The Baro-Bhuyans (also spelled as Baro-Bhuians and Baro Bhuiyans) were confederacies of soldier-landowners in Assam and Bengal in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The confederacies consisted of loosely independent entities, each led by a warrior chief or a landlord (Bhuiyan). The tradition of Baro-Bhuyan is peculiar to both Assam and Bengal"The tradition of Bara Bhuyan is peculiarly common to both Assam and Bengal." and differs from the tradition of Bhuihar of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar"[T]he Bhuyans of Assam have nothing to do with Bhuihars or Babhans of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar..." —in Assam this phenomenon came into prominence in the 13th century when they resisted the invasion of Ghiyasuddin Iwaj Shah"The Bara Bhuyans of Kamarupa played a similar role in the country's history round about the thirteenth century...Jadunath Sarkar holds that Husamuddin Iwaz () reduced some of the Barabhuyans to submission when he attacked Kamarupa." and in Bengal when they resisted Mughal rule in the 16th century."Some of the Bara Bhuyans of Bengal are mentioned in the Akbar-namah and Ain-i-Akbari so that the institution seems to have been in existence even before the times of Akbar."
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 , and the more powerful among them called themselves raja. The rulers of the Bhuyanships belonged to different ethnic, religious or social backgrounds."The territories under the Bhuyans, a growing landlord class, mostly belonging to the Brahmanas and Kayasthas, in the middle of the valley on both banks of the Brahmaputra""It is usually believed that the Bhuyans constituted a Hindu caste. But the Darrang Raj Vamshavali, as well as in Persian sources like the Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari, there are references to Muslim Bhuyans as well. This confirms that the Bhuyans were a class rather than a caste."
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."In the 13th century, the Indo-Aryan culture still dominated the lives of a major section of the population in the central plains of the Brahmaputra Valley. However, nothing was left of the ancient state of Kamarupa at that juncture, except for what fragments remained of it in the form of petty chiefdoms. The petty chiefs were called bhuyan many of whom were migrant adventurers from North India. The rule by a bhuyan was called bhuyan-raj and their temporary confederacies were known as bara-bhuyan raj.""The Karatoya on the western border is a well-known river now flowing through the Jalpaiguri District of West Bengal and the Rangpur and Bogra Districts of Bangladesh while the junction of the Brahmaputra and the Laksha (modern Lakhya) at the southern boundary now stands near the border between near the border between the Dacca and Mymensingh Districts of Bangladesh." 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.Akbarnama, Volume III, Page 647 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"We, incidentally, do not deny that some kind of fragmentation had taken place in Assam but would argue that the process set in quite early, in the 9th century, in fact. We get a good deal of information on this point from the epigraphic records." when the tradition of granting away police, revenue and administrative rights to the donee of lands became common."The parcellization of political power was reinforced by the large scale donations of land which comprise the most important economic trend in this period. Although the first land grant from Assam was issued in the 5th century A.D. (the Nagajari Khanikargaon fragmentary stone inscription), from the 9th century onwards, police, revenue and administrative rights were granted away along with large plots of land by reigning monarchs to brahmins; this trend continued right till the end of the 12th century. The Nowgong plates of Balavarman III (end of the 9th century) are fairly illustrative of this point." 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"On the one hand, they were linked through economic ties with the common people--they were the beneficiaries of large scale land donations, plots, sometimes villages, which very often had to be cultivated by others." and propagated Indo-Aryan culture.The importance of this class of landed intermediaries in pre-Ahom Assam is worth mentioning. That significant links existed between the brahmins and the common people is evident from the penetration of Sanskrit culture to the grass roots level." This gave rise to the condition that individual domains were self-administered, economically self-sufficient and capable of surviving the fragmentation of central authority,"The basic point we are trying to make is this: if the brahmin landed intermediaries by the 13th century are vested with political, administrative and economic power, if the village has emerged as a self-sufficient axis, this entire structure would only be marginally affected by fragmentation at the central level." 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."Not all of them were transformed into local bhuyan chiefs, since many of the bhuyans were known to be migrant adventurers of high caste, coming from North India after the fall of Kanauj to the Turko-Afghans." 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.Neog, Maheswar, Early History of the Vaishnavite Faith and Movement in Assam, p. 29, It is supposed to have been written in 1586 saka (1664 AD). However, Maheswar Neog has called the account spurious or fabricated.Maheswar Neog states that the Adi-cwita, ascribed to Madhavadeva, has created much ill feeling among the Vaisnavas of Assam, and has been denounced by the more considerate section of sattra pontiffs and literary men alike. 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."On the behalf of the Ahom king, they fought with and killed, the Kachari and Dhirnarayana, the Chutiya king" 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