Historical Lineage, Political Authority, and Documentary Provenance in Changegau

The historical identity, political authority, and land rights of local lineages in Limbuwan cannot be adequately reconstructed from genealogies alone. This is particularly evident in the case of Changegau, historically appearing in some records as Chagya or related forms, in present-day Taplejung, where the Siring and Angbuhang lineages are associated with competing interpretations of historical authority, territorial rights, and descent. This study examines the problem through a source-critical comparison of royal orders, administrative records, tax documents, judicial proceedings, genealogical traditions, and later historical interpretations. Particular attention is given to Sen-era documents associated with the names Jas Rai, Suchi Raja, and Jagadip Rai; early Gorkhali records referring to Siring or Sering Limbus; nineteenth-century records concerning Siring officials and Kipat land; an 1880 BS Megajin tax document referring to Sirihang in Chagya; and the 1894 and 1900 BS records associated with Chetsingh Angbuhang and the Changegau administrative dispute. The evidence indicates that several individuals associated with Siring or Sering appear in state records before the documented emergence of Chetsingh Angbuhang as a Subba of Changegau in the late nineteenth century. The documentation for the earlier eighteenth-century Sen documents does not in itself prove a continuous biological descent from the "persons named" in those documents to the later Siring lineage and does not conclusively prove that the Angbuhang genealogical traditions were made up. The evidence is rather more conservative: that political sovereignty, administrative function, territorial control, document ownership, and genealogic identity were historically linked but not necessarily congruous. The study argues that Changegau's history is best understood through the interaction of Kipat tenure, local chiefly authority, state recognition, administrative succession, and retrospective genealogical interpretation. Rather than treating either lineage's genealogy as automatically authoritative, the study proposes a hierarchy of evidence in which contemporary royal documents, authenticated copies, revenue records, judicial proceedings, archaeological evidence, oral traditions, and later genealogies are compared according to provenance and chronological proximity.