A short-lived partition
On Nara Narayan's death the kingdom was divided: his son took the western portion as Koch Bihar, and Chilarai's son Raghudev the eastern, called Koch Hajo. The two halves were immediately hostile, and each sought outside support — Koch Bihar from the Mughals, Koch Hajo from the Ahoms and then also from the Mughals.
Parikshit Narayan was defeated by a Mughal expedition in 1614 and the territory annexed to the empire.
The consequence was strategic and lasting: the Mughal frontier now met the Ahom kingdom directly, and the wars that followed ran for sixty years, ending with the Ahom victory at Saraighat in 1671 under Lachit Barphukan — a river battle on the Brahmaputra that halted Mughal expansion into the northeast permanently, and that remains the central episode of Assamese historical memory.
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.