Koch

The Koch are a Tibeto-Burman people of the lower Brahmaputra and North Bengal, organised into nine matrilineal, exogamous clans and speaking a Boro-Garo language, though many groups later adopted Indo-Aryan speech. Muslim chronicles already place them in western Kamrup in the early thirteenth century.

After the Bengal sultan seized Kamata in 1498, the Koch leader Hajo united the tribes, and his grandson Bisu overthrew the Baro-Bhuyan chieftains, took the Hindu name Biswa Singha and founded the Koch kingdom at Kamatapur in 1515. Under Nara Narayan in the mid-sixteenth century it became the strongest power northeast of Bengal and patronised the Vaishnava revival of Sankardev.

The kingdom then split into Koch Bihar and Koch Hajo: Mughal armies conquered Koch Hajo in 1612, the Khaspur branch merged into the Kachari kingdom in 1745, and Koch Bihar survived as a Mughal-aligned state.