Baro-Bhuyan

Although the term baro denotes the number twelve in Bengali and Assamese languages, in general, there were more than twelve chiefs or landlords, and the word baro meant many. Thus, Bhuyan-raj denoted individual Bhuyanship, whereas Baro-Bhuyan denoted temporary confederacies that they formed. In times of aggression by external powers, they generally cooperated in defending and expelling the aggressor. In times of peace, they maintained their respective sovereignty. In the presence of a strong king, they offered their allegiance. In general, each of them was in control of a group of villages, called cakala, and the more powerful among them called themselves raja. The rulers of the Bhuyanships belonged to different ethnic, religious or social backgrounds.

In the 13th century Brahmaputra Valley, the system of Baro-Bhuyan Raj was formed from the petty chieftains—the remaining fragments of the erstwhile Kamarupa state. They often resisted foreign invasions (Ghiyasuddin Iwaj Shah in the 13th century), removed foreign rule (Hussain Shah in the 16th century) and sometimes usurped state power (Arimatta in the 14th century). They occupied the region west of the Kachari kingdom on the south bank of the Brahmaputra River, and west of the Chutiya kingdom on the north bank. These included areas of Nagaon, Darrang and Sonitpur districts. Subsequently, the Baro Bhuyan rule ended in the 16th century as they were squeezed between the Kachari kingdom and the Kamata kingdom in the west and were slowly overpowered by the expanding Ahom kingdom in the east.

In Bengal, the most prominent Baro Bhuiyan confederacy was led by Isa Khan of Sonargaon in the 16th century, which emerged during the disintegration of the Bengal Sultanate in the region, as a resistance to the Mughal expansion. They carved the land of Bhati and other areas of Bengal into twelve administrative units, or Dwadas Bangla. The Baro-Bhuyans gradually succumbed to the Mughal dominance and eventually lost control during the reign of emperor Jahangir, under the leadership of Islam Khan I, the governor of Bengal Subah.

Baro-Bhuyans of Assam

Epigraphic sources indicate that the Kamarupa state had entered a state of fragmentation in the 9th century when the tradition of granting away police, revenue and administrative rights to the donee of lands became common. This led to the creation of a class of landed intermediaries between the king and his subjects—the members of which held central administrative offices, maintained economic and administrative links within their own domain and propagated Indo-Aryan culture. This gave rise to the condition that individual domains were self-administered, economically self-sufficient and capable of surviving the fragmentation of central authority, when the Kamarupa kingdom finally collapsed in the 12th century.

Amalendu Guha claims that the Baro-Bhuyan emerged in the 13th century from the fragmented remains of the Kamarupa chieftains. Nevertheless, not all local Kamarupa administrators (samanta) became Bhuyans, and many were later-day migrant adventurers from North India. Though there exist many legendary accounts of the origin of the Baro Bhuyan, these accounts are often vague and contradictory.

The Adi Bhuyan group

This original group is often referred to as the Adi Bhuyan, or the progenitor Bhuyans. The Adi-charita written in the late 17th century is the only manuscript that mentions the Adi-Bhuyan group. However, Maheswar Neog has called the account spurious or fabricated. Dimbeswar Neog, likewise states that the Adi charita cannot be depended as anything approaching a history of the Baro-Bhuyans.

Nevertheless, their presence is recorded in the Ahom Buranjis, where it is recorded that they were instrumental in ending the rule of the Kachari kingdom. As a reward, the Ahom king Suhungmung (1497–1539) settled these Bhuyans (originally living in Rowta-Temoni, present-day Darrang and Nagaon) in Kalabari, Gohpur, Kalangpur and Narayanpur as tributary feudal lords. The Lacam Kalita Bhuyan family was placed at Bahbari, while one of them was settled on the river Sonari, and another on hills. Towards the end of Suhungmung's reign, the remaining Baro Bhuyan of Rowta-Temani (Madanagiri, Dharmai, Ramacandragiri, Dandar Dalai, Tamuli dalai, Bar comdar, Dalid khan and others) evacuated their own headquarters and gathered near the river Kalang and prepared to fight with the Ahoms. But they were defeated in 1539; they submitted, paid homage to the Ahom monarch on the Kapili and were appointed as officers.

By the mid-16th century, all the Adi Bhuyans power was crushed, and they remained satisfied with what service they could render to the Ahom state as Baruwas or Phukans, Tamulis or Pachanis. During the first expedition of Chilarai against the Ahom kingdom, some of the Bhuyans aligned with the Ahoms, but during the renewed Koch invasion of 1562–63 they supported or submitted to the Koches. Nityananda Gogoi notes specifically that the Bhuyans of Rowta submitted to Nara Narayan during his Assam expedition of 1563, after which a number of people were removed from Rowta. Chilarai subsequently appointed Uzir Bamun, Tapashi Laskar and Malamulya Laskar as Rajkhowas in Uttarkula after the Koch conquest extended eastwards in 1563.

The submission of these chiefs brought the north-bank Bhuyan territories into the wider Koch political sphere, although the local Bhuyanships were not immediately extinguished. In the later division of the Koch kingdom, Raghudeva's eastern dominion is described as extending from the Sankosh to the Bharali. Local Baro-Bhuyan chiefs nevertheless continued to hold the tract between the Barnadi and Bharali rivers. After the Mughals conquered Koch Hajo in 1612 and advanced east of the Barnadi, they expelled these Bhuyan chiefs from the Barnadi–Bharali tract. The Ahoms subsequently defeated the Mughal advance in 1616, and Pratap Singha assigned the recovered territory between the Barnadi and Bharali to the Koch prince Balinarayana (Dharmanarayana) as a tributary ruler, forming the later Darrang state. This group of Bhuyans was finally subjugated by Prataap Singha in 1623, who relocated them to the south bank of the Brahmaputra. The Saru Bhuyans, who had moved west after the conflict with the Bor Baro-Bhuyans, trace the genealogy of Candivara to Kanvajara, the eldest son of Sumanta, but this is not given credence.

Later group

The later Baro-Bhuyans had ensconced themselves between the Kachari kingdom in the east and the Kamata kingdom in the west on the south bank of the Brahmaputra River. According to Neog, the leader (shiromani) of the group, Chandivara, was originally a ruler of Kannauj, who may have had to flee due to Firuz Shah Tughlaq's 1353 campaign against Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah and reached Gauda, the domain of Dharmanarayana. As a result of a treaty between Dharmanarayana and Durlabhnarayana of the Kamata kingdom, a group of seven Kayastha and seven Brahmin families led by Candivara was transferred to Langamaguri, a few miles north of present-day Guwahati. However, Baniprasanna Misra has questioned the traditional chronology based on Sankardev's conventional 1449 birth date and argued that Sankardev was more likely born around c.1479–1484. Misra consequently revised the period of Durlabhnarayana forward from the earlier estimates and suggested that he may have ruled in the late 14th-early 15th century. This revised chronology places Chandivara's migration considerably later than the mid-14th-century Tughlaq campaign.

During the harvesting season in Lengamaguri, the Bhutiyas attacked and looted the country, and in one instance the Bhutiyas captured Rajadhara, the son of Candivara. Candivara chased the Bhutiyas as far as Daimara between Maguri (near Changsari town) and Dewangiri (in Bhutan), killed a few of them, and released his son from captivity. In the next four or five years, the people of Lengamaguri, finding that Bhutiyas were planning an attack in retaliation, decided to hand over Candivara as the person responsible for the massacre of the Bhutiyas. The Bhutiyas chased Candivara as far as Rauta (in present-day Udalguri district) but had to suffer defeat at the hands of the Baro-Bhuyans. Candivara and his group, in search of a safe haven, did not stay in Lengamaguri for long and moved soon to Bordowa in present-day Nagaon district with the support of Durlabhnarayana. Among the descendants of Candivara was Srimanta Sankardeva.

After the death of Candivara, Rajadhara became the Baro-Bhuyan. A second group of five Bhuyans joined the Candivara group later. In due course, members of these Bhuyans became powerful. Alauddin Husain Shah, who ended the Khen dynasty by displacing Nilambar in 1498, extended his rule up to the Barnadi River by defeating Harup Narayan, who was a descendant of Gandharva-raya, a Bhuyan from the second group established by Durlabhnarayana at Bausi (Chota raja of Bausi), among others. The Baro-Bhuyans retaliated and were instrumental in ending the rule of Alauddin Husain Shah via his son Shahzada Danyal. But very soon, the rise of Biswa Singha of the Koch dynasty in Kamata destroyed their hold in Kamrup and squeezed those in the Nagaon region against the Kacharis to their east. They had to relocate to the north bank of the Brahmaputra in the first quarter of the 16th century, to a region west of the Bor Baro-Bhuyan group. The increasing Koch and Ahom conflicts further ate away at their independence and sovereignty.