Kumaoni

The Kumaoni are the people of Kumaon, a Himalayan hill country in present-day Uttarakhand; they speak Kumaoni, an Indo-Aryan language that was once the official tongue of the Kumaon kingdom and survives in temple stone and copper-plate inscriptions.

Around the seventh century Vasu Dev of the Katyuri dynasty united local principalities into the kingdom of Kurmanchal; Katyuri kings patronised Shaivism and built the temples of Jageshwar and Katarmal. After the Katyuris collapsed in the eleventh century the hills fragmented for three centuries until the Chand dynasty reunified them in the mid-fifteenth century, moving the capital to Champawat and then, in 1563, to Almora.

The Chands later acknowledged Mughal suzerainty and sent tribute to Delhi. Weakened in the eighteenth century, Kumaon was conquered by the Kingdom of Nepal in 1791 and passed to the British East India Company after the Anglo-Nepalese war of 1814 to 1816.