For Everyone's information
I have modified the jqgrid source file to achieve the objective.
Modifications
Added a new flag to the jqgrid options.
Modification to the sortData function to only set the current page as 1 if the flag is false.
Modification to the sortData functino to fire the sortArrayData function only if the flag is true and to fire the populate function if the flag is false.
By doing this there's no need to change the datatypes or any other options for each grid.Functionality works for reloadgrid / paging (using serverside processing with data type as 'json')
Hope this can be integrated in the future releases
Cheers.
