Khairigarh — The Forgotten History of the Terai

What was a pargana?

In the revenue systems of Mughal and later British India, a district was divided into parganas: groups of villages assessed together for land revenue. Parganas were administrative units, not kingdoms. Their boundaries often followed rivers and forest edges, and they could change as land was cleared, rivers moved or new settlements were made.

The 1877 gazetteer itself says the older mahal of Khairigarh had imprecise boundaries. As later reconstructed, the area once covered by that name also included what became the Nighasan and Palia parganas and part of Dhaurahra ^[1][3]. Khairigarh is therefore best thought of as a historical district within a district, and its limits should not be read as identical to any modern protected area.

A landscape made by rivers

The gazetteer places the pargana between the Mohan river on the north and the Suheli, "or Sarju", on the south ^{[1, p. 142]}. It explains that the Suheli was really the old channel of the Sarju, a river that once ran beneath the Khairigarh fort before moving away. It also notes that two former tributaries of the Sarju now wound through grass and brushwood ^{[1, p. 142]}.

The Kheri district article in the same volume adds a detail that shows how far rivers move in this country. It cites the eighteenth-century geographer Joseph Tieffenthaler, who placed the river about three miles east of the Khairigarh fort. By the 1870s it was eight miles away ^{[1, p. 138]}.

The land fell gently from about 600 feet above sea level at the bluffs in the north-west to about 440 feet near the junction of the Suheli and the Kauriala ^{[1, p. 142]}. The Kauriala is a branch of the Ghaghara, and it is the same river system that today flows past Katarniaghat. Within this slope, the gazetteer says, the low hollows were either swamps or, where slightly higher, rice-fields ^{[1, p. 142]}. That pattern of forest, grassland, swamp and seasonally flooded fields shaped by moving water is still the key to Dudhwa's ecology. The natural history story explores it further.

The Suheli, the gazetteer explains, was really the old channel of the Sarju, which once ran under the Khairigarh fort.

Fields at the forest edge

Khairigarh's farming was precarious. The gazetteer records that crops were mainly rice and barley, that irrigation was not practised, and that unhusked rice averaged about four hundredweight an acre ^{[1, p. 145]}. It also notes that rice land in "the worst jungly part" of the pargana had become cheaper to rent in the preceding fifteen years ^{[1, p. 146]}. That suggests cultivation at the forest edge was hard work and easily abandoned.

The scarcity of 1873 hit this northern country hard. The district article estimates that Khairigarh, Nighasan, Dhaurahra and Bhur may have received ten inches of rain or less that year, against about twenty inches in Kheri itself, and the rice crop failed across the region ^{[1, p. 203]}. The food of the old Terai story follows these crops onto the household plate.

The Tharu of the grassy savannahs

The gazetteer's Khairigarh entry also records people. It states that the Tharu occupied, almost exclusively, the grassy savannahs inside the forest. It notes that their houses were raised on platforms, and that Khairigarh was the only pargana on that side of the Ghaghara where they were permanent residents. The figure it gives for their number reads as 900 in the scanned text ^{[1, p. 143]}.

It appends an account by a British officer (the scanned text renders his name as Captain Thurbum) describing two Tharu groups that did not intermarry, houses on raised grass-and-mat platforms reached by ladders, and kitchen gardens ^{[1, p. 144]}. These are outsiders' observations made through the categories of a colonial administration, and they should be read that way. They are still among the earliest written records of the people who lived in this forest before it became a reserve.

The fort and its traditions

At the centre of the pargana's history stands the fort. Here the record moves from observation into tradition, and it needs careful reading.

• The Tughlaq tradition. The Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908) says the northern frontier was lined with forts built to guard the lowlands against raids from Doti and Nepal. It names Khairigarh as one of them, says it is more commonly ascribed to Firoz Shah Tughlaq around 1379, and says such forts were abandoned soon after completion ^[3]. The 1877 gazetteer repeats a tradition that Firoz Shah climbed the tallest tower of "the great Khairigarh fort". It adds that the Ain-i-Akbari counts the fort among the best in India ^{[1, p. 146]}. These are traditions reported by the gazetteer, and we have not checked them against the original Persian sources.
• After the emperors. According to the 1877 account, the fort then lay abandoned for centuries. The first clear documentary trace of the place comes in deeds granted to a family of qanungos, the hereditary revenue record-keepers ^{[1, p. 147]}.
• Later struggles. The gazetteer goes on to describe a turbulent eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It includes episodes involving Banjara groups, a line of local rajas of Khairigarh, and a defence of the fort's walls by a man named Gain Singh ^{[1, pp. 147–150]}. These passages draw on family histories and local memory, which the gazetteer itself marks as such, and the details are best treated as tradition.
• Deeper antiquity. The Imperial Gazetteer also notes that many villages in Kheri contain ancient mounds, and names Khairigarh among the most remarkable. It records a stone horse found near Khairigarh bearing an inscription of the fourth-century Gupta emperor Samudra Gupta ^{[3, p. 282]}.

None of this makes Khairigarh an independent kingdom. The written evidence describes a fortified frontier post, a revenue subdivision and a succession of local landholding families under larger powers.

From frontier to forest estate

The district's modern political history is better documented. The official Kheri district history records several stages ^[2]:

• In 1801, when Rohilkhand was ceded to the British, part of the present district went with it.
• After the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814–1816 that part was restored to Oudh.
• On the annexation of Oudh in 1856 the western part became a district called Mohammadi.
• After 1858 the headquarters of the single district were moved to Lakhimpur.

The forests were claimed next. Accounts drawing on Project Tiger's history of Dudhwa describe a 303-square-kilometre block reserved after Dietrich Brandis's visit in 1860. They say further areas were added between 1867 and 1879, including the sal forests and grasslands of Khairigarh pargana between the Mohana and Suheli rivers. The North Kheri forest was legally constituted as Reserved Forest in 1937 ^[4]. The Billy Arjan Singh story follows the later twentieth-century steps, from the Sonaripur sanctuary to Dudhwa National Park.

How to read a colonial gazetteer

Gazetteers were written to help govern and tax. They are excellent on rivers, soils, crops, rents and the movements of landholding families. They are much weaker on the knowledge, beliefs and own histories of the people they counted.

Their language about castes and tribes reflects nineteenth-century assumptions that we no longer share. Their figures were often estimates. The scanned text available online has also passed through optical character recognition, which introduces errors. For these reasons the figures above are cited to specific pages, and the original page images should be checked before any are quoted in print.

Why it matters

Khairigarh shows that Dudhwa's forests were never an empty wilderness. They were a frontier of shifting rivers, contested forts, seasonal rice-fields and Tharu settlements, later remade by the forest department into a timber estate and finally a protected area. Each layer explains part of what a visitor sees today: the swamps in the old river beds, the grassland clearings, and the edge where farmland meets the forest.

What this story tells us about Dudhwa today

The wetlands along the Suheli and the patchwork of grassland and sal forest are not accidents. They are the legacy of a river that moved, and of land that was farmed, abandoned and reserved. When a naturalist points out an old channel or a grassland that floods each monsoon, they are reading the same landscape the gazetteer's surveyors described in the 1870s.

In closing

Khairigarh survives as a name on old maps, a mound near Singahi and a few dense pages of an 1877 gazetteer. Read carefully, those pages turn Dudhwa from a park into a place with a past, shaped by water, worked by its people, and long contested before it was protected.