Three kings
The Khen dynasty, of local origin, took Kāmatā around 1440 and ruled through three reigns from the fortified capital at Kāmatāpur. Nilambar, the last of them, extended the kingdom eastward and built roads and tanks that local tradition still attributes to him.
The kingdom fell in 1498 when Alauddin Hussain Shah besieged Kāmatāpur. The Assamese and Bengali accounts of how the city was taken differ, and the standard story of a stratagem involving a musician's entry has the shape of a legend rather than a report.
The Khens are a good example of the difficulty of writing the northeast's history: a dynasty that certainly existed, ruled a substantial kingdom, and left almost no documentary record of its own, so that it is known chiefly through the chronicles of the powers that destroyed it.
Further reading
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.