Along the northern edge of Punjab lay two dozen small Rajput hill states: Kangra, Kahlur or Bilaspur, Chamba, Guler, Nurpur, Mandi, Suket, Sirmur and the rest. They survived because the terrain made conquest expensive and holding them impossible.
They were tributary to the Mughals, then contested between the Gurkhas, the Sikhs and the British. Ranjit Singh Ji took Kangra fort in 1809 and reduced most of them to tribute.
Their cultural output is out of all proportion to their size. The Pahari schools of painting, Basohli, Guler, Kangra, produced some of the finest miniature painting in India, and their artists came down to the Lahore court when hill patronage failed.
Their relations with the Sikh Gurus were long and mixed: allies at Nadaun, opponents at Bhangani and Anandpur.
The hill districts were part of Punjab until 1966, when they went to Himachal Pradesh. Punjab lost a third of its area and effectively all of its hills in one Act.
Kangra fort is the largest fort in the Himalaya and the Katoch family that held it claims one of the oldest continuous ruling lines anywhere. It was taken by Mahmud of Ghazni, by the Mughals under Jahangir and by the Sikh state in 1809, and then by the earthquake of 1905, which did more damage to it than any of them.
The painting was made for courts of a few thousand people. A raja of Guler or Basohli commanded one valley and paid a workshop of two or three families, and the Nainsukh and Manaku line produced over four generations work that now sits in museums on three continents. Those patrons could not have afforded a fort.
When the hill patronage failed after 1809 the painters came down to Lahore and into the Sikh sardars' households, and the late Pahari work is Sikh portraiture. That transfer is the reason the Chandigarh and Lahore collections hold what they hold.