Between the Mughals and the Ahoms: The hill chieftains of Kamrup in the Brahmaputra Valley

Focusing on the hilly area of Kamrup located in the southern part of the Brahmaputra valley, this article traces the history of certain local powers who inhabited the common frontier of the Mughal empire and the Ahom kingdom, and examines their identity construction during the Mughal–Ahom conflict and its aftermath. By reading historical records from the perspective of the locality and not from those of the Mughal and Ahom courts, it shifts the focus from the state grid to the local arena, and from a static structure of politics to a dynamic political process that comprises three phases: (a) the hill polities’ military participation in the Mughal–Ahom wars in the 1610s–80s; (b) their negotiation with the regional supreme power, the Ahom state, in the 1690s–750s; and (c) the transition of some of them from the status of a chieftaincy to a principality with a large landed estate in the 1760s–850s. Throughout these periods, none of the frontier local powers had kept either solid fidelity or constant antagonism to both the trans-regional and the regional state. Neither were they a monolithic entity. This continued fluidity stands as an example of the historical reality of pre-modern South Asia that should not be subsumed into modern communal categories.