Kindly see the following image.
How would I achieve the same span in cols and rows ?
Here is the demo for the table structure you are looking for
In left panel, go to 'Frozen Cols.Group Header(new)'. Under that go to 'Group Header - with colspan style' & check out grid configuration.
You need to call 'setGroupHeaders' method like this:
jQuery("#id").jqGrid('setGroupHeaders', {
useColSpanStyle: true,
groupHeaders:[{startColumnName: 'Permanent', numberOfColumns: 2, titleText: 'group 1'}]
});