Chutia

The Chutia are a Bodo-Kachari people of eastern Assam, settled cultivators who built the foremost tribal state to arise after Kamarupa's fall. Their kingdom, called Sadiya after its upper Brahmaputra capital, took shape in the early thirteenth century and rose in the later fourteenth, its earliest inscriptionally attested king Nandisvara.

The ruling house showed matrilineal traits and claimed descent from the Asuras, while the people worshipped the goddess Kechaikhati, whose Sadiya temple was served by Deori priests. Ahom chronicles record a clash under Sutuphaa (1369–1379) in which the Ahom king was killed, and border wars from 1512 ended in 1523–1524 when the Ahom king Suhungmung conquered Sadiya.

The Chutia were dispersed across Upper Assam and absorbed into Ahom society, their craftsmen famed as gunmakers. In the seventeenth century many joined the Vaishnava Ekasarana movement, and their Tibeto-Burman speech gave way to Assamese.