The court chronicle of Bilaspur, the Shāhī Vaṃś Vinod (1882, hereafter SV V) relates that Shiv Datt’s father, Raghunath Bhatt, was ‘a Brahmin from Varanasi’ taken into service by the Kahluri noble miyan Sakht Chand.3 Sakht Chand met Raghunath in Jwalamukhi at the end of a ...