What is recorded
Bhulua's founding tradition places its origin in a prince from Mithilā who settled in the coastal country in the twelfth century. The kingdom held the Noakhali district between the Meghna estuary and the Chittagong hills, and like Chandradwip it was one of the small deltaic states that the Baro-Bhuyan confederacy comprised.
It was exposed on two sides: to Mughal expansion from the north and to the Arakanese and Portuguese slave raiders — the Magh and Harmad of Bengali memory — who devastated the coast in the seventeenth century until Shaista Khan's expedition against Chittagong in 1666 suppressed them.
Bhulua's rajas continued as zamindars under Mughal and then British revenue administration. Their kingdom belongs to a class of small Bengal polities that are attested in land records and local chronicles and almost nowhere else.
Further reading
- Dimock, Edward C. The Place of the Hidden Moon. University of Chicago Press, 1966
- Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Bakker, Hans T. The World of the Skandapurana. Brill, 2014
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.