Bombay state was divided along linguistic lines into the new states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. The territory of Saurashtra, including Junagadh and all of Sorath, became part of Gujarat. Junagadh, which had issued its own stamps decades earlier, now belonged to that state.

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• 6. Hills and Reserves

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  A range of low hills known as the Gir Hills fills the south-central portion of the peninsula, and Girnar is the highest of them. Xeric scrub is the natural vegetation across most of the peninsula. The hills hold an enclave of tropical dry broadleaf forest instead.

  Kathiawar has three national parks. Gir National Park and its surroundings are the first. Blackbuck National Park at Velavadar sits on the Gulf of Cambay. Marine National Park lies in the Gulf of Kutch near Jamnagar, on the water that forms the peninsula's north-western edge.

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• 7. Stamps of Junagadh

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  In 1864, the first postage stamps of the state were issued for the princely state of Junagadh. Each showed three lines of Hindi script in colourless letters on black. They were made by hand-stamping with watercolor ink. A second issue in 1868 used coloured letters, printed in black or red on several colours of paper.

  The issue of 1877 was the first to include Latin letters. Its circular design carried the inscription "SORUTH POSTAGE" at the top. At the bottom it read "ONE ANNA OF A RUPEE," or "FOUR ANNAS" on the higher value. Some of these were surcharged in 1913-14, and redesigned stamps followed in 1914.

  A set of eight stamps in 1929 pictured Junagadh, the Gir lion and the Kathi horse, along with the nawab. In 1937 the one anna value was reissued reading "POSTAGE AND REVENUE."

  The Indian province of Saurashtra never designed stamps of its own. Before adopting the stamps of India, it issued a court fee stamp overprinted for postal use. It then made more one anna stamps by surcharging three stamps of the 1929 issue.

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• 8. Water and Drought

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  Saurashtra has been rich in natural resources since ancient times, yet it went through several droughts, especially during the 20th century. Water shaped the region and, to a degree, its farming economy.

  In 1998, Ashvin A. Shah, a US-based engineering consultant, surveyed water availability in the region. He said: "The presence of 700,000 dugwells in Saurashtra region indicates the presence of extensive groundwater aquifers throughout the region. This means there is one well for fewer than 20 people or one well every 300 metres."

  The droughts were severe enough that people could no longer grow crops or find drinking water. In recent times, a campaign took up rain water harvesting. The check dam campaign, begun in the late 1990s, brought a drastic change by raising water tables across Saurashtra.

  The relief did not last through every dry spell. In 2019, a severe drought struck 20 districts in Gujarat. Water had to be brought in by tanker from the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River.

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