Kamarupi

The Kamarupi are the Indo-Aryan people of the old Kamarupa kingdom, which from the fourth century covered the Brahmaputra valley and at its height North Bengal and Bhutan. Their Middle Indo-Aryan speech, Kamarupi Prakrit, grew out of Gauda-Kamarupi Prakrit and is the ancestor of Assamese and the Kamatapuri dialects; its habits survive in the Sanskrit copper-plate inscriptions of Kamarupa's kings.

Three dynasties ruled in turn: the Varmans, under whom Xuanzang visited in the seventh century, the Mlechchhas and the Palas, whose last kings reigned near Guwahati until the kingdom broke up in the twelfth century. Around 1257 the ruler Sandhya moved his capital west to Kamatapur in North Bengal and founded the Kamata kingdom, where the Kamarupi of the Bengal borderlands lived in 1337.

The Khen dynasty fell to the Bengal sultan Alauddin Husain Shah in 1498, and in 1515 Biswa Singha founded the Koch dynasty, later split into Koch Bihar and Koch Hajo, the latter absorbed by the Ahoms in the seventeenth century.